10 ms·

BSD-XFCE installs macOS-like XFCE enviroment on FreeBSD

138 points by vermaden 4y ago

sgerenser 4y ago
Kerning in that screenshot makes me ill. Look at the Firefox titlebar: hom e?
rahen 4y ago
Right now I would be more interested in ravynOS: https://airyx.org https://airyx.org It's also FreeBSD, but they're writing their own Apple-compatible userland on top.
- POPOSYS 4y ago
  This is interesting: "On 2022-02-14, we decided to abandon the current path of using X11/KDE desktop components and write from scratch a new UI that will align better with our goals."
  - rahen 4y ago
    Yes. Also it's written in Objective-C and uses AppKit, CoreGraphics and QuartzCore. https://wiki.ravynos.com/wiki/Roadmap#WindowServer_and_the_Magma_Desktop_Environment https://wiki.ravynos.com/wiki/Roadmap#WindowServer_and_the_M...
- lproven 4y ago
  > they're writing their own AFAIK it is mainly a fork of Simon Peter's Hello System. He did the bulk of the work, AFAIK. Credit where it is due.
alwillis 4y ago
Thanks for posting this.
Shared404 4y ago
It's interesting that it only supports Nvidia, not Intel or AMD graphics. Is there a reason behind that other than that being what the author had on hand?
k2enemy 4y ago
Cool project and kudos to the developers, however projects such as these often fall into an uncanny valley for me. The overall look matches that of MacOS (or Windows, etc), but the details are off. Fonts are wrong, padding and spacing are wrong, UI controls are a little off. The attention to detail just never matches that of the real thing.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  The details always being a bit off makes me think the better route might be to create an environment that follows macOS in the broad strokes (e.g. global menubar, applications presiding over windows in navigation, a general inclination towards loose organization of odd sized windows, etc) but when it comes to aesthetics has its own identity filling in the details. A lot of DEs already do similar for Windows, being variants on the Win9X desktop paradigm (taskbar, windows over applications, inclination towards windows being maximized) so it’s hardly a novel concept and I think it more consistently delivers decent results.
- linguae 4y ago
  I agree. I'd like to see some themes that are Mac-inspired but are not clones, which seem to suffer from this "uncanny valley" you mentioned. To add, Mac OS is much more than its visual elements; the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines establishes what it means for a Mac application to be one by specifying rules that not only apply to visuals, but also to behaviors. Historically Mac users rejected software that did not comply with the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (for example, the widespread rejection of Microsoft Word 6 for Mac, which was decried as too Windows-like, which caused people to stick to the well-received Word 5.1). It's possible to make an application built using Win32, GTK, or Qt to look like a Mac application simply by applying themes with a high degree of fidelity to the Mac. However, themes are unable to change the behavior of the applications to bring them in line with the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. A typical GNOME application with a Mac theme is still a GNOME application. Of course, in an era where cross-platform apps are increasingly becoming the norm, there's less concern about adhering to a platform's UI/UX guidelines. I still believe there is value with having an ecosystem of applications that largely comply with well-thought UI/UX guidelines, which is one area where the Mac has absolutely shined throughout its history.
sandreas 4y ago
