[HN Gopher] Projects for Old Versions of OS X
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Projects for Old Versions of OS X
Author : Wowfunhappy
Score : 159 points
Date : 2022-04-26 06:12 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jonathanalland.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jonathanalland.com)
| smm11 wrote:
| Nothing for Rhapsody?
| Pephers wrote:
| I've been using a Mac since Tiger. To me macOS Monterey has been
| the best version since Snow Leopard. It feels very stable and
| performant, much more so than Catalina and Big Sur.
|
| I've dubbed it the "Snow Leopard" of modern macOS. IIRC it's
| coincidentally the second release after a CPU architecture
| change, too.
| freewizard wrote:
| Monterey dropped code for quite a few legacy hardware in
| kernel, which make it much hard to be installed on older Macs;
| but the flip side is it obviously feels better for newer
| models.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Note that there obviously is a working weather widget, the new
| translation service is pretty excellent, and the spotlight input
| can do unit and currency conversions.
|
| (there's also OCR now, and it beats anything else I've seen in
| speed and accuracy with a healthy margin. It somehow indexed old
| photos of handwritten notes that I have trouble reading myself)
| uuyi wrote:
| There's some real magic in macOS now. I found the other day I
| can just search for "cows" in my photo library. And they are
| there!
| dmitriid wrote:
| Were they there before? ;)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Hey all, author here, I'm flattered this made it to the front
| page! You might also enjoy:
|
| * Me getting modern Unity games to run on Mavericks:
| https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/414688/how-can-i-r...
|
| * Me kind-of sort-of getting Mavericks to install on a slightly-
| too-new Macbook Air:
| https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/402726/how-can-i-a...
|
| I'm currently running Mavericks on a Hackintosh with an i7-4790K
| a GTX 780 6GB. I wrote some more details on how I arrived at this
| point, and other things I tried, down-thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31206278
|
| No one has asked about security yet, which always seems to come
| up. My feeling is that (1) my computer is behind a router with
| up-to-date firmware, (2) I'm using an up-to-date web browser, (3)
| I'm relatively careful about what software I install, and (4) I
| regularly back up my data to cold storage. There are absolutely
| gaps, but in exchange for this small risk, I enjoy using my
| computer much more than I would otherwise.
| lampshades wrote:
| Do you trust the bootloaders that you have to use to run
| Hackintosh? I haven't run one in several years, but at the time
| I used the Clover bootloader. It was the best I could find but
| it was written in Russia. I just couldn't trust it when
| accessing any sensitive information on my computer.
|
| Sorry if you have already answered in another thread.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I still use Clover. It's a relatively old project and it's
| completely open source. It has been worked on by a lot of
| talented developers over the years. Some of those developers
| are based in Russia, but I'm not inclined to dismiss it out
| of hand because of that, especially since it predates the
| most-recent craziness.
|
| The new standard for Hackintosh bootloaders is OpenCore, but
| I've been using Clover for years and haven't had any problems
| with it. And, I suspect Clover has been tested more
| extensively with older versions of OS X, just by the nature
| of when it was developed and released.
| rnd0 wrote:
| I haven't played with hackintosh in like 12 years. It was a
| hassle then a couple years after I stopped I got a real imac.
|
| I'm not sure what the current deal with hackintosh is, but
| I'm vaguely under the impression that there's at least one
| that is open source, then there's an open source boot loader
| rEFInd as well.
|
| Hopefully someone can confirm or refute my impression.
| hrrsn wrote:
| Modern Hackintoshes have moved to using OpenCore as the
| bootloader, which is open source:
| https://github.com/acidanthera/OpenCorePkg
|
| The older standard was Clover, also open source:
| https://github.com/CloverHackyColor/CloverBootloader
| hawflakes wrote:
| Fun stuff! I'm wondering where the updated source for SIMBL is
| kept. I know the author and he was surprised that people have
| continued to build on it!
