Re: NetBSD for the dekstop

[Stephan <stephanwib%googlemail.com@localhost>]

I think there are basically 2 types of open source OSses, those that
are designed for the desktop and those that are not.

The first case is for example Syllable and Haiku OS. Syllable is not
actively maintained anymore and it is far from stable. Haiku is in a
pretty good shape but but it is not yet completely stable and lacks
support for ARM for example, which we have.

The second case is Linux and the BSDs. NetBSD, among others, is very
mature, fast and supports a lot of hardware. There is however no GUI
stack, but you have the choise between 1000 of different crazy
"desktop environments", which themselves rely on many different
toolkits and environmental services. You can´t speak of a desktop OS
because everything looks and behaves completely different. There is
also often no good vertical integration with the OS underneath. That
is exactly why "Linux on the desktop" never got any relevance, because
neither administrators nor users can handle it if no Linux
installation is equal to another.

What I´m thinking about is to "steal" the UI layer (appserver,
toolkit, basic apps) from Syllable or Haiku and make it work on top of
NetBSD. I grabbed Syllable´s source and applied many C++ fixes to
libsyllable, registrar and the appserver in order to make these
compile. That´s already working. I can´t link anything though because
some interfaces differ (threding, semaphores) and some stuff that we
don´t have (message passing, among others). Haiku is probably better,
because of its license (MIT vs. GPL) and it is actively maintained -
but I just wanted to see how far I could get investing a few hours.

2015-02-17 14:24 GMT+01:00 Mayuresh <mayuresh%acm.org@localhost>:
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 01:29:11PM +0100, Stephan wrote:
>> Is there anyone still interested in bringing NetBSD to the desktop?
>
> I use NetBSD on desktops and laptops.
>
> What specific characteristics do you think NetBSD needs to "bring" it to
> desktop? (Also, I didn't get "still" part of it.)
>
> Mayuresh