Although I honor this huge effort - just looking like macOS does not mean it is macOS-Like. I hate to say this, but macOS is way more than just its look. Most people miss that. I doubt that these FreeBSD changes will contain the following macOS-Like features: - The best touchpad expierience including kinetic / inertial scrolling, rubberbanding,etc. - Apps like Mail and Preview with its simple but yet powerful set of features - Fast and stable Wifi - Battery life - Excellent Typography - System wide function keys (play, pause, volume up, etc.) that work everywhere - Quick look - Air drop I recently switched from macOS to Fedora 36 and will keep using it, because it is awesome, but the things I miss the most are listed above :-) But prefer freedom over macOS-Like, so kudos for posting this.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  The best thing to not have from macOS is the idiotic display system that prevents you from using a non-Apple HiDPI monitor.
  - BearOso 4y ago
    That's because what seemed like the best way to do hidpi when macOS added it (fixed scale factors and assets) ended up being a problem. It's better to not abstract away the DPI differences. It makes for worse compatibility in the short term, but much better long-term. The behavior with high refresh rates is pretty bad, too. A lot of stuff is hardcoded to 60hz, and programs have to opt in. They haven't even fixed Safari properly yet.
    - lproven 4y ago
      Strongly disagree. Every time I read about the benefits of Wayland, I read shopping list of stuff I don't care about and don't want. I don't give a stuff about techie nerdwank like refresh rates, tearing, video smoothness, triple buffering and other pointless implementation details that it is the entire job of a GUI to make go away. What I care about is that I plug in a screen, I drag a window onto it, and it stays the same size. That my window can straddle two screens and still work. That I can resize it across as many screens as I want. I want it to work and I want how that happens to be invisible. Wayland, as far as I can tell, is about xNix graphics programmers complaining about how hard the job is, I'm afraid.
hs86 4y ago
This script mixes ports with custom build options with the official binary packages, which are built using only the default build options. Going forward, it would be advised to only update via e.g. portmaster or poudriere. In both cases, the user would need to compile updates from source.
henning 4y ago
> Disables CPU mitigations for Spectre/Meltdown WTF?
- newx 4y ago
  First: I agree with you. As for the reason: I believe it's for 'performance gain' as those mitigations have performance impact
- broodbucket 4y ago
  It's a silly thing to do by default but the vast majority of people do not need them and can't justify the loss of performance on every context switch. The only untrusted code people tend to run on personal computers is in the browser, where you have same address space sandbox escapes which OS mitigations don't typically mitigate. You're protecting against one process attacking another process, or one process attacking the kernel. That's not your threat model on a personal device. Your threat model is much more likely that whatever process you're running has complete access to all your files, there are a lot of issues unsolved before even considering speculation and sidechannels
gee_totes 4y ago
I did not know that XFCE supported this level of customization. Where can I find other XFCE skinpacks?
- mmgutz 4y ago
  The best ones are usually the Windows themes like [Chicago 95](https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95). Users show off on reddit.com/r/unixporn.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
It's in good company as macOS/XNU/Darwin userland is based on 4.4BSD-Lite2 and an ancient version of FreeBSD.
lastdong 4y ago
Great to see XFCE: it’s amazing, so flexible, lightweight and enables so much more than one would expect. To bear in mind, MacOS is not just visual, there’s a whole UX paradigm that goes with it
leoh 4y ago
Off topic, but I’m really interested in the opposite. ie alternative desktop environments to Mac OS X’s WindowServer.
