Link: https://itsfoss.com/news/ghostbsd-new-desktop/

Nice timing for a project named after Mocha. ✊

BSD licensed 🙄

The man leading GhostBSD, Eric Turgeon, has come up with Mocka, a new desktop for this BSD distribution that would eventually replace MATE. So far, he has unveiled the dock that will go into it, as well as some preliminary concepts and specifications that show us where Mocka will head next.

Existing users of GhostBSD don't need to do anything now since nothing has changed on their machines. All of this is still under heavy development after all. 🤷

Grammar nazis won't like this

In his search for projects named "Mocha," the caffeinated drink, Eric made a typo and ended up naming his new creation "Mocka," where every component has been built from scratch, taking in nothing from the MATE project.

He plans to replace one component at a time, reverse-engineering what MATE already provides until full feature parity has been achieved. Once this is complete, I assume that GhostBSD will default to using Mocka as its default desktop environment.

And this is not his first time carrying out such a major change. In February, he came to the conclusion that MATE was not ready for Wayland and GhostBSD would switch to XLibre to keep its X11 session intact.

That line of thinking also checks out with what Eric's doing now.

The desktop's first component, a taskbar-style dock applet for the MATE panel called Mocka Dock, is already out now as an alpha for early testers. It lets you open apps, view their thumbnails, bring them forward into focus, and manage multiple windows of an app—basically doing what a dock worth its salt should do.

People who have the skills can build it from source right now to see what it offers, while the rest of us will have to wait for it to show up as an GhostBSD package update. Though it is not becoming the default experience yet, you will have to manually set it using the "Add to Panel" button on the taskbar.

If you take a look at Mocka's GitHub page, you will get a better understanding of what's being worked on apart from the dock. There's Mocka Menu, which has a proper PLAN.md file that lays out what work has already been completed and what's to be done.

The document shows us how a meson build and schema work has been done, with a long list of work yet to be carried out. This would give Mocka the ability to show a menu with listed items, the ability to handle search and keyboard inputs, integrate with the dock, and much more.

Eric has plans for a settings app too. Once complete, it would give users a single-access point for managing their GhostBSD machine's desktop appearance, network config, power management, keyboard layouts, and other UI-focused options.

There's also a separate repo that hosts the code for Mocka's official website. It is considerably behind in terms of development than the menu component we saw earlier and only contained placeholder content at the time of writing.

The project is hoping to ensure that these new Mocka components remain compatible with MATE so that users can mix-match during this transitional phase to a full Mocka desktop on GhostBSD.

fyi XLibre is a Xorg fork by some MAGA who thinks ^ in C is for exponential not xor

Aware. I'm betting on Xlibre being short lived. Mocka is for Wayland, tho.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Rootfull-Desktop

https://ofourdan.blogspot.com/2023/11/xwayland-rootful-part-2.html?m=1

Why are BSD people so desperate to reimplement perfectly good copyleft stuff under their cuck license?

What's wrong with the BSD license? I know nothing about it

It's an open source license that lets anyone take the code and relicense it under a proprietary license. That enables corporations to take the code, make it closed source, and profit from it without legally having to give anything back to the project that made the code in the first place (as an example, the PS3, PS4 and PS5 are all forks of BSD. And some parts of Mac OS and the Nintendo Switches take some parts from BSD. All of them were able to close source the code, making them proprietary).

Since they don't have to contribute back to the original project, BSD itself didn't benefit as much from all those corporations using it, despite the billions they made doing so, and all the users of those products were stuck with a closed source OS they couldn't modify.

In comparison, Linux projects generally use the GPL license, which doesn't allow anyone who forks the code to change the license to something other than GPL. That means if they distribute their forked version publicly, they are legally obligated to provide access to the source code to whomever requests it. So any beneficial changes they made can make it back upstream to the original project, as well as ensuring the end-users are never trapped in a closed ecosystem, since they can always fork it if a corporation goes rogue and enshittifies.

Thank you so much for the explanation, that makes a lot of sense! ❤️

Release engineering team lead at FreeBSD commented on reddit that Sony would actually fund a bunch of development work that went into FreeBSD proper rather than just their fork, but do it super under the radar (mostly because they don't want competitors knowing what they're up to in future versions, particularly in terms of hardware support). Netflix contributes tons to BSD and uses it not because of the license but because of the networking stack, as they wouldn't have to disclose shit if they did run Linux, it's all on their servers. Apple funded development of LLVM (which many other large corporations have also contributed to).

