lproven

> either have a discoverable GUI for noobs, or a configurable, keyboard driven system

Absolutely wrong. Windows is both and it can be 100% keyboard driven.

No no, be fair -- some of us ridicule everyone using AI and the slop they get it to extrude.

This one is news to me! Thank you!

How long has it been around? Anyone tried it and can give an impression of what it's like?

Nah. Doesn't really matter when you are building the hardware to do that job. And in any event, FreeBSD is primarily a server OS, and its support is quite good in that department.

Example: OpenBSD and NetBSD both will install X11 and a window manager by default from the installer, if you want. FreeBSD doesn't. They're working on it, but they've been working on it for years.

As the others said: chasing big-corporate $$$.

You can integrate a fleet of Linux storage servers with a collection of K8s clusters more easily than a you can BSD storage servers. Getting BSD and Linux talking smoothly needs Real Unix Skills.

Colleagues in K8s shops tell me that their k8s guys come for help with complex tasks like.... deleting files. They know to construct and deploy containers, but not how to delete a file without using a GUI (meaning Windows or at best WSL).

I am told that some companies are now demanding "bash" among the list of skills for would-be container-herders. And here, "bash skills" means you should know to to create, edit, and then delete a file -- over an ssh connection.

TrueNAS SCALE is not BSD based. It's Linux, specifically, Debian.

The thing is that this would seem to be a whole new shell, needing constant maintenance and adjustment to keep it current with KDE.

Whereas AIUI the alternative here is just a cosmetic change to Xfce and shouldn't need any maintenance at all. There are only new KDE releases once every 2 years.

I know which of those I'd want. As it happens, I also much prefer Xfce to KDE: it's smaller, simpler, lighter, faster, more coherent, and complies much better with Windows's keyboard UI.

It's pretty but it's just GNOME with a ton of extensions.

There are no true title bars, so I can't middle-click the title bar to send the window to the back. I can't roll up windows into the title bar. Random dialog buttons end up in there although I have not yet had a chance to read the text and work out what answer I need; the GNOME design is "answer first then we'll ask the question." Keyboard UI is woeful because it's GNOME. Files was cut down into a sad castrated replica of itself a decade ago, and still is. Apps mostly have no menu bars and I have to mess around with tiny hidden hamburger menus as if I were trying to control an iPad that had a broken touchscreen.

It feels like trying to operate a desktop with my nose because both hands are tied behind my back. It is painful.

It's pretty, though.

> a fully-featured File Explorer work-alike complete with previews of every file type and a full-on context menu copy

Corel LinuxOS did this at the turn of the century. Xandros took it even further.

Sadly, although a company is still around and owns the names, they do not use any of the original code.

Xandros's version of KDE 2 was the best Linux desktop of its era and it wasn't even close. By a decade later, Ubuntu Unity took that role, but a lot of people don't know how to drive Windows by keyboard, and aren't willing to learn new things, so they hated it -- especially here on HN, which called for it to be cancelled, and Canonical listened.

Why not both?

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49460716 (Phoronix)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49454542 (Project site)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49463938 (OS News story

Also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49454542 (4 comments)

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451029

Oh, I see what you mean, now. All right: conceded -- that is true.

Conceded. :-)

The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago.

This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today.

Mind-boggling.

Yup. I was there, using the web, back then. I used Altavista dozens of times a day. It wasn't very good.

I never thought of it.

I never thought of the Million Dollar Homepage, either.

It's still there! https://milliondollarhomepage.com/

I remember the first ever HTML CV (résumé) being published.

I am Slashdot user #6030. I used it for ages before I created a user account.

I was already paying for my own personal email address in 1991 when timbl revealed the WWW to the world. I thought it was a gimmick. It'd never catch on. We already had Gopher and Archie and Veronica.

deep sigh

Update to this: his son contacted me and informed me that Dr King was in fact 71.

This is simply not true.

NetBSD includes Firefox:

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/www/firefox...

And Chromium:

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/www/chromiu...

And LLVM:

https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/lang/llvm/i...

And Python:

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/lang/python...

In fact, the only thing that you mentioned that is not in its ports collection is a Rust compiler, as far as I can see.

Code generated with LLMs is explicitly forbidden.

I wrote about that last year:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/05/18/gentoo-and-n...

It's in the guidelines:

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

« Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core. »

I don't know of any such thing getting approval.

Yes, like OpenBSD, things might get grandfathered in. OpenBSD includes `tmux`. Tmux includes bot-assisted commits. I wrote about that too:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/05/25/openbsd-79-a...

NetBSD is right there.

Uhuh.