- lproven 4y ago
  There are none to be interested in, and never were. I welcome correction on this, but TTBOMK there never has been a single one, from the original Lisa OS in 1983. Apple OSes have always been designed and built as an integrated whole. That's one of the things Apple owners like about them. Rather than developer effort being split across dozens of competing rival implementations, there is one, and all effort goes into improving that single one. Before I get called a fanboy: I wasn't an Apple owner until about 12 years after the Mac launched and I have never bought a new Apple product in my life. All mine were 2nd hand, or free, saved from disposal.
  - leoh 4y ago
    I would be glad to use Mac OS X applications and OS with a radically different windowing system like i3wm.
    - lproven 4y ago
      macOS is a UNIX, but it's not Linux. It doesn't use X11 or Wayland, any more than Android does. If you removed Quartz, there would be no GUI left. If that's what you want, then there is Darwin out there. https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu There have been various efforts to make it run as a standalone OS with X11: • Pure Darwin: http://www.puredarwin.org/ http://www.puredarwin.org/ • Open Darwin: https://archiveos.org/opendarwin/ https://archiveos.org/opendarwin/ • Next BSD: https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD But they aren't much use. If you just want tiling windows, then I use Rectangle: https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/ For me that replaced Spectacle when that was discontinued: https://www.spectacleapp.com/ https://www.spectacleapp.com/
qwerty456127 4y ago
> Installs Creative Suite (Audio/Video & image editing applications) Wut? How? To me lack of the Adobe apps has always bean the number-one problem of free OSes.
- resoluteteeth 4y ago
  They appear to just mean standard media applications like gimp and audacity based on the shell script. This potentially misleading but maybe arguably less so now that Adobe doesn't actually have a product named Creative Suite (it's Creative Cloud now).
- POPOSYS 4y ago
  Many pro artists and content producers today do not need Adobe Software anymore, the alternatives are often much better. Take some time and taste freedom.
- alwillis 4y ago
  Wut? How? To me lack of the Adobe apps has always bean the number-one problem of free OSes. We’re not as reliant on Adobe’s apps like we were back in the day. But if you’re on FreeBSD or Linux, you can access Photoshop on the web if necessary: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/14/23162580/photoshop-web-free-freemium-version-adobe https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/14/23162580/photoshop-web-fr...
brokenkebab2 4y ago
MacOSX UI nowadays feels quite outdated compared to e.g. default KDE. And I don't even like KDE that much.
User23 4y ago
I was hoping this was going to be the frankly considerably more attractive System 6 or so era appearance.
- lproven 4y ago
  That would be nice, but the thing is that the OS X UI has been heavily influenced by more mainstream PC desktop UI design, which makes it both more accessible to migrants from other platforms, and for making imitations of it. Classic MacOS wasn't, and there are no complete emulations of it any more. There were in the '90s, but they are lost now. I've looked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937562
  - User23 4y ago
    I had a go at it 25 years ago, but I lost that .fvwmrc not long after. So I can totally relate.
jcadam 4y ago
> ... with a very beautiful looking for classic macOS users. Huh? this looks like OS X, not Classic Mac OS.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
> Disables CPU mitigations for Spectre/Meltdown Umm.. Really bad idea to disable security protections as part of a UI package. Please leave that kind of thing up to the user to decide for themselves.

