On Sun, 2024-03-03 at 05:22 -0600, Draciron Smith wrote: > > > 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. > 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. Well, I gave up on that idea about 30 years ago because it's wishful thinking. In theory, you should be able to successfully compile and run a program written in C on any platform. In practise, you can not do that. > 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. When I look at a Mac, I'm looking at something that's stuck 25 years in the past. Not even the keyboard works right, and when you try to pick a file from a directory containing lots of files, the system hangs. The GUI is far worse than Gnome and there's not much software available. Apple manages to sell cheap hardware for high prices, that's all. > 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. It seems you bought the wrong hardware. > 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. Well, what do expect from Apple? They want to control everything, including the user. > 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. After switching from KDE to Gnome and back to KDE, my impression is that KDE has become a lot faster than it used to be, and it seems now faster than Gnome after Gnome seemed to be faster than KDE. I only switched to Gnome because KDE was too buggy, and so far, that also has improved. Fvwm was faster. Was it better? I wouldn't say it's better than KDE unless maybe you have the need to go great lengths with configurability. KDE is easier to configure. There is no version of fvwm that works with Wayland --- and that is why I switched to KDE to begin with. Is plasma 6 better? I can only hope they didn't dumb it down. Where do you see the useless bloat? Stuff works together and that reduces bloat because not every program needs to reinvent and provide its own wheel. > So why not retain compatibility. When you can control the hardware, software and by that the users, you can make your users pay whatever you want them to pay for more stuff, or for new stuff you force them to buy, that controls them even more. The more incompatible what you sell them is, the more you can control them and keep them locked in your trap. If you made compatible stuff, your users could spend their money with your competition. So why would you want to retain compatibility? Why are there so many open source projects working on more or less the same thing as others instead of everyone working together? > 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. right The problem is to know in advance what you can still use 20 or 30 years later. > 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. Emacs is still around. So is LaTeX. If you had known that you could have used Emacs to begin with and that kedit has changed too much to still use it while Emacs has become more usable, would you have ever messed with kedit? Perhaps gedit is for you? Geanie can be nice. What exactly do you consider 'light weight', and how is 'light weight' relevant? > 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. Who else but Apple could you blame for OSX requiring derelict versions of programming languages and making everything difficult? If Apple hadn't decided to take FreeBSD to make a propriety OS that exclusively runs on the hardware they sell and isn't even open source but had instead worked with, for example, Debian, to work well with the hardware they're selling, you might have no problem to run the same editor on any Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch or whatever installation. So why do you even support Apple to begin with by buying their hard- and software? Apple is only making things difficult for you. > 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. When something 'should', it doesn't mean that something does or is. 'Should' usually means 'does not' or 'is not'; and that you're more or less unreasonably optimistic that it 'is' or 'does' since you might get lucky for a change. It's also not easier having to maintain multiple variants of some software so it works on multiple platforms. Take NFS for a good example: The implementation of NFS for FreeBSD is useless because it requires to always export a whole file system. You can not export a directory, or some directories, but only a whole file system. It took me days to figure that out, wondering why things didn't freaking work, despite the handbook clearly says you can export a file system. The NFS implementation in Linux works right and I'd never have thought it would be that retarded in FreeBSD. I simply expected it to work even after reading it like 20 times in the handbook and doing it just the way it said. Only, of course I expected to be able to export directories and not only whole file systems. Exporting the whole file system wasn't an option at all. How do you suppose it would be easier to maintain a single NFS implementation for any BSD, Linux and OSX all at once, with all the various file systems that exist? And isn't that built into the kernels? You want one kernel for all platforms? Maybe it would be nicer if all software worked on all platforms the same and if there were only a single version of each. But what about variety? I would never want to use kedit or any other editor instead of emacs --- not because it's emacs but because I've never found anything better than emacs. Someone else may never want to use emacs. Maybe someone wants to be limited to exporting only whole file systems.
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