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

[rabcor]

Lol, the finesse of macos? Man, this can only seriously suck, besides their horrid interface design choices (with the philosophy of 'DO NOT ALLOW USER TO CHANGE ANYTHING') and the OSes downright embarrassing performance, losing out to just about any other OS in just about any benchmark out there...

Yeah, the 'finesse' of macos is a very low bar to set

[dragon321]

But they could still join forces to create one system and let the user decide if they want the modern theme or oldskool theme.

It's not only about theme. There are fundamental differences. Both are inspired by macOS so they are visually similar but they are different under the hood. It seems that helloSystem mostly focuses on GUI side and keep FreeBSD base more or less unchanged with different technologies than macOS uses, while airyxOS, according to FAQ, also has macOS compatibility goal. Two different approaches that can't really work in one system.

[kylew77]

Why do people support BSD licenses for OS when their only advantage over GPL is for the corporations that can take it up, make some improvements and release it as a closed source proprietary OS without benefiting the original project in any way? I mean, if BSD license was good for projects, then darwin and freeBSD/openBSD etc would be one of the best supported and feature rich projects out there, given how many companies have benefited from them for their proprietary software

People are Evil! The BSD, MIT, and ISC licenses are suppierier to me because they are truly free, BUT like you said you get companies like Apple and Sony and Juniper who do not contribute back. They just take and take. Does that mean that truly open license is bad? No it doesn't, it just means there are some evil companies out there who won't contribute back!

[kylew77]

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.

We let people drive a car who can't change the oil or do basic maintenance on it. Some people were taught that is wrong. Like my dad taught me. You should know how your car works just as much as you should know how your operating system works. Being too dumb to edit your fstab is a sign that maybe a *BSD isn't for that user. There is a reason I put my elderly family members on Xubuntu and not OpenBSD despite OpenBSD being the superior OS. They can't handle the day to day maintenance of the system. That is why Windows is so popular in part, it has little wizards and setup tools and you never have to touch the CLI if you don't want to. The *BSDs encourage that so I'll keep on being an Open/Free/NetBSD fan! (WIndows is also popular because of BS that Microsoft did to preload in on computers, but that is another story for another time).

[amxfonseca]

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.

Well, it runs way more software when it comes to graphics design than Linux. So that’s already an advantage. And it properly handles scaling on high DPI screens, which I do use. In my case I run the laptop screen at 2x and the main 4K screen at 1.5x scaling factors and all applications transition pretty well between them. All nice and sharp without pixelated icons and fonts.

And let’s not talk about color profiles. Try to use a non sRGB screen on Linux or even windows and show us how it looks. Half of the applications aren’t aware of the color space, so you either end up with wrong over saturated colors or everything gets limited to sRGB.

Audio is the same. You can run an application like Ableton out of the box in macOS and have zero stutter or crackling. Even with tiny buffers in case you need low latency for live audio. MIDI is also a breeze to work with. No need to “configure” pipewire/pulse/JACK or whatever is the latest trend just to get sound on the device.

Now, Linux is just a better kernel on all measures. No questions on that part. And that’s why I use it as a developer. So I am not saying that macOS is just better, because It is not.

But macOS serves me well as a day to day operative system. I have an M1 max MacBook and that thing rocks. It instantly wakes from sleep, the battery lasts for ages and it’s really fast. And I can run MS office if I need, audio editing apps like Ableton or Cubase without issues. Kicad also works (just like it works on Linux), but the devs are to lazy to support high DPI screens so every icon looks like crap.

I run Linux aarch64 on a qemu VM. Since qemu supports HVF acceleration (macOS native hyper visor), the Linux VM runs at native speed. So I can run all the development tools inside Linux. Like I said, I prefer Linux as a dev environment, so I use it. I don’t have strong ideological beliefs when it comes to tools, I just use what’s best and does the job. I do prefer open-source tools and I am myself a small contributor. But if the tool isn’t good enough I won’t make my life miserable to to follow a cult.

But I don’t run any UI related stuff on Linux, just go pure CLI. There’s where it shines. I found the desktop environments in Linux quite unpolished. So I do prefer the macOS desktop experience. So I just use that, and perfectly does the job I need.

