The Mac GUI is closed source. You're not cloning it without being sued by Apple's turbo lawyers or at the very least receive a C&D. This is for console applications?
macOS will now be ARM-only. If you buy Apple hardware you already have a license for the real thing.
Why run a TBD meme OS when you could run Darwin, FreeBSD, Linux, etc. or real macOS to accomplish whatever unclear goals are presented here?
*sigh* This is for no one, there is no viable use case. The ReactOS team will be sending a fruit basket.
I regret to actually say this, and mean no controversy - but, I have been actually asking myself just that - and, not in the "workout or not" sense, alone. In the "does anything have a point", way. Apologies.-
In general, things have meaning because people assign meanings to them. Nothing inherently has meaning as meaning exists only within the human mind/soul. If you are searching for meaning, you will find nothing.
That's what this is. Darwin isn't installable today. Apple just dumps a bunch of source code. Previous attempts at making Darwin bootable didn't go far and had no GUI.
Four years and still pre-alpha. Stick a fork in it.
There's also PureDarwin (?) which had been around forever but last I recall the lone developer was seriously ill and the project was not receiving help. I don't see how this would be any different.
To everyone here cheering this on: when will you be contributing? Or are you just waiting to download it, run it once for the lulz, and drag it to the Trash?
Perhaps the biggest reason is that the existing FOSS OS world has little to offer for people who like a Mac-style desktop. It's possible to customize DEs to have a very shallow visual resemblance but the details are all wrong, with Windows, legacy Linux desktops, and even mobile operating systems (in e.g. the case of GNOME) exerting the greater bulk of design influence.
The question might then, "why not make this a DE instead?" to which the answer is that Mac users also like how the underpinnings of the OS work (or have worked in older releases) and would like to continue to use their favorite Mac apps, which isn't going to happen as long as any traditional Linux distribution is involved. Mac apps also have a design ethos that's rare among current native Linux apps, which drives demand for alternatives.
To do this properly it really needs to be a whole-OS endeavor.
EndeavorOS. I think it's actually the userspace though, which this aims to emulate. The problem is that if you're using a macbook for final cut pro, then endeavorOS doesn't solve your problem.
Hmm, isn't EndeavorOS in the same vein as CachyOS? Mainly a pre-configured Arch variant with a custom point-and-click configurator built in? I don't see where it'd be of particular interest to would-be switchers using macOS.
I’m super confused as to what is missing in the FOSS world, how does it “have little to offer?” It really sounds like you just like the macOS style and want a clone of it, and that’s certainly fine as a desire or a request, but if you like macOS, macOS is already available. For what logical reason should a project be copying macOS?
I would absolutely agree that a logical reason is to run macOS apps on other platforms, but other than that, the macOS operating system and its design is nothing incredibly exciting, unique, or unattainable elsewhere.
You’ve established that a Linux desktop environment in macOS style alone is not sufficient, and that makes me wonder what details of the underpinnings is Linux getting wrong compared to Mac? Is launchd superior to systemd? Is Metal superior to Vulkan? Is container superior to docker/podman in Linux? I think in a lot of cases the macOS underpinnings are quite inferior to those on offer by the FOSS world. Not in every case, of course, but a whole lot of Apple’s low level tools are half-baked and weird.
I think we need to articulate what is actually wrong with Linux or other FOSS alternatives as far as their underpinnings because I am really coming up short.
Heck, macOS and FOSS alternatives share a whole lot of identical low level tools underpinnings, like how you can run your favorite shell in either OS or even install Homebrew on Linux. (Another hot take: Linux package management is vastly superior to macOS or any other operating system on the market).
This idea of the design ethos being superior on Mac…was that true with Liquid Glass too? Are we going to exclude from our analysis evert time Apple rushes out the next big Ui redesign to meet marketing deadlines and fixes it in subsequent updates like they’ve done multiple times in the past?
I look at befuddling aspects of the macOS design ethos like the fact that the menu bar will just silently truncate items when you run out of space or the fact that there’s a giant notch on the screen as evidence that maybe the macOS design ethos is nothing to envy.
