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HelloSystem: A graphical OS built on FreeBSD

253 points by gautamcgoel 3y ago

trollied 3y ago
The UI reminds me of RISC OS!
- azinman2 3y ago
  It’s a pretty clear rip of macOS, from the aqua-inspired UI, finder at base, to the layout of the directories.
  - danjoredd 3y ago
    I mean, the directories are laid out in the same way because MacOS runs on top of BSD. They basically ARE the same file system. I agree on the rest of your points though.
- lproven 3y ago
  Allegedly, one of the Acorn OS developers quit and went to work for NeXT in Silicon Valley... and right afterwards, the test in-development version of NeXTstep suddenly had this Acorn Risc OS-like floating icon bar! NeXT also implemented app directories, where all the contents of an app, its resources and libraries and so on, are in a folder with a special magic name... another idea nicked from Acorn. (Risc OS apps are called !Name; NeXTstep ones are called Name.app.) Acorn Risc OS was also the first OS to have integrated, always-on font antialiasing, next seen in NeXTstep, and the first to have full-window drag. Source: a retrospective meetup of the surviving developers, which I moderated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_SDL0IwbCc&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_SDL0IwbCc&t=2s
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - superq 3y ago
    somewhat related to the directories: https://www.macdisk.com/macforken.php https://www.macdisk.com/macforken.php
    - lproven 3y ago
      Not really... that's a Classic MacOS thing, not anything in NeXTstep, OpenStep or OS X, although OS X respects and preserves them. Perhaps the closer correspondence is file metadata. For all that Risc OS is based on Acorn MOS, an OS that's as old or older than MS-DOS, it stores richer metadata: for instance, files have a Creator Type which is 3 hex digits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RISC_OS_filetypes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RISC_OS_filetypes This can't be stored on DOS filesystems. So, just like Classic MacOS files with their 2 forks, to keep Risc OS files on DOS media without damaging them, they must be packed inside a Zip file or something like that -- and using a RiscOS (or MacOS) native Zip program that stores, and recreates, the metadata. (Linux used to do something vaguely similar with the `umsdos` filesystem.) DOS/Windows PC owners, who think the universe revolves around them, never could get the hang of this.
  - spookie 3y ago
    Oh, interesting!
nazgulsenpai 3y ago
Post from 7 months ago with 210 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34519824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34519824
- bee_rider 3y ago
  The complaints in the first post there really stood out when I looked at the screenshots on the HelloSystem site. I’m not saying what the complaints are, because I’m curious if they’ll be so obvious to somebody who isn’t primed to look for them. Could someone skip that thread and look directly at the HelloSystem site, then check and see if they also saw the issues in that post? It could be an interesting experiment.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    What’s the moratorium for posting a comment here? 20 minutes from now?
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      I don’t think there needs to be any. Hopefully folks won’t check the follow up posts to mine before checking the site, haha. I think we’re not going to get a scientific sampling anyway, so may as well just let people have fun with it.
  - parasti 3y ago
    That's literally the first thing I noticed in the screenshot on the website. Spacing in the UI is very inconsistent, almost the polar opposite of macOS aesthetic.
skibz 3y ago
Another project in this ecosystem: https://ravynos.com/ https://ravynos.com/
- rahen 3y ago
  RavynOS is a much more interesting project. Basically it keeps everything that's open-source in Darwin (save for XNU), and re-implements what that's proprietary with tailor made free software, on top of a FreeBSD kernel. Since many layers, frameworks and APIs from macOS are reused (even for the GUI which is written in Objective-C and uses the actual Cocoa APIs), the goal is to achieve compatibility with both macOS and FreeBSD apps. And yes, it natively runs Mach-O binaries in the kernel, no emulation layer. "ravynOS is explicitly trying to be compatible with Mac software at a source and eventually a binary level, without losing support for FreeBSD/X11 software, and to implement a very similar experience on the desktop and at the command line. For example, on ravynOS you can type open -a MyApp image.jpg and have image.jpg open in MyApp. You will find things in (mostly) the same directories as a Mac, like ~/Library or /System/Library/Fonts." Most other projects are just vanilla FreeBSD or Linux with a macOS theme.
  - gymbeaux 3y ago
    It looks cool but honestly I think it’s another one of those “looks cool but never gets to v1.0” projects, like Fallout 4: New Vegas. For ravynOS, the Windows 9x buttons mixed with macOS everything else is hard to look at.
29athrowaway 3y ago
See also Elementary OS and its Pantheon desktop environment.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Has ElementaryOS gotten their staff problems fixed yet? I’m also annoyed that they don’t go for Objective C which could make a lot of seasoned Apple developers comfortable, but instead went for a custom language.
  - 29athrowaway 3y ago
    Then take a look at GnuStep or WindowMaker.
    - badsectoracula 3y ago