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| SIMBL lives on mostly thanks to w0lfschild, see:
| https://github.com/w0lfschild/MacForgeFramework. This repo
| hasn't been updated since 2018; I'm not entirely clear
| whether the most recent versions of MacForge is still based
| on SIMBL.
|
| The SIMBL on my website uses an unmodified SIMBLAgent binary
| taken from an older version of w0lfchild's mySIMBL
| (https://github.com/w0lfschild/mySIMBL). However, I
| recompiled his SIMBL.osax with 32-bit support added back in,
| since I use a lot of 32-bit apps:
| https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/MacForgeFramework
|
| Quick note that I don't really understand this code, I can
| just tell you that it works, at least on Mavericks.
| occoder wrote:
| Kudos to you! Huge respect for the skills and efforts involved.
| makecheck wrote:
| I tried for a really, really long time to implement backward
| compatibility (and was even impressed with things I came up with)
| but Apple makes it incredibly hard. Certain hard boundaries can
| be crossed, e.g. some point where the compiler/runtime support
| changes. At a certain point you are looking at practically two
| implementations if you want the same code to not look somewhat
| antiquated on newer systems UI-wise, too. And of course, Xcode
| just starts outright refusing to compile which means you might
| need older Xcode versions and even older hardware.
|
| The worst part is that for every 5 cool things they add, they do
| at least one really stupid annoying new thing on macOS that makes
| using newer systems annoying.
|
| For example, if there is one thing I recommend everyone do right
| now, is set this on newer macOS:
|
| `NSAlertMetricsGatheringEnabled = 0`
|
| It completely removes the majority of those stupid iOS-style
| alert boxes and returns them to the older sane layout.
| grishka wrote:
| It's defaults write -g
| NSAlertMetricsGatheringEnabled -bool false
|
| And it's amazing, thanks. Is there also a command to remove the
| paddings on the sides in sidebars and menus?
| brimble wrote:
| I really, really wish Apple would release an official way to
| run arbitrary older versions of their OS in VMs. They have a
| hypervisor and have for a long time, but using it to run an
| older OSX/macOS version is very much a DIY thing. It'd be
| hugely helpful for people supporting software, who need to test
| on older versions and maybe even to occasionally compile an
| important bug fix for something that's now "ancient".
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| If you have an Intel Mac, VMWare Fusion works really well for
| this! I have VMs of Lion, Mountain Lion, High Sierra, and Big
| Sur available at my fingertips within VMware Fusion 8 running
| atop Mavericks.
|
| I do all of my development with VMs. It lets me instantly
| switch between xCode versions, and install dependencies
| without messing with the state of my real system.
|
| (P.S. I also have Tiger and Snow Leopard VMs, but this
| requires patching VMWare and is definitely not endorsed by
| Apple!)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I'm the author, and I agree, it's not really possible for Cocoa
| developers to continue supporting old versions of macOS. The
| projects on my page have the advantage of _only_ targeting old
| OS X releases, and not modern ones.
|
| However, what _really_ helps me is developers who document when
| support for an old OS was dropped, and continue to make older
| compatible versions of their software available for download
| and purchase. I have spent countless hours digging through the
| Internet Archive, doing a manual bisect to find the last
| compatible version of some app. Sometimes only to realize at
| the end that this version won 't work with new license keys.
|
| Worst of all are apps that have auto-update mechanisms I can't
| disable, which automatically replace my old working copy with a
| new version that crashes on launch. Please, don't do this!
|
| ---
|
| Apps designed to be cross-platform are a different story. I
| think it's more than a little annoying that Google Chrome
| doesn't support OS X 10.10 and older, when the set of changes
| needed to support back to 10.7 is really quite minuscule,
| relative to the size of the Chromium codebase:
| https://github.com/chromium/chromium/compare/main...blueboxd...
|
| If a single developer working in his free time is able to
| maintain backwards compatibility, the full force of Google
| should be able to do it too. Not just for weird people like me
| who are strangely emotionally attached to old versions of OS X,
| but for people in Guatemala who literally can't afford to
| upgrade their hardware!
| armadsen wrote:
| > However, what really helps me is developers who document
| when support for an old OS was dropped, and continue to make
| older compatible versions of their software available for
| download and purchase.
|
| I'm a Cocoa developer and go out of my way to do this. You
| can find and download the last supported version of my app
| for each major OS X release here:
| https://help.aetherlog.com/faq/oldversions/ (linked from the
| main page on the website). I've also intentionally kept the
| license key scheme the same so a license purchased today will
| activate any version of the app, even very old ones.