Maybe macOS design is merely “pretty good” and not actually something that significantly far above and beyond its competitors.
Again, I applaud the idea of making software to run macOS apps outside of the propriety ecosystem just like the tools we use to run Windows apps in FOSS operating systems. However, I don’t think users looking for macOS design ethos or platform quality are starved of options.
macOS isn't perfect, particularly in its incarnations since Ventura, though gripes have been piling up since the "great flattening" with Yosemite, which is why Mac users might be interested in a similar alternative.
As a whole however, it works really well for some people. Better than Windows and Windows-like desktops (of which most DEs are closest to) and better than the desktoppified-mobile-OS shape of GNOME/Pantheon or tiling WM sort of thing.
The value lies more in the collection of frameworks referred to as Cocoa (primarily AppKit) and the desktop and third party apps built with it. The global menubar and perks it brings (such as a standardized menu API, which then enables things like System Settings allowing any menu item in any app to have its key shortcut remapped), the application-document process model, the windowing model that's built around windows overlapping with just the relevant bits remaining visible, first and third party GUI apps all being scriptable via AppleScript, high level of adherence to a central HIG, among many other things.
Many of these aren't unique but the particular combination is and doesn't really exist in the Linux desktop world… the best you can do is light mimicry and even that takes considerable manual configuration on the user's behalf, not to mention fighting against the grain and the awkwardness that brings.
I recognize all these things as legitimately useful and advantageous, I just question the uniqueness or strength of the utility of a lot of them.
For all of these advantages, it seems like other platforms have some kind of alternative that gets the job done just as well.
Global menu bar is great until popular third party cross-platform apps don’t bother using it (e.g., anything electron).
Scriptable GUI via AppleScript is nice but relatively underutilized. It seems like there are a lot of advanced power users on Mac who use scripts and terminal commands all the time but has never touched AppleScript. Dictionary quality varies by app.
I guess Shortcuts is a nice evolution of that but it’s probably even less flexible than AppleScript, and other platforms like Android manage have the same sort of thing available (Tasker).
Another counter to the benefit of AppleScript from the Linux side is that it’s way easier to find Linux GUI apps that either include a command line interface or are simply frontends for easily scriptable applications and APIs, which are inherently more useful for scripting. E.g., automating QuickTime GUI interactions to convert a video file via AppleScript is really not as good of a scripting experience as interacting with ffmpeg directly.
I’m not understanding what’s so special about the overlapping window model? Seems like all operating systems have overlapping windows very well covered unless I’m misunderstanding that one.
Central HIG seems to be increasing violated (see: first iteration of Liquid Glass from last year, which couldn’t even make consistent rounded corners). I also think that third party cross-platform apps ignoring those guidelines tends to diminish the benefits of a consistent set of guidelines regardless of platform. How am I benefitting from those HIG guidelines if my workflow is listening to Spotify, messaging my team on Slack, writing my notes in Obsidian, playing Minecraft on my downtime, and writing emails in Chrome? For a lot of platforms HIGs being only adhered to by the OEM often means they’re somewhat irrelevant.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of these aspects are legitimate advantages of macOS, I’m just not sure any of them are incredible strengths that are big reasons to choose a platform.
> You’ve established that a Linux desktop environment in macOS style alone is not sufficient, and that makes me wonder what details of the underpinnings is Linux getting wrong compared to Mac? Is launchd superior to systemd?
The “everything is better than systemd” thing is a reactionary hot take from the early days of systemd. In practice systemd has a lot of great tools and I can’t think of any from macOS that are superior. For example, macOS has nothing close to the power that systemd journal gives you. Launchd uses XML, has less flexibility on launch dependencies, and has worse debugging functionality.
You should look into PipeWire for audio in Linux. It can do things that no other audio platform can. Route a browser tab into Audacity while also sending it to a virtual mic for a call, while a synth app feeds a DAW.
I would agree that Wayland has more development time to go to get better, but Wayland is architected better from the start and represents a more modern design. A lot of Wayland’s security advantages are by design where macOS had to tack them on after the fact. You also get a modular, extensible architecture with compositer diversity.