Source on the Sony and Netflix part, can't link directly to the comment because new reddit ui sucks and I can't access old without logging in anymore

It's not as one-sided as that comment makes it seem (see my reply to them). Many corporations do contribute back or fund development, especially since it's easier and cheaper to do that than to maintain a hard fork for all their changes. Hell, with Linux, despite GPL, they could still run a bunch of proprietary code on your device through modules since those don't have to be compiled into the kernel and thus aren't bound by the kernel's GPL.

With something like a video game console, if your whole operating system is easy to replicate, that makes it much easier for someone to build a copycat OS that lets anyone run that console's games on non-sanctioned hardware. Wouldn't need an emulator if you just straight up get the whole OS running on wholly different hardware and modify it to your liking easily and you could probably skirt copy protection too. Hell, it would be GREAT for us consumers. Not so great, however, for companies that spend tens or hundreds of millions developing a new console hoping it will sell tens of millions of units to pay off (and then get a cut on the games themselves).

Instead, we've arrived at a sort of hybrid model, where companies contribute to the development of things that aren't specific to their hardware or whatever they believe their advantage to be, while contributing to things that help everyone, but won't reveal their "secret sauce".

as an example, the OS for Mac OS, the PS3, as well as the Nintendo Switches, are all just closed, proprietary versions of OpenBSD.

No, they are not. MacOS's kernel, Darwin, uses some FreeBSD code. MacOS is not a closed version of openBSD. I think macOS mostly is derived from NeXTstep. The PlayStation OS is a closed fork of FreeBSD. Nintendo switch made its own OS using FreeBSD networking code.

Copyleft licenses (e.g. GPL) are designed to ensure freedom for all end-users by requiring that such users be provided with the means to use and modify the program how they want. Permssive licenses (e.g. BSD) give freedom to the immediate next developer who receives it to do with the program what they want, including denying those freedoms to anyone further downstream from them.

It's kind of like the idea of "your right to swing your fist ends at my face" -- copyleft supports that principle, while permissive licensing would say "go ahead and keep swinging!" Or for an even more inciteful metaphor, permissive licensing asserts the "right" for any future developer to close the code similarly to how the Confederacy asserted the "right" to own slaves. Absolute "freedom," including the power to deny it to others.

...And in practice, freedom for that first set of "others" to make improvements and then turn right around and deny access to them to the original authors! That's why I called it a 'cuck license': some megacorp takes your code, adds features, shoves it in a commercial product, and then doesn't even contribute back the code for those features, let alone the whole product. I mean, yes, some developers are okay with and consciously choose that... but then again, some husbands are okay with and consciously choose letting other men fuck their wives, too.

Thanks for the info, I was going off stuff I'd read years ago, but I should've done more research to verify.

Looks like Mac OS is indeed still mostly a continuation of NextStep, though the original NextStep itself seems to have incorporated a decent amount from BSD. I was misinformed about the Switch, it looks like there was a fair amount of threads from a decade ago perpetuating that it ran on a BSD of some sort, and never came across the corrections. I edited my post to reflect that new info.

MATE is already perfect, for a more modern alternative you can use Cinnamon. This project is just a waste of time and resources. It is not like some corporate overlord is waiting for a BSD-licensed MATE to profit off of. I am not against people working on passion projects that are not necessarily viable, but the whole point of this seems to license-wash MATE.

Thank you for the additional and conflicting perspective! I think having more lenses through which to look at something makes your perspective more well rounded

Appreciate you!

While BSD did get some help from the corps basing off it, ultimately it is a roll of the dice if they decide to contribute back, where as with GPL, it is enforced at a license level, and the newer AGPL license helps avoid the issue you describe with Netflix not being legally obligated to contribute back code that's distributed under the normal GPL.

I personally think GPL/AGPL provides a better outcome for regular users, and empowers them to not be beholden to closed gardens and proprietary software, where as the BSD enables corporations to enshittify forks by legally allowing them to become closed and proprietary.

Also @Cris_Citrus@piefed.zip

Yeah no problem. I originally thought macOS was based off FreeBSD, but someone in the forums corrected me and I did research to find he was right.

I believe the worst example of what could happen if you use a permissive license is MINIX. It runs the closed source spyware, Intel ME. This makes MINIX the most used OS in the world though.

How much was vibe coded?