      Window Maker does not use GNUstep or Objective-C at all, it is all written in plain C. In fact the UI toolkit it uses (developed for Window Maker itself) is called "WINGs" for "WINGs Is Not GNUstep".
      - 29athrowaway 3y ago
        Probably it's time to rewrite WINGs in Swift.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    > custom language Vala wasn't a custom language for elementaryOS, it already existed for years before the first version of the OS (and i think the first version didn't use any Vala code). It most likely used instead of Objective-C because its object system was built on top of glib's gobject system and elementaryOS used Gtk and a lot of other glib/gobject-based libraries. Using Objective-C would mean they'd have to base their UI on GNUstep and GNUstep wasn't as polished as Gtk. Remember that while they used macOS as an inspiration, it was never elementaryOS's goal to make a macOS clone.
jnsie 3y ago
I wonder if, in the future, stable diffusion or other AI techniques can be used to generate nice icon sets and other UI elements. Not that I'd expect Apple levels of design, but anything to bridge the gap would be nice...I'm primarily a macOS user, secondarily a windows user, and my forays into *nix have always provided a poor first impression. Anecdotal, of course...
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  Heh my dream was a real-time generative overlay on top of Dwarf Fortress ASCII art. (That was before the Steam version ofc.)
- nunodonato 3y ago
  that's interesting. I find the icons available for *nix far superior and interesting. The problem is finding out the good stuff, because its hard with the current signal vs noise ratio. I actually dislike the current macOS icon sets, far too colorful and saturated.
  - dlivingston 3y ago
    Which icon sets do you find superior, in particular? Note that parent meant the UI holistically, and not just icon sets. AFAIK, this way of thinking about the design of the entire system, and not just in discrete segments is largely unique to macOS. I think it is because Apple has a design language they try to enforce as rigorously as possible, even onto 3rd party developers, which gives the OS & all applications on it a very uniform and consistent feeling. Windows is the worst. Microsoft has a design language, but they barely encourage it even among their own apps (Settings vs. Control Panel as one example). I will make a strong claim: I don't think any O.S. developer takes design truly seriously besides Apple. Definitely not Microsoft, partially Google with Android, and certainly not most *nix distros (with the possible rare exception like System76's Pop!_OS).
    - dijit 3y ago
      Most linux desktop environments (notable exception of Gnome3 though it applies for Gnome2) seem to favour old school UX design which, incidentally, I happen to find nicer than “pretty”. I personally really like the Adwaita icon sets much more than windows and at least on-par with MacOS, though MacOS has the advantage of being rendered only on extremely high DPI screens. So most people only have that experienfe
wk_end 3y ago
I'm not a lawyer but if this gets any traction Apple's gonna get big mad about the branding, aren't they? They're basically swiping original Mac advertising campaign wholesale.
- pipeline_peak 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    As much as I disagree with OP, copyright law is not trademark law.
    - wk_end 3y ago
      It's true that trademark is what's at play here, although either way - giving something a BSD license doesn't mean you can use it to violate others' copyright OR trademarks.
  - wk_end 3y ago
    Do you think Apple BSD licensed the iconic Macintosh "hello" image or something? https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/24/apple-launched-macintosh-on-january-24-1984-and-changed-the-world----eventually https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/24/apple-launched-ma...
    - pipeline_peak 3y ago
      No I meant this is under BSD, and they aren’t even selling it.
      - wk_end 3y ago
        Releasing something for free, whether as in beer or as in freedom, doesn't give you carte blanche to violate trademark law. For just one example (well...hundreds), look at the multitude of fangames Nintendo has shut down [0]. [0] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/01/nintendo_issues_mass_dmca_takedown_379_fan-made_games_forcibly_removed https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/01/nintendo_issues_ma...
pipeline_peak 3y ago
Contribute to GNUStep if you want to support a legitimate transition for Mac users. Not yet another aqua rip off distro running reskinned Mate. Just get FreeBSD with gnome or mate if you’re so inclined. If you’re using Hello as your daily driver, you’re gonna get your hands dirty getting things to work anyway. Might as well start from core. GhostBSD, MidnightBSD, TrueOS, haven’t people realized FreeBSD is too obscure to get a community led distro to gain traction? Ubuntu is the use case for “mere mortals” on Unix-like systems. Anyone tech savvy enough to use FreeBSD on a personally machine successfully (whoever you are) doesn’t need some pre rolled version. It’s a niche use case and this project will ultimately go nowhere.
- jwells89 3y ago
  Presumably, what technically-minded Mac users who might switch want and what projects like this are aiming to achieve is to have a high level of consistency and "one piece design" not just on the user-facing half, but also under the hood, and the various BSDs have more to offer in this department than mainstream GNU/Linux distributions. It might be worth looking at one of those Linux distros that swaps out GNU userland/toolchain in favor of BSD equivalents wherever possible though.