Everyone gets to name their projects for their own reasons. If the pitch is basically an “alternate apple” macOS, I would have chosen one of the other other (alternate) apple varieties as the root of my OS. Missed opportunity I guess.
Real apple-people would'nt consider this anyways. Open source geeks is were they can get traction. Seems like there is plenty of us that would like fbsd quality and vertical integration to the desktop level. There is effort but no breakthroughs.
The more technical side of the Mac user base would probably jump ship if a polished, open macOS analogue appeared. There's been a lot of discontent with changes dating as far back as 10.7 Lion, and has been gradually mounting more rapidly since 10.10 Yosemite and accelerating greatly with 13 Ventura through 26 Tahoe.
There's substantial demand for a spiritual successor to OS X 10.4/10.6/10.9 that isn't being filled.
Tell me about it. Those OS X versions you mentioned for Tiger, Snow Leopard, and Mavericks were some of the best releases of OS X ever.
Thankfully, macOS Golden Gate is proving to be a decent release so far in my tests of the public betas, but I do yearn for the simplicity (and more power user friendly aspects) of the aforementioned OS X releases.
I agree. I would switch to an open source spiritual successor to even Tiger in a heartbeat if it were available.
The difficult part is replicating the ecosystem of applications. From a technological standpoint I would prefer a modern Linux distribution with KDE or Cinnamon over using 2005-era Mac OS X Tiger, though I’d gladly use a version of Tiger that was retrofitted with a modern Darwin core, modern libraries for security purposes, and an up-to-date web browser. However, Linux does not have Microsoft Office, the Adobe Creative Suite, Preview.app, Keynote, Dictionary.app, and other pleasant Mac apps. The FOSS alternatives are not as polished. Even venerable Office 2008 for Mac feels nicer than LibreOffice, and it’s compatible with the XML-based Office formats.
I guess for now I could run Tiger in an emulator, though admittedly current operating systems serve my needs, even if I prefer the polish of Tiger and Snow Leopard. I get really good performance running PowerPC Tiger inside QEMU on my base M4 Mac Mini and on my Ryzen 9 3900 desktop, definitely not as snappy as running Tiger on actual contemporary PowerPC hardware, but fast enough to actually be productive.
I think this is one of those cases where “build it and they will come” applies.
The corporate giants are their own thing, but indie/small Mac devs are among some of the most steadfast early adopters in the software world. They routinely have new releases leveraging whatever new things were added at WWDC in the span of a few weeks or months. Many would be thrilled by a project that promises to bring back what they loved about OS X and would be happy to contribute.
The only problem is that the “it” that needs to be built is a set of frameworks that’s as robust as Cocoa/AppKit is, is flexible with language use (Mac apps have long rolled in C, C++, Ruby, and Python alongside Objective-C or Swift for UI), and isn’t afraid to be opinionated (a single well-supported “happy path” for doing something is better than a dozen halfassed ways). That’s really the hardest part.
As for Tiger, on the Ryzen box you might get better performance from a hackintoshed x86 build (especially if you’ve got a spare PCI slot for passing through an old supported GPU for UI acceleration).
It seems so weird that the M series are really SOCs and not just CPUs. I also don't really want a home computer to have coprocessors just for machine learning...
At least they always allow installing your own arbitrary OS.
I’m super excited about any open source OS there is, but in all honesty, I see very little value for a desktop system like that. Linux is plenty good and apps ecosystem is slowly coming into a really great state. I’d love to see FreeBSD being there too, and basically you need nothing different from that.
from the faq:
> Is this... legally sketchy?
No. Consider projects like ReactOS, a from-scratch effort to create an OS compatible with Microsoft Windows, GNUstep, which provides an open implementation of Cocoa APIs and other things, or Darling, a compatibility layer for running Darwin (macOS) binaries on Linux. ravynOS is similar and stands on the shoulders of many such projects.
as far as i understand it, most companies don’t bother sending cease and desists to projects you’ve never heard of. the fact that the aforementioned projects have avoided the banhammer of Apple should not be an indication that a successful MacOS clone would receive the same treatment.
but on the other hand, maybe that’s a champagne problem. if you can make a macos clone good enough to get the attention of Apple, you’ve already done something incredible.