But I respect people that use/prefer Gnome/KDE. It’s their choice. Unfortunately most of people on this forum do not accept that people may have different preferences. And just keep bashing and complaining. Again, it’s like being part of some kind of cult.

[Anux]

I'm not too familiar with MacOS and its design but that screenshot of the installer gives me Win 95 vibes. The only thing they took from Mac are the really bad min/max/close knobs that are totally unintuitiv and an even greater horror for color blind people.
I hope that is just because of the alpha stage.

But I also don't get why everyone praises mac for their design, if it is not intuitv and has bad useability it can look nice and shiny all it wants. What about useability? Shouldn't that be the biggest goal?

[skeevy420]

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?

That's why I said Head Date-X Years for active projects. It could also be stated as Commit Date+X Years. Both have a similar meaning. As an open source programmer, you'll know your code will stay as GPLv2 or CDDL or Apache or MIT for X Years. After X it becomes PD.

To put that in copyright perspective, take Winnie the Pooh. It's first book just went into Public Domain on the first of this year. Anything from the WtP 1.0 release is free range because it's Public Domain. Anything from subsequent WtP releases, books, isn't covered under Public Domain yet. That means I could write a WtP story using the characters, locations, and settings but I couldn't do a story about Tigger because he didn't exist until the 2nd WtP book. Tigger comes to PD in 2028. I also couldn't do Pooh in a red shirt because Disney owns the copyrights to that; they bought them in the 1930s from the guy who drew it.

Source code would be handled the exact same. If it's, using the OG copyright date, 20 years from the today then Linux code form 1/31/2002 would open up to Public Domain. Since it's constantly evolving, Commit Date+X Years.

But I'm thinking of situations like OpenZFS; not necessarily the Linux kernel (thought that's certainly related to OpenZFS). AFAIK, it's been over 10 years since an Oracle employee has touched that code. How long does Oracle get to have rights over something they don't even contribute towards anymore? Is ZFS supposed stay using the incompatible with Linux CDDL for all time?

Then there's death and the one time contributors. Are anyone's commits supposed to stay as XYZ license 200 years after they die? Why is that fair? Code truly does need a Public Domain clause. I'll use me as an example -- I've done one or two commits to the PTS under GPLv3. Should I die tomorrow, does that death mean that Michael is unable to update the license to the PTS? No one else that I know even knows that so they don't even know to inherit my license rights to those PTS commits to assist with Michael and his potential relicensing (granted that all I did was simple scripting that anyone could rewrite, but the point stands).

That's a grim, macabre aspect to consider, but it needs to be considered none-the-less. Because the alternative is buyouts and inheriting licenses. Can anyone assure us that in 10 years they won't be broke and need Red Hat's money so they sell their rights? Can anyone assure us that their kids or grand-kids won't do that? In the long run, without some sort of clause, checks and balances, open and free will lose to money in the long run. It always does and will become "open" and "free". Maybe that's me being paranoid, maybe that's me looking at history and seeing how families have squandered their legacies' name, genius, and wealth into nothing.

[leech]

On the flip side of this, I guess it depends on what you consider Public Domain. GPLv# basically forces people to share the code changes, and to make them available to whomever uses the software. Funny enough, that does make it so people could commercialize things, but still have to share the source along with the binaries. But not necessarily to the public, unless that codebase is already public. It sort of is a forced public domain. I do agree though that source code should be treated more like books. If a program sits there unused for X years, just like trademarks and such, they should be released out to the open. Though I could see some exceptions, like cryptography and such.

[Anux]

My understanding is that GPL is about giving all the power to the user to prevent corps from taking control and MIT/BSD is about maximum freedom without restricting anyone. While I admire Stallman for his consequent fighting for its ideals, I also see nothing wrong with max freedom. Who writes it also dictates the license.

Also in germany you are not legaly able to give away your copyright but you could agree to republish your code under whatever future license.

[Volta]

I find it kind of funny because your favourite DE borrowed so heavily from that particular toy os and it still has a long way to get there...

My favorite DE was KDE. I'm Gnome user since about 1.5 year, but what you said was valid for Gnome 2. Gnome 3 is different thing.