Potabi Developer Blog

As the lead developer of Potabi, I take full responsibility for fucking this one up. However, we are actually not a BSD system, it's supposed to be (long-term) a new UNIX branch all together, away from any BSD's. Potabi will later include bits and pieces from all sorts of operating systems, including (but not limited to) ReactOS, Illumos, Linux (clones of what they do at least, because of Linux's borderline-abusive license), HaikuOS, Minix, SerenityOS, and others. So Potabi plans to basically rework everything in FreeBSD long-term? Why? Instead of taking the SerenityOS route and doing it 100% from scratch, we are going to utilize open-source software that already exists to give us a short term boost.  But wait, isn't Potabi a "better FreeBSD for desktop and mobile"? Wasn't it a mobile OS? Yes, yes, but also, it's complicated. Potabi was originally just a way for me to get a better mobile OS , then it became bigger and bigger. It has long since not be...

Dear Potabi Foundation Community,     Recently, over on the @PotabiSystems Twitter, I tried applying a social media manager so I could focus my time on developing the operating system, and working on school. The social media manager I selected was a friend of mine, whom I have worked with before on projects like Discord bots, a website, Novuspax Technologies (an older startup project), among other things.     Clearly, having trust he would be a good team member, and respectful to the community was a mistake. I take full responsibility for not doing my due diligence as the foundation president for whom would be running our social media accounts.     Hostile comments were made, and even telling people to "fuck off" based on comments he disagreed with. At the time I had disabled notifications for the Twitter app. He sent me a link to an OMG! Ubuntu article relating to Firefox being installed as a Snap by default while saying "People are crazy ...

"Wait, don't y'all already make the KIS package manager?" Well, no. KIS is not a package manager, it's a standard for custom package managers that happens to be working on a KIS implementation as an example. Here is the deal, there seems to be a misconception that package management systems for Unix-like systems (including Potabi) should be the same as everyone else. "Everyone should use Snap!" "No, use AppImage!" "Wait! No! Use Flatpak!" "RPM is perfect." "APT has the best packages!" etc.  First, let's make it clear. Flatpak and AppImage will be supported, because they are popular technologies. Second, the FreeBSD "pkg" package manager will be in Potabi for a long while, until Package can be built with a large set of packages. Lastly, no, the name "Package" isn't directly from FreeBSD's "PKG". Second, we will not support Snap's, APT, RPM, or other package managers. For...

I wanted to share something being done intentionally for Potabi, the providing of what, but being quiet of why. "Why an operating system?" and "What an operating system?" are two VERY different things that distributions don't do well in distinguishing. Here are a few examples of clear "What an operating system?" type situations. - "A Linux distribution" - "For an easy system" - "For a privacy focused system" But why is a whole lot more complicated, and usually ends up being a "what". Like "To give people choice/freedom/ease/etc", "To give an alternative to using <insert software here>", and even "Just as something I can do as a hobby." These are whats, not whys. What is the reason, why is the passion, which a lot of distributions do not have. People keep asking me why, and I didn't want to give more what. That is why I was not really providing a why, because I knew a why wa...

    One quote by John Muir I found on the internet goes "Don't try and reinvent the wheel - just work on making it better than anyone else." After working on the last iteration builder and finding so much difficulty due to a month's hiatus, where the code was confusing, everything irritating, and I failed to do the one thing I aimed to do with that builder: Make it easy enough to work with as a newcomer. I fell for the common issue of a programmer not understanding the code they wrote months previously, so with that I knew I needed a new strategy.     So, we are moving it to a highly modified version of GhostBSD, cool. Why? As in why the change, and why specifically GhostBSD? Well, to the first question, I answered. The current build system is confusing, and annoying to work with. Trust me, I made it.  Why GhostBSD? Well because it's the closest to what we want, and it's already well designed for what we want to add. Remember that quote about not reinv...