I can’t even feel superior to everyone when theirs so many arch installers!! I use real arch btw. I thought “I guess I should go to Gentoo” but then wait, CHROMEOS IS A GENTOO INSTALLER!

I feel like we only have two options now

  1. Ascend to BSD-land
  2. Ironically supporting Windows Unironically

edit: I have decided to replace my debian laptop with BSD

        • BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org
          26·
          16 days ago

          If you are nostalgic for BeOS, then the elevator pitch is, “It’s Be, only on modern hardware and more software support.”

          If you are unfamiliar with BeOS, the pitch is: “Imagine an extremely lightweight desktop is with all of the things you would expect in a modern environment with none of the legacy. In an alternative universe, BeOS would have become OSX.”

          There are so many things that Be did right from the very beginning that other OSs have adopted, but never as cleanly as Be did it.

          For example, its file system. Most people don’t really notice or care about the file system, they all have directorys and hold files, maybe with permissions. BeFS does that as well, of course, but so much more. The entire file system acts as a database, so you can easily perform fast queries on it. You can also create virtual directories that are the result of those queries.

          You want a “folder” that contains every markdown file created after 2020 between 20 and 1000kb in size? Bam, instantly done and live updated whenever something accesses it. The files aren’t actually copied there, just appear there to normal tools, almost like soft links.

          BeFS also supports a resource fork system that it calls attributes. These can also be queried using the same database like tools as the rest of the system. File typing is done this way, every file gets a MIME type attribute and there is a daemon that sniffs them when a new file is downloaded or copied over.

          Even more, this allows some crazy things like plain text files that have font, color and other formatting elements because all that is stored as an attribute.

          Or their contact information app, which stores every person as a zero length file with details as attributes. You can create a virtual folder of all your contacts that meet a certain criteria and have other applications use that folder for whatever.

          Or the email app which stores each email as a file, and adds the basic metadata like to, from, subject, read, etc as attributes. Then you can have different virtual folders based on those. This also means that the basic file system browser is the default way to view email, because it supports all the attribute viewing, queries and such you would need. Or you can do it all from the command line using either basic cli tools or some slightly specialized ones.

          Combining attributes and virtual directories makes for a fantastic media library system, all built into the os for free. Imagine a directory that contains “Every metal song I have, from 1989 to 1993, that I haven’t played in three weeks” or whatever else you want.

          Back when people used files and all applications were local first, this was probably much more exciting, but it’s still pretty cool.

          • evol@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
            8·
            16 days ago

            The file system thing is really cool, are their downsides of implementing it like that? Curious why Linux would not implement something like that

            • BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org
              8·
              16 days ago

              I think there are a couple of reasons. First, the Linux kernel doesn’t support resource forks at all. They aren’t part of POSIX nor do they really fit the unix file philosophy. Second, most of the cool things that BeFS enables are very end user desktop oriented, and Linux leaves that desktop environments, not the kernel. BeOS was designed as a fully integrated desktop os, not a multiuser server os. Finally, I expect that they are a security headache, as they present this whole other place that malware could be stored. Imagine an innocent looking plain text file that has an evil payload sitting in an attribute.

              • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
                6·
                16 days ago

                First, the Linux kernel doesn’t support resource forks at all. They aren’t part of POSIX nor do they really fit the unix file philosophy.

                The resource fork isn’t gonna be really meaningful to essentially all Linux software, but there have been ways to access filesystems that do have resource forks. IIRC, there was some client to mount some Apple file server protocol, exposed the resource forks as a file with a different name and the data fork as just a regular file.

                https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/hfsplus.html

                Linux does support HFS+, which has resource forks, as the hfsplus driver, so I imagine that it provides access one way or another.

                searches

                https://superuser.com/questions/363602/how-to-access-resource-fork-of-hfs-filesystem-on-linux

                Add /..namedfork/rsrc to the end of the file name to access the resource fork.

                Also, pretty esoteric, but NTFS, the current Windows file system, also has a resource fork, though it’s not typically used.

                searches

                Ah, the WP article that OP, @evol@lemmy.today linked to describes it.

                The Windows NT NTFS can support forks (and so can be a file server for Mac files), the native feature providing that support is called an alternate data stream. Windows operating system features (such as the standard Summary tab in the Properties page for non-Office files) and Windows applications use them and Microsoft was developing a next-generation file system that has this sort of feature as basis.

          • [object Object]@lemmy.world
            2·
            15 days ago

            Considering how the mainstream OSes dropped the ball on file metadata super hard without even approaching what you describe, exchanging files between Haiku and those OSes gotta be a pain.

            • BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org
              2·
              15 days ago

              Oh it absolutely is. Bringing files into Be is fine. The file type sniffer runs in the background and adds whatever metadata it can in a lightweight quick way. IIRC there are addons for specific file types like media files that add nice things like author, runtime, etc.

              Sending them out is a pain though. All the metadata is usually lost and from what I recall even emailing a file from one Be machine to another could be difficult. IIRC you could zip them and the metadata would make it, but raw files and tgz would lose it.

        • Limerance@piefed.socialEnglish
          2·
          16 days ago

          The excellent answer by @bartydecanter@lemmy.sdf.org already presented the cool features of the file system. There are a bunch of other interesting features found throughout the OS.

