You may already know this but you can run OPNsense on top of Proxmox. That may mitigate the driver issues you are having.

BSD is well designed and cohesive but has many more missing bits and contraints than Linux. So, if you are in its sweet spot, it is awesome and maybe better than Linux. However, outside that it can be totally unusable.

For me, the biggest issue is the lack of software. There is both a mountain of it as it is of course an POSIX compatible OS and at the same time it is trivial to need important software that is missing.

As a desktop, it therefore feels very nice and also very limiting.

I love that it is actually real UNIX with an unbroken history back to the beginning. I find that really compelling. At the same time, I always get “bored” using it because it inevitably does not support what I want to do.

I am still hoping Chimera Linux finds a sweet spot that melds the two worlds in a nice way.

First line of the the description of Zorin on zorin.com/os

“Zorin OS is the alternative to Windows”

https://zorin.com/os/

Totally agree.

I think they had or have commercial aspirations. That along with the strong desire to curate the experience are likely what lead to the walled garden effect.

The problem with walled gardens ( well, I hate them always ) is that they only work if you have the resources to pull off the full experience by yourself. Elementary really never had that and, before they could get there, they stumbled internally and killed their execution. It is going to be really hard to get it back.

Whatever their original aspirations, salvaging what they have into a distro agnostic DE is probably their best hope for relevance and survival. With a curated Flatpak store, they may even be able to someday pull off their walled garden in a cross-distro way. If it ever became big enough, they could take another run at being a full distro.

As it is, Elementary is on borrowed time. That would be the case even if the Wayland clock was not ticking but ticking it is.

If it runs under WINE, it will probably be higher performance and of course integrates better into the rest of your system ( eg. files ).

If it does not work under WINE, it will probably work in a VM. So, depending on the app, this may be the only choice.

Apps that depend on talking to specific hardware ( including the GPU ) do not always work in a VM.

So, it depends…

ARM is a recent development and frankly not that big a problem at the API level.

Absolutely.

A lot of it is just the organization and leadership within the projects themselves. The GNUstep guys struggled for a long time. Just agreeing to implement the Mac APIs instead of just the NeXTstep ones is a thing.

Regardless of how attractive projects are, they can be run well or badly. Without trying to disparage anybody, look at the progress of WINE vs ReactOS for example. And if you think it is just because kernels are hard, look at Linux or Haiku or SerenityOS vs ReactOS instead.

But the popularity of Windows made the Win32 APIs more commercially viable as well and so you get companies like CodeWeavers and Valve that really accelerate the WINE effort. That wind at your back really helps.

In what way?

The binary formats are not compatible, not even the format of the files themselves. Linux uses ELF. MacOS uses MachO.

True, macOS is more or less POSIX at the base but the API Mac applications are written to is not that at all ( Cocoa ). GNUstep exists for a reason. Sadly, it is not very mature. It is certainly not a trivial undertaking though as there have been a number of attempts over decades and nobody has really pulled it off.

The Win32 API on the other hand has largely been implanted on Linux. A few Win32 APIs are even being added to the kernel.

Going the other way is easier. You can port POSIX stuff to macOS fairly easily.

Ubuntu was the “original” easy-to-use Linux desktop. It expanded into that demand and still enjoys the market share it got when nobody else was really filling that niche.

Mint exists explicitly as a fork of Ubuntu and enjoys less success as a result. Many, including me, think Mint does a better job at being a solid desktop option than Ubuntu and is kind of the goto distro for that now ( not still not as popular as Ubuntu still is ).

Elementary is a curated desktop for people that really like coherence and design. That is, first of all, a more demanding target. It is perhaps too ambitious for their scale. And they have stumbled in execution. The task might be easier if they focussed on just being a DE ( desktop environment ) that other distros could use.

An “official” Ubuntu or Mint spin would have a real shot.

They are probably saying the shared POSIX underpinnings means greater commonality between macOS and Linux and therefore easier porting. That is likely true to some extent but real apps are written to Apple proprietary APIs and therefore that advantage is largely nullified.