And what happens when the price goes up by an extra zero on the end?

And then another one?

And then the cloud stuff goes away because all the vendors go broke, despite the price rises, and you have to switch to using local models?

That is, models that are hugely slower, unless you have a computer with hardware tensor-math acceleration, which costs 10x more because of the chip famine?

And then, suddenly, those local models cost an absolute bomb to license, because the companies that bought up the wreckage of the original model creators are trying to recoup their spend?

Meanwhile the company is being hit by nuisance litigation from people whose code the bots plagiarised, or customers who are annoyed it doesn't work?

There are so many ways all this stuff can just go away.

"¿Porque no los dos?"

"Why not both?"

> it will be ubiquitous and universal in adoption

[[citation needed]]

Which is gonna be tricky as I am confident you don't have a time machine.

I think generative AI as a whole is a total scam. It has uses, but not many, and outside of translation, not good ones... and yet, it is running at truly epic financial losses. Multiple trillions of dollars are being pumped into this.

I think the next AI Winter, the 3rd big one, is coming very soon.

There's going to be a market crash to dwarf the dot-com crash and 20087 financial crisis (both of which I worked through as an employed adult), and a lot of the current tech industry will be wiped out.

I've watched that happen before as well.

I am quite looking forward to it. I have no stocks or shares in anything anywhere, few savings, no loans, no debt... but all my immediate family own their own homes outright, and I am close to retirement age.

Let it all burn.

I wrote it. I am fully aware of that, and I said so in the piece.

I want to spread awareness that it's happening -- it only has a couple of days to run.

So far there are only ~350 votes:

https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_llm/

Circa 270 people have voted:

https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_llm/tally.txt

(My reckoning; could well be wrong!)

With a project the size of Debian, I feel sure that is a tiny fraction of eligible developers.

> I would describe most forums in the same way

True that.

Honestly, this is quibbling about implementation details, IMHO.

You can put DOS on a USB key and boot basically any 21st century x86 box straight into DOS.

I have a hobby project that does just that:

https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos

And yes, that includes UEFI boxes:

https://github.com/CSMWrap/CSMWrap

(No, I have not tried this myself yet. I own very few UEFI-only machines. I personally have no use for it.)

Posting this because I want people to vote -- and ideally vote for a total ban.

Thank you for that!

All right. I write and have written a bit about enterprise distros, but because all 3 of the main vendors are just remarkably unhelpful -- I think more from sheer incompetence than malice -- I do not look at them much. It is not very germane to what I do: no competent finance director would base their choice of enterprise OS on reviews in the Register. :-)

I don't know enough to even dispute the timing, so I will let it go.

But the core point here is that Linux has no kernel-integrated GUI, so it is possible to rip and replace it.

Whereas in the comments on my obit for Dr Tim King...

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/tim-king-ami...

... there are people discussing how it was impossible to completely disable the GUI in AmigaOS 1... it fired up with a CLI in a window because the windowing system is in the ROM. King used it to replace terminal sessions in TRIPOS, if I understand it correctly.

(I was using a Sinclair ZX Spectrum back then myself, and after a while on an Amstrad PCW, moved to an Acorn Archimedes. When AmigaOS 1.x was current, an Amiga cost as much as a small car in the UK, and I had just gone to university and could not afford a bicycle let alone a car.)

Although they were written by different teams, you could no more disable the Amiga's GUI than you could boot a Mac Plus into text mode: it didn't have a text mode to boot into. The GUI was an integral core part of the OS.

AmigaOS was better structured, with kernel, multitasking layer, and GUI layer... but they were still one inextricable whole.

This is the reverse of Unix, including Linux, which is a 1960s minicomputer OS design. Its inextricable core concepts are dumb terminals on serial ports, and a filesystem, and it barely has any built in idea of "networking" or "a GUI" -- they are bolted on extras that came a decade or 2 later.

You can boot any Linux into single-user mode with no networking and no GUI.

I am watching this with some interest -- I wrote about AROS myself last year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44061609

It's a remarkable little OS, and it does have potential. The Pi is a lovely little computer but a bit underpowered for modern Linux or FreeBSD, let alone Windows.

But as RISC OS on the Pi shows, it's got more than enough power to be a capable GUI desktop computer, and AROS could make it into one of the fastest Amigas ever.

While AROS also runs on x86 of course, including x86-64, that is a crowded market: AROS is a small fish in a big pond.

However, on a 1GB RISC machine, it could really shine as a fast, responsive, capable GUI OS, open to hacking and experimentation, and able to run pretty much any original Amiga software under emulation at much faster than Amiga speeds.