          Pervasive multithreading and multitasking makes Haiku very reactive and fast, even under load. Back when BeOS came out, the killer demo was playing several videos simultaneously without stutter. This is of course less impressive today, but you can fell this all over the OS when using it.

          Window management has two really cool features called Stack and Tile. Enabling you to stick windows together, so they move as one. On top of that you can put several windows from different applications together into one tabbed window bar . It’s super cool and unique.

          The biggest difference when using it compared to the big desktop operating systems today is that it gets out of your way and just lets you do things. Using it will make you realize how cumbersome the current desktop has become. Of course there are some security downsides, as there’s no pervasive sandboxing, rights management, and so on.

          Running on real hardware can be difficult because of a lack of drivers. I highly recommend trying it in a VM (VirtualBox, qemy, UTM) first. The increasing number of ports (mostly FOSS stuff you know from Linux) make this operating system actually practically usable. The ports don’t take advantage of the Haiku specific features, but are great overall. Especially the KDE apps are a good fit.

          Some people say it’s ready to be a daily driver even it’s still in beta, others say it’s what Linux used to be .

  • unmagical@lemmy.ml
    15·
    16 days ago

    There’s always LFS.

    But if you really wanna bail on tux, Haiku, Plan 9, or ReactOs

    • evol@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      1·
      16 days ago

      Hm im debating putting a laptop I mostly use for SSH on bsd. Might be fun

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      16 days ago

      That’s been automated by the sun-tracking solar power array managed by SolarAssistant running on Home Assistant on the Raspberry Pi. Valuable human time can be dedicated to more productive pursuits.

  • highball@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    16 days ago

    Open source Windows obviously. https://reactos.org/

    All these recent Windows to Linux converts, whining about how Linux should be more like Windows, should be going to ReactOS. They want open source Windows, not open source Unix.

  • AItoothbrush@lemmy.zipEnglish
    8·
    16 days ago

    Everyone saying nixos the next arch but we are all traumatized so we dont even recommend it /hj. But actually dont use it, youre gonna give up or spend hundreds of hours crafting the perfect deployable system which youre never gonna deploy on anything other than your single laptop that has nixos.

    • NannerBanner@literature.cafe
      11·
      16 days ago

      The first person in real life that I met who used nixos was so proud to show off his configs. I let him, and was suitably impressed. I then returned home and decided to play dark souls 2 on my lovely little manjaro.

    • Ghostie@lemmy.zip
      2·
      15 days ago

      Nix users will tell you how passionately they love nix and then give you the 1000 yard stare if you ask if they recommend it.

    • evol@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      2·
      16 days ago

      Imma be honest I never understood NixOS for laptop/workstations, these systems are highly volatile so setting up deployable builds sounds lke a nightmare. For Servers/Deployments it makes bunch more sense.

        • evol@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
          2·
          16 days ago

          yeah sure, I think like its not worth the hassle in that case. It’s probs still fun to work on lol

      • [object Object]@lemmy.world
        2·
        15 days ago

        Lots of devs use Ansible configs to have any new machine or reinstall ready in ten minutes. It’s mostly just ‘these apps need to be installed’ and ‘these config files need to be written’, which are a no-brainer to add. The most annoying part is figuring out how to do things with the desktop environment, like install widgets or remap the keyboard.

        One benefit of this approach is that I never forget what I fiddled somewhere: I can just look through my config for the particular setting. I have the config for the machine that I set up about ten years ago and which has been chugging along as a server since then — and I won’t need to poke around like an amnesiac should I decide to change something.

        Notably, this and dotfiles are popular among devs using Mac, since MacOS has nearly all settings available either via config files or the defaults system from the command line. In comparison, Windows is total ass about configuring via the command line, and even Cinnamon gives me some headache by either not reloading or straight up overwriting my settings.

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          1·
          15 days ago

          Notably, this and dotfiles are popular among devs using Mac, since MacOS has nearly all settings available either via config files or the defaults system from the command line. In comparison, Windows is total ass about configuring via the command line, and even Cinnamon gives me some headache by either not reloading or straight up overwriting my settings.

          The application-level format isn’t really designed for end user consumption, but WINE uses a text representation of the Windows registry. I imagine that one could probably put that in a git registry and that there’s some way to apply that to a Windows registry. Or maybe a collectiom of .reg files, which are also text.

    • juipeltje@lemmy.world
      1·
      16 days ago

      While i do kinda agree with you that it’s debatable on if it’s even worth it to invest the time in it, i do think it’s neat even for a home setup, but i’d say it depends on what your setup looks like. If you’re the type of user who just uses a stock DE with some apps on top of it there’s probably not much to be gained, but if you have a highly customized setup, like a minimal arch install for example with a bunch of window managers, custom services and configs and all that, then it’s pretty nice to have all that stuff declared, so you can easily replicate it when you reinstall.

    • GrapheneOSRuinedMyPixel@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      16 days ago

      But are you truly using nixos, if you don’t have a swarm of 10+ machines that do distributed builds?Can you really say that your system is deployable, if you never tested it on an obscure ARM board and a laptop from 2005?