airyxOS Aims To Build Upon FreeBSD With The "Finesse of macOS"

[skeevy420]

skeevy420

Get lost troll.

I take it that something about the concept of License to PD after so many years pisses you off? I take it you have no decent, meritable argument against it so you went straight into the attacks. Good for you.

If Joe Smith dies, why should Joe Smith's code stay as CDDL or Apache for perpetuity? Should code staying under X license for perpetuity be a thing? Do the licensee rights pass on to Joe's family or someone in a will? Seeing the source tree having the standards as well as special GPL and CDDL directories made me think of that.

What about people who make one-off commits and are then never heard from again? Is their code supposed to be under a specific license for all eternity?

I assume that you do not like the GPL to PD aspect of the concept, but use-cases covering how the licensing of code works when we're dead and gone is a relevant topic.

While I'm sure these are covered in wills -- what if Linus Torvalds or Linus Pottering were hit by buses tomorrow? Where to their rights to the kernel and systemd end up with? Red Hat? Someone in their will? Somewhere else? How can it be guaranteed that the Linux kernel will be in good stewardship 10 years after that? 20 years? 3 or 4 wills later? How can it be guaranteed that the licensee rights will keep being passed from good person to good person?

A Public Domain after so many years could help to act as a counter to bad actors taking control of the license rights as well as give the community an old option to fork and modernize just in case the worst-case scenario happens -- Red Hat, Microsoft, Google, etc eventually buy off or are willed into all the (GPLv2) license rights and then close up shop for outsiders.

[jacob]

There have been many projects based on that idea already, none have resulted in anything meaningful. The FreeBSD community are the most vocal opponents to systemd, freedesktop, gnome, wayland etc and everything and anything that seeks to de-unixify the ecosystem and move it towards a more modern, intuitive desktop OS. They can't achieve "the finesse of MacOS" until they accept that people expect their desktop OS to Just Work and stay out of the way. No-one installs it for the privilege of being able to do vi /etc/fstab, opening a shell and using su/sudo/ifconfig to connect to WiFi or having to write a disgustingly tortuous shell script to make their torrent client start upon login.

[stormcrow]

Was wondering why they're doing this and not contributing to another project, I looked at their FAQ and it's very in-depth

https://airyx.org/faq.html

It sounds like they actually know what they're talking about and not just blindly trying to paste a fancy KDE theme over FreeBSD. Although, it's disappointing they're using every outdated and insecure language as possible for new projects instead of adopting Rust. I mean, god, you really want to use Java after log4shell? Why not throw in COBOL while you're at it. Although I suppose Mac was never intended to be anything more than a toy desktop so it's not like it needs to be secure or stable. Still, best of luck to them.

You really don't know what you're talking about. Did you even investigate the details of the Log4Shell exploit before you started spouting off? The programming logic in Log4J would have been exploitable in just about any programming language because it was a LOGIC flaw. They didn't sanitize their inputs (again). It had very little to do with it being written in Java.

Java is a widely used language, and for the most part its virtual machine is reasonably secure when used by a team of skilled engineers. The problem with Java is the same as if it had been any other Turing complete language exposed to the Internet via web browser at large. It was a stupid idea, just as it's stupid to have Javascript, PHP, WebASM, etc etc etc exposed to the Internet. You're going to have problems because you end up running untrusted code with untrusted input dumped to backends with naive interfaces. That's impossible to fully secure unless you're using a very limited language.

Second, you sound like the pocket protector snobs from the 1980s that were on their way of being pushed out of research and academia by the end of the 90s. If the OS wasn't VMS/SunOS it was a "toy" OS. Well, I'm here to tell you MacOS as it exists today is not a toy, and it's just as useful for work as any Unix (or Windows) system in production. It needs to be as secure and performant as Apple can make it. MacOS and iOS are one of the most widely deployed client operating systems on the planet (they're mostly the same core OS with a different UI emphasis). Between the two they have well over a billion users, and people get their work done on them each and every day.

I'd much rather have the MacOS interface than almost any of the current disasters of DEs in X11 land so if these guys can come up with something new that addresses some of the warts on MacOS UI for FreeBSD then so much the better.

( Oh, and I wrote this post with Firefox on MacOS. Stuff it. )

[Luke_Wolf]

Good joke! It had upper hand in audio and graphic stack, but nothing more. With Wayland and pipewire this is going to change. In everything else toyOS sucks.

