helloSystem Wants To Be The "macOS of BSDs" With A Polished Desktop Experience

[skeevy420]

"macOS of BSDs"

the funny thing is macOS is actually a derivative of the original UNIX.

I wonder what Xzibit is up to these days. He'd appreciate this.

[CochainComplex]

I wonder what Xzibit is up to these days. He'd appreciate this.

He will use X for sure....

[kpedersen]

And Windows supports 100% of them by virtue of it being the de facto desktop and laptop OS. Any single hardware that is designed to be used with a desktop, laptop or workstation will definitely have downloadable and installable Windows drivers available, either by Microsoft or the hardware vendors themselves.

Yep but only for the very latest consumer hardware. For server hardware, Windows Server 2019 often does less well than Linux. Some manufacturers don't even list Windows Server as a supported OS.

I also notice that Linux and BSD driver support greatly outmatches Windows for > 5 year old laptops. For example Mesa keeps improving for older chips, long after the proprietary Windows driver last sees an update.

Windows drivers rot quite badly basically.

And when I tried to run pkg install drm-kmod drm-legacy-kmod to install the radeon driver, the system immediately hardlocked. In contrast, Windows 10 + latest legacy AMD drivers worked like a charm.

Yep, can't win em all. Get a laptop that *does* work. You can find one for about 25 bucks on ebay.

[Sonadow]

Windows drivers rot quite badly basically.

Then you have not been using Windows much.

I can install an XP x64 driver for an ancient 802.11g wifi card in Windows 10 x64. And it works.

Similarly, I an using a 20 year old Canon scanner on 32-bit Windows 8.1 with the Win98 driver.

[kpedersen]

Then you have not been using Windows much.

Thanks. I actually make a point of it

I can install an XP x64 driver for an ancient 802.11g wifi card in Windows 10 x64. And it works.

Similarly, I an using a 20 year old Canon scanner on 32-bit Windows 8.1 with the Win98 driver.

Try something substantial like a Windows XP era GPU on Windows 10. Since they dropped the XDDM stuff it simply cannot work:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...for-windows-8-

These intel GPUs works great in modern Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD (even Haiku haha!). If Microsoft users had their way they would all be in the landfill.

Also, nothing with 802.11g is ancient. Try a Cisco Aironet 350 11b. Last time I plugged one of them in a Windows 8 machine it bluescreened. To be fair, Windows even struggles to load drivers for the PCMCIA hardware itself. So the bluescreen was actually better than I expected Windows to manage.

[Sonadow]

Try something substantial like a Windows XP era GPU on Windows 10. Since they dropped the XDDM stuff it simply cannot work:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...for-windows-8-

The HD 3470 works on Windows 10 with Vista drivers. That's > 10 years of binary driver compatibility. Linux binary drivers can't even survive a minor kernel difference.

Also, nothing with 802.11g is ancient.

Sure, keep telling yourself that 20-year-old products aren't ancient.

[kpedersen]

Linux binary drivers can't even survive a minor kernel difference.

They don't need to by design. Linux has source drivers. We all know which one will ultimately stand the test of time better.

Sure, keep telling yourself that 20-year-old products aren't ancient.

And yet, many machines that hold the internet and other infrastructure together are much older. Not everyone wants to fill up landfills with iPads.

[ezst036]

Sure, keep telling yourself that 20-year-old products aren't ancient.

They aren't. It's certainly pushing the limit though. A 286 or 386, that's ancient.

[dreich]

I seriously doubt this will attract freebsd developers conditioned to the auto-magical oob experience and integration of apple products. Even the act of installing helloSystem will probably be too much of a hassle for them.

[dremon_nl]

And Windows supports 100% of them by virtue of it being the de facto desktop and laptop OS. Any single hardware that is designed to be used with a desktop, laptop or workstation will definitely have downloadable and installable Windows drivers available, either by Microsoft or the hardware vendors themselves.

Older hardware often is not supported by Windows 10 because "hardware vendors themselves" don't care about their own hardware which is perfectly fine but just a few years old. Buy a new shiny thing, that's it. Same as with the Android smartphones.

Besides the hardware point this "de facto" OS annoys the hell out of many people like me 1) when I leave it for a couple of hours untouched just to come back later and realize that piece of shit rebooted and updated without asking killing all my work 2) when it shows bloody ads in the OS itself 3) when it is slow as hell due to built-in antivirus, indexing engine and a dozen unknown services kicking in periodically 4) when I want to add a printer and it shows an error "Operation failed. Error code 0x80004fdc".

I mean, it's a great OS for gaming, but that's it, thank you very much. Plasma/Tumbleweed has it's little quirks, bugs and annoyances here and there but is light years ahead from anything Microsoft can offer.