I think the better example is actually GNU, which endured several challenges as a clean room implementation of unix. I think this is legally sound, but IANAL.
not saying $TECHCO doesn’t know about X project. i’m just saying that if the average person doesn’t know about it, it’s unlikely to get shut down, as it poses no threat.
Maybe. But Microsoft get the bulk of their licensing from enterprise offerings. And Windows comes preinstalled on consumer machines anyway. So I don’t think there’s any risk of ReactOS becoming a problem for MS.
And with Apple, they’ve always approached the market as a hardware company first and foremost. Which is why macOS has always been free vs Windows which, until recently, was not.
Platforms like Linux was always a greater threat to both companies because Linux takes potential customers away from Microsoft and Apples ecosystems in ways that FOSS reimplementations do not.
But that all said, companies of that scale are inherently greedy and paranoid. So I wouldn’t be surprised to them burying those projects under a mountain of frivolous legal demands if those projects were to become as widely known as Linux.
You may be broadly correct, but “macOS has always been free” is definitely not true: all the Big Cat releases of Mac OS X were paid-for, right up until MacOS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” released in 2012. Only later, from Mavericks in 2013 onwards, were upgrades free. And further back in time I remember buying a software update for my first-generation iPod Touch up to par with the first-generation iPhone way back in 2008. Apple still sells or provides subscriptions to a lot of software (Final Cut Pro, Logic, et cetera) and back in the day I paid a lot of money for some of their more niche offerings Xsan, for example, which I remember cost me an eye-watering thousand bucks per node. Xgrid on the other hand was free, and it’s extremely unfortunate they killed it because in this day and age of Thunderbolt-interconnected Mac Studios with unified memory architectures running AI workloads “here’s a bunch of Macs regard them as a unified computing resource” would be extremely useful (but I digress from the digression).
can’t speak for Proton, but it’s no wonder Windows doesn’t see Wine as a threat. because Wine sucks to run. any normal person would just run Windows instead of having to fool with Wine. it’s for us hobbyists, because we don’t mind a little pain.
Wine is an integral part of Proton, so they do see it as a threat.
Proton provides a better Windows runtime than Windows itself nowadays. Many games using legacy DirectX versions run perfectly fine on Linux, but need patches on Windows 11.
> Developers can port existing Cocoa applications with minimal changes.
I wonder how big the actual gap between close to Cocoa App compatibility and full app compatibility is? Being able to run MacOS apps natively would unlock a huge barrier to adoption here.
Imagine the world where open-source is collaborating instead of fragmenting. Single Linux distribution, single compartibility layer for other OSes, single graphics API, single package manager...
I mean, yes, that might get more folks working on a single project - which _might_ lead to shipping more quickly (might - more devs doesn't always equal speed). But I think what we'd end up with is Gnome; something that works fairly well, yet the committee won't allow simple things that the community wants. So we have the whole, "fine, I'll fork this project and add it myself" followed by, "why don't you spend your time HELPING the project instead of creating your own". It sounds a bit like a doom-loop.
I'm kinda on the opposite end of the spectrum. I love this world where 45 people try to race toward the same goal. Sometimes the best ideas win. Sometimes the fastest to the first goal wins. Sometimes everyone gives up. Sometimes we have competing standards we have to sift through. It's a mess, but it's a beautiful mess.
That world is terrible. Thank deity no one has the power to actually inflict and enforce their particular bankrupt oppressive idea of the one true world on everyone else.
Most people aren't interested in cooperating. The neat thing about collaboration is that work can be shared without cooperation. Free software is inherently anarchist. Sure, there are several successful cooperative organizations, but they all benefit primarily from the collaboration they do with everyone else, and vice versa.
I get where you're coming from ivenjermakov, but the root cause of why we have a Linux, why Unix even existed, why Woz & Jobs created Apple, and so forth, is because creative, smart people want to break the hold of "common stuff".
