HelloSystem: A graphical OS built on FreeBSD | Hacker News Reader

HelloSystem: A graphical OS built on FreeBSD

hellosystem.github.io

253 pointsgautamcgoel142 comments

Another project in this ecosystem: https://ravynos.com/

RavynOS is a much more interesting project. Basically it keeps everything that's open-source in Darwin (save for XNU), and re-implements what that's proprietary with tailor made free software, on top of a FreeBSD kernel.

Since many layers, frameworks and APIs from macOS are reused (even for the GUI which is written in Objective-C and uses the actual Cocoa APIs), the goal is to achieve compatibility with both macOS and FreeBSD apps. And yes, it natively runs Mach-O binaries in the kernel, no emulation layer.

"ravynOS is explicitly trying to be compatible with Mac software at a source and eventually a binary level, without losing support for FreeBSD/X11 software, and to implement a very similar experience on the desktop and at the command line. For example, on ravynOS you can type open -a MyApp image.jpg and have image.jpg open in MyApp. You will find things in (mostly) the same directories as a Mac, like ~/Library or /System/Library/Fonts."

Most other projects are just vanilla FreeBSD or Linux with a macOS theme.

It looks cool but honestly I think it’s another one of those “looks cool but never gets to v1.0” projects, like Fallout 4: New Vegas. For ravynOS, the Windows 9x buttons mixed with macOS everything else is hard to look at.

About 20 years ago I was an openbsd and freebsd admin, webhosting mostly. Then the rest of my maybe 16 year career was debian with some sprinkles of centos/rhel

What would bring me to bsd today? Not in a negative way at all, I'm curious what people love about it. I barely remember much about it. I loved pf over iptables but I don't remember why. It has jailed containers which.. I think people still love? I'm not sure.

I'm reading about appjails and these sound interesting.

For me the main point of bsd or small linuxes over debians/redhats is that running htop fills just one third of the screen and I can understand what each program does right away. It fills me with a sense of control and tranquility that just isn't there in more complex setups.

That's a great point. Would you consider yourself a minimalist in general? I think I'm the opposite. I'm one of those people who installs every (secure and vetted) plugin/extension/app that makes my life/work "easier." I have a ridiculous amount of vscode/intellij/obsidian plugins that I use. I'm sure if I used emacs/vim it'd be the same.

Just as an example that's super frowned upon, I install about 5-10 various packages like jq, htop, net-utils, bash, httpie, things like that into each oci container I build. I also have the exact same customized ~/.bashrc with aliases and a motd that tells me the distro and outdated packages and what not in all of the oci containers I build. Also a custom ~/.nanorc with syntax highlighting so I don't have to constantly write nano -l (everyone will hate me for using nano, I know).

I have to troubleshoot containers a lot. This example I'm posting here went from a 150Mb container to 203 with my "debug" packages. And each time I exec into one I get a nice little motd that makes fixing things so much faster for me. A 203Mb container has absolutely no effect on my autoscaling infrastructure. We watch for anomalies and immediately scale up and have the oci images cached on the clusters. I used to make these little 30mb scratch go containers that had literally nothing but the app. It was so annoying having to troubleshoot them and the benefit seemed so not worth it. Not having bash installed is absolutely horrendous. Being forced to use sh. I can't use arrow keys to move the cursor or up and down to go through history. I think ctrl-r doesnt even work.

I would get absolutely screamed at by the greybeard genius nix admins I used to work with. But I make the infra standards now.. Package attack vectors are definitely a concern. My containers go through a rigorous security test while being built.

https://imgur.com/MkyuyVS

Nothing wrong installing your favorite packages. Think the grandparent is talking about daemons running at startup.

seconded

process list and mount table on oldschool unixes "fit's in head" conveying familiarity and trust while laying a foundation for security

Got your dotfiles shared anywhere?

Until you disable hide kernel threads, or threads in general.

