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Comment by sneak

4 years ago

This is a great idea, but I think they'd be better off aiming for Linux.

One of the main benefits of macOS is perfect hardware support. Linux has a definite edge on all other free software kernels here.

I hope they succeed, regardless of technical decisions.

9 comments

sneak

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p1necone  4 years ago

> One of the main benefits of macOS is perfect hardware support.

Insofar as you have perfect support for the very small subset of hardware that computers running macOS can have. I'm sure you could get similarly perfect hardware support on Linux by being careful about which hardware you run it on.

  • sneak  4 years ago

    Nobody did this for Linux on the small subset of Apple-branded macOS-capable x64 machines before, much to my chagrin.

    I donated to marcan in the hopes that someone now will.

    There should be a free software OS installer that is as easy to use and supports as much hardware with full functionality as the Apple OS installer. Apple has already done the heavy lifting of a well defined hardware target.

ggm  4 years ago

Their target is existing MacOS users. Thats a BSD derived kernel and OS API and the model is quite different. Making a Linux kernel look right, is a path ?Gentoo? took some time ago, and I am unsure you can call it an unqualified success.

"does it run homebrew" is my lead question

  • sofixa  4 years ago

    > "does it run homebrew" is my lead question

    Or even better, a better package manager that isn't slow as hell and understands semver.

    • eyelidlessness  4 years ago

      Heh. Or even “Xpm install ___” doesn’t mean I want to update thousands of unrelated packages I’ve installed directly or transitively. Regardless of their semver compatibilities.

      Edit for people using macOS: if you want to install one thing without waiting to update unfold numbers of other things, hilariously Cakebrew (a GUI frontend for homebrew) will let you do that with homebrew as the package manager.

      2 replies →

  • sneak  4 years ago

    Existing macOS users have Apple hardware. Does FreeBSD support recent x64 Apple gear well? Last I looked even Linux had less than perfect support.

    The situation is even more Linux-centric on Mx.

    • ggm  4 years ago

      There is a huge community who port MacOS onto Intel architecture laptops with special set-aside hacks on the Apple .ISO files.

      I think, thats the target. not 'run it on my mac' but 'be like a mac, running on my Lenovo PC, which already supports FreeBSD well[*]'

      [*] does not always work well with blob demanding devices == 802.11/GPU