Not to diss you, but these kind of questions ("Why another distro?", "Why another language?", "Why another ssh server/client/framework"? and so forth) have been asked zillions of times already, and the answer is always the same: the current offerings were not enough, for whatever definition of "enough" was at the time, and those offerings were tied down by whatever social structure or framework that did not work for these creative folks. I love that we have the freedom to explore with technology in the way we do.
You're using open-source Apple code (Darwin) and aiming for Cocoa API compatibility. How are you handling the legal side? Apple's APIs and frameworks are proprietary. Are you reimplementing them from scratch, or using something like GNUstep?
Maybe someone more familiar with operating systems kernels can answer this: Is Darwin really all the exiting? It is different from both the BSD kernels and Linux, but less so than Windows. Other than the ability to run macOS applications (assuming you can clone the libraries and APIs from macOS) is there some benefit of Darwin that I'm not seeing?
> The format is very simple: it adds some accounting info at the start of the file, and then appends all the ELF binaries after it, adding padding for alignment. The end of the file isn't touched, so you can still do things like self-extracting .zip files for multiple architectures with FatELF.
But I would indeed call it very-not-alive; their demo image is Ubuntu 9.04
I honestly think the kernel interface is by far the easiest part of building a MacOS compat layer. The userland is gigantic, super complex, and totally closed source. That's the hard part.
AFAIK all macos software only talks to the kernel via userland APIs - so there's no particular benefit to basing ravynOS on XNU anyway. (Just the opinion of a layman.)
Er, uhm… I have to disagree really. You have monolithic kernels versus micro kernels, I’ve used weird stuff such as DragonFlyBSD, Plan9, and BeOS. Even the Windows NT kernel (now mainline Windows) is a very unusual piece of software engineering.
I'm sort of surprised that development is still on X86 instead of moving over to ARM, it looks like the only builds for ARM are for raspberry pi - I know about Asahi but I would have thought that these darwin-based projects would have a leg up on booting even the latest hardware, is Apple not updating darwin anymore?
ARM is great. Love it. There are tons of chips that all do things differently, much more so than x86. Plus the booting mechanisms are a PITA to figure out, debugging is tricky, etc - and that's a single target. x86 isn't particularly elegant given its years of cruft and questionable design decisions but at least it's quasi-consistent (yes, lots of "well actually" possible; I'm speaking broadly).
The ISA on ARM is better, IMO, than x86 but the surrounding ecosystem is hellishly fragmented. Just my $0.02. makes it difficult for OSdevers to find an 'in' to a wider ARM audience. rpi is a great entry point.
Why using Discord for comms? Is there anyone who hasn't hit the max 100 "servers" years ago? I've been [lightly] using Discord since 2015 - I'm at the point where I just simply won't even consider trying to narrow down which "server" I can leave so as to join a new one, unless it's something pretty important to make it worth that time sink.
So many people in these comments talking about this project like it's pitching itself as a ready to go replacement for MacOS... why are you expecting screenshots, this is a tiny project of ambitious scale that is only 5 years old. What they have achieved is brilliant.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 7.0 ms ] threadThe Mac GUI is closed source. You're not cloning it without being sued by Apple's turbo lawyers or at the very least receive a C&D. This is for console applications?
macOS will now be ARM-only. If you buy Apple hardware you already have a license for the real thing.
Why run a TBD meme OS when you could run Darwin, FreeBSD, Linux, etc. or real macOS to accomplish whatever unclear goals are presented here?
*sigh* This is for no one, there is no viable use case. The ReactOS team will be sending a fruit basket.
I regret to actually say this, and mean no controversy - but, I have been actually asking myself just that - and, not in the "workout or not" sense, alone. In the "does anything have a point", way. Apologies.-
That's what this is. Darwin isn't installable today. Apple just dumps a bunch of source code. Previous attempts at making Darwin bootable didn't go far and had no GUI.
There's also PureDarwin (?) which had been around forever but last I recall the lone developer was seriously ill and the project was not receiving help. I don't see how this would be any different.
To everyone here cheering this on: when will you be contributing? Or are you just waiting to download it, run it once for the lulz, and drag it to the Trash?
