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It feels like more of the Linux desktop world is increasingly tied to things that are either dispositionally incompatible or incompatible license-wise with the
by peatmoss 8y ago
It feels like more of the Linux desktop world is increasingly tied to things that are either dispositionally incompatible or incompatible license-wise with the BSDs. For example dbus, Wayland, and systemd are all problematic for BSD for various degrees of problematic.
If I were interested in a long-term stable desktop ecosystem on BSD, and I were part of a core team, I’d start a cooperative project to build BSD-licensed cleanroom implementations of launchd, the NeXTStep APIs, and a desktop environment that stayed as close to macOS metaphors as possible.
I have to imagine that there are some corporate sponsors who’d be delighted for a mostly source-compatible, BSD-licensed path to writing apps for both macOS and also appliances and other devices.
A while back Sony seemed poised to work on a NeXTStep compatible UI layer, going as far as posting some code IIRC, before pulling the plug.
- JdeBP 8y agoThere have been several failed attempts at launchd. There was also a NeXTBSD. * http://jdebp.eu./FGA/launchd-on-bsd.html http://jdebp.eu./FGA/launchd-on-bsd.html * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13899766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13899766 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14983970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14983970 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15161361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15161361 I mention nosh there. I am going to release version 1.38 soon.
- peatmoss 8y agoWow, looks like others have had the same idea. Wonder what stalled things out? Maybe there’d be something worth picking back up.
- loeg 8y agoThe big sticking point the last go-around was adding Mach IPC to FreeBSD. Mach IPC affects the security of the system in potentially subtle ways (it seems Apple struggled with Mach IPC security for a while in the early days of OS X). In addition to security concerns, there was a question of whether FreeBSD should have Mach IPC, as a sort of project identity question. Some suggested using plain Unix sockets instead of Mach IPC, but the effort required for that seemed to be very non-trivial. There was some concern about XML plists, which no one is excited about, but I view those as somewhat trivial. (FreeBSD launchd could easily use a JSON or "libucl" format plist.) Finally, the developer behind the Mach IPC and launchd port didn't really want to do the politics required to land a big change like this. I can't really fault him that; it's tedious and thankless.