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RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

ravynos.com

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Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What distro works more reliably than ubuntu?

Literally every one, including Fedora, openSUSE (both Leap and Tumbleweed), Debian, Linux Mint, Manjaro, Void, Arch and Gentoo with their respective derivatives. Ubuntu is a mess that introduces config-breaking changes every release and rides the already existing market. If Canonical tried to release their products nowadays without their track record and existing user base, they would never succeed. The peak Linux ex…

Linux was my main desktop OS for about a decade. About four years of that on Gentoo, so yes, I do actually know what I'm doing, didn't just pointy-clicky install to an Ubuntu desktop and never learn how to actually use or configure it. I dropped Linux around 2012 for macOS (OSX, at the time) after I was forced to use that at work and, after about a month of getting used to it, realized what I'd been missing.

I try desktop Linux again every year or two[0]. It's always just as bad as it's always been. Way more application crashes than I'm used to on macOS, jankiness galore, all the stuff I used to avoid doing out of habit because it often breaks things on Linux (and to some extent also on Windows) but am now used to doing because it's fine on macOS is still often a bad on Linux (e.g. drag-n-drop actions). Lots of little annoyances like the default US English keyboard layout being crap for no reason on most distros, which, sure, I can change it, but why not have a good default? Still nothing as good as Preview on any platform other than macOS, AFAIK, which hurts quite a bit.

I think there was about a two-year high point in the late '00s when Ubuntu was just curating good defaults and smoothing things out and the future looked really bright, then Ubuntu rapidly deteriorated and it's back to how it had been before then, now, just shinier because of all the mostly-mediocre-or-bad GUI changes in the major DEs since then.

My next attempt, I'll probably just shoot for the holy grail of FreeBSD on the desktop. Linux seems like a lost cause at this point. May not be any better but a lot about it sure is way saner than Linux-land, so, worth a shot. Great on servers, certainly. Not expecting much because it's mostly the same as Linux in the GUI department, though.

[0] Last time: Ubuntu and Fedora (I don't like rpm-based distros, but thought I'd give them another shot), plus tried Void for the first time which was pretty great actually but I just don't enjoy fiddling with configs anymore so, it's a no for me.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#292
post #72

At this point, "Consistent shortcuts" is the main "feature" keeping me on MacOS. Cmd+, opens preferences in every app. Cmd+[ or ] goes "back" and "forward", in every app that has those concepts Cmd+Shift+[ or ] switches tabs, in every app that has tabs, except a handful of stupid chat apps who think they're too good for it. Cmd+W always closes the current tab, if the app has tabs, (or current window, if the app has n…

On a similar note, it's pretty damn handy that just about every text box in macOS implements readline keyboard shortcuts. Also, having ctrl and cmd be separate keys is a godsend. No, I don't want to kill the running app, I want to copy some text.

For me it's word erase (Ctrl-W). CUA was a mistake, and ‘desktop Linux’ slavishly imitating Windows was a mistake.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#293

I really hope they build some kind of application registry, including listing projects that don't yet work on RavynOS, so that the community can see which packages are most in-demand, what % of apps that people want are supported, reviews from others on stability for the platform, etc. Could bootstrap this by looking at everything in Homebrew (including casks) and sharing whether it seems to work on RavynOS yet (or w…

The biggest gap from developers will be the lack of docker on freebsd.

Personally, I find that to be an asset not a failure.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#294

Does MacOS really have that finesse they try to emulate? First thing I noticed when I started using a mac is that double clicking the Finder titlebar only expands it vertically while every other app expands both vertically and horizontally. Second thing, when I close a window and then press Cmd+tab, the icon is still there, and if I select it nothing shows up. There's more of these everyday things that work sloppy so…

It's not "sloppy" it is just a different approach.

It drives me nuts on Windows that when I close FireFox the entire APPLICATION closes! I just wanted to close the window. Now when I start it again / open a new window, I have to enter my LastPass credentials. And pay the boot penalty.

IMHO, a multi-window app should not exit when I close the last window.

Linux Desktops and Windows both do this, macOS does not.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#295

Quoted post unavailable.

You do realize that Netflix uses FreeBSD, right? That a good chunk of NAS builds, diy or not, use FreeBSD? That high performance network solutions often use FreeBSD because of what is commonly seen as a better/more mature network stack? Having a smaller user base than the world's most used kernel (Linux) doesn't mean it has a small user base in absolute terms. And being a smaller kernel in lines of code is certainly…

The OS on every Sony game console since the PlayStation 3 is forked from FreeBSD as well

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#296
Hmm. I'm not sure what to think of all this special build stuff. I moved from macOS to FreeBSD + KDE mainly because I felt that macOS was becoming too dumbed down.

And I actually like the UI and configurability of KDE.

So no, I'm not going to use it but it probably could have made me move to FreeBSD a few years earlier. But with this kind of 'copycat' I always wonder if they manage to support a large enough ecosystem to make it work well. After all the biggest selling point of macOS is traditionally the 'just works' principle. Using FreeBSD as a daily driver I know the hardware/driver side needs a lot of tinkering. Which I don't mind, but macOS users would.

I also wonder about their business model, it seems to be a company?

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#299

Ex graphic designer here, but don't (and never have) used Mac. I highly respect this project and initiative, and the following is more a commentary on my own reaction than your product. I read the title--finesse of MacOS. I open the link, and the first thing I see at the top is the circular raven logo vertically misaligned with the header on mobile. That made me think, okay let's try desktop version instead, so I swi…

> why do people / projects/teams (in general--not just this product) try to emulate the "finesse" of Apple products Because people like them. Why do all sedans look kind of alike? Why are there dozens knock-off chairs that emulate the Aeron? Some people, myself included, really like the look and feel of macOS, but may want to run *nix instead. Enough of those people got together and made an OS.

Moacos is a posix compatible Unix.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#300

I really hope they build some kind of application registry, including listing projects that don't yet work on RavynOS, so that the community can see which packages are most in-demand, what % of apps that people want are supported, reviews from others on stability for the platform, etc. Could bootstrap this by looking at everything in Homebrew (including casks) and sharing whether it seems to work on RavynOS yet (or w…

The biggest gap from developers will be the lack of docker on freebsd.

> lack of docker on freebsd

I'm using sysutils/docker on FreeBSD with DOCKER_HOST env var set to "ssh://user@linuxvm" where linuxvm is a local VM running on bhyve[1]. Part of local FreeBSD filesystem is shared with the Linux VM via virtio-9p passthrough. Everything plays together nicely.

nerdctl[2] works with sysutils/containerd. You can't run Linux images on FreeBSD kernel (Linux jails may be an option) but there are FreeBSD images. Pkgbase[3] aims to make FreeBSD more modular, divided in chunks smaller than "base", "ports", "src"; feasible for containers.

[1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve

[2] https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl

[3] https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase

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