- pacija 3y ago
  I also find these BlahBlahBSDs silly. Since when is setting desktop themes or tuning a few sysctls "forking" or worth calling a new OS?
  - pacija 3y ago
    Ok, I see downvotes coming and I understand I didn't give enough context so I'll try to clarify. I use BSD, particularly FreeBSD and OpenBSD, for two decades now. For the last 15 years professionally. Four "recognized" members of BSD family are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonflyBSD. Each of them pursue different goals - FreeBSD stability, OpenBSD security, NetBSD portability, DragonflyBSD no idea, never tried it. All of them have similar (make) but different way of building (poudriere / dpb) and managing (pkg / pkg_) packages, similar (rc) but different way of managing system services (rc.d/ / rc.conf.local), similar (ifconfig) but different (rc.conf's ifconfig_if / hostname.if) way of setting network interfaces, similar but different ways of containerization and virtualization (jails, chroot, vmm, bhyve) etc. I have reasons why I would choose FreeBSD over OpenBSD for storage server (ZFS), or vice versa for router / firewall (rdomains, pf, bgpd, ospfd, iked / ipsec etc.) I don't have a slightest idea why would I choose HelloSystem or HardenedBSD for my laptop instead of FreeBSD.
EspressoGPT 3y ago
> Not a clone of anything, but something with which the long-time Mac user should feel instantly comfortable. The longer I look at the screenshot, the cheekier this advertising seems.
- hedora 3y ago
  I wonder if they cloned Finder from MacOS 9, which was better than the MacOS X one in pretty much every way. The screenshot makes me think they might have.
  - Lammy 3y ago
    It looks like the Mac OS X 10.0–10.2 Finder with the toolbar collapsed. Same massive icon spacing: https://i.imgur.com/fLndIw6.png https://i.imgur.com/fLndIw6.png The closest Free Software analogue I've ever found for the Classic Finder is ROX-Filer, pictured here: https://cooltrainer.org/images/original/freebsd11-wmaker.png https://cooltrainer.org/images/original/freebsd11-wmaker.png
    - jonhohle 3y ago
      That screenshot gives me the feels: WindowMaker, WipEout, FreeBSD. That’s as beautiful today as it might have been 15+ years ago. The “modern” FreeBSD logo and composited windows decorations betray it’s timelessness a bit (2005 or sooner), though I suppose the earliest it could have been was sometime after 1999 (ROX-Filer and Sim City 3000).
Santosh83 3y ago
Seems to be KDE on top of FreeBSD?
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
  for what it's worth KDE3.5.x is available as Trinity Desktop for FreeBSD.
  - spookie 3y ago
    It's also available in some Linux distros, but it's a bit of a mess getting it running.
    - calvinmorrison 3y ago
      Definitely they got a bunch of packages. Totally fine in Debian
- suprjami 3y ago
  No, it's the creator's own desktop environment called Hello. If you read the website or GitHub there is a lot of content about design opinion.
jeroen79 3y ago
i don't know why people wan't to keep cloning osx, it might looks nice, but time has proven its a quite unproductive gui
- mvanbaak 3y ago
  Please provide more context. “Proven to be X” without proof nor links …
- gaze 3y ago
  Yeah but always OS X of maybe 10 years ago. They gave up the glossy thing. Also I disagree about it being unproductive. Not everyone is most productive in i3 or whatever.
- jwells89 3y ago
  The problem is that very few macOS clone projects reach anything close to maturity, which means that paradigm is barely represented in FOSS desktops. Aside from GNOME (which is iPadOS, not macOS) and its prettier cousin Pantheon, It's just Win9X clones and tiling WMs as far as the eye can see. That might not seem like a big deal, but if the goal is to get as many people switched away from commercial operating systems as possible there needs to be a healthy range of conventions/workflows represented by meaningfully different DEs so more users find one they can slip on like a comfy pair of shoes. For most people, switching desktop paradigms is something they want to avoid if at all possible because of the immense friction it brings.
  - lproven 3y ago
    Ubuntu Unity did better than most in that department. Still alive and being maintained, too.
    - jwells89 3y ago
      Unity's implementation of a global menu is probably the most consistently functional I've seen at the very least. KDE has this feature but compatibility is more spotty, partially thanks to necessary packages going unmaintained and on my main distro (Fedora) missing altogether.
swozey 3y ago
About 20 years ago I was an openbsd and freebsd admin, webhosting mostly. Then the rest of my maybe 16 year career was debian with some sprinkles of centos/rhel What would bring me to bsd today? Not in a negative way at all, I'm curious what people love about it. I barely remember much about it. I loved pf over iptables but I don't remember why. It has jailed containers which.. I think people still love? I'm not sure. I'm reading about appjails and these sound interesting.
- enriquto 3y ago
  For me the main point of bsd or small linuxes over debians/redhats is that running htop fills just one third of the screen and I can understand what each program does right away. It fills me with a sense of control and tranquility that just isn't there in more complex setups.
  - swozey 3y ago
