Running The macOS-Inspired, FreeBSD-Powered helloSystem v0.8 On AMD Zen 4

[dragon321]

For example, he's the creator of a gist to try to "boycott Wayland" that has been kept active for years. In his posts he doesn't even attempt to be familiar with the very thing he's critiquing or keep up with anything. You can see him being taught 101-level things about Wayland a year after it's creation and then promptly ignoring them after enough time has passed.

Even better thing - in that gist there is point that says something like "Wayland breaks global menu on KDE" and there is an link to the bug report which was fixed years ago. Another funny point is claim that Wayland breaks Qt AppImages because they don't work without providing "special plugin" for Wayland support in Qt - completely ignoring the fact that it's not some "special plugin" because Qt supports windowing system by plugins. There is plugin for X11, Windows or macOS and if you remove X11 plugin from AppImage then application won't work on Xorg either exactly like it does on Wayland without Wayland plugin, yet for some reason he believes that X11 is somehow better in that regard. Many comments pointed that and more things but it seems he simply decided to ignore them.

I respect AppImage and some his work but his gist about Wayland is nonsense. While Wayland obviously have disadvantages and it's not perfect, his points are mostly not technical but personal bias towards Wayland. It seems that he doesn't like Wayland simply because Wayland is not X11 and works differently. Of course he can do that, this is free software but why doing some unnecessary gist without good technical points and calling for boycott?

[Myownfriend]

Another funny point is claim that Wayland breaks Qt AppImages because they don't work without providing "special plugin" for Wayland support in Qt - completely ignoring the fact that it's not some "special plugin" because Qt supports windowing system by plugins. There is plugin for X11, Windows or macOS and if you remove X11 plugin from AppImage then application won't work on Xorg either exactly like it does on Wayland without Wayland plugin, yet for some reason he believes that X11 is somehow better in that regard. Many comments pointed that and more things but it seems he simply decided to ignore them.

I was gonna mention that! lol I'm one of the people that brought that up but he refuses to take anything off the list. He'll only add to it. His mindset is basically that, if the app needs to have even one line of code added to it in order to add support for Wayland, then it's a work-around.

He's under the impression that apps inately have X11 support.

He's also against Pipewire and portals because he thinks they only work with Flatpaks. People have corrected him about this and it looked like he was taking the info in, but then once there were enough posts to push that conversation up the page enough, he pretended he was never corrected.

I respect AppImage and some his work but his gist about Wayland is nonsense. While Wayland obviously have disadvantages and it's not perfect, his points are mostly not technical but personal bias towards Wayland. It seems that he doesn't like Wayland simply because Wayland is not X11 and works differently. Of course he can do that, this is free software but why doing some unnecessary gist without good technical points and calling for boycott?

Yea AppImage is pretty great. It's my preferred way of running console emulators. I believe a lot of UI in HelloSystem uses AppImages.

[Linuxxx]

Thank you for not going over to YouTube!

While I understand & respect his reasons for not making more profound use of YouTube, that inevitable means leaving alot of ad-money on the table in the process, too.

For example, just a few days ago "Digital Foundry" published a new video about the Steam Deck, and it already generated 180k+ view counts at the time of writing.

Compare that with the view count of this article's comment section, which sits at ~1,5k+ currently.

Even just reacting to these kind of videos with articles & videos of his own would help to promote the Phoronix brand significantly, as I have suggested here:

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/general-discussion/1369114-michael-an-opportunity-for-a-heavy-phoronix-promotion-just-came-up

(Plus it would certainly ensure that SteamOS gets further polished before public release, because right now it has some mind-boggling shortcomings, as described in the above post...)

[redgreen925]

Unfortunately it looks like this has a long way to go. Just tried to get it up and running in QEMU. After a couple of failed attempts got it to at least boot to a "Live ISO" gui, but only in BIOS mode, could not get EFI working.

Could not find any sort of installer to get it onto the disk. Granted I did not look super hard before having to move onto the business of the day. This was also the 0.7 version that I could find... could not actually find 0.8 in the repository linked to from their docs...

Just managed to boot it on spare machine it apparently does not like my relatively old RX560 in a machine with builtin graphics card machine. The installer was in the Utilities menu if my memory serves me well listed as Install BSD. Almost forgot what Leopard looked like until I seen the buttons in the dialogs and that damn combined menu I dislike so much. Not sure if it does the not closing an app after pressing the X on the left while everything else is on the right like Mac does, at least they have them all in same place, as that was the point I said enough of this and shut it down.