I run FreeBSD for my home storage server, have for almost a decade now. I've also used it for various other things here and there, but that's my major personal use.

The best thing about it is that it is boring, completely predictable outside of hardware faults, and dependable. If you know how to competently manage it, which isn't hard, it is a rock.

Also nice is that FreeBSD isn't involved in vendor tugs-of-war that result in the constant stream of bullshit changes* - the network config format doesn't change every version, people aren't playing political games with init, etc. All of which mean far fewer goofy make-work surprises.

And the quality of their releases is still very high. I consider them one of top open source projects, period, in terms of qualities others should emulate for better results.

As with anything, it isn't for everything. If you need the latest version of whatever is trendy this month, you should run Linux. But if your use case benefits from stability and ease of administration, FreeBSD rocks.

* What is bullshit in my environment may not be in yours, etc.

I don't think it's any more stable, dependable or predictable than any similarly mature Linux distro. It's just a preference, perhaps with a sliver of contrarianism.

Can you name any production-quality / daily-driver linux distros that have used the same network config, init, logging, etc for the last 5 years, let alone the last 3 decades (like the BSDs have)?

I never felt comfortable managing openbsd, but linux has repeatedly and gratuitously changed all the management tools, so now it’s easier for me to get around an openbsd box, despite using Linux daily, and openbsd maybe twice a year.

(It’s a serious question. I’m strongly considering switching to one of the bsd’s at this point.)

> Can you name any production-quality / daily-driver linux distros that have used the same network config, init, logging, etc for the last 5 years, let alone the last 3 decades (like the BSDs have)?

Are you not so subtly referring to the systemd fiasco? That was about, if not over 10 years ago. I also don't think it matters. Change is not a bad thing, and that change is not as hectic or constant as you seem to imply.

If you really want a Linux distro that hasn't changed at all in the past 30 years, Slackware might be your bets bet, but I don't think that 'having not changed in the past 30 years' really makes sense as a metric.

Personally, I'm a fan of Alpine and Void Linux, and I also run NetBSD. FreeBSD seems too 'messy' as someone that likes minimalism, and OpenBSD's security focus is misplaced IMO.

It’s not just systemd. Wayland broke the world. ifconfig doesn’t work anymore. File permissions don’t reliably work thanks to acls. There’s also the selinux vs cgroups vs ???, etc, etc.

ifconfig got replaced just as OpenBSD's pf replaced whatever it replaced.

Wayland, ACLs, SELinux and cgroup are all just options, none are forced.

> ifconfig

Was deprecated ~20 years ago. Not a recent change.

> selinux vs cgroups vs ???

This doesn't make any sense? It's like writing "network drivers vs. X11" in OpenBSD.

Fedora switched to Systemd in 2011. That's over 5 years?

Systemd has changed stuff continuously ever since.

For instance, some systemd-login thing broke compatibility with xscreensaver on my manjaro box 6 months ago.

imho rhel is a close second, but bsd's being vastly less complex inherently means less assumptions and changes and more robustness

Same same. Today I'm indifferent to Linux flavors. I am not sure why I would use FreeBSD although I recall the community being very helpful.

I use openbsd in a desktop role, which is a but unusual. I like it because it is comfortable in a way I don't find in linux or windows. I think this is because I understand it. A situation I never feel on windows. you are sitting on so much complexity, it is fine when you are in the happy path where things are working, But I start to get nervous when pondering not only how much I don't know about windows but on how much I can not know. Linux is much better, but still has too many moving parts.

I don't think of openbsd as a minimal system, in fact it is almost the opposite openbsd crams more into it's base distribution than most linux distos. But the openbsd services tend to be small and well behaved and well documented., I am a bit biased but I tend to think of openbsd as the best bsd for desktop use. It is not the fastest, it does not have the best filesystems, but damn if everything does not come together in a really comfortable package.

The fact BSD can't run Docker with its vast ecosystem is already a show stopper.

