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2·6 hours agoThe difference is that Haiku is actually capable of being a daily driver OS at this point (for some people). It also installs on a fair bit of real hardware.
ReactOS is still a technology preview. It can host old software in a VM. Hardware support remains very limited.
That said, ReactOS has made a lot of interesting progress recently and getting their 0.4.15 release out after literally years of being stuck in limbo was a big step forward. They have started to talk about new APIs, new hardware support, and 64 bit. I think they got some new blood. Fingers crossed.
What?
First one is optimized obvious.
Second one optimizes to x = 10 via constant propagation.
Third one first unrolls the loop, propagates constants including booleans, and then eliminates dead code to arrive at x = 10.
The last one cannot be optimized as “new” created objects that get used, nextInt() changes the state of those objects, and the global state of the random number system is impacted.
3·9 hours agoUNIX was a proprietary operating system developed by AT&T that was originally shipped with source code.
BSD started as a set of enhancements to UNIX at Berkely University.
BSD developed into a fully independent UNIX distribution. BSD code was available for free and always non-proprietary.
In the early 90’s, AT&T launched a lawsuit to stop BSD from being distributed.
During that lawsuit, in 1991, Linus Torvalds created Linux. It was written from scratch to be like UNIX as Linus liked UNIX but could not afford it.
In 1993, BSD won its lawsuit and FreeBSD was born. But by then, Linux was already getting lots of attention. FreeBSD, while technically superior at the time, has never caught up in terms of popularity.
Linux uses the “design” of UNIX but is not UNIX. FreeBSD is considered “real” UNIX. Both implement the POSIX standard.
FreeBSD has always been focussed on servers. There are other BSD “distributions” that focus on different things: OpenBSD (security), NetBSD (portability), DragonFly BSD (innovation/performance). Some people consider macOS to be a BSD.
There are also “desktop” spins of FreeBSD like GhostBSD or MidnightBSD. FreeBSD recently has had more of a desktop push focussing on things like WiFi and power management. But it has nowhere near the hardware support that Linux has.
Linux, technically, is not a full operating system. It is just a kernel (the bit that talks to the hardware). The Linux kernel is released at kernel.org.
Linux “distros” collect a bunch of software to run on the Linux kernel to create a Linux distribution (full operating system). This includes key components like C library, core utilities, compilers, and init systems. Many Linux distros use software from the GNU Project for these components. But other Linux distros use non-GNU software for this, sometimes even software created by BSD.
As others have said, the BSD systems are built as an entire OS by a single team. FreeBSD 15 was just released. The entire software stack was created as a unit, including C library, utilities, compiler, and init system.
IRed Hat Linux is kind of developed as a full operating system as well as they are heavily involved in the kernel, are the primary contributors to the GNU tools, sheppard GNOME, and created Systemd. You could argue that Red Hat is the de facto Linux platform and that others distos build off that. But not everybody would agree.
So, Linux is more like UNIX but not UNIX (created in 1991) while BSD is UNIX (in continuous dev since the 70’s).
As a desktop OS though, Linux is substantially more popular than any BSD and so, these days, the tables have turned and the BSD variants often have to work to stay compatible with things that appear first on Linux.
I have quite a collection of ISOs.
One reason is that I have hardware that requires specific versions to boot (newer ones have removed support). Sometimes the distro still works just fine in that hardware but the live iso does not. So I can install with an older ISO and update.
Another is that use virtual machines regularly. I do not want to have to wait for the ISO to download every time.
There is always more.
Have you tried Chimera Linux?
I do not think it impacts that. Have you used GIMP3? Way better text handling.
Fair comment.
That said, it just installs in vanilla Arch at this point, which means it would work on EndeavourOS and probably CachyOS as well.
You can of course switch to another DE at any time.
So, you are really not exposing yourself to any risk. If it gets broken or abandoned, just stop using it.
Not that this means you should bother with it. But it is clearly a low risk option to try.
Mint is very boring and middle of the road, exactly as a default recommendation should be. They are also very protective of the user experience. They are unlikely to embarrass me.
Mint has a familiar UX if you are new to Linux. It is not nearly as foreign or locked down as GNOME. It is not as configurable and complex as KDE. There are good GUI tools for most common tasks.
Mint does not change too rapidly or have too many updates but the desktop and tools are kept up-to-date.
They are being very conservative with the Wayland transition. But nobody on Mint is moaning that Wayland is not ready. They are very protective about the user experience.