    That's a great point. Would you consider yourself a minimalist in general? I think I'm the opposite. I'm one of those people who installs every (secure and vetted) plugin/extension/app that makes my life/work "easier." I have a ridiculous amount of vscode/intellij/obsidian plugins that I use. I'm sure if I used emacs/vim it'd be the same. Just as an example that's super frowned upon, I install about 5-10 various packages like jq, htop, net-utils, bash, httpie, things like that into each oci container I build. I also have the exact same customized ~/.bashrc with aliases and a motd that tells me the distro and outdated packages and what not in all of the oci containers I build. Also a custom ~/.nanorc with syntax highlighting so I don't have to constantly write nano -l (everyone will hate me for using nano, I know). I have to troubleshoot containers a lot. This example I'm posting here went from a 150Mb container to 203 with my "debug" packages. And each time I exec into one I get a nice little motd that makes fixing things so much faster for me. A 203Mb container has absolutely no effect on my autoscaling infrastructure. We watch for anomalies and immediately scale up and have the oci images cached on the clusters. I used to make these little 30mb scratch go containers that had literally nothing but the app. It was so annoying having to troubleshoot them and the benefit seemed so not worth it. Not having bash installed is absolutely horrendous. Being forced to use sh. I can't use arrow keys to move the cursor or up and down to go through history. I think ctrl-r doesnt even work. I would get absolutely screamed at by the greybeard genius nix admins I used to work with. But I make the infra standards now.. Package attack vectors are definitely a concern. My containers go through a rigorous security test while being built. https://imgur.com/MkyuyVS https://imgur.com/MkyuyVS
egypturnash 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jjrh 3y ago
  A lot of people care about software freedom? To the point where they will use a (currently) worse tool.
- trimethylpurine 3y ago
  Mac OS currently has no enterprise usable file sharing, for starters. The Samba driver is garbage and AFP is maintained by third parties. Etc. The Mac OS has uses, but they are VASTLY fewer in number than Linux or Windows. Why does anyone make new stuff? To solve problems, or serve needs and desires.
- ketralnis 3y ago
  Alright. Sounds like it's not for you then. That's okay. I don't know what you want us to say here. If you don't like it then you don't like it. No skin off of anybody's teeth if egypturnash isn't convinced.
- nawfalak 3y ago
  I feel like you're looking a bit too much into it and that this rant is a bit unnecessary. You write as though you're being attacked by the creators or something. It's not going to "replace your MacOS" or anything, but rather is a showcase of clean UI and UX. Looking through the "What" and "Why" sections on their Github says how it follows certain UI and UX guidelines; many of which Apple has adopted. I don't think you're the target audience either. If you're interested in FreeBSD and like MacOS, you'd probably love this.
  - egypturnash 3y ago
    I'm critiquing the presentation. "helloSystem is a desktop system for creators with a focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. Its design follows the “Less, but better” philosophy. It is intended as a system for “mere mortals”, welcoming to switchers from the Mac." Sounds like I'm somewhere near the target audience if you ask me.
dgfitz 3y ago
> On GNU-style systems (e.g., most Linux distributions), status=progress does not work and can be left away. This isn’t really an accurate claim. How strange.
- Shared404 3y ago
  Yep. GNU dd definitely supports status=progress, at least in any modern version. Maybe they're thinking of busybox dd?
  - dgfitz 3y ago
    Ah yeah possibly. It just isn’t quite what they said.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dark-star 3y ago
I tested helloSystem when it was still new and beta. It was buggy but it showed great potential. I will try it again tomorrow, I guess a lot has changed (for the better) I love the idea of FreeBSD on a desktop (or laptop), and stock FreeBSD has always been troublesome to get working nicely on a laptop (at least for me)
JediPig 3y ago
I love FreeBSD on personal servers and workstations. But lean into FreeBSD not into macOS look and feel. The m2 macs make it the best workstation out there. If you have that there is no business need for this os. Run it for fun but it’s never going to reach mass appeal
- Gud 3y ago
  Don’t know what people expect from an operating system like FreeBSD. Will joe average install it on their family computer? Probably not. Still FreeBSD quietly powers so many things, and has been used for so many platforms(Hotmail, Yahoo, WhatsApp, Netflix, etc). plus PlayStation, userland in OS X… plus all the network appliances(and storage). It seems to me FreeBSD gives you a great platform to do your own thing without getting in your way.
deleted 3y ago
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user6723 3y ago
[dead]
QuantumG 3y ago
https://youtu.be/LLqWMRrRaZs?si=xbov8X9Z6bmqELG9 https://youtu.be/LLqWMRrRaZs?si=xbov8X9Z6bmqELG9 I wonder what it'd be like on a tablet.
desireco42 3y ago
What are advantages of FreeBSD over Linux for example? I mostly used Linux with mostly joy and some frustration, but never FreeBSD. I do use Mac, but I don't think it can be translated, or can it?
- stragies 3y ago
  As far as I'm aware, the largest users/vendor of BSD(-based) software are Apple, Sony/PlayStation, Cisco, and both Amazon and Netflix are reported to use BSD in their CDN infrastructure. So they have a vested interest in the BSD-Ecosystem to stay alive and well, so as to continue to assure the existence of developers and beta-testers for the BSD system/userland they base their commercial offerings on. Personal choice, if you see that as a Pro or Con.