138 points by vermaden 4y ago

Kerning in that screenshot makes me ill. Look at the Firefox titlebar: hom e?

Right now I would be more interested in ravynOS: https://airyx.org https://airyx.org It's also FreeBSD, but they're writing their own Apple-compatible userland on top.

POPOSYS 4y ago
This is interesting: "On 2022-02-14, we decided to abandon the current path of using X11/KDE desktop components and write from scratch a new UI that will align better with our goals."
- rahen 4y ago
  Yes. Also it's written in Objective-C and uses AppKit, CoreGraphics and QuartzCore. https://wiki.ravynos.com/wiki/Roadmap#WindowServer_and_the_Magma_Desktop_Environment https://wiki.ravynos.com/wiki/Roadmap#WindowServer_and_the_M...
lproven 4y ago
> they're writing their own AFAIK it is mainly a fork of Simon Peter's Hello System. He did the bulk of the work, AFAIK. Credit where it is due.

alwillis 4y ago

Thanks for posting this.

Shared404 4y ago

It's interesting that it only supports Nvidia, not Intel or AMD graphics. Is there a reason behind that other than that being what the author had on hand?

k2enemy 4y ago

Cool project and kudos to the developers, however projects such as these often fall into an uncanny valley for me. The overall look matches that of MacOS (or Windows, etc), but the details are off. Fonts are wrong, padding and spacing are wrong, UI controls are a little off. The attention to detail just never matches that of the real thing.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
The details always being a bit off makes me think the better route might be to create an environment that follows macOS in the broad strokes (e.g. global menubar, applications presiding over windows in navigation, a general inclination towards loose organization of odd sized windows, etc) but when it comes to aesthetics has its own identity filling in the details. A lot of DEs already do similar for Windows, being variants on the Win9X desktop paradigm (taskbar, windows over applications, inclination towards windows being maximized) so it’s hardly a novel concept and I think it more consistently delivers decent results.
linguae 4y ago
I agree. I'd like to see some themes that are Mac-inspired but are not clones, which seem to suffer from this "uncanny valley" you mentioned. To add, Mac OS is much more than its visual elements; the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines establishes what it means for a Mac application to be one by specifying rules that not only apply to visuals, but also to behaviors. Historically Mac users rejected software that did not comply with the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (for example, the widespread rejection of Microsoft Word 6 for Mac, which was decried as too Windows-like, which caused people to stick to the well-received Word 5.1). It's possible to make an application built using Win32, GTK, or Qt to look like a Mac application simply by applying themes with a high degree of fidelity to the Mac. However, themes are unable to change the behavior of the applications to bring them in line with the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. A typical GNOME application with a Mac theme is still a GNOME application. Of course, in an era where cross-platform apps are increasingly becoming the norm, there's less concern about adhering to a platform's UI/UX guidelines. I still believe there is value with having an ecosystem of applications that largely comply with well-thought UI/UX guidelines, which is one area where the Mac has absolutely shined throughout its history.

sandreas 4y ago

Although I honor this huge effort - just looking like macOS does not mean it is macOS-Like. I hate to say this, but macOS is way more than just its look. Most people miss that. I doubt that these FreeBSD changes will contain the following macOS-Like features: - The best touchpad expierience including kinetic / inertial scrolling, rubberbanding,etc. - Apps like Mail and Preview with its simple but yet powerful set of features - Fast and stable Wifi - Battery life - Excellent Typography - System wide function keys (play, pause, volume up, etc.) that work everywhere - Quick look - Air drop I recently switched from macOS to Fedora 36 and will keep using it, because it is awesome, but the things I miss the most are listed above :-) But prefer freedom over macOS-Like, so kudos for posting this.

29athrowaway 4y ago
The best thing to not have from macOS is the idiotic display system that prevents you from using a non-Apple HiDPI monitor.
- BearOso 4y ago
  That's because what seemed like the best way to do hidpi when macOS added it (fixed scale factors and assets) ended up being a problem. It's better to not abstract away the DPI differences. It makes for worse compatibility in the short term, but much better long-term. The behavior with high refresh rates is pretty bad, too. A lot of stuff is hardcoded to 60hz, and programs have to opt in. They haven't even fixed Safari properly yet.
  - lproven 4y ago
    Strongly disagree. Every time I read about the benefits of Wayland, I read shopping list of stuff I don't care about and don't want. I don't give a stuff about techie nerdwank like refresh rates, tearing, video smoothness, triple buffering and other pointless implementation details that it is the entire job of a GUI to make go away. What I care about is that I plug in a screen, I drag a window onto it, and it stays the same size. That my window can straddle two screens and still work. That I can resize it across as many screens as I want. I want it to work and I want how that happens to be invisible. Wayland, as far as I can tell, is about xNix graphics programmers complaining about how hard the job is, I'm afraid.

hs86 4y ago

This script mixes ports with custom build options with the official binary packages, which are built using only the default build options. Going forward, it would be advised to only update via e.g. portmaster or poudriere. In both cases, the user would need to compile updates from source.

henning 4y ago

> Disables CPU mitigations for Spectre/Meltdown WTF?

newx 4y ago
First: I agree with you. As for the reason: I believe it's for 'performance gain' as those mitigations have performance impact
broodbucket 4y ago
It's a silly thing to do by default but the vast majority of people do not need them and can't justify the loss of performance on every context switch. The only untrusted code people tend to run on personal computers is in the browser, where you have same address space sandbox escapes which OS mitigations don't typically mitigate. You're protecting against one process attacking another process, or one process attacking the kernel. That's not your threat model on a personal device. Your threat model is much more likely that whatever process you're running has complete access to all your files, there are a lot of issues unsolved before even considering speculation and sidechannels

gee_totes 4y ago

I did not know that XFCE supported this level of customization. Where can I find other XFCE skinpacks?