Also having little glitches by tiny differences in shell handling make your already tuned Linux dotfiles incompatible that adds to the annoyances.

And then I don't really get anything over Linux. pf is good but I'm just mostly using ufw and not running a router in the cloud that requires more than port handling.

Ubuntu supports zfs in a very seamless way that I just don't find a reason to use BSD anymore unfortunately. It's probably only driven by companies that don't want to expose their code via GPL.

Yep, what other reason could there be.

a couple projects underway for containers, still wip but promising.

https://hackmd.io/7BIT_khIRQyPAe4EdiigHg

https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj

If BSD can run existing Docker ecosystem, then suddenly FreeBSD becomes a candidate for use.

Though I don't find anything better than Linux, it's not lacking either.

A lot have happened for these 15-20 years:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36972903

... and that can give You another reason 'why':

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/

... but if you are happy where You are - then stay where You are.

I moved to FreeBSD because I was not happy on Linux.

Regards, vermaden

Excellent article! Re-ignited my intention to use freebsd.

Thank You!

I wonder if, in the future, stable diffusion or other AI techniques can be used to generate nice icon sets and other UI elements. Not that I'd expect Apple levels of design, but anything to bridge the gap would be nice...I'm primarily a macOS user, secondarily a windows user, and my forays into *nix have always provided a poor first impression. Anecdotal, of course...

Heh my dream was a real-time generative overlay on top of Dwarf Fortress ASCII art.

(That was before the Steam version ofc.)

that's interesting. I find the icons available for *nix far superior and interesting. The problem is finding out the good stuff, because its hard with the current signal vs noise ratio. I actually dislike the current macOS icon sets, far too colorful and saturated.

Which icon sets do you find superior, in particular?

Note that parent meant the UI holistically, and not just icon sets.

AFAIK, this way of thinking about the design of the entire system, and not just in discrete segments is largely unique to macOS. I think it is because Apple has a design language they try to enforce as rigorously as possible, even onto 3rd party developers, which gives the OS & all applications on it a very uniform and consistent feeling.

Windows is the worst. Microsoft has a design language, but they barely encourage it even among their own apps (Settings vs. Control Panel as one example).

I will make a strong claim: I don't think any O.S. developer takes design truly seriously besides Apple. Definitely not Microsoft, partially Google with Android, and certainly not most *nix distros (with the possible rare exception like System76's Pop!_OS).

Most linux desktop environments (notable exception of Gnome3 though it applies for Gnome2) seem to favour old school UX design which, incidentally, I happen to find nicer than “pretty”.

I personally really like the Adwaita icon sets much more than windows and at least on-par with MacOS, though MacOS has the advantage of being rendered only on extremely high DPI screens. So most people only have that experienfe

For whatever it's worth, macOS/OS X has had very high resolution icons well before high DPI displays were commonly available. Even 10.0 which was released in 2001 supported 128x128 icons, which was 4x larger than what other popular desktops were capable of at the time and enabled far greater levels of detail, even if most users wouldn't be seeing that detail most of the time.

Thats actually true with Adwaita also. :D

the default gnome ones, and the whole Adwaita design language. I would prefer it any day over the current mac. Obviously its a personal preference, there's no right or wrong. But I used to like the mac design much more a bunch of years ago. Now, not so much.

I'm not a KDE user, but to be honest, I quite like a lot of the KDE designs. I'll admit, KDE design is nowhere near as meticulous as Apple's design, but even since KDE 3 I've always admired the design anyways, just for being colorful and functional.

Focusing too much on style can be a bit of a problem, though. All too often, Linux theming and UX feels very "skin deep" - and obviously, It'd be great if most people focused on stability and robustness at this point.

Honestly probably not that hard, could train a model/lora with about 30 images, so gather more than 30 good looking icons, train a model and then take the time to prompt and generate all the icons you need. Then do touchups in gimp/photoshop.

At most would take me a week or so to do I think, more likely less than a day.

