>>Somehow I doubt that you could take, for example, Xorg and all the
>>programs using it from some variant of BSD and compile it under >>Linux
>>and have it magically work without any regard to or dependency on
>>suitable graphics card drivers.
>>programs using it from some variant of BSD and compile it under >>Linux
>>and have it magically work without any regard to or dependency on
>>suitable graphics card drivers.
Thing is you SHOULD be able to do that. That is kind of the idea that drives OSS in general. Moving apps tween all of the *Nix flavors shouldn't be the nightmare that it is. Especially when it comes to moving between OSX and Linux. When I can afford to own a Mac I do because of the driver support and the apps on the OSX platform for working with sound and video. Some of which should be but are not easily ported to Linux and there are Linux apps I'd love to port to OSX.
I wouldn't even NEED a Mac if I could port over those apps and drivers from OSX so I could use and program my effects boxes directly from Linux. Hell I can't even find a Linux driver at all for most of my gear.
The various splits in the *Nix world are forgetting one of the core principles. That is the ability to leverage great ideas on other *Nix spits into your particular flavor of *Nix.
It's not like performance is even a consideration any more. The modern KDE and Gnome are as bad or worse than Microsoft windows in terms of useless bloat. So why not retain compatibility.
The other great thing about *Nix is the ability to write something that people like and people can use it decades later. New is often not better. I dearly miss Kedit for example. It was super light weight but had all the features I needed to write SQL schemas, use for character sheets when writing fiction, for keeping notes, or code snippits, pre-writing something I'd later pull up in a word processor, etc. There's nothing really like it any more. The "kedit" offered now is just Kwrite with features disabled. Still the same resource hog and mem leaks. The old Kedit was bullet proof and super lightweight.
Text wrangler on the Mac platform would be awesome to run on Linux. I wouldn't even miss Kedit any more. I made a stab at porting Trelby over to the Mac once but the dependency hell thwarted that effort. Sad since it's written in Python but the Python used on OSX was locked at a version back from what was run on the common Linux distros. If you upgraded Python on OSX at the time, it'd break OSX. Backporting the source to a previous Python version didn't go very well, and the Trelby folks were not keen on the idea of forking just to support a Mac port, and I can't blame them.
That's exactly what *Nix should not be doing. It should have been trivial to port Trelby over to the Mac. If it was easier to port, then Linux users would have access to the wealth of drivers written for OSX.
The system calls should be fairly standard even if what goes on when invoked might be substantially different. To the driver calling them they should be a black box with standard parms between *Nix variants. The underlying graphics engines like QT, GTK, etc should and pretty much are supported on almost all *Nix variants. So the problem is just nobody is talking to each other between the *Nix variants to help make that happen. All would benefit. OSX would gain a whole lot of free software, Linux & BSD access to all those drivers written for the Mac, and ports of some OSS Mac software that has no good Linux equiv. It'd make support easier for folks that maintain versions on different *Nix variants.
