On Fri, 19 Apr 2024 at 10:01, Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mott...@libero.it> 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 Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven IoM: (+44) 7624 277612: UK: (+44) 7939-087884 Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053