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Comment by massysett | Hacker News Reader

> I sometimes wonder if GNU Herd would have been better at this, since everything would be designed by the GNU folks for one unified ecosystem.

You just invented *BSD.

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Which BSD has its own desktop environment? Which BSD has centralized, discoverable settings? (discoverable meaning I don't have to dig into man pages to figure out what to do). BSD is better but still doesn't go far enough IMO.

FWIW, I have never needed to dig into Windows' help system or Google to figure out how to use Windows Settings or the old Control Panel.

None of them. But GNU does not have this either. For awhile GNOME was part of the GNU project, but isn't now, and even when it was, X was not a GNU project.

GNU has this random assemblage of packages:

https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html

So add the Hurd to that, along with an actual distribution mechanism (not a trivial task), and what you get is something like a BSD.

Ah OK, I stand corrected. Looks like my pipe dream of getting a Unix derivative as unified as Windows stays unattainable then (although KDE Neon was pretty good last time I tried it, from a Settings point of view anyway)

Oh, not at all unattainable - a Unix derivative as unified as Windows is macOS. I've got a terminal and an Emacs running on my Mac right now.

But a free software one? No - that's the point of this article: the free software desktop users aren't willing to put up the resources it would take to develop what you're seeking.

WhichBSD?

Considering Hurd is mentioned, I humbly nominate OSF/1

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