Leaving Apple for FreeBSD

H

hoobastank

I have used Apple since my first computer, an iMac I got as a boy in 2001. Right up until Jobs died I was the perfect Mac devotee. I use an iPhone, a MacBook air, and a Mac Pro.
But after Apple's latest fuckery I am finally done. This company could not be further away from the "Think Different" philosophy of freedom, power, and simplicity of old.
I am going to switch to FreeBSD. When I switch, I want to take as much of the power of macOS with me as possible. Therefore I will be using a software stack built like Cocoa. This brings me to my questions: is GCC or Clang the better Objective-C compiler on FreeBSD? Is Etoile dead or useable? If dead, I will have to use NeXTSpace with the Etoile GNUstep theme - I would help the author of NeXTSpace to port over Etoile technologies, of course. Is Grand Central generally available on FreeBSD?
 
hoobastank said:
Is Etoile dead or useable?
Click to expand...
Last news is from 2014, I suspect it's dead. As a dodo.

Étoilé

Étoilé is an innovative GNUstep based user environment built from the ground up on highly modular and light components with project and document orientation in mind.
etoileos.com etoileos.com

Étoilé

Étoilé is an innovative GNUstep based user environment built from the ground up on highly modular and light components with project and document orientation in mind.
etoileos.com etoileos.com
 
If you want to use older Apple technology, then perhaps a virtual machine?
It might not be a good use of your time trying to convert FreeBSD into Mac OS X any more than it would Linux or Windows (don't let Apple's "BSD Subsystem" fool you. macOS is not based on BSD).

My suggestion is move on from the platform you know and love (and that Apple has taken away from you and killed) and in future only tie yourself down to a platform that is completely vendor agnostic and impossible to kill. C, C++ and an open-source vendor-free GUI toolkit like wxWidgets is a good start.
 
Ahoy from the fellow Mac user!

Check out my experience here:
http://trafyx.com/?p=2551

Xfce, Plank and MacOS icon theme can get you pretty close to MacOS workflow. All the stuff definitely needs some tweaking, and it still won't be exactly like it, but I am almost two years on FreeBSD as my main driver and feel pretty good. But, be aware there are occasional moments of despair as well, like the recent drm-kmod breakage in 12.1, so not everything is perfect on this side as well.
 
I love the sentiment here, but the GNUStep kickstarter failed twice (I know this off the top of my head because I backed it twice). You're going to have to make a clean break if you want "the power."
 
hoobastank said:
I have used Apple since my first computer ... I want to take as much of the power of macOS with me as possible ... Cocoa ... Objective-C ... Etoile ... GNUstep theme
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As a Mac developer 1985-90 I wrote a multi-tasking security system for Mac -- we ordered Macs in lots of 100 for our product -- and of course used Macs up till 200? For a couple of years I was an Apple salesman ("Apple Solutions Consultant"). Over time I've seen them hurt many developers, abandon and kill good projects (stranding developers who had invested deeply in time and money). I've convinced many a naive user to switch to Macintosh and sold a million dollars of Macs.

Sigh.

FreeBSD is not a poor man's Macintosh nor is it the basis of MacOS / iOS. Darwin (the free part of MacOS) is not even used by anyone that I know of to run their workstation. GNUstep is probably not as good an interface or platform as more modern Desktop Environments on FreeBSD and has little to recommend it for getting work done. It's a great way to enjoy Objective-C programming.

I'll have to join others in suggesting that you do start over with a fresh new Think Different with FreeBSD. KDE Plasma may be close. Give it a try. I like to have a file manager with some of the characteristics of the old Finder and I like to have a shelf (a panel onto which I can drag ANY object including mount points and documents) so I use ROX-Filer, fluxbox and dmenu as the basis of my highly customized working environment.. To get what I want I build rox filer from source and the panel applets like the pager from source.

FreeBSD has proven to be rock solid and easy to maintain. Good sound. Great selection of packages. Reliable developers. Welcome to a real Unix.
 
macOS (formerly marketed as Mac OS X and OS X) is not FreeBSD. There are many similarities, but few equivalences.

I use and program both operating systems with Free Pascal/Lazarus (in the FreeBSD ports) as well as C -- for more details see https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Portal:Mac and https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Portal:FreeBSD. I use both operating systems on Mac minis from 2009 to 2018 (FreeBSD is a VM on 2018 due to the T2 chip/SSD controller).