Or bring back skins[0]! Have software read textures from areas in a big image, then let the user replace the image. Forest theme for Microsoft Teams! SciFi file explorer!

I tried using MidJourney to generate exaggerated UI themes (not skins, just general themes for inspiration), but the results were disappointing. They were always gorgeous[1], but my prompt engineering skills couldn't coax it to use space efficiently.

[0]: https://skins.webamp.org/

[1] https://i.imgur.com/5KC2u7J.png

Part of me really misses those days, and another part of me is screaming “please no” internally.

this approach does not allow UI scaling, because the UI is made up of pixels.

the open source modular synthesis software VCV Rack has a UI composed entirely of SVG descriptions (even though 95% of the UI is provided by 3rd party modules that get loaded into the main program). They can look like anything you want, but the result is an infinitely (more or less) zoomable/scalable UI.

"here is an open source operating system for creatives"

First HN comment: "I wonder if we could use AI to replace the large-scale creative work of making sets icons."

Visiting The Orange Site provides a wealth of comedy

There's no reason why both can't happen side by side. Don't see any cause for your derision.

I feel like this is weak argument these days, places like reddit.com/r/unixporn are overkill when it comes to styling a desktop environment, but a quick change to the Numix icon set and a new GTK theme makes most Linux installations with Gnome look great.

Eh icons aren't what set macOS apart, it's UI considerations. I mean it looks fine but macOS would still be worth using if it looked like ass.

Post from 7 months ago with 210 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34519824

The complaints in the first post there really stood out when I looked at the screenshots on the HelloSystem site. I’m not saying what the complaints are, because I’m curious if they’ll be so obvious to somebody who isn’t primed to look for them. Could someone skip that thread and look directly at the HelloSystem site, then check and see if they also saw the issues in that post? It could be an interesting experiment.

What’s the moratorium for posting a comment here?

20 minutes from now?

I don’t think there needs to be any. Hopefully folks won’t check the follow up posts to mine before checking the site, haha. I think we’re not going to get a scientific sampling anyway, so may as well just let people have fun with it.

That's literally the first thing I noticed in the screenshot on the website. Spacing in the UI is very inconsistent, almost the polar opposite of macOS aesthetic.

i don't know why people wan't to keep cloning osx, it might looks nice, but time has proven its a quite unproductive gui

Please provide more context. “Proven to be X” without proof nor links …

Yeah but always OS X of maybe 10 years ago. They gave up the glossy thing.

Also I disagree about it being unproductive. Not everyone is most productive in i3 or whatever.

The problem is that very few macOS clone projects reach anything close to maturity, which means that paradigm is barely represented in FOSS desktops. Aside from GNOME (which is iPadOS, not macOS) and its prettier cousin Pantheon, It's just Win9X clones and tiling WMs as far as the eye can see.

That might not seem like a big deal, but if the goal is to get as many people switched away from commercial operating systems as possible there needs to be a healthy range of conventions/workflows represented by meaningfully different DEs so more users find one they can slip on like a comfy pair of shoes. For most people, switching desktop paradigms is something they want to avoid if at all possible because of the immense friction it brings.

Ubuntu Unity did better than most in that department.

Still alive and being maintained, too.

Unity's implementation of a global menu is probably the most consistently functional I've seen at the very least. KDE has this feature but compatibility is more spotty, partially thanks to necessary packages going unmaintained and on my main distro (Fedora) missing altogether.

I agree.

Xfce has a plugin to do it as well, but it needs various strange Gtk settings to tell apps to use it, and I can't get most of those to work.

There are some impressive KDE-based distros out there, and I wish someone rose to the challenge of offering a Mac/Unity-like Xfce-based desktop.

Gnome 2 did a good job of taking all the best ideas from Windows and MacOS, then innovating on top. Sun even ran user studies to validate the UI as it was being built.