Upper hand in graphics? you mean the one that was always worse than Windows? You mean the one that for most of the past decade has been slower than Linux's? You mean the one that didn't pick up mouse cursor warping until after Linux? Mac only ever had an upper hand in graphics because of the PPC hardware being better for floating point than early x86, and even then they weren't the best choice for that era, that would be the Amiga.

[bple2137]

I was pretty disappointed that helloSystem did not boot on my Ryzen 4500U APU thinkpad, the hardware support doesn't seem to be all that there. These guys seem to know what they are doing so I will follow.

I tried to boot helloSystem on desktop Ryzen 7 and it was stuck on the bootscreen.

[leech]

I take it that something about the concept of License to PD after so many years pisses you off? I take it you have no decent, meritable argument against it so you went straight into the attacks. Good for you.

If Joe Smith dies, why should Joe Smith's code stay as CDDL or Apache for perpetuity? Should code staying under X license for perpetuity be a thing? Do the licensee rights pass on to Joe's family or someone in a will? Seeing the source tree having the standards as well as special GPL and CDDL directories made me think of that.

What about people who make one-off commits and are then never heard from again? Is their code supposed to be under a specific license for all eternity?

I assume that you do not like the GPL to PD aspect of the concept, but use-cases covering how the licensing of code works when we're dead and gone is a relevant topic.

While I'm sure these are covered in wills -- what if Linus Torvalds or Linus Pottering were hit by buses tomorrow? Where to their rights to the kernel and systemd end up with? Red Hat? Someone in their will? Somewhere else? How can it be guaranteed that the Linux kernel will be in good stewardship 10 years after that? 20 years? 3 or 4 wills later? How can it be guaranteed that the licensee rights will keep being passed from good person to good person?

A Public Domain after so many years could help to act as a counter to bad actors taking control of the license rights as well as give the community an old option to fork and modernize just in case the worst-case scenario happens -- Red Hat, Microsoft, Google, etc eventually buy off or are willed into all the (GPLv2) license rights and then close up shop for outsiders.

I think the problem with the thought of Source Code becoming public domain after X years is that Source Code, unlike say books that are under copyright, is that source code evolves. Now sure, it should fall under the normal copyright as anything else does. If source code has not been touched in.. I think it's like 70 years after the author's death, then sure it should be released into public domain. But let's face it, 70 year old source code wouldn't likely be very useful for anything, now would it? Since the Linux source code is a full project and is continually evolving, you can't really use any of that logic to justify it moving to a PD license.

If you need a kernel you can just grab and do whatever with, why would you bother with GPL, which forces you to share changes?

[leech]

Upper hand in graphics? you mean the one that was always worse than Windows? You mean the one that for most of the past decade has been slower than Linux's? You mean the one that didn't pick up mouse cursor warping until after Linux? Mac only ever had an upper hand in graphics because of the PPC hardware being better for floating point than early x86, and even then they weren't the best choice for that era, that would be the Amiga.

Ha ha, one of the new features of Monterey is that you can now change the colors of the Mouse cursor... something AmigaOS has had since 1.3 at least, potentially earlier. Oh and you can do 4 color mouse pointers. macOS can only do two...

https://www.imore.com/how-customize-your-cursor-macos-monterey

[jacob]

Upper hand in graphics? you mean the one that was always worse than Windows? You mean the one that for most of the past decade has been slower than Linux's? You mean the one that didn't pick up mouse cursor warping until after Linux? Mac only ever had an upper hand in graphics because of the PPC hardware being better for floating point than early x86, and even then they weren't the best choice for that era, that would be the Amiga.

Actually back then the Mac has always been the better machine for graphics. The Amiga was unparalleled in 2D animation, that's undeniable. It was also uniquely suited for video because of its interlaced display (which was a huge downside at the same time). But for pure graphics work (photo editing, desktop publishing, drawing, CAD etc) the Mac had superior display modes. Even the Mac II, which came out more or less at the same time as the Amiga 2000, already had hi-res with 480 lines (physical, not laced) in 256 simultaneous colors with a 24 bit palette. IIRC it could even support 1024*768 in True Color with a video memory expansion and an optional (arguably expensive) monitor. It also had a more powerful CPU.

[lumks]

I do not understand the intention behind all of this "Lets create a copy of XY" while, if you think a minute about it it always ends in a "Copy of XY without any support from outside, with no polish, with no apps, with almost no testing, with no usage for an enduser".

For real, create something own, something that is not to different from todays world of computing, but is an own thing. Like Fedora does, like ElementaryOS does. No one cares about a "free clone", users want "usable alternatives"

[dagger]

Sounds like another copycat project..