Re: Please forgive a blatant plug: I reviewed v10 for the Reg

[Liam Proven <lproven%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Fri, 19 Apr 2024 at 10:01, Riccardo Mottola
<riccardo.mottola%libero.it@localhost> wrote:
>
> Hi Liam.

Ciao!

> Nice share and thanks for taking the time to write it.

Oh, thank you!

I really wish there were more technology sharing between the BSDs.

In the last ~2 years, I have tried Net, Open, Free, Dragonfly, Ghost,
Midnight, Nomad, the Hello System, plus XigmaNAS and TrueNAS Core.

(I have also installed and written about 9Front, Redox OS, Serenity
OS, Genode, Arca OS, FreeDOS, RISC OS Open, RISC OS Direct, and
others.)

I really am trying to cover as many bases as I can here.

Dragonfly has the best installer, IMHO, but of course it has many
fewer options to cover.

FreeBSD is the worst inasmuch as it does the least complete job.

Some OpenBSD folks are angry with me because I criticise its disk
partitioner. When I tell them the config I work with and they recoil
and go "OMG that is _impossible!_"

One of the better Linux installers is Calamares, which does not depend
upon any distribution: it's an independent project. Pop OS and
Elementary OS share an installer. Multiple Ubuntu remixes share
variants of Ubiquity and Subiquity. Some variants of this can run in
both GUI and text-driven modes.

The point being: cross-platform installers that work on multiple very
different distros with different packaging tools are 100% a thing.

I am sure it would be possible to write a program which, when run,
tests the console or terminal to determine if it can use colour and
cursor controls, and if it can, which presents a
cursor-key-driven-menu based UI with CUA-style controls -- but  if the
terminal does not, then falls back gracefully to simple numeric or
letter-choice menus.

Binary compatibility is not really an issue because this is an ideal
kind of application of a scripting language.

It would be to the advantage of all the BSDs if they worked together
on this, pick the best of each OS's installer, and combined them into
one.

Long-term users often tell me that they do not notice the issues
because they simply upgrade from one version to the next and never see
the installer. Well, in that case, offer that opportunity to visitors
as well: it would be to the benefit of all of the BSD family if the
projects supplied pre-installed and pre-configured VM images for
direct download, so that the curious could simply download an OVA
file, import it into the hypervisor of their choice, and try the OS
out without installing it at all.

Several Linux distros do this, especially the enterprise ones which do
not expect to run on bare metal.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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