I find that the two operating systems complement each other, rather than one being a replacement for the other. FreeBSD is better for server tasks (mailserver, web server etc), although I use it as a Desktop and as my main machine. macOS is better for Desktop tasks. I did try to use macOS for my mail etc servers but it didn't pan out like I'd hoped which is why I'm still with FreeBSD today, having started with FreeBSD 2.1 after Mark Williams COHERENT Unix died a death.
 
hoobastank said:
I have used Apple since my first computer, an iMac I got as a boy in 2001. Right up until Jobs died I was the perfect Mac devotee. I use an iPhone, a MacBook air, and a Mac Pro.
But after Apple's latest fuckery I am finally done. This company could not be further away from the "Think Different" philosophy of freedom, power, and simplicity of old.
I am going to switch to FreeBSD. When I switch, I want to take as much of the power of macOS with me as possible. Therefore I will be using a software stack built like Cocoa. This brings me to my questions: is GCC or Clang the better Objective-C compiler on FreeBSD? Is Etoile dead or useable? If dead, I will have to use NeXTSpace with the Etoile GNUstep theme - I would help the author of NeXTSpace to port over Etoile technologies, of course. Is Grand Central generally available on FreeBSD?
Click to expand...
Clang/llvm is obviously better than gcc for objective c - it's Apple's pet project after all. Clang is default on freebsd anyway so if you want gcc you'd have to look to the ports/packages collection.
 
Other than the environment, I would agree with keeping current with Objective-C. Once Swift has run its course I predict a real resurgence and need for Objective-C developers to re-implement any legacy Swift code back into homogeneous Objective-C going forwards.

I think it is possible to carve out a really good niche there. Or at least be an early (re)adopter.
 
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hoobastank said:
I am going to switch to FreeBSD. When I switch, I want to take as much of the power of macOS with me as possible. Therefore I will be using a software stack built like Cocoa. This brings me to my
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You want to change change "something", but without changing enough that you experience the change at all?
It doesn't compute...

Advice: if you want to change, try out FreeBSD (or whatever else you want to change to) - and be open to the experience (things will be different), keep with it until you have made your mind up.
If this change isn't for you, go back to the thing you used before (or try a different change).
 
hoobastank said:
... I will have to use NeXTSpace with the Etoile GNUstep theme - I would help the author of NeXTSpace to port over Etoile technologies, of course. Is Grand Central generally available on FreeBSD?
Click to expand...

The reason I suggested that this was the wrong approach to building a FreeBSD application environment is not that it is a bad idea but that we should have built such a consistent framework but have failed to garner enough interest -- the application-level work that gets most interest in our communities (Linux and BSD) is mere bling, so people like me trying to get simple work done use "window managers" and shell scripts for the flexibility. People will suggest ways to make your interface look like MacOS but without any idea of the depth of support underneath that is provided by MacOS. In our desktop environments we don't even have good, consistent drag-and-drop support that would allow one to drag any object (fragment of plain text, formatted text, an image, a sound sample) from anywhere to anywhere. If you have the inclination to work on nextspace in FreeBSD you could find a lot of satisfaction in the work. GNUstep + gWorkspace + WindowMaker + llvm/objc/GCD is a fair beginning that is available on FreeBSD now -- I would love :) to see progress on nextspace and etoile.
 
garry said:
People will suggest ways to make your interface look like MacOS but without any idea of the depth of support underneath that is provided by MacOS.
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The underlying seemingly cohesive experience between applications is what OS X/macOS has that most environments just don't offer. What's even more amazing is the fact that it offered that experience pretty much since the first Macintosh computer was released. NEXTSPACE seemingly seeks to be useful as a reference implementation for a GNUstep desktop environment the way GNOME and KDE are for GTK+ and Qt, and I sincerely hope it achieves its goal since Étoilé never quite made it out of its "development environment" status; the last commit to Étoilé's Github repo was something like 5 or 6 years ago!

I remember first discovering Objective-C and GNUstep years ago, and if I had to choose a stacking window manager instead of a tiling one (e.g. maybe my fingers don't work so well anymore, so keyboard shortcuts are difficult), it would certainly be WindowMaker again, or something like it. NEXTSPACE does sound quite attractive from what I've been reading, so I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it. The Plan9 design choices also interest me as well, and maybe one day someone will find the SECONDARY selection useful again, though probably not in NEXTSPACE. :p
 
Here it is 2024 and FreeBSD 14 is working great.

My old MacbookPro 8, 1 (early 2011) met it's date with macos 10.13.6 and was running great until around 2022 and I noticed a serious slow down. My SSD installed in 2013-14 ish was still good. I did nothing differently in macos than normal, web browsing, email, youtube, MacTex (which I loved) but I noticed too much slowdown in the UI. I think this is Apple's way of saying "hey stupid, time to pay us some more money for a new computer and a better experience." . I said to them, go suck money from another sucker. I know hardware, except for spinning disks, don't wear out like that with time.