Then the gnome 3 team intentionally sabotaged it all by intentionally arranging for gnome 3 apps to refuse to coexist with a gnome 2 install.

Sigh.

Yeah, I thought GNOME 2 was pretty usable. MATE is around now but aging and probably forever X11-only. Rebuilding GNOME 2 on Wayland and with modern necessities like fractional scaling would be a worthy project.

Everything except the Control Centre has been started porting to Wayland, and a few things are even finished: https://wiki.mate-desktop.org/developers-corner/wayland-meso...

XFCE are not that far along, but the developers are tinkering: https://www.phoronix.com/news/xfwm4-wayland-May-2023

My theory was that RedHat was concerned about software patents and/or law suits, so felt they had to significantly change Gnome 2, even if it would make people less productive.

That doesn’t explain why they actively sabotaged the work done by people outside of redhat.

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Funny—i'm very productive on macOS and feel the exact same as you do about pc interfaces (including all linux and bsd environments). I don't even know how i'd go about "fixing" (in my head) the horrifically bad keybindings that make these environments so hard to use.

It's atrocious. I guess people get used to it. It's always baffled me why so many apparently 'power users' opt for it over Windows. Windows has a ton of issues, especially since 10/11, but is infinitely more configurable and customizable.

I love FreeBSD on personal servers and workstations. But lean into FreeBSD not into macOS look and feel. The m2 macs make it the best workstation out there. If you have that there is no business need for this os.

Run it for fun but it’s never going to reach mass appeal

Don’t know what people expect from an operating system like FreeBSD. Will joe average install it on their family computer? Probably not.

Still FreeBSD quietly powers so many things, and has been used for so many platforms(Hotmail, Yahoo, WhatsApp, Netflix, etc). plus PlayStation, userland in OS X… plus all the network appliances(and storage).

It seems to me FreeBSD gives you a great platform to do your own thing without getting in your way.

What are advantages of FreeBSD over Linux for example?

I mostly used Linux with mostly joy and some frustration, but never FreeBSD. I do use Mac, but I don't think it can be translated, or can it?

As far as I'm aware, the largest users/vendor of BSD(-based) software are Apple, Sony/PlayStation, Cisco, and both Amazon and Netflix are reported to use BSD in their CDN infrastructure.

So they have a vested interest in the BSD-Ecosystem to stay alive and well, so as to continue to assure the existence of developers and beta-testers for the BSD system/userland they base their commercial offerings on. Personal choice, if you see that as a Pro or Con.

> Not a clone of anything, but something with which the long-time Mac user should feel instantly comfortable.

The longer I look at the screenshot, the cheekier this advertising seems.

I wonder if they cloned Finder from MacOS 9, which was better than the MacOS X one in pretty much every way.

The screenshot makes me think they might have.

It looks like the Mac OS X 10.0–10.2 Finder with the toolbar collapsed. Same massive icon spacing: https://i.imgur.com/fLndIw6.png

The closest Free Software analogue I've ever found for the Classic Finder is ROX-Filer, pictured here: https://cooltrainer.org/images/original/freebsd11-wmaker.png

That screenshot gives me the feels: WindowMaker, WipEout, FreeBSD. That’s as beautiful today as it might have been 15+ years ago. The “modern” FreeBSD logo and composited windows decorations betray it’s timelessness a bit (2005 or sooner), though I suppose the earliest it could have been was sometime after 1999 (ROX-Filer and Sim City 3000).

> On GNU-style systems (e.g., most Linux distributions), status=progress does not work and can be left away.

This isn’t really an accurate claim. How strange.

Yep. GNU dd definitely supports status=progress, at least in any modern version.

Maybe they're thinking of busybox dd?

Ah yeah possibly. It just isn’t quite what they said.

I tested helloSystem when it was still new and beta. It was buggy but it showed great potential. I will try it again tomorrow, I guess a lot has changed (for the better)

I love the idea of FreeBSD on a desktop (or laptop), and stock FreeBSD has always been troublesome to get working nicely on a laptop (at least for me)

https://youtu.be/LLqWMRrRaZs?si=xbov8X9Z6bmqELG9

I wonder what it'd be like on a tablet.