|
| I hear not-too-infrequently from users who have an old Mac
| that they want to use for my software, and it's nice to have
| a solution for them. The caveat of course is that some things
| are inevitably broken with regard to (third-party) web APIs
| that have changed. But I'm lucky that my app's core
| functionality isn't dependent on an internet connection at
| all.
| cpach wrote:
| Wow!
|
| The level of dedication here is simply amazing.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Thanks, note that it's all very much built on the shoulders of
| giants!
|
| For example, the "Chromium Legacy Downloader" just adds
| automatic updates (and some tweaks) to to an existing project.
| Chromium Legacy itself--a branch of Chromium kept in sync with
| upstream which retains support for legacy OS X--is maintained
| by a Japanese developer I don't know much about.
| https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy.
|
| Other downloads, like the Dolphin emulator, are basically just
| source recompiles, which use MacPorts tooling to support legacy
| OS X. MacPorts has _incredible_ legacy support.
| icybox wrote:
| I really miss the colors and contrast of Snow Leopard. I was able
| to relatively okay with things up to High Sierra. Mojave brought
| random freezes on wake (~10s) on my Macbook Air 2015, Catalina
| brought call-home on every executable. Big Sur redesign just
| killed it. I don't like the unicorn coloring book for kids to be
| my OS! There's no contrast, there's just too much wasted space
| everywhere (I don't use external monitors). So all and all, I'm
| running ubuntu unity ( https://ubuntuunity.org/ ) with Ambiance.
| Those have the right contrast for me. And I brought in Menlo and
| Lucida Grande fonts in for GUI and terminal. Those more round
| corners since Big Sur get on my nerves too :-( I'm sure I was
| using it wrong tho ... :-P
| lproven wrote:
| I am happy to see someone else recommending Ubuntu Unity,
| especially as being Mac-like. It remains my default OS for my
| laptops and it continues to improve; version 22.04 uses mainly
| MATE accessories, to provide proper menus and toolbars, and
| also supports Flatpak.
| my123 wrote:
| It however didn't seem to make the move to Wayland...
|
| And unity8 (now Lomri) is in perpetual beta, and written in
| Qt.
| lproven wrote:
| > It however didn't seem to make the move to Wayland...
|
| "You say that like it's a bad thing."
|
| > And unity8 (now Lomri) is in perpetual beta, and written
| in Qt.
|
| Is it now? I wonder if it's a descendant of Unity-2D then.
| That was in Qt and seems to be forgotten now.
|
| Yes, it does seem mired in dev hell, and I wonder how much
| is really left to do.
|
| Canonical got a lot of stick, especially on here, about
| Unity etc. (and still do over Snap).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821
|
| I think it's undeserved. Unity was and is a damned good
| desktop, it's just _different_. Some people are neophobic.
| There 's more to life than the Win95 desktop.
|
| IMHO Canonical's only big mistake, really, was Mir.
|
| Wayland remains controversial, and I'm not qualified to
| judge why. But like systemd, it is basically the new
| standard, and so going with it would have been pragmatic.
|
| Trying to write a new WM _and_ a new desktop _and_ a mobile
| OS _and_ a new packaging format _and_ a new display server
| was a big stretch. Eliminating one big chunk of it seems
| like a win to me.
|
| Apparently not to them: they pressed ahead and then
| abandoned the whole thing.
|
| Damned shame. _Someone_ in the Linux world needed to
| address mobile/tablets. It is the entire herd of elephants
| stampeding about the room.
|
| IMHO a few sketchy efforts based on GNOME and KDE are not
| really enough.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I mostly agree with everything you've said here. Frankly,
| I don't think Wayland has the functionality to support
| what people want to do on Desktop Linux. Wayland
| apologists will claim "that's the point", which I would
| be willing to agree with if the development of things
| like Mutter and wlroots weren't so spread apart. It's
| resulted in a scenario where two and a half desktops
| _actually support_ Wayland, and even those don 't have
| feature-complete implementations. GNOME, Sway, and
| _especially_ KDE are still playing catch-up with x11
| functionality. That 's simply unacceptable for a software
| project that's 10 years in the making.