253 points by gautamcgoel 3y ago

trollied 3y ago

The UI reminds me of RISC OS!

azinman2 3y ago
It’s a pretty clear rip of macOS, from the aqua-inspired UI, finder at base, to the layout of the directories.
- danjoredd 3y ago
  I mean, the directories are laid out in the same way because MacOS runs on top of BSD. They basically ARE the same file system. I agree on the rest of your points though.
lproven 3y ago
Allegedly, one of the Acorn OS developers quit and went to work for NeXT in Silicon Valley... and right afterwards, the test in-development version of NeXTstep suddenly had this Acorn Risc OS-like floating icon bar! NeXT also implemented app directories, where all the contents of an app, its resources and libraries and so on, are in a folder with a special magic name... another idea nicked from Acorn. (Risc OS apps are called !Name; NeXTstep ones are called Name.app.) Acorn Risc OS was also the first OS to have integrated, always-on font antialiasing, next seen in NeXTstep, and the first to have full-window drag. Source: a retrospective meetup of the surviving developers, which I moderated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_SDL0IwbCc&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_SDL0IwbCc&t=2s
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- superq 3y ago
  somewhat related to the directories: https://www.macdisk.com/macforken.php https://www.macdisk.com/macforken.php
  - lproven 3y ago
    Not really... that's a Classic MacOS thing, not anything in NeXTstep, OpenStep or OS X, although OS X respects and preserves them. Perhaps the closer correspondence is file metadata. For all that Risc OS is based on Acorn MOS, an OS that's as old or older than MS-DOS, it stores richer metadata: for instance, files have a Creator Type which is 3 hex digits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RISC_OS_filetypes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RISC_OS_filetypes This can't be stored on DOS filesystems. So, just like Classic MacOS files with their 2 forks, to keep Risc OS files on DOS media without damaging them, they must be packed inside a Zip file or something like that -- and using a RiscOS (or MacOS) native Zip program that stores, and recreates, the metadata. (Linux used to do something vaguely similar with the `umsdos` filesystem.) DOS/Windows PC owners, who think the universe revolves around them, never could get the hang of this.
- spookie 3y ago
  Oh, interesting!

nazgulsenpai 3y ago

Post from 7 months ago with 210 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34519824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34519824

bee_rider 3y ago
The complaints in the first post there really stood out when I looked at the screenshots on the HelloSystem site. I’m not saying what the complaints are, because I’m curious if they’ll be so obvious to somebody who isn’t primed to look for them. Could someone skip that thread and look directly at the HelloSystem site, then check and see if they also saw the issues in that post? It could be an interesting experiment.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  What’s the moratorium for posting a comment here? 20 minutes from now?
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I don’t think there needs to be any. Hopefully folks won’t check the follow up posts to mine before checking the site, haha. I think we’re not going to get a scientific sampling anyway, so may as well just let people have fun with it.
- parasti 3y ago
  That's literally the first thing I noticed in the screenshot on the website. Spacing in the UI is very inconsistent, almost the polar opposite of macOS aesthetic.

skibz 3y ago

Another project in this ecosystem: https://ravynos.com/ https://ravynos.com/

rahen 3y ago
RavynOS is a much more interesting project. Basically it keeps everything that's open-source in Darwin (save for XNU), and re-implements what that's proprietary with tailor made free software, on top of a FreeBSD kernel. Since many layers, frameworks and APIs from macOS are reused (even for the GUI which is written in Objective-C and uses the actual Cocoa APIs), the goal is to achieve compatibility with both macOS and FreeBSD apps. And yes, it natively runs Mach-O binaries in the kernel, no emulation layer. "ravynOS is explicitly trying to be compatible with Mac software at a source and eventually a binary level, without losing support for FreeBSD/X11 software, and to implement a very similar experience on the desktop and at the command line. For example, on ravynOS you can type open -a MyApp image.jpg and have image.jpg open in MyApp. You will find things in (mostly) the same directories as a Mac, like ~/Library or /System/Library/Fonts." Most other projects are just vanilla FreeBSD or Linux with a macOS theme.
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  It looks cool but honestly I think it’s another one of those “looks cool but never gets to v1.0” projects, like Fallout 4: New Vegas. For ravynOS, the Windows 9x buttons mixed with macOS everything else is hard to look at.