The question might then, "why not make this a DE instead?" to which the answer is that Mac users also like how the underpinnings of the OS work (or have worked in older releases) and would like to continue to use their favorite Mac apps, which isn't going to happen as long as any traditional Linux distribution is involved. Mac apps also have a design ethos that's rare among current native Linux apps, which drives demand for alternatives.
To do this properly it really needs to be a whole-OS endeavor.
I would absolutely agree that a logical reason is to run macOS apps on other platforms, but other than that, the macOS operating system and its design is nothing incredibly exciting, unique, or unattainable elsewhere.
You’ve established that a Linux desktop environment in macOS style alone is not sufficient, and that makes me wonder what details of the underpinnings is Linux getting wrong compared to Mac? Is launchd superior to systemd? Is Metal superior to Vulkan? Is container superior to docker/podman in Linux? I think in a lot of cases the macOS underpinnings are quite inferior to those on offer by the FOSS world. Not in every case, of course, but a whole lot of Apple’s low level tools are half-baked and weird.
I think we need to articulate what is actually wrong with Linux or other FOSS alternatives as far as their underpinnings because I am really coming up short.
Heck, macOS and FOSS alternatives share a whole lot of identical low level tools underpinnings, like how you can run your favorite shell in either OS or even install Homebrew on Linux. (Another hot take: Linux package management is vastly superior to macOS or any other operating system on the market).
This idea of the design ethos being superior on Mac…was that true with Liquid Glass too? Are we going to exclude from our analysis evert time Apple rushes out the next big Ui redesign to meet marketing deadlines and fixes it in subsequent updates like they’ve done multiple times in the past?
I look at befuddling aspects of the macOS design ethos like the fact that the menu bar will just silently truncate items when you run out of space or the fact that there’s a giant notch on the screen as evidence that maybe the macOS design ethos is nothing to envy.
Maybe macOS design is merely “pretty good” and not actually something that significantly far above and beyond its competitors.
Again, I applaud the idea of making software to run macOS apps outside of the propriety ecosystem just like the tools we use to run Windows apps in FOSS operating systems. However, I don’t think users looking for macOS design ethos or platform quality are starved of options.
As a whole however, it works really well for some people. Better than Windows and Windows-like desktops (of which most DEs are closest to) and better than the desktoppified-mobile-OS shape of GNOME/Pantheon or tiling WM sort of thing.
The value lies more in the collection of frameworks referred to as Cocoa (primarily AppKit) and the desktop and third party apps built with it. The global menubar and perks it brings (such as a standardized menu API, which then enables things like System Settings allowing any menu item in any app to have its key shortcut remapped), the application-document process model, the windowing model that's built around windows overlapping with just the relevant bits remaining visible, first and third party GUI apps all being scriptable via AppleScript, high level of adherence to a central HIG, among many other things.
Many of these aren't unique but the particular combination is and doesn't really exist in the Linux desktop world… the best you can do is light mimicry and even that takes considerable manual configuration on the user's behalf, not to mention fighting against the grain and the awkwardness that brings.
For all of these advantages, it seems like other platforms have some kind of alternative that gets the job done just as well.
Global menu bar is great until popular third party cross-platform apps don’t bother using it (e.g., anything electron).
Scriptable GUI via AppleScript is nice but relatively underutilized. It seems like there are a lot of advanced power users on Mac who use scripts and terminal commands all the time but has never touched AppleScript. Dictionary quality varies by app.
I guess Shortcuts is a nice evolution of that but it’s probably even less flexible than AppleScript, and other platforms like Android manage have the same sort of thing available (Tasker).
Another counter to the benefit of AppleScript from the Linux side is that it’s way easier to find Linux GUI apps that either include a command line interface or are simply frontends for easily scriptable applications and APIs, which are inherently more useful for scripting. E.g., automating QuickTime GUI interactions to convert a video file via AppleScript is really not as good of a scripting experience as interacting with ffmpeg directly.
I’m not understanding what’s so special about the overlapping window model? Seems like all operating systems have overlapping windows very well covered unless I’m misunderstanding that one.