mmgutz 4y ago
The best ones are usually the Windows themes like [Chicago 95](https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95). Users show off on reddit.com/r/unixporn.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago

It's in good company as macOS/XNU/Darwin userland is based on 4.4BSD-Lite2 and an ancient version of FreeBSD.

lastdong 4y ago

Great to see XFCE: it’s amazing, so flexible, lightweight and enables so much more than one would expect. To bear in mind, MacOS is not just visual, there’s a whole UX paradigm that goes with it

leoh 4y ago

Off topic, but I’m really interested in the opposite. ie alternative desktop environments to Mac OS X’s WindowServer.

lproven 4y ago
There are none to be interested in, and never were. I welcome correction on this, but TTBOMK there never has been a single one, from the original Lisa OS in 1983. Apple OSes have always been designed and built as an integrated whole. That's one of the things Apple owners like about them. Rather than developer effort being split across dozens of competing rival implementations, there is one, and all effort goes into improving that single one. Before I get called a fanboy: I wasn't an Apple owner until about 12 years after the Mac launched and I have never bought a new Apple product in my life. All mine were 2nd hand, or free, saved from disposal.
- leoh 4y ago
  I would be glad to use Mac OS X applications and OS with a radically different windowing system like i3wm.
  - lproven 4y ago
    macOS is a UNIX, but it's not Linux. It doesn't use X11 or Wayland, any more than Android does. If you removed Quartz, there would be no GUI left. If that's what you want, then there is Darwin out there. https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu There have been various efforts to make it run as a standalone OS with X11: • Pure Darwin: http://www.puredarwin.org/ http://www.puredarwin.org/ • Open Darwin: https://archiveos.org/opendarwin/ https://archiveos.org/opendarwin/ • Next BSD: https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD But they aren't much use. If you just want tiling windows, then I use Rectangle: https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/ For me that replaced Spectacle when that was discontinued: https://www.spectacleapp.com/ https://www.spectacleapp.com/

qwerty456127 4y ago

> Installs Creative Suite (Audio/Video & image editing applications) Wut? How? To me lack of the Adobe apps has always bean the number-one problem of free OSes.

resoluteteeth 4y ago
They appear to just mean standard media applications like gimp and audacity based on the shell script. This potentially misleading but maybe arguably less so now that Adobe doesn't actually have a product named Creative Suite (it's Creative Cloud now).
POPOSYS 4y ago
Many pro artists and content producers today do not need Adobe Software anymore, the alternatives are often much better. Take some time and taste freedom.
alwillis 4y ago
Wut? How? To me lack of the Adobe apps has always bean the number-one problem of free OSes. We’re not as reliant on Adobe’s apps like we were back in the day. But if you’re on FreeBSD or Linux, you can access Photoshop on the web if necessary: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/14/23162580/photoshop-web-free-freemium-version-adobe https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/14/23162580/photoshop-web-fr...

brokenkebab2 4y ago

MacOSX UI nowadays feels quite outdated compared to e.g. default KDE. And I don't even like KDE that much.

User23 4y ago

I was hoping this was going to be the frankly considerably more attractive System 6 or so era appearance.

lproven 4y ago
That would be nice, but the thing is that the OS X UI has been heavily influenced by more mainstream PC desktop UI design, which makes it both more accessible to migrants from other platforms, and for making imitations of it. Classic MacOS wasn't, and there are no complete emulations of it any more. There were in the '90s, but they are lost now. I've looked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937562
- User23 4y ago
  I had a go at it 25 years ago, but I lost that .fvwmrc not long after. So I can totally relate.

jcadam 4y ago

> ... with a very beautiful looking for classic macOS users. Huh? this looks like OS X, not Classic Mac OS.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

> Disables CPU mitigations for Spectre/Meltdown Umm.. Really bad idea to disable security protections as part of a UI package. Please leave that kind of thing up to the user to decide for themselves.