3 ms·

One moderately frustrating thing about using FreeBSD is that it's always been treated as sort of a second-class citizen by GNOME, and therefore Gtk, and therefo

by scythe 3y ago

One moderately frustrating thing about using FreeBSD is that it's always been treated as sort of a second-class citizen by GNOME, and therefore Gtk, and therefore most of the Linux ecosystem which depends on Gtk. So probably the most popular desktop environment is KDE, and it's nice, but it is a certain kind of interface which doesn't appeal to everyone. Meanwhile, OS X shares a little code with FreeBSD and was partially derived from it around 30 years ago. And the design philosophy of OS X is roughly the opposite of KDE. This situation has engendered at least half a dozen projects over the years, most of which are never really complete, to make a FreeBSD-first DE/UI that works like Mac. And if it can run Mac applications, so much the better! Unfortunately, this is really hard. Cocoa is a moving target, and contra Wine, Apple is not as pertinaciously obsessed with backwards compatibility as Microsoft. Even much less ambitious (in my estimation) projects like enlightenment 17 and Wayland have struggled to replace major components of the desktop from the ground up.

bityard 3y ago
> OS X shares a little code with FreeBSD and was partially derived from it around 30 years ago. The first release of FreeBSD was 30 years ago, OS X a little over 20.
- steve1977 3y ago
  Well Rhapsody was released 25 years ago. So you’re both right, now go back playing ;-)
- scythe 3y ago
  OS X is derived from NeXTSTEP, first released in 1989 and based on 4.3BSD-Tahoe. Meanwhile, this was updated to 4.3BSD-Reno and ported to the x86 as 386BSD, from which NetBSD was forked in early 1993; it was subsequently reorganized to become FreeBSD in late 1993. NeXTSTEP and OS X later imported a few system components from FreeBSD, while replacing others, particularly replacing parts of the kernel with Mach.
jwells89 3y ago
Not only is Cocoa a moving target, it’s deep and wide. The amount of functionality it offers is staggering and extensive enough that for many types of apps, a dev may not need to import any third party libraries if they don’t want to, with no negative impact on the quality of the final product. That’s extremely difficult to reimplement, even if you lock compatibility to a particular macOS release.

by scythe 3y ago

bityard 3y ago

> OS X shares a little code with FreeBSD and was partially derived from it around 30 years ago. The first release of FreeBSD was 30 years ago, OS X a little over 20.

steve1977 3y ago
Well Rhapsody was released 25 years ago. So you’re both right, now go back playing ;-)
scythe 3y ago
OS X is derived from NeXTSTEP, first released in 1989 and based on 4.3BSD-Tahoe. Meanwhile, this was updated to 4.3BSD-Reno and ported to the x86 as 386BSD, from which NetBSD was forked in early 1993; it was subsequently reorganized to become FreeBSD in late 1993. NeXTSTEP and OS X later imported a few system components from FreeBSD, while replacing others, particularly replacing parts of the kernel with Mach.

jwells89 3y ago

Not only is Cocoa a moving target, it’s deep and wide. The amount of functionality it offers is staggering and extensive enough that for many types of apps, a dev may not need to import any third party libraries if they don’t want to, with no negative impact on the quality of the final product. That’s extremely difficult to reimplement, even if you lock compatibility to a particular macOS release.