Central HIG seems to be increasing violated (see: first iteration of Liquid Glass from last year, which couldn’t even make consistent rounded corners). I also think that third party cross-platform apps ignoring those guidelines tends to diminish the benefits of a consistent set of guidelines regardless of platform. How am I benefitting from those HIG guidelines if my workflow is listening to Spotify, messaging my team on Slack, writing my notes in Obsidian, playing Minecraft on my downtime, and writing emails in Chrome? For a lot of platforms HIGs being only adhered to by the OEM often means they’re somewhat irrelevant.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of these aspects are legitimate advantages of macOS, I’m just not sure any of them are incredible strengths that are big reasons to choose a platform.
Pretty much anything is better than systemd.
CoreAudio is far superior to anything Linux has.
WindowServer is better than Wayland.
You should look into PipeWire for audio in Linux. It can do things that no other audio platform can. Route a browser tab into Audacity while also sending it to a virtual mic for a call, while a synth app feeds a DAW.
I would agree that Wayland has more development time to go to get better, but Wayland is architected better from the start and represents a more modern design. A lot of Wayland’s security advantages are by design where macOS had to tack them on after the fact. You also get a modular, extensible architecture with compositer diversity.
There's substantial demand for a spiritual successor to OS X 10.4/10.6/10.9 that isn't being filled.
Thankfully, macOS Golden Gate is proving to be a decent release so far in my tests of the public betas, but I do yearn for the simplicity (and more power user friendly aspects) of the aforementioned OS X releases.
The difficult part is replicating the ecosystem of applications. From a technological standpoint I would prefer a modern Linux distribution with KDE or Cinnamon over using 2005-era Mac OS X Tiger, though I’d gladly use a version of Tiger that was retrofitted with a modern Darwin core, modern libraries for security purposes, and an up-to-date web browser. However, Linux does not have Microsoft Office, the Adobe Creative Suite, Preview.app, Keynote, Dictionary.app, and other pleasant Mac apps. The FOSS alternatives are not as polished. Even venerable Office 2008 for Mac feels nicer than LibreOffice, and it’s compatible with the XML-based Office formats.
I guess for now I could run Tiger in an emulator, though admittedly current operating systems serve my needs, even if I prefer the polish of Tiger and Snow Leopard. I get really good performance running PowerPC Tiger inside QEMU on my base M4 Mac Mini and on my Ryzen 9 3900 desktop, definitely not as snappy as running Tiger on actual contemporary PowerPC hardware, but fast enough to actually be productive.
The corporate giants are their own thing, but indie/small Mac devs are among some of the most steadfast early adopters in the software world. They routinely have new releases leveraging whatever new things were added at WWDC in the span of a few weeks or months. Many would be thrilled by a project that promises to bring back what they loved about OS X and would be happy to contribute.
The only problem is that the “it” that needs to be built is a set of frameworks that’s as robust as Cocoa/AppKit is, is flexible with language use (Mac apps have long rolled in C, C++, Ruby, and Python alongside Objective-C or Swift for UI), and isn’t afraid to be opinionated (a single well-supported “happy path” for doing something is better than a dozen halfassed ways). That’s really the hardest part.
As for Tiger, on the Ryzen box you might get better performance from a hackintoshed x86 build (especially if you’ve got a spare PCI slot for passing through an old supported GPU for UI acceleration).
What has changed about Apple's ecosystem vis a vis openness, hardware, or the 'ecosystem'?
The macOS ecosystem is pretty much the same as it has been since 1997
Prior to that, modern Macs were just PCs. Then Apple started to introduce, and then depend upon, their unique hardware.
Then the ARM migration using proprietary CPUs and GPUs really kicked it up a level. The OS relies on the hardware, which is unique to Apple now.
At least they always allow installing your own arbitrary OS.