|
| Wayland is going to have a hard time being "the new
| standard" if it continues down it's path of less hardware
| compatibility, less software compatibility and less
| overall functionality. I'm willing to point the finger
| squarely at GNOME here too, because they've intentionally
| gimped Wayland's development over the years under the
| guise that they're the lead implementation, while giving
| the rest of the community the pittance of wlroots. This
| has been _disastrous_ to the development cycle of
| Wayland, and ended up splintering the wrong projects and
| blocking the right features. Stuff like app tray
| indicators have been completely depreciated on a system
| level solely because GNOME said they didn 't want them.
| It's really petty, and it certainly isn't moving desktop
| Linux forward.
|
| In general, everything GNOME-related after Unity has just
| been a really slow downhill decline. The freshness and
| uniqueness of the desktop is dead, all we're left with
| now is a lame Mac clone that can't even play nice with
| the rest of the community. This is probably a real "old
| man yells at cloud" moment by most respects, but watching
| their behavior in recent years frustrates and disappoints
| me. They used to be a pretty respectable group of
| maintainers; now it's just drip-fed patches, gutting old
| features and setting inane new precedents as "the
| standard" and getting mad at downstream maintainers when
| they don't adopt them.
| pygy_ wrote:
| Up to Snow Leopard, OS X updates felt like little Christmas
| mornings. It went downhill starting with Lion. I've stopped
| caring about new features, there's too much churn anyway.
| grishka wrote:
| At some point they decided they need to sync the OS updates
| with the rotation of the planet for some reason. This is when
| it went downhill.
| asciimov wrote:
| 2009 marked the last year of good Operating System releases
| with both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard shipping that summer.
| After this point, bloat became good, non-flat design became
| bad, and existing system apps started to be replaced with
| buggy alternatives.
| grishka wrote:
| Lion did introduce the notification center, the one feature
| that was truly long overdue. I don't miss Growl.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Lion was a bad release filled with bugs, but it
| introduced a _lot_ of features I don 't think I could
| live without. Things like high DPI support, the ability
| to render emoji (!), and the ability to rename a document
| from an app's title bar. Behind the scenes, Lion is when
| Apple introduced Automatic Reference Counting. And, while
| I know they're controversial, I really like how Apple
| implemented full screen and auto saving, particularly
| after the Apple tweaked them in Mountain Lion.
|
| Mountain Lion went a long way towards fixing Lion's
| problems, and Mavericks just about finished the job.
| Which is why I run Mavericks. The only remaining Lion
| things I _really_ dislike are the Launchpad, the hidden
| Library folder, and some minor-ish aesthetic differences.
| I 've patched some of these.
| grishka wrote:
| > Behind the scenes, Lion is when Apple introduced
| Automatic Reference Counting.
|
| Hm. I've never written anything serious for Apple
| platforms but of course played around for a bit. But,
| I've always assumed ARC is implemented purely in the
| compiler, isn't it? I remember disassembling something I
| wrote and learning that the compiler inserted
| retain/release calls as necessary.
|
| > Which is why I run Mavericks.
|
| Actually, I ran Mavericks for several years after it was
| superseded. I was made fun of by some people (who
| complained about glitchy WiFi on Yosemite, lol). Had to
| finally update when I got a new job and needed to compile
| an iOS app, which required latest Xcode, which required
| latest macOS. Then I stayed on Mojave for like 2 more
| years, refusing to update to Catalina to keep using
| 32-bit apps. And then several months ago I bought an M1
| Max MacBook, which means Monterey.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I don't really understand how ARC works, but I can tell
| you it's tied into the OS somehow.
|
| ARC does partially work on Snow Leopard, but only for
| 64-bit, and it's limited (namely, you can't use weak
| references).
| smoldesu wrote:
| I haven't been excited for a MacOS update since Mojave. Since
| then, it's always been a question of "how much are they
| taking away this time?" instead of "what have they added?"...
| asdff wrote:
| I think they ran out of low hanging fruit pretty fast. Tiger
| was great, and once they added multiple desktops that was all
| they really had to do with OSX and it was complete,
| lightweight, performant. Too bad the more recent stuff has
| been just taking away things (32 bit, eventually x86
| compatibility if thats the trend), or making it annoying
| (having your OS yell at you every time you open something not
| from the mac app store is patronizing).
