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

[aht0]

And probably the fact that so many are trying to ape Apple designs in their 3rd party themes built for other OS's.

[dragon321]

Non-sequitur? The comment you are responding to said nothing about Windows.

The comment merely pointed out (correctly, IMO) that the OSX DE is a hot mess and certainly not something to aspire to from a usability perspective. Surely we can objectively agree that having a File menu detached from the application it relates to makes very little sense in the multi-monitor era, as one example.

Can't think of a good reason why these guys wouldn't just get KDE running on Free BSD. I have to assume their target audience is system admins and developers, and for those use cases, KDE is miles ahead of Windows or OSX.

A lot of desktop environments are more similar to Windows desktop metaphor than any other OS. That's fine. But certainly there is no rule or even any reason why every desktop or operating system should be more similar to Windows than for NeXT/macOS. So why helloSystem following macOS is worse than a lot of Linux distributions following Windows?

Why correctly? What makes Windows DE better than macOS DE and why we should follow Microsoft and not Apple? Of course macOS desktop environment is not perfect and it's not like I'm big fan of it (for example I'm not very comfortable with Finder file manager) but Windows DE is not perfect either. It's most popular on desktop for sure but this doesn't mean everybody should follow it and it's better than any other. I suspect macOS user is not very comfortable with Windows as well.

There is list of "Welcome and unwelcome technologies" on helloSystem GitHub. It seems they don't like GNOME and KDE. GNOME is pointed as "too complex technologically" and KDE has too many features.

Hardware support in FreeBSD is not so bad: over 90% of popular hardware is supported!
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/h...pported.76466/

On desktop it's not very bad at all. With relatively modern graphics drivers ported from Linux and official Nvidia support - it can work in many cases just fine. Laptops are different story.

[piorunz]

Name choice is terrible.

[timrichardson]

And Windows supports 100% of them by virtue of it being the de facto desktop and laptop OS.

Actually, Windows doesn't support it. The vendors support Windows. At least, they support it for a while, but when the product no longer sells, the vendor loses motivation to keep supporting it.

So while hardware support on Windows is broad, it is not chronologically deep. If you took a bucket of new hardware of which 100% had Windows support and 80% Linux, in five years the gap will be narrower: Linux will have added support, and latest Windows will have lost support.

Even for macs: I have a macbook pro 2012 which is still a very nice laptop. It runs the latest Ubuntu almost perfectly, but Apple doesn't support it with the latest macos.

[tuaris]

About this project I'm not really sure if FreeBSD is good choice (despite I like it). Hardware and software (mainly closed source) compatibility are inferior compared to Linux. Especially laptop users won't be happy about that.

I see lots of people questioning the decision to use FreeBSD (not just here). "Use Linux instead" because it will offer a "better out of the box experience". I don't mean to criticize anyone, but those are short sighted statements. Using Linux instead of FreeBSD will result in just another Linux distribution, put together with some custom tools and preconfigured defaults. There are plenty of those that come and go, and the fact that there are so many, is kind of telling of an much deeper problem (but that's a different discussion).

It's true that FreeBSD's hardware support for the laptop and desktop is not great. I can say that with confidence because I am someone who tries to use FreeBSD as a desktop/laptop OS. When it works, it works and works well. When it doesn't work (which is actually rare) it's a blocker, but those problems do get fixed and it's no longer a blocker. helloSystem's developer (based on my interaction with him) wants to build a new OS using FreeBSD as a basis (but not a fork). Initially there will be rough edges and hardware support will be limited. With the increased exposure, and as work progresses, users will report these issues. The shortcomings will be identified and efforts will be made to fix them (either by the project itself, upstream in FreeBSD, or ideally both).

I've been following this for a few months and I am intrigued. At the same time I'm not getting too excited. It's a major task that needs a major amount of people resources (and yes, the goals as written appear broad and untargetted). I like his mindset and agree with many of the ways he approaches things. I think he 100% correct about some of the deep rooted issues with the Unix/Linux design decisions (like the way software is installed). If he does succeed (and I want him to), it ultimately leads to improvements in FreeBSD that everyone can benefit from.