New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45997212 - Nov 2025 (165 comments)
RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485596 - Dec 2023 (176 comments)
RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32492514 - Aug 2022 (366 comments)
I’m super excited about any open source OS there is, but in all honesty, I see very little value for a desktop system like that. Linux is plenty good and apps ecosystem is slowly coming into a really great state. I’d love to see FreeBSD being there too, and basically you need nothing different from that.
as far as i understand it, most companies don’t bother sending cease and desists to projects you’ve never heard of. the fact that the aforementioned projects have avoided the banhammer of Apple should not be an indication that a successful MacOS clone would receive the same treatment.
but on the other hand, maybe that’s a champagne problem. if you can make a macos clone good enough to get the attention of Apple, you’ve already done something incredible.
And with Apple, they’ve always approached the market as a hardware company first and foremost. Which is why macOS has always been free vs Windows which, until recently, was not.
Platforms like Linux was always a greater threat to both companies because Linux takes potential customers away from Microsoft and Apples ecosystems in ways that FOSS reimplementations do not.
But that all said, companies of that scale are inherently greedy and paranoid. So I wouldn’t be surprised to them burying those projects under a mountain of frivolous legal demands if those projects were to become as widely known as Linux.
But i didn’t realise Apple used to charge for OS upgrades. So thanks for the correction there.
Proton provides a better Windows runtime than Windows itself nowadays. Many games using legacy DirectX versions run perfectly fine on Linux, but need patches on Windows 11.
I wonder how big the actual gap between close to Cocoa App compatibility and full app compatibility is? Being able to run MacOS apps natively would unlock a huge barrier to adoption here.
And if it ever reaches a usable state, I assume it will far behind Apple's current systems.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVDzuT0fXro
I'm kinda on the opposite end of the spectrum. I love this world where 45 people try to race toward the same goal. Sometimes the best ideas win. Sometimes the fastest to the first goal wins. Sometimes everyone gives up. Sometimes we have competing standards we have to sift through. It's a mess, but it's a beautiful mess.
Most people aren't interested in cooperating. The neat thing about collaboration is that work can be shared without cooperation. Free software is inherently anarchist. Sure, there are several successful cooperative organizations, but they all benefit primarily from the collaboration they do with everyone else, and vice versa.
Not to diss you, but these kind of questions ("Why another distro?", "Why another language?", "Why another ssh server/client/framework"? and so forth) have been asked zillions of times already, and the answer is always the same: the current offerings were not enough, for whatever definition of "enough" was at the time, and those offerings were tied down by whatever social structure or framework that did not work for these creative folks. I love that we have the freedom to explore with technology in the way we do.
https://cocotron.org/
It's been a stable foundation for several of the most successful operating systems in history though
It’s Mach based, so it has Mach ports, which are an IPC system that is fairly heavily used by macOS.
It has DriverKit, which is a C++ framework for drivers that’s got morecsuppirt than the usual Unix driver model.
Mach-O does more than ELF, and enables the two-layer namespacing that makes macOS able to manage dynamic linking dependencies better than ELF.
Nothing really earth-shattering but interesting enough. And far easier to build a macOS environment on than FreeBSD.
I've always admired that mach-o supports fat binaries.
> The format is very simple: it adds some accounting info at the start of the file, and then appends all the ELF binaries after it, adding padding for alignment. The end of the file isn't touched, so you can still do things like self-extracting .zip files for multiple architectures with FatELF.
But I would indeed call it very-not-alive; their demo image is Ubuntu 9.04
AFAIK all macos software only talks to the kernel via userland APIs - so there's no particular benefit to basing ravynOS on XNU anyway. (Just the opinion of a layman.)
> Is Darwin really all the exiting?
I’ve tried to reread your question, and couldn’t get the sense, before I thought maybe that’s an autocorrection / misprint.
ARM is great. Love it. There are tons of chips that all do things differently, much more so than x86. Plus the booting mechanisms are a PITA to figure out, debugging is tricky, etc - and that's a single target. x86 isn't particularly elegant given its years of cruft and questionable design decisions but at least it's quasi-consistent (yes, lots of "well actually" possible; I'm speaking broadly).
The ISA on ARM is better, IMO, than x86 but the surrounding ecosystem is hellishly fragmented. Just my $0.02. makes it difficult for OSdevers to find an 'in' to a wider ARM audience. rpi is a great entry point.
The wiki is impossible to read on mobile, due to the sidebar.
https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/