See also Elementary OS and its Pantheon desktop environment.

Has ElementaryOS gotten their staff problems fixed yet?

I’m also annoyed that they don’t go for Objective C which could make a lot of seasoned Apple developers comfortable, but instead went for a custom language.

Then take a look at GnuStep or WindowMaker.

Window Maker does not use GNUstep or Objective-C at all, it is all written in plain C. In fact the UI toolkit it uses (developed for Window Maker itself) is called "WINGs" for "WINGs Is Not GNUstep".

Probably it's time to rewrite WINGs in Swift.

> custom language

Vala wasn't a custom language for elementaryOS, it already existed for years before the first version of the OS (and i think the first version didn't use any Vala code).

It most likely used instead of Objective-C because its object system was built on top of glib's gobject system and elementaryOS used Gtk and a lot of other glib/gobject-based libraries. Using Objective-C would mean they'd have to base their UI on GNUstep and GNUstep wasn't as polished as Gtk.

Remember that while they used macOS as an inspiration, it was never elementaryOS's goal to make a macOS clone.

Of course they could have used GTK from ObjectiveC, in fact it has been proposed.

Of course they could have used Gtk from Objective-C, it is a C superset after all. However it'd be the same as using Gtk from C and the point of using Vala was to use a higher level language which understands the gobject object system and works with its memory management so they wont have to care about it.

I have used Vala a bit some years ago to make a Gtk program and it was MUCH easier using it than using Gtk from C directly, so i can understand why they went with it.

A long while back there were efforts to port Pantheon to FreeBSD. IMO, a coordinated effort to get the graphical and UX experience on Linux or FreeBSD would be better than yet another one.

I do wonder about eOS staff issues. It would be a shame to see that fall apart, I've been using it for years. Even so, someone picking up the torch as it were would be better than starting another.

ElementaryOS is very polished aesthetically and I love that they didn't jump aboard the "flat rectangles and monochrome icons" bandwagon like everybody else, but the way they went along with the various functionality-limiting GNOME conventions like replacing proper menubars with hamburger menus and hiding the minimize button is disappointing.

Still better than GNOME

So much effort goes into badly cloning another desktop these days.

I like macOS for the attention to detail, not for the rounded corners.

I like X11 for the flexibility, not for the ability to poorly imitate another system.

I will give credit to GNOME for trying to be their own thing, but it seems like they have no real vision, except trying to be "simpler" at all costs.

The UI reminds me of RISC OS!

It’s a pretty clear rip of macOS, from the aqua-inspired UI, finder at base, to the layout of the directories.

I mean, the directories are laid out in the same way because MacOS runs on top of BSD. They basically ARE the same file system. I agree on the rest of your points though.

Allegedly, one of the Acorn OS developers quit and went to work for NeXT in Silicon Valley... and right afterwards, the test in-development version of NeXTstep suddenly had this Acorn Risc OS-like floating icon bar! NeXT also implemented app directories, where all the contents of an app, its resources and libraries and so on, are in a folder with a special magic name... another idea nicked from Acorn.

(Risc OS apps are called !Name; NeXTstep ones are called Name.app.)

Acorn Risc OS was also the first OS to have integrated, always-on font antialiasing, next seen in NeXTstep, and the first to have full-window drag.

Source: a retrospective meetup of the surviving developers, which I moderated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_SDL0IwbCc&t=2s

somewhat related to the directories:

https://www.macdisk.com/macforken.php

Not really... that's a Classic MacOS thing, not anything in NeXTstep, OpenStep or OS X, although OS X respects and preserves them.

