[gallerytungsten]

re: FreeBSD is Just OS X Without the Good Bits

The "good bits" are things like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark.

Sure, I'm aware there are alternatives like Gimp and [whatever]. But the alternatives are kludges for edge case experts; and not for people who need to Get Stuff Done.

PS. I operate a FreeBSD server. It's great for that.

[jomamaxx]

The 'good bits' of OSX is that there is no such a thing as 'drivers' from the users perspective.

If you have to use the word 'driver' - it's not user friendly.

If you have to 'build' anything - it's not user friendly.

99% of people want to use their apps - even most devs just want a clean, stable, bug-free, well documented and consistent platform to develop on.

I have nothing against any of the unix flavours - all the power to them, but I'm not sure that these kinds of articles are hitting the mark when it comes to anything remotely resembling mass adoption.

Free BSD is not a 'product' really, I would argue that it's 'technology'.

[microtonal]

The 'good bits' of OSX is that there is no such a thing as 'drivers' from the users perspective.

Well, unless you buy some hardware that is not from Apple. Buy a 802.11ac USB stick (because your Mac has 802.11n and you cannot upgrade the hardware) with Mac drivers. The vendor decides to release a (buggy) driver update for El Capitan half a year after it's released.

Pretending that the driver problem does not exist on macOS does not make it go away.

(Mac user since 2007.)

[jomamaxx]

"Pretending that the driver problem does not exist on macOS does not make it go away."

I never said there was not a driver problem.

I alluded to the user perception of drivers.

Users in this day and age should have absolutely no need to be aware of the concept of 'drivers'.

Do you have any drivers for your Android? iPhone?

The very concept may very well be dated and perhaps there is a a better solution in 2016.

[open-source-ux]

You make a good point and don't deserve the downvotes. Some OS projects don't aim for mass desktop adoption, although I'm sure all would like more visibility and users.

The barrier to entry for most UNIX-related tools is quite high for "non technical" users. I don't think that's a controversial thought. And one can hardly deny that some UNIX users like that i.e. if you can't read the MAN pages and figure it out, then perhaps UNIX isn't for you.

[astrange]

Some other good bits: development tools (malloc_history, spindump, leaks, crash logs, panic logs, dSYMs, powermetrics), security (code signing, ASLR, Time Machine), system APIs (Mach ports, XPC, launchd).

[2bitencryption]

does FreeBSD not have ASLR? I thought that was, like, standard among all modern popular OS's: Windows, OS X, Linux... right?

[astrange]

Nope. There were some patches but it never made it in somehow.

I think it's worse there's no sandboxing. Ports just runs all kinds of code downloaded off the internet as root. Latest version does have the very beginnings of some in Capsicum but it's not like OS X where every daemon is syscall and FS sandboxed.

[eeZi]

Nope no ASLR. They're working on it but not yet.