In terms of effort to bring apps over, there has been far, far more effort put into porting Windows apps and so that task ( at this point ) is generally easier. It may have been less effort to port macOS at the start ( eg. GNUstep ) but that work has still largely never been done.

It is easy to move POSIX world apps to macOS. It is not as easy to go the other way.

I installed EndeavourOS on a 2013 MacBook Air a month ago for a backpack trip. It was light enough to carry around and it was cheap enough I did not worry about it being broken or stolen.

It works fantastically. LibreOffice, Outlook online, Teams, OBS Studio, Distrobox, Docker, IntellijIDEA. I have even played a little Steam on it. The only thing that was not out of the box was the iSight camera and even that was a one line command after install.

The only software that let me down was DaVinci Resolve. The integrated GPU is not supported.

All I did was hold down Option at boot so I could boot off the USB and then I let the installer do the work. Anybody could do it.

Did you install the facetimehd module?

When is this hardware from? 2010?

I have been using a 2013 MacBook Air recently that has Intel integrated graphics and have actually run a few Steam games in it. I also use a 2008 iMac but it actually has a dedicated GPU so that does not help with your hardware.

Even my old stuff has more than 4 MB of RAM though. That would be hassle these days.

I love running Linux on old kit. Way to go.

This thread is 3 MB

I assume it is because /var can be written to while the rest of the filesystem ( outside /home ) is expected to be read-only.

What is the name of the dinit system designed for containers?

As others have said, macOS does not “just work” anymore.

I am primary tech support for a few “normy” users including my mother and wife. My wife, the more technical and capable of the two, uses macOS. My mother uses Windows. My wife requires substantially more tech support. Worse, the issues are often complete mysteries to me like “why is everything so slow” and it turning out that some OS level process is consuming huge amounts of memory and / or CPU. Web searches reveal lots of people with similar issues but no real insight into what to do about it or why it is happening. I have moved OS versions just to solve this kind of crap on Mac. Another problem is software not working on older versions of the OS.

I am no Windows lover but, once I show my mother how to do something, I never hear from her. Every once in a while I stop by to marvel at how many updates need to be applied but that is about it. She is in the Windows 10 that I installed for her many years ago now. It just works.

While I understand the sentiment, we have to understand that Open Source developers work on projects that motivate them.

So, we can have a single example of each of these but they do necessarily get any more devs. In fact, if you take economic theory ( competition for example ), it is likely they attract less attention individually than they do competing as part of an ecosystem.

It would certainly help on the user acceptance and commercial software side where choice is an impediment. But, if we are just talking resources, limiting the number of projects only works if you pay people to work on them.

Why was each of these projects started ( eg. window managers )? The answer is simple. It is because the founding developer did not like any of the existing options.

That is honestly a decent analogy. So, on what rides is it ok if something goes wrong and a young family member is killed? Rust says, it is never ok so we won’t let you do it.

To use your analogy though, the issue is the driver feeling quite confident in their skills and rating the risk as low. Then a tire blows on a corner. Or somebody else runs a red light. Or, there is just that one day when an otherwise good driver makes a mistake. History tells us, the risk is higher than the overconfident “good” drivers think it is.

In particular, history shows that 70% of the real world injuries and fatalities come from passengers without seat belts. So, instead of each driver deciding if it is safe, we as a society decide that seat belt use is mandatory because it will prevent those 70% of injuries and fatalities ( without worrying about which individual drivers are responsible )

Rust is the seat belt law that demonstrably saves lives regardless of how safe each individual driver thinks they are. It is a hard transition with many critics but the generation that grows up with seat belts will never go back. Eventually, we will all realize just how crazy it was that they were not always used.

Mint would be a perfect distro to start with. Don’t listen to them—just download Mint. I don’t like Ubuntu but honestly it would be fine too. In other words, although it does matter, it does not matter as much as people say as long as you do not start with something to too hard to install.