Here’s something that’s both surprising and, in a way, not surprising at all, especially after yesterday’s announcement from KaOS, a distribution long known for its deep commitment to the KDE Plasma desktop, that it plans to move away from it. The main reason cited was KDE’s reliance on systemd in a specific component.
As expected, the news quickly gained traction, prompting KDE to clarify its dependence on systemd and which parts of the desktop environment rely on it. In a post on KDE’s Reddit community titled “A quick anti-FUD FAQ to debunk ‘the KDE is forcing systemd!’ hoax“, the contributor described the claims as misinformation and provided a short FAQ clarifying the project’s position.
Like many, back when it was fashionable I was open to the possibility of that idea being correct and I guess it’s still best to keep an open mind, but the results thus far suggest otherwise. Using Hurd is somewhat difficult for most purposes. Using cron rather than systemd timers on the other hand is much more pleasant and easy.
macOS runs on the Mach/xnu micro kernel and is pretty successful with it.
Apparently there have been attempts to make a free OS based on Apple’s kernel, but wikipedia mostly talks about them in the past tense. Too bad, it would’ve been good to have such an option.
Pure Darwin ist still around.
I tried out a Darwin distribution a few years ago. It was a BSD with some apple flavor. None of the GUI was included, not all drivers, firmware, etc.
The community is tiny. There was also little incentive to try and fix things or add features, because upstream Apple ignored it pretty much. Grabbing the sources and compiling them into an operating system has little documentation from Apple.
Mac OS X used to install XQuartz, a hardware accelerated Xorg/X11 server by default in the 2000s, but dropped it at some point.
Even back when OpenDarwin and such were around, people would rather install YellowDog Linux that supported PowerPC Macs.
I think at some point the old NeXtStep/OpenStep folks left Apple and the new engineers didn’t understand Unix or think it’s important.