29athrowaway 3y ago

See also Elementary OS and its Pantheon desktop environment.

actionfromafar 3y ago
Has ElementaryOS gotten their staff problems fixed yet? I’m also annoyed that they don’t go for Objective C which could make a lot of seasoned Apple developers comfortable, but instead went for a custom language.
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  Then take a look at GnuStep or WindowMaker.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    Window Maker does not use GNUstep or Objective-C at all, it is all written in plain C. In fact the UI toolkit it uses (developed for Window Maker itself) is called "WINGs" for "WINGs Is Not GNUstep".
    - 29athrowaway 3y ago
      Probably it's time to rewrite WINGs in Swift.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  > custom language Vala wasn't a custom language for elementaryOS, it already existed for years before the first version of the OS (and i think the first version didn't use any Vala code). It most likely used instead of Objective-C because its object system was built on top of glib's gobject system and elementaryOS used Gtk and a lot of other glib/gobject-based libraries. Using Objective-C would mean they'd have to base their UI on GNUstep and GNUstep wasn't as polished as Gtk. Remember that while they used macOS as an inspiration, it was never elementaryOS's goal to make a macOS clone.

jnsie 3y ago

I wonder if, in the future, stable diffusion or other AI techniques can be used to generate nice icon sets and other UI elements. Not that I'd expect Apple levels of design, but anything to bridge the gap would be nice...I'm primarily a macOS user, secondarily a windows user, and my forays into *nix have always provided a poor first impression. Anecdotal, of course...

rpastuszak 3y ago
Heh my dream was a real-time generative overlay on top of Dwarf Fortress ASCII art. (That was before the Steam version ofc.)
nunodonato 3y ago
that's interesting. I find the icons available for *nix far superior and interesting. The problem is finding out the good stuff, because its hard with the current signal vs noise ratio. I actually dislike the current macOS icon sets, far too colorful and saturated.
- dlivingston 3y ago
  Which icon sets do you find superior, in particular? Note that parent meant the UI holistically, and not just icon sets. AFAIK, this way of thinking about the design of the entire system, and not just in discrete segments is largely unique to macOS. I think it is because Apple has a design language they try to enforce as rigorously as possible, even onto 3rd party developers, which gives the OS & all applications on it a very uniform and consistent feeling. Windows is the worst. Microsoft has a design language, but they barely encourage it even among their own apps (Settings vs. Control Panel as one example). I will make a strong claim: I don't think any O.S. developer takes design truly seriously besides Apple. Definitely not Microsoft, partially Google with Android, and certainly not most *nix distros (with the possible rare exception like System76's Pop!_OS).
  - dijit 3y ago
    Most linux desktop environments (notable exception of Gnome3 though it applies for Gnome2) seem to favour old school UX design which, incidentally, I happen to find nicer than “pretty”. I personally really like the Adwaita icon sets much more than windows and at least on-par with MacOS, though MacOS has the advantage of being rendered only on extremely high DPI screens. So most people only have that experienfe

wk_end 3y ago

I'm not a lawyer but if this gets any traction Apple's gonna get big mad about the branding, aren't they? They're basically swiping original Mac advertising campaign wholesale.

pipeline_peak 3y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  As much as I disagree with OP, copyright law is not trademark law.
  - wk_end 3y ago
    It's true that trademark is what's at play here, although either way - giving something a BSD license doesn't mean you can use it to violate others' copyright OR trademarks.
- wk_end 3y ago
  Do you think Apple BSD licensed the iconic Macintosh "hello" image or something? https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/24/apple-launched-macintosh-on-january-24-1984-and-changed-the-world----eventually https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/24/apple-launched-ma...
  - pipeline_peak 3y ago
    No I meant this is under BSD, and they aren’t even selling it.
    - wk_end 3y ago
      Releasing something for free, whether as in beer or as in freedom, doesn't give you carte blanche to violate trademark law. For just one example (well...hundreds), look at the multitude of fangames Nintendo has shut down [0]. [0] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/01/nintendo_issues_mass_dmca_takedown_379_fan-made_games_forcibly_removed https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/01/nintendo_issues_ma...

pipeline_peak 3y ago

Contribute to GNUStep if you want to support a legitimate transition for Mac users. Not yet another aqua rip off distro running reskinned Mate. Just get FreeBSD with gnome or mate if you’re so inclined. If you’re using Hello as your daily driver, you’re gonna get your hands dirty getting things to work anyway. Might as well start from core. GhostBSD, MidnightBSD, TrueOS, haven’t people realized FreeBSD is too obscure to get a community led distro to gain traction? Ubuntu is the use case for “mere mortals” on Unix-like systems. Anyone tech savvy enough to use FreeBSD on a personally machine successfully (whoever you are) doesn’t need some pre rolled version. It’s a niche use case and this project will ultimately go nowhere.

