On Sunday March 03 2024 05:22:15 Draciron Smith wrote:
>Thing is you SHOULD be able to do that. That is kind of the idea that
>drives OSS in general.
And AFAIK you can. XOrg has a single codebase for every officially supported platform; Xquartz for instance is built from the upstream sources with just a number of patches that are probably intended to be upstreamed. I'm not really familiar enough with all the hairy details of selecting drivers on Linux or the extent to which you could get decent performance without hardware-specific ones, but I do notice they're part of the XOrg sources.
>Some of which should be but are not easily ported to Linux and there are
>Linux apps I'd love to port to OSX.
Apple have tied their (formerly) main programming language way too much to the OS IMHO (Swift exists for Linux but I have no idea if it's more usable there than ObjC is). That hinders porting to other platforms, but they're also the only Unix (I know of) where it's often impossible to even compile recent software on older OS versions (which is all that older hardware will still run, extra maddening since that hardware is so long-lived).
>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.
I am in fact not certain that was ever really a thing beyond the software you wrote yourself!
>The system calls should be fairly standard even if what goes on when
>invoked might be substantially different. To the driver calling them they
Well, they are, but for one thing there's the big cleavage between BSD and SysV, and Apple have not made things easier by adapting a Mach kernel on their Unix. But if we ignore Darwin it's quite obvious that Linux is the driving force in the Unix universe, and thus also the source of many incompatibilities which often promptly get used because so much software development is being done on Linux...
>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.
Gnome definitely, KDE5 is still relatively lean in my more or less up-to-date Devuan test install. But I'm leaning very much to using a DE like XFCE or Cinnamon when I finally move on from my current system that's still based in Kubuntu 14.04 . Though part of the reason for that would be to continue to be able to build the KDE5 libs and applications I want with my own patches as I've been doing for the past years.
>Text wrangler on the Mac platform would be awesome to run on Linux.
Did you try it with Darwine?
>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
It probably still would, but there's a good chance the same thing would happen on Linux distros (at least those that used or still use Python 2.7 for their crucial scripts).
Python is designed around the idea of being able to have every single version installed and pick the one you want or need for a particular task (as long as you don't mind installing all add-ons as many times).
>All would benefit. OSX would gain a whole lot of free software, Linux & BSD
>access to all those drivers written for the Mac,
Realistically, not really. Those drivers must often target aspects of the OS that simply aren't Unix despite the fact that the OS is (still?) certified as a Unix variant. Many of the standard Unix APIs on Darwin are in fact wrappers around Mac-specific (usually meaning Mach) APIs, so software that's more concerned about efficiency has more reason to target those APIs directly. That includes development efficiency of your main product is actually the MSWin version (and/or if you intend to provide your products via the platform's official store).
It's true that it's sad; back in 2004/5 when I got re-acquainted with the first Macs under what was still called Mac OS X I quickly abandoned the other Unix versions I'd been using (Irix and a bit of Linux) because I thought I'd finally found the perfect "Unix for the desktop". It only took a bit more than 6 years to realise that Apple had other plans with their platform and was more interested in selling expensive serious toys to Starbucks yuppies.
R.
