The best UNIX desktops experiences were the ones with vertical integration, where the desktop, vendor tooling and hardware provided a unique experience, instead of yet another UNIX fork.
NeWS, NeXTSTEP, Irix, ...
As for Android and Chrome OS, yeah they might use Linux kernel, which is an implementation detail on Android SDK/NDK official APIs for app developers, and on ChromeOS only exposed via the sandboxed Crostini environment.
Google could switch to another POSIX like kernel and app developers would barely notice, only OEMs and people rooting their devices would.
In a lot of ways macOS is that. It’s a very workable Unix and (I wasn’t watching when), Homebrew has gone from being a PITA even on its home turf to working great on everything from NixOS to WSL2.
But I’m still about one free weekend away from virtualizing Linux on my Macs because you just hit a limit with Yubai or Rectangle or Divvy or whatever.
I want a real tiler, I want rounded corners to fuck off, and I’ll pay a little in sub-pixel hinting to get it.
I thing macos sucks for Linux development. There is not enough memory and disk space for virtualization, so you run random scripts from Internet on your main machine. Command line tools are decades old and obsolete...
I'm still using a Unix desktop, it's called FreeBSD, and it's awesome.
The article doesn't mention the shameful lawsuit against Berkley Software Design and the University of California over some alleged UNIX code in the BSD source.
"Of the 18,000 files in the Berkeley distribution, only three had to be removed and 70 modified to show USL copyright notices. A further condition of the settlement was that USL would not file further lawsuits against users and distributors of the upcoming 4.4BSD-Lite release."
After 5 years running FreeBSD and Xfce on my laptop I cannot imagine using anything else. I have a few Windows machines in the house and I am always flabbergasted how slow, ad-ridden and convoluted they are. To each his own, of course, but Unix desktop is absolutely freaking awesome today.
Indeed! I've been using the same setup for 20 years - FreeBSD + XFCE, and I love it. I toyed around with different window managers and desktop environments, but I think the developers of XFCE and I have the same philosophy.
If it's not broken, don't fix it.
Not much has changed how I use my computer network over the last two decades, only small improvements, and the introduction of ZFS(a game changer).
While in my corporate job I am forced to use Windows, and for every year that passes, somehow it has gotten worse. The start menu was replaced by some horror show. The settings I used to easily change in the control panel in the Windows NT/2000/XP era are now all over the place, and always changing.
And now recently, I have to go through the Microsoft app store to download software for my HP printer??
I've had similar experiences with Linux, where things are changing for no good reason. One day, ifconfig was replaced with ip????
While in FreeBSD, it's the same old configuration files as it always was.
There is one thing I miss though, and that is functioning bluetooth.
The wifi is not the best, but I get by using wifibox, a tiny virtual linux machine with pci passthrough for my wifi network interface.
Despite this, I still prefer FreeBSD over any other operating system.
OpenBSD is great, too.
With the BSDs, I am in control of my hardware, not some profit driven mega corporation.
That lawsuit proves that had AT&T been allowed to sell UNIX from day one, history would have taken a different course, and C might not have been relevant outside Bell Labs.
Sad part is to know how many great ideas have been crushed by circumstance or bad decisions. Just imagine all the cool stuff we could have today if companies like SGI and Be had survived. Even Sun was giving the world things like ZFS and OpenSolaris before Oracle killed it.
Yeah, even when Sun made Solaris open source, not a lot of people cared. It spawned a small number of derivative distributions, but it barely got any traction. By that the time Sun open sourced Solaris Linux had long won the server market and the small FLOSS desktop niche.
Been a long-time lurker of your blog. Some of the best FreeBSD content out there, imo, thank you for putting it out there.
Despite never being able to fully commit to a BSD over Linux/MacOS (due to hardware compatibility, lack of Linux containerization support, and now being fully invested in Nix) I appreciate the core values of the FreeBSD project.
At one point, I got Docker up and running on FreeBSD with Lima[0]. At this point, I’d be really curious how well Nix does on [Free,Open]BSD — I think I’d switch if I knew Nix was rock solid.
Regardless, thanks for your blog — it’s invaluable to anyone getting into FreeBSD. :)
I discovered that, almost without noticing it, I had been using LinuxMint MATE for about a dozen years. Even when I install a Debian system, I use the MATE desktop with that also.
Before Linux, I was using Solaris as my daily driver. That was good too.
There are many reasons Windows beat Unix.
Windows didn't beat UNIX. Linux beat UNIX. The rise of the Linux-based internet was what killed both UNIX and Windows servers.
seems bizarre Ubuntu is not mentioned ... its the 800 pound elephant in the room ... to me its the path of least resistance for server side developers ... especially when kicking tires of endless repos on a daily basis
Readit News
NeWS, NeXTSTEP, Irix, ...
As for Android and Chrome OS, yeah they might use Linux kernel, which is an implementation detail on Android SDK/NDK official APIs for app developers, and on ChromeOS only exposed via the sandboxed Crostini environment.
Google could switch to another POSIX like kernel and app developers would barely notice, only OEMs and people rooting their devices would.
But I’m still about one free weekend away from virtualizing Linux on my Macs because you just hit a limit with Yubai or Rectangle or Divvy or whatever.
I want a real tiler, I want rounded corners to fuck off, and I’ll pay a little in sub-pixel hinting to get it.
The article doesn't mention the shameful lawsuit against Berkley Software Design and the University of California over some alleged UNIX code in the BSD source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....
"Of the 18,000 files in the Berkeley distribution, only three had to be removed and 70 modified to show USL copyright notices. A further condition of the settlement was that USL would not file further lawsuits against users and distributors of the upcoming 4.4BSD-Lite release."
Not much has changed how I use my computer network over the last two decades, only small improvements, and the introduction of ZFS(a game changer).
While in my corporate job I am forced to use Windows, and for every year that passes, somehow it has gotten worse. The start menu was replaced by some horror show. The settings I used to easily change in the control panel in the Windows NT/2000/XP era are now all over the place, and always changing. And now recently, I have to go through the Microsoft app store to download software for my HP printer??
I've had similar experiences with Linux, where things are changing for no good reason. One day, ifconfig was replaced with ip????
While in FreeBSD, it's the same old configuration files as it always was. There is one thing I miss though, and that is functioning bluetooth. The wifi is not the best, but I get by using wifibox, a tiny virtual linux machine with pci passthrough for my wifi network interface.
Despite this, I still prefer FreeBSD over any other operating system. OpenBSD is great, too.
With the BSDs, I am in control of my hardware, not some profit driven mega corporation.
end rant
How much responsibility carries Google by torpedoing Sun with Android, IBM for withdrawing their offer, everyone else for not caring?
Details:
- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/freebsd-desktop/
Despite never being able to fully commit to a BSD over Linux/MacOS (due to hardware compatibility, lack of Linux containerization support, and now being fully invested in Nix) I appreciate the core values of the FreeBSD project.
At one point, I got Docker up and running on FreeBSD with Lima[0]. At this point, I’d be really curious how well Nix does on [Free,Open]BSD — I think I’d switch if I knew Nix was rock solid.
Regardless, thanks for your blog — it’s invaluable to anyone getting into FreeBSD. :)
[0] https://heywoodlh.io/freebsd-docker-2022
Before Linux, I was using Solaris as my daily driver. That was good too.
There are many reasons Windows beat Unix.
Windows didn't beat UNIX. Linux beat UNIX. The rise of the Linux-based internet was what killed both UNIX and Windows servers.
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