jwells89 3y ago
Presumably, what technically-minded Mac users who might switch want and what projects like this are aiming to achieve is to have a high level of consistency and "one piece design" not just on the user-facing half, but also under the hood, and the various BSDs have more to offer in this department than mainstream GNU/Linux distributions. It might be worth looking at one of those Linux distros that swaps out GNU userland/toolchain in favor of BSD equivalents wherever possible though.
pacija 3y ago
I also find these BlahBlahBSDs silly. Since when is setting desktop themes or tuning a few sysctls "forking" or worth calling a new OS?
- pacija 3y ago
  Ok, I see downvotes coming and I understand I didn't give enough context so I'll try to clarify. I use BSD, particularly FreeBSD and OpenBSD, for two decades now. For the last 15 years professionally. Four "recognized" members of BSD family are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonflyBSD. Each of them pursue different goals - FreeBSD stability, OpenBSD security, NetBSD portability, DragonflyBSD no idea, never tried it. All of them have similar (make) but different way of building (poudriere / dpb) and managing (pkg / pkg_) packages, similar (rc) but different way of managing system services (rc.d/ / rc.conf.local), similar (ifconfig) but different (rc.conf's ifconfig_if / hostname.if) way of setting network interfaces, similar but different ways of containerization and virtualization (jails, chroot, vmm, bhyve) etc. I have reasons why I would choose FreeBSD over OpenBSD for storage server (ZFS), or vice versa for router / firewall (rdomains, pf, bgpd, ospfd, iked / ipsec etc.) I don't have a slightest idea why would I choose HelloSystem or HardenedBSD for my laptop instead of FreeBSD.

EspressoGPT 3y ago

> Not a clone of anything, but something with which the long-time Mac user should feel instantly comfortable. The longer I look at the screenshot, the cheekier this advertising seems.

hedora 3y ago
I wonder if they cloned Finder from MacOS 9, which was better than the MacOS X one in pretty much every way. The screenshot makes me think they might have.
- Lammy 3y ago
  It looks like the Mac OS X 10.0–10.2 Finder with the toolbar collapsed. Same massive icon spacing: https://i.imgur.com/fLndIw6.png https://i.imgur.com/fLndIw6.png The closest Free Software analogue I've ever found for the Classic Finder is ROX-Filer, pictured here: https://cooltrainer.org/images/original/freebsd11-wmaker.png https://cooltrainer.org/images/original/freebsd11-wmaker.png
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    That screenshot gives me the feels: WindowMaker, WipEout, FreeBSD. That’s as beautiful today as it might have been 15+ years ago. The “modern” FreeBSD logo and composited windows decorations betray it’s timelessness a bit (2005 or sooner), though I suppose the earliest it could have been was sometime after 1999 (ROX-Filer and Sim City 3000).

Santosh83 3y ago

Seems to be KDE on top of FreeBSD?

calvinmorrison 3y ago
for what it's worth KDE3.5.x is available as Trinity Desktop for FreeBSD.
- spookie 3y ago
  It's also available in some Linux distros, but it's a bit of a mess getting it running.
  - calvinmorrison 3y ago
    Definitely they got a bunch of packages. Totally fine in Debian
suprjami 3y ago
No, it's the creator's own desktop environment called Hello. If you read the website or GitHub there is a lot of content about design opinion.

jeroen79 3y ago

i don't know why people wan't to keep cloning osx, it might looks nice, but time has proven its a quite unproductive gui

mvanbaak 3y ago
Please provide more context. “Proven to be X” without proof nor links …
gaze 3y ago
Yeah but always OS X of maybe 10 years ago. They gave up the glossy thing. Also I disagree about it being unproductive. Not everyone is most productive in i3 or whatever.
jwells89 3y ago
The problem is that very few macOS clone projects reach anything close to maturity, which means that paradigm is barely represented in FOSS desktops. Aside from GNOME (which is iPadOS, not macOS) and its prettier cousin Pantheon, It's just Win9X clones and tiling WMs as far as the eye can see. That might not seem like a big deal, but if the goal is to get as many people switched away from commercial operating systems as possible there needs to be a healthy range of conventions/workflows represented by meaningfully different DEs so more users find one they can slip on like a comfy pair of shoes. For most people, switching desktop paradigms is something they want to avoid if at all possible because of the immense friction it brings.
- lproven 3y ago
  Ubuntu Unity did better than most in that department. Still alive and being maintained, too.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Unity's implementation of a global menu is probably the most consistently functional I've seen at the very least. KDE has this feature but compatibility is more spotty, partially thanks to necessary packages going unmaintained and on my main distro (Fedora) missing altogether.

swozey 3y ago

About 20 years ago I was an openbsd and freebsd admin, webhosting mostly. Then the rest of my maybe 16 year career was debian with some sprinkles of centos/rhel What would bring me to bsd today? Not in a negative way at all, I'm curious what people love about it. I barely remember much about it. I loved pf over iptables but I don't remember why. It has jailed containers which.. I think people still love? I'm not sure. I'm reading about appjails and these sound interesting.

