helloSystem is the latest attempt to recreate macOS’s interface in an open-source OS.
How does it hold up?
Let’s find out.
What Is helloSystem?
helloSystemis an open-source OS development effort to provide an elegant user interface on top of free and open software.
Like macOS, it’s based on FreeBSD.
While the design is obviously influenced by macOS, helloSystem is not intended as a drop-in clone.
They’ve posted a long list of articles that support their claims on their GitHub page.
The system is still in its early development stages.
The latest version is 0.7.0, which was released in December 2021.
If you’re running it on VirtualBox, they recommendusing EFI instead of the standard BIOSfirmware.
The developers really recommend that you try it on real hardware, though.
Installing helloSystem is a lot like installing a standard Linux distribution.
Like a lot of modern distros, helloSystem boots to a live version.
This lets you try out the interface before you commit to an installation.
There are several other utilities, such as a calculator and a terminal app.
Looking around at this live environment, it looks slick but it’s obvious that the system is incomplete.
Even the display preferences setting doesn’t work.
You’ll get a graphical installer instead of the standard text-based FreeBSD installer.
The helloSystem Desktop
The interface does look a lot like macOS.
There’s a menu bar at the top that stays there all the time.
There’s a dock where you could keep frequently used applications to launch quickly.
The system includes two browsers, Falkon, based on Firefox, and Iridium, based on Chromium.
It also comes with the FeatherPad text editor and a calendar program.
This makes it a usable desktop, but barely.
Clearly, the developers have a lot of work ahead of them.
There are a number of other utilities, such as a calculator and a terminal program.
The default shell is zsh, which is the same as on macOS.
There’s also a tool to extract ISO images to USB media.
If you installed helloSystem on the hard drive, it will boot straight into this desktop.
You’ll most likely want to use packages since they’re precompiled.
Trying to install something as basic as Vim gave an error when attempting to trigger the program.
helloSystem has a Debian runtime that’s listed as “under construction.”
Attempts to install Debian 11 Bullseye also failed on this system, even with two builds available.
This could give access to a wider variety of software when this feature is fully implemented.
Is helloSystem Too Good to Be True?
A project to implement a macOS-like open-source OS sounds ambitious.
An interface inspired by macOS might be better than trying to create a direct replacement for it.
The incompleteness of helloSystem as of December 2022 means that it’s still an interesting idea for power users.
The developers even have a message saying that this version is intended for developers and power users.
Other open-source desktops like KDE and XFCE have also built attractive user interfaces for Unix-like systems.
Despite the age of the last version, the project seems active on GitHub.
The repositories seem to receive plenty of updates.
This means that a new version might be on the horizon.
The real test would be how many promised features are actually implemented.
This would show how the OS is proceeding.
At the moment, helloSystem is an interesting tech demo.
It will need to be more complete before anyone might consider using it daily.
helloSystem will need to include more apps and make it easier to install new ones to be successful.
helloSystem is not the only BSD-based effort to build a user-friendly open-source OS.
MidnightBSD hopes to create an attractive desktop with the rock-solid backbone of FreeBSD.