[zexelon]

Just managed to boot it on spare machine it apparently does not like my relatively old RX560 in a machine with builtin graphics card machine. The installer was in the Utilities menu if my memory serves me well listed as Install BSD. Almost forgot what Leopard looked like until I seen the buttons in the dialogs and that damn combined menu I dislike so much. Not sure if it does the not closing an app after pressing the X on the left while everything else is on the right like Mac does, at least they have them all in same place, as that was the point I said enough of this and shut it down.

Yeah... on my second attempt today I found the install script and got it onto the VM... Got it booted and everything! Then I ran the command to update all the packages (first thing I do on basically any OS after a fresh install)... and after rebooting it was fully melted down, GUI hard locked for all intents and purposes.

On a lark I tried installing FreeBSD 13.1 today too... no further success, got it to boot (only in BIOS mode also, even though they claim EFI support) but could not get the su/sudo commands to work on any level. After 5 minutes it reminded me very much of Linux circa early 2000's... and I am very happy to not go back to the dark ages.

[redgreen925]

Yeah... on my second attempt today I found the install script and got it onto the VM... Got it booted and everything! Then I ran the command to update all the packages (first thing I do on basically any OS after a fresh install)... and after rebooting it was fully melted down, GUI hard locked for all intents and purposes.

On a lark I tried installing FreeBSD 13.1 today too... no further success, got it to boot (only in BIOS mode also, even though they claim EFI support) but could not get the su/sudo commands to work on any level. After 5 minutes it reminded me very much of Linux circa early 2000's... and I am very happy to not go back to the dark ages.

It managed to boot EFI here as my machine is set only to boot with that method. As I said before it reminded me of Leopard which was 2008 not interested in going back there either.

[kylew77]

On a lark I tried installing FreeBSD 13.1 today too... no further success, got it to boot (only in BIOS mode also, even though they claim EFI support) but could not get the su/sudo commands to work on any level. After 5 minutes it reminded me very much of Linux circa early 2000's... and I am very happy to not go back to the dark ages.

FreeBSD has about the easiest ncurses installer the world over. It is so easy to set up encrypted ZFS a child could do it. FreeBSD supports efi but not secure boot. Their install is ultra minimal sudo is not installed by default, doas or sudo can be installed and configured. The install is really just the bare minimum install possible. Maybe try OpenBSD or NetBSD which include Xorg and OpenBSD includes doas but it is not configured out of the box. I like the the *BSDs remind me of Linux circa 2004 that is why I prefer them.

[hiryu]

On a lark I tried installing FreeBSD 13.1 today too... no further success, got it to boot (only in BIOS mode also, even though they claim EFI support) but could not get the su/sudo commands to work on any level. After 5 minutes it reminded me very much of Linux circa early 2000's... and I am very happy to not go back to the dark ages.

For su to work, the user account has to be in the "wheel" group. That's likely what's missing in your case.

As to Michael's issue with the Ethernet support... That Intel NIC is technically supported, but it seems this newest revision is not... In 13.1. Building and running STABLE will get it to work. I have the Asus Crosshair x670 Extreme and this what I did to get the Intel NIC working.

My board has an additional Acquantia 10g NIC that's like not in Hero. There's an incomplete driver for the 10g NIC in ports, but it's super buggy and is a bit worse than no driver at all for me.

My previous motherboard, an older iteration of the Asus Crosshair Extreme (Zen 3), had the same 2 NICs and the same problems. I was able to get the Intel NIC working with STABLE as well. Fortunately, that revision of the NIC does work under FreeBSD 13.1.

[zexelon]

FreeBSD has about the easiest ncurses installer the world over. It is so easy to set up encrypted ZFS a child could do it. FreeBSD supports efi but not secure boot. Their install is ultra minimal sudo is not installed by default, doas or sudo can be installed and configured. The install is really just the bare minimum install possible. Maybe try OpenBSD or NetBSD which include Xorg and OpenBSD includes doas but it is not configured out of the box. I like the the *BSDs remind me of Linux circa 2004 that is why I prefer them.

Yes, I was very impressed with the ncurses installer, I have not seen anything quite like that before! Though I do take exception to the idea that a child could install it... no child I know could do that!

Yah, what I struggled with was post install usability. It 100% could be solved and I am certain it was my own lack of knowledge of the FreeBSD idiosyncrasies, but at the end of the day Linux has enough of those to keep me reasonably entertained. I really do want to get FreeBSD going some day though just for the OpenZFS support!

[dragon321]

He's under the impression that apps inately have X11 support.

Yeah, that was exactly my feeling. For some reason he considers X11 as integral part of Unix like OS. Something like DWM on Windows or Quartz Compositor on macOS. Which is obviously false, X11 is not part of most Unix like OS and they can work fine without it. It's separate project and not "more native" (whatever that means) than Wayland or anything else.

As for AppImage - I agree. I'm using it as well. I made few AppImages for personal use and after few years they are still working.