So I ditched macos 10.13.6 after backing up all my music and photos and documents. I put OpenBSD 7.5 on it but I can't get the resolution good on any desktop like XFCE. That 1280x800 monitor kinda sucks now compared to my new Mouse Computer (bought in Japan in 2023 and dumped the Windows 11 to put Debian 12.5 on it now) which has a great monitor. So finally I left the computer for some time and finally tried various things like LinuxMint which I'm not really a fan of. Widgets took up too much screen real estate for one.
This brings us to May-June 2024 and I finally broke down and put FreeBSD 14-REL on it. I love it. Back in the FreeBSD 13.x days I had many problems getting it to work well. But 14 is good. After I got Wayfair working on Wayland I just had to find out how to get my dvorak keyboard back, same with XFCE. I got those sorted out and that makes more configuring much more comfortable. But the sound was defaulting to a very low level. That took some time to figure out and I finally posted on these forums to update previous people's problems with it. Now Audacious works well and Bob Seger and Dire Straits are sounding good on the old MacbookPro. XFCE works well. Stable, good resolution at 1280x800 scaled at it's 1x. Wayfair on Wayland also works well. I have to learn more of its configuration though. The cube thing works great and audacious, VLC work well too. TexWorks and Texmaker open promptly and work great.

So in conclusion, please consider the move to FreeBSD on the desktop if your old Apple product is suffering from "Apple gimme money" problems. It's ready and stable.
 
MacOS is unacceptable from the closed source code point of view. You cannot rely on something you cannot audit for basic security. Period. It's UNSAFE for any end-user, to put it mildly, in pretty real terms. I love their design - as many people seem to as well - but none of that can ever excuse their choice to be proprietary source code. Operate on pure trust when it comes to your safety? Please.
 
canihazsekooriti said:
MacOS is unacceptable from the closed source code point of view. You cannot rely on something you cannot audit for basic security. Period. It's UNSAFE for any end-user, to put it mildly, in pretty real terms. I love their design - as many people seem to as well - but none of that can ever excuse their choice to be proprietary source code. Operate on pure trust when it comes to your safety? Please.
Click to expand...
Could you please share the report and analysis of your full audit of FreeBSD?
 
ralphbsz said:
Could you please share the report and analysis of your full audit of FreeBSD?
Click to expand...
Working on it!

Ok, maybe not full but examine network-related things. I'm just starting with FreeBSD (this is not a threat). I have looked at Linux code (Linux user), changed Linux kernel, and importantly I can modify it if needed. I have modified Android OS code much (whatever is open-source at least), some serious security issues...but I can't do that on iPhones. Sorry, I can't do *anything* on iPhones. Ok, sorry, I jailbrokened some iPhones, and I was already seeing foul smelling behaviors when I tried to tweak the code in whatever limited mode I was allowed to operate in.

You know, even the fact that your source code is open to scrutiny is important enough to change behavior of corporations (and foster all kinds of good things), EVEN if all the devs in the world conspired to keep their mouths shut about backdoors in code.
 
In
kpedersen said:
Other than the environment, I would agree with keeping current with Objective-C. Once Swift has run its course I predict a real resurgence and need for Objective-C developers to re-implement any legacy Swift code back into homogeneous Objective-C going forwards.

I think it is possible to carve out a really good niche there. Or at least be an early (re)adopter.
Click to expand...
Interesting... I've got a couple of friends writing swift for apple. They seem to think obj-c is history. Time will tell I guess. Java didn't knock out C either.
 
blackbird9 said:
Interesting... I've got a couple of friends writing swift for apple. They seem to think obj-c is history. Time will tell I guess. Java didn't knock out C either.
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It is a hunch but similarly with Microsoft and C#, you have to ignore their "evangelism" campaigns and instead look at what the internal developers use to predict their long term directions. For them it is pretty much exclusively C++ and a decade later we are seeing a big push back to C++ with "go native" once they realized that maintaining the .NET VM is complex.

With Apple's macOS, many of the frameworks are being written and extended with Objective-C (and interestingly, still a lot of C++ for their deeper layers and kexts), they aren't making any attempts to migrate to Swift.

Metal is an interesting one. A relatively new API but Objective-C (and C++) tend to be the first class citizen, not Swift. Naturally this could be due to the popularity of those languages in the media industry but that doesn't really change things. The media industry is one of Apple's biggest markets.
 
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