Hacker News Reader

Comment by NexRebular | Hacker News Reader

Linux monoculturalization is not great news. We should deploy e.g. *BSD and illumos as well to prevent having all eggs in one basket.

View on HN

Let's not let perfect become the enemy of better. :)

I think the kernel is really an implementation detail. The user space would be mostly the same between all of the open source posix OSes.

I think the user space apps will mostly work on BSD, so if somehow in future a BSD distro will be superior to Linux should be easy to move the apps over. I do not think there will be a lot of work put in the Linux kernel and I think KDE still works on BSDs

KDE still does. GNOME also does, but it basically requires them to compat-shim systemd, which is really unfortunate.

but does a BSD user want GNOME? GNOME target users are more casual, too many options are too much for them.

I don't know, but given that e.g. FreeBSD has an entire team dedicated to keeping GNOME working with whatever hacks are necessary, presumably there are at least enough to volunteer for such work.

Anyway, my point was more broadly that Gnome and its surrounding software ecosystem is explicitly and openly Linux-first and have no qualms introducing dependencies like systemd that make it that much harder to get it working everywhere else. I'm pretty sure I've seen Gnome folk straight up say that they simply don't care about anything other than Linux. So unfortunately it's not always that simple to move the apps over.

(KDE, on the other hand, is pretty BSD-friendly.)

I'm gonna do my part and champion Haiku OS instead.

Anything non-Windows would work for the time being. OpenIndiana and FreeBSD / OpenBSD can come later. :D

Reply on news.ycombinator.com