enriquto 3y ago
For me the main point of bsd or small linuxes over debians/redhats is that running htop fills just one third of the screen and I can understand what each program does right away. It fills me with a sense of control and tranquility that just isn't there in more complex setups.
- swozey 3y ago
  That's a great point. Would you consider yourself a minimalist in general? I think I'm the opposite. I'm one of those people who installs every (secure and vetted) plugin/extension/app that makes my life/work "easier." I have a ridiculous amount of vscode/intellij/obsidian plugins that I use. I'm sure if I used emacs/vim it'd be the same. Just as an example that's super frowned upon, I install about 5-10 various packages like jq, htop, net-utils, bash, httpie, things like that into each oci container I build. I also have the exact same customized ~/.bashrc with aliases and a motd that tells me the distro and outdated packages and what not in all of the oci containers I build. Also a custom ~/.nanorc with syntax highlighting so I don't have to constantly write nano -l (everyone will hate me for using nano, I know). I have to troubleshoot containers a lot. This example I'm posting here went from a 150Mb container to 203 with my "debug" packages. And each time I exec into one I get a nice little motd that makes fixing things so much faster for me. A 203Mb container has absolutely no effect on my autoscaling infrastructure. We watch for anomalies and immediately scale up and have the oci images cached on the clusters. I used to make these little 30mb scratch go containers that had literally nothing but the app. It was so annoying having to troubleshoot them and the benefit seemed so not worth it. Not having bash installed is absolutely horrendous. Being forced to use sh. I can't use arrow keys to move the cursor or up and down to go through history. I think ctrl-r doesnt even work. I would get absolutely screamed at by the greybeard genius nix admins I used to work with. But I make the infra standards now.. Package attack vectors are definitely a concern. My containers go through a rigorous security test while being built. https://imgur.com/MkyuyVS https://imgur.com/MkyuyVS

egypturnash 3y ago

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jjrh 3y ago
A lot of people care about software freedom? To the point where they will use a (currently) worse tool.
trimethylpurine 3y ago
Mac OS currently has no enterprise usable file sharing, for starters. The Samba driver is garbage and AFP is maintained by third parties. Etc. The Mac OS has uses, but they are VASTLY fewer in number than Linux or Windows. Why does anyone make new stuff? To solve problems, or serve needs and desires.
ketralnis 3y ago
Alright. Sounds like it's not for you then. That's okay. I don't know what you want us to say here. If you don't like it then you don't like it. No skin off of anybody's teeth if egypturnash isn't convinced.
nawfalak 3y ago
I feel like you're looking a bit too much into it and that this rant is a bit unnecessary. You write as though you're being attacked by the creators or something. It's not going to "replace your MacOS" or anything, but rather is a showcase of clean UI and UX. Looking through the "What" and "Why" sections on their Github says how it follows certain UI and UX guidelines; many of which Apple has adopted. I don't think you're the target audience either. If you're interested in FreeBSD and like MacOS, you'd probably love this.
- egypturnash 3y ago
  I'm critiquing the presentation. "helloSystem is a desktop system for creators with a focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. Its design follows the “Less, but better” philosophy. It is intended as a system for “mere mortals”, welcoming to switchers from the Mac." Sounds like I'm somewhere near the target audience if you ask me.

dgfitz 3y ago

> On GNU-style systems (e.g., most Linux distributions), status=progress does not work and can be left away. This isn’t really an accurate claim. How strange.

Shared404 3y ago
Yep. GNU dd definitely supports status=progress, at least in any modern version. Maybe they're thinking of busybox dd?
- dgfitz 3y ago
  Ah yeah possibly. It just isn’t quite what they said.
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dark-star 3y ago

I tested helloSystem when it was still new and beta. It was buggy but it showed great potential. I will try it again tomorrow, I guess a lot has changed (for the better) I love the idea of FreeBSD on a desktop (or laptop), and stock FreeBSD has always been troublesome to get working nicely on a laptop (at least for me)

JediPig 3y ago

I love FreeBSD on personal servers and workstations. But lean into FreeBSD not into macOS look and feel. The m2 macs make it the best workstation out there. If you have that there is no business need for this os. Run it for fun but it’s never going to reach mass appeal

Gud 3y ago
Don’t know what people expect from an operating system like FreeBSD. Will joe average install it on their family computer? Probably not. Still FreeBSD quietly powers so many things, and has been used for so many platforms(Hotmail, Yahoo, WhatsApp, Netflix, etc). plus PlayStation, userland in OS X… plus all the network appliances(and storage). It seems to me FreeBSD gives you a great platform to do your own thing without getting in your way.

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user6723 3y ago

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QuantumG 3y ago

https://youtu.be/LLqWMRrRaZs?si=xbov8X9Z6bmqELG9 https://youtu.be/LLqWMRrRaZs?si=xbov8X9Z6bmqELG9 I wonder what it'd be like on a tablet.

desireco42 3y ago

What are advantages of FreeBSD over Linux for example? I mostly used Linux with mostly joy and some frustration, but never FreeBSD. I do use Mac, but I don't think it can be translated, or can it?

stragies 3y ago
As far as I'm aware, the largest users/vendor of BSD(-based) software are Apple, Sony/PlayStation, Cisco, and both Amazon and Netflix are reported to use BSD in their CDN infrastructure. So they have a vested interest in the BSD-Ecosystem to stay alive and well, so as to continue to assure the existence of developers and beta-testers for the BSD system/userland they base their commercial offerings on. Personal choice, if you see that as a Pro or Con.