# Leaving Apple for FreeBSD



## hoobastank (Jan 27, 2020)

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?


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## SirDice (Jan 27, 2020)

hoobastank said:


> Is Etoile dead or useable?


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
				








						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


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## kpedersen (Jan 27, 2020)

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.


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## forgiven_noob (Jan 27, 2020)

Etoile is definitely dead


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## blackhaz (Jan 27, 2020)

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.


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## msplsh (Jan 27, 2020)

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."


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## Alain De Vos (Jan 27, 2020)

PS : To macify freebsd, I just copied the icons,








						macbuntu/.icons at master · rizwansoaib/macbuntu
					

Turn your Ubuntu looks like MAC OS X. Contribute to rizwansoaib/macbuntu development by creating an account on GitHub.




					github.com
				



to /usr/local/share/icons ...


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## garry (Jan 28, 2020)

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


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.


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## trev (Jan 28, 2020)

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.


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## mark_j (Jan 28, 2020)

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?


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.


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## kpedersen (Jan 28, 2020)

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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## tingo (Jan 28, 2020)

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


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).


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## garry (Jan 29, 2020)

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?



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.


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## msplsh (Jan 29, 2020)

Can't even standardize on D-Bus, so, not surprising


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## memreflect (Jan 29, 2020)

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.


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.


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