Perhaps the closer correspondence is file metadata. For all that Risc OS is based on Acorn MOS, an OS that's as old or older than MS-DOS, it stores richer metadata: for instance, files have a Creator Type which is 3 hex digits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RISC_OS_filetypes

This can't be stored on DOS filesystems. So, just like Classic MacOS files with their 2 forks, to keep Risc OS files on DOS media without damaging them, they must be packed inside a Zip file or something like that -- and using a RiscOS (or MacOS) native Zip program that stores, and recreates, the metadata.

(Linux used to do something vaguely similar with the `umsdos` filesystem.)

DOS/Windows PC owners, who think the universe revolves around them, never could get the hang of this.

Oh, interesting!

Seems to be KDE on top of FreeBSD?

for what it's worth KDE3.5.x is available as Trinity Desktop for FreeBSD.

It's also available in some Linux distros, but it's a bit of a mess getting it running.

Definitely they got a bunch of packages. Totally fine in Debian

No, it's the creator's own desktop environment called Hello. If you read the website or GitHub there is a lot of content about design opinion.

I'm not a lawyer but if this gets any traction Apple's gonna get big mad about the branding, aren't they? They're basically swiping original Mac advertising campaign wholesale.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses

As much as I disagree with OP, copyright law is not trademark law.

It's true that trademark is what's at play here, although either way - giving something a BSD license doesn't mean you can use it to violate others' copyright OR trademarks.

Do you think Apple BSD licensed the iconic Macintosh "hello" image or something?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/24/apple-launched-ma...

No I meant this is under BSD, and they aren’t even selling it.

Releasing something for free, whether as in beer or as in freedom, doesn't give you carte blanche to violate trademark law. For just one example (well...hundreds), look at the multitude of fangames Nintendo has shut down [0].

[0] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/01/nintendo_issues_ma...

"hello" doesn't show up in https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/... which probably makes it much easier.

> The following is a non-exhaustive list of Apple’s trademarks and service marks. [...] The absence of a product or service name or logo from this list does not constitute a waiver of Apple’s trademark or other intellectual property rights concerning that name or logo.

So the idea is that Apple might have a trademark on the word Hello in cursive?

Like I said, I'm not a lawyer, but: yes, I would claim that Apple has a trademark on the word "hello", entirely in lowercase cursive, in that very particular cursive typeface, with a animation that shows it being written out at precisely that speed and in precisely that manner, as a means of promoting a distinctive graphical computer operating system, in a manner that they've continued to reference for the past 40 years [0], yes.

Not a lawyer though.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGrxGQUPqxk

Yes, but HelloSystem will never go anywhere because it's BSD.

The canary in the coal mine will be the Elementary Linux distro's Pantheon desktop which even uses the Command symbol ⌘ yet claims "resemblance to any other graphical environment is purely coincidental".

There was some other Mac-copy Linux distro who Apple did send a C&D to for similar reasons but I can't remember the name.

Contribute to GNUStep if you want to support a legitimate transition for Mac users.

Not yet another aqua rip off distro running reskinned Mate.

Just get FreeBSD with gnome or mate if you’re so inclined.

If you’re using Hello as your daily driver, you’re gonna get your hands dirty getting things to work anyway. Might as well start from core.

GhostBSD, MidnightBSD, TrueOS, haven’t people realized FreeBSD is too obscure to get a community led distro to gain traction?

Ubuntu is the use case for “mere mortals” on Unix-like systems. Anyone tech savvy enough to use FreeBSD on a personally machine successfully (whoever you are) doesn’t need some pre rolled version.

It’s a niche use case and this project will ultimately go nowhere.

Presumably, what technically-minded Mac users who might switch want and what projects like this are aiming to achieve is to have a high level of consistency and "one piece design" not just on the user-facing half, but also under the hood, and the various BSDs have more to offer in this department than mainstream GNU/Linux distributions.

It might be worth looking at one of those Linux distros that swaps out GNU userland/toolchain in favor of BSD equivalents wherever possible though.