[kenjitamura]

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.

Well, that is unless Microsoft went ahead and decided to force an entire class of hardware into obsolescence like they did with easy transfer cables in Windows 10. Last month someone came to me to help them backup files onto a new laptop using a three year old cable and came to find Windows discontinued support for the cables when they removed their Easy Transfer feature.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...2-dfabae35fa01

The replacement software being directed to from the Microsoft website only supports a specific easy transfer cable they themselves make so said acquaintances Belkin cable is just e-waste.

[Hi-Angel]

Maybe I'm growing old but I don't know why these guis are needed in the first place. It's not like there is any workflow or speed advantages over a terminal and a tiling wm - probably rather the opposite. Makes sense for touch inputs, but I doubt they even considered that ...

It's fancies. I'm definitely not judging: am a user of i3, but I love fancies! So I'm using i3 + picom (transparency) + KDE.

[nabero]

It is a failure of the education system. From 1990 onwards, school children in their IT lessons have been told that DOS is old, Windows is new. They have then incorrectly related CLI to be DOS which is old, and GUI to be Windows, which is new. Times will change (and go the other way). But it will take exactly one generation to unlearn this nonsense.

Not sure, there's something interesting about GUIs that CLI don't have: easy discoverability of things. A picture is worth a thousand words and it's easier to spot an icon than or a menu than running your cli software with "--help"... nope "/?".. nope... -help here it is ! wait.. nope, only basic usage is shown... v_v

Most importantly, you need to learn how to use CLIs, which kind of keyword type, which key you should use for what. A pointer and a button is way more intuitive for interacting with a computer. Most users don't want and/or don't have the time to learn for doing stuff, the computer is just a tool that should give you a fast result for the task you do once in a while. Can't beat a GUI on that.

[curfew]

I don't understand why these projects seem to always focus on theming the OS using sub-par OS X rip-offs. Already 10 or 15 years ago everyone tried to mimic that and even as of today we still don't have a single decent "OS X-based" theme for any desktop environment that didn't look awful and amateuristic.

They should come up with their own identity and definition of elegance, even if borrowing ideas from OS X at the same time. To my mind Gnome has been successful in this in recent years. That's why I love it.

[pabloski]

helloSystem's developer (based on my interaction with him) wants to build a new OS using FreeBSD as a basis (but not a fork).

And this is one of the problems. I was reading a thread on FreeBSD forums about the demise of FuryBSD ( of which helloSystem looks to be the spiritual child ) and one of the users triumphantly commented "Good that it is dead. They wanted to create a FreeBSD distro, but we are not like Linux...blahblah".

This is the problem. helloSystem will face an incredibly opposition by the FreeBSD community. The ones who could help the project, will bash it and try to bury it.

The hardware problem obviously exists, but it isn't the biggest problem. Software support is another side of it. And with all energies focused on Linux, the best people can expect is a Linux-centric software ecosystem barely adapted to work on FreeBSD too. Look at Gnome. And look at KDE too!! And every major software in between ( except server-side software and dev tools ).

Also, the problems about the filesystem layout mainly stem from Linux/BSD being Unixes. Let's face it, it is insane to put all of the binaries in /bin, and /usr/bin, all the config files in /etc ( and often replicated in the $HOME ), etc... It is a problem that Apple solved discretely. Same for Windows. Gobolinux tried to solve it, but it hasn't gained too much traction. Clear Linux is a recent Linux distro trying to do the same, in an innovative way. We will see.

Meanwhile Redhat and friends are saying that the solution is to bundle everything into "frameworks" ( I am referring to Flatpak and Snap ) and practically ship giant containerized applications. At this point, just ship programs compiled statically!! It makes much more sense.