And there is really no desktop use case that Mint is not suitable for.
I do not use Mint but it is a very solid recommendation for “normal” users.
I think Pop!OS is back to being that too and COSMIC is Wayland only (so no future transition to manage).
It depends on the distro but generally yes. If you want to do this, choose a distro with up-to-date packages. I would recommend either EndeavourOS or CachyOS.
Why doesn’t anybody ever recommend Debian testing? It has stricter quality criteria than unstable while being almost as up-to-date.
I agree that Debian Stable is not a great fit for desktop as the packages get very old between releases.
2·2 days agoWhat happens when you say that you do not use social media?
When anybody, anywhere in the world visits the US, the IQ goes up in both countries.
I think it is a smart play.
They are getting lots of press in the places where the people that care go.
On their website, they focus on the benefits of their platform for customers. From that perspective, the new COSMIC is just a refinement on what they were shipping before.
And this is just the beginning. COSMIC itself is still fairly basic. And the “new” Pop!OS is based on an LTS base that is already 2 years old. None of that is a problem but it is not a hand they want to overplay.
They may actually make a bigger deal about the benefits when 26.04 ships. Things will be a bit more “industry leading” by then.
Ya, it seems odd to be releasing a 24.04 in 25.12 for sure. That said, 24.04 is still the current LTS and so it is the version we would be on now if they had released earlier (even a year ago).
They plan on releasing a 26.04 LTS as well. So, Pop!OS is not lagging. It just feels strange now.
As I said in another comment, critical parts of Pop!OS 24.04 are also quite up to date including the kernel, Mesa, NVIDIA drivers, and of course COSMIC itself.
Moving forward, I expect the versions of COSMIC in 24.04 and 26.04 to be the same. If I was them, I would even consider syncing Mesa between the two. It will make support and testing so much easier and they are already shipping a newer Mesa in 24.04 anyway.
Fair enough.
But before you scare anybody off, it is worth pointing out that Pop!OS 24.04 is quite up-to-date in those areas.
- kernel 6.17
- Mesa 25.1
- NVIDIA 580 drivers
- current Wayland (COSMIC)
Those are what is going to drive your GPU and Wayland experience and they are about the same as you get in Kubuntu 25.10
A lot of the 24.04 packages will be older for sure but it is not fair to compare COSMIC in Pop!OS to the old KDE version you would have been using on Ubuntu 24.04 (Kubuntu).
And I expect Pop!OS 24.04 LTS to see steady COSMIC updates on the road to 26.04. It would kind of shock me if they do not harmonize the desktops between those two releases.
I find it pretty solid if a bit bare bones. With the basics in place, it should improve fairly quickly.
They are planning a 26.04 LTS release. We will see what it looks like by then.
CachyOS will work on older hardware as well. There are four repositories for x86-64 v1, v2, v3, and v4. If you have newer hardware, the v3 or v4 packages will theoretically give you better performance. That is probably what you are talking about.
That said, the v1 repos will work on x86-64 machines going back to 2003. Not exactly bleeding edge.
The only thing that I have noticed is that packages are not all in sync between repos with v1 lagging behind v3. For example, I think Cachy is already on the 6.18 kernel but the v1 repos still only have 6.17. I have seen svt-av1 lag as well.
I am not a CachyOS user so apologies if any of my info is dated.
I will never say anything bad about EndeavourOS.
I am one of those waiting for RVA23. SpaceMIT claimed they would ship by the end of 2025 but that is seeming very unlikely.
To be honest, I am really waiting for Ascalon now (itself RVA23). Tenstorrent says they will ship a version of their own silicon mid-2026. And the guy that created AMD Ryzen says it will be about as fast as Ryzen 5. We will see what it costs though. This chip “exists” but nobody is manufacturing the silicon yet.
If you don’t care about the vector instructions, this is pretty tempting though: https://milkv.io/titan
But RVA23 will be so much more compatible going forward. I would expect all RISC-V software to work with RVA23 for a long time and for most RISC-V software to require RVA23 in 2026 and beyond. It is like when the Intel ecosystem went 32 bit. “386 compatible” was the standard for well over a decade acting as the minimum but also remaining sufficient.
I know RVA23 maps to x86-64v4 and you can still run plain old RV64I or RV64GC on RVA23 but you cannot run 32 bit code on it. So the x86 to x86-64 transition is not a perfect analogy. But you can run a standard Linux distro released in 2025 on Intel hardware released in 2005. RVA23 may be like that.