I also find these BlahBlahBSDs silly. Since when is setting desktop themes or tuning a few sysctls "forking" or worth calling a new OS?

Ok, I see downvotes coming and I understand I didn't give enough context so I'll try to clarify.

I use BSD, particularly FreeBSD and OpenBSD, for two decades now. For the last 15 years professionally.

Four "recognized" members of BSD family are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonflyBSD. Each of them pursue different goals - FreeBSD stability, OpenBSD security, NetBSD portability, DragonflyBSD no idea, never tried it. All of them have similar (make) but different way of building (poudriere / dpb) and managing (pkg / pkg_) packages, similar (rc) but different way of managing system services (rc.d/ / rc.conf.local), similar (ifconfig) but different (rc.conf's ifconfig_if / hostname.if) way of setting network interfaces, similar but different ways of containerization and virtualization (jails, chroot, vmm, bhyve) etc.

I have reasons why I would choose FreeBSD over OpenBSD for storage server (ZFS), or vice versa for router / firewall (rdomains, pf, bgpd, ospfd, iked / ipsec etc.)

I don't have a slightest idea why would I choose HelloSystem or HardenedBSD for my laptop instead of FreeBSD.

I personally wouldn't dare run any BSD on a daily laptop. I've been down that road with a ThinkPad T410 and all 3 of the major ones. OpenBSD wouldn't support my network card, FreeBSD was easiest but I remember X11 would lag, resorting in having to turn off some hardware accel stuff (thanks to their helpful forum), NetBSD experience was brief but I simply felt like I was in no mans land, maybe i was wrong...

Mouse gestures wouldn't work, I think some media buttons, all these annoying little things I had to hunt down and tweak myself. Mind you again, this was on a damn Thinkpad, what better laptop to run FreeBSD!

That's probably the use case for what HelloSystem is for, a BSD you don't have to muck around with on a laptop. But I knew damn well when I was 20 I wasn't going to swallow my pride and install some kiddieBSD, at that rate I'd say why BSD at all and go back to Ubuntu where everything is safe. I did and have no regrets lol.

I don't remember where, but someone once said FreeBSD is best for computers that you don't have to look at. That and of course as a starting point for companies like Nintendo, Sony, and Apple to derive from with their ACTUAL development teams.

> I don't have a slightest idea why would I choose HelloSystem or HardenedBSD for my laptop instead of FreeBSD.

I haven't actually tried HelloSystem on real hardware as a daily driver, but I can clearly see why people would find it valuable (at least according to their stated goals).

The reasons are the same as why you'd choose Ubuntu over Slackware: the base install is intended as a fully functional desktop OS. Focus on the OOB experience, vertical integration, accessibility, polish, simplicity, etc. Even if you're a power user, there is still value to having all of these things: your energy is probably better spent on something more useful than figuring why basic, random stuff isn't working. (Assuming HelloSystem delivers on their stated goals!)

It is true that these are all "merely" downstream projects, but I wouldn't dismiss them on these grounds alone. As long as any improvements can be ported back to FreeBSD, it's a win for everyone involved.

> Each of them pursue different goals - FreeBSD stability, OpenBSD security, NetBSD portability, DragonflyBSD no idea, never tried it.

The goal of desktop BSDs are to specialize as desktop OSes, and people keep trying it because the four main BSDs aren't particularly great at it — OpenBSD is probably being the best (mainly thanks to OpenBSD devs dogfooding it on their laptops), but its hardware compatibility and older packages aren't particularly great for most desktop users nor is its functional but spartan setup process.

Its less setting a new desktop theme, and more maintaining compatibility with a Desktop Environment. Ghost BSD is significant because it is the "easy way" to get BSD working on computers. FreeBSD by itself is about like setting up Arch Linux. Same with most versions of BSD. If you know what you are doing you can get something set up, but if you don't care for needing to set everything up yourself, a distro like GhostBSD is invaluable.

Your points are addressed here https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/31/hellosystem_08/

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