| larusso wrote:
| In the early 2000th when I was introduced to Apple Macs (G3
| iMac MacOS9) I couldn't understand who wanted to work with
| these machines. I tried out macOS-X in the school Labs and
| the only piece of software I actually liked was iTunes (I
| know weird). It took years and then I saw a machine running
| leopard and the coverflow in Finder etc. I thought wow this
| looks and feels so much cooler than my ugly windows XP/Vista.
| I convinced my wife to buy a MacBook and bought the Snow
| Leopard update. Freaking unbelievable. I switched to Mac
| myself and it was such a joy ride. Everything was just
| working and I actually felt real joy. Updates later and I
| don't feel like this anymore. It started with the 2017
| MacBook I got from work (the worst machine I ever had to use)
| This was only hardware. But the software broke under me as
| well with the introduction of Catalina. I still run a Mac at
| work cause the company only supports windows and Mac. At home
| I switched to Linux and try to become the maker of my own
| joy.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| There is an option "increase contrast" in accessibility, plus a
| slider to adjust the display contrast, plus a set of color
| filters for color blindness that can be quite useful even if
| you don't suffer any of the specific conditions.
| icybox wrote:
| Thanks! I'm aware of this. I don't know how to describe it
| properly - the old OSX icons, even the "lickable" control
| buttons in snow leopard look just right. It's almost like
| there's a black line around the icons, the saturation is
| right and also colors go right together. I don't see this in
| Big Sur or Monterey. It's just oversaturated pastels without
| clearly defined borders. Looked slightly better in dark mode,
| but I prefer light mode. Snow Leopard (https://apparelever169
| .weebly.com/uploads/1/2/4/9/124908212/...) vs. Monterey
| (https://scr3.golem.de/screenshots/2106/MacOS-
| Monterey/Apple_...) - random searches for screenshots.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| The increase contrast option in modern macOS increases the
| contrast at the expense of making everything ugly.
|
| Aqua in OS X 10.9 and below are naturally designed with high
| contrast and tonal range in mind.
| grishka wrote:
| There's an accessibility setting to add borders to toolbar
| buttons, I had to turn that on to undo all the cLeAnLInEsS and
| make the damn thing practical. I still wish I could undo the
| toolbars combined with title bars as well -- they're cramped
| for no good reason yet "airy" because of way too much padding.
| But then these things apparently don't inconvenience me enough
| to patch the OS to have it my way.
|
| Switching to other OS is not an option for me at this point.
| Everything else is even worse. Windows is a piece of malware at
| this point ( _in addition_ to being a UX consistency
| clusterfuck and Microsoft 's insistence on making touchscreens
| a thing), desktop Linux is as much of a nightmare as it's
| always been.
| kristianp wrote:
| This reminds me of "old calculator" for Windows, which installs
| the calculator from windows 7 on your system. From windows 8 the
| calculator has a bloated feeling scalable ui that's never the
| right size when you change from external monitor to laptop
| screen.
| tveyben wrote:
| Yep - same with the w10 calc, you can no longer move it with
| WIN-ARROW, as it scales to half the monitor... I guess I should
| try to copy the W7 calc (which also have great shortcuts F5 /F6
| to toggle between the normal/binary (programmer?) modes -
| really handy for a quick decimal to hex conversion - I miss
| that...
| ethical wrote:
| Oh yes! this is marvellous! thank you, I just needed a modern web
| browser and a fix for the HTTPS issues (all the recent ones
| become unsupported)! I agree on the security front. If you have
| hygenic browsing habbits, appart from driveby, and phishing, you
| might be ok. I suppose a crond Clam routine scan may help. I do
| like Ubuntu, it works really well on the core duo 32bit iMac. But
| I shall try Lion with these fixes for a while. :-)
| astone26 wrote:
| I had some interest in the last few months working with macOS
| 9.2. Got it running through a few different emulation options.
| The main issues I saw was that there is no morsel web browser.
| SSL support is limited even if you manage to get an updated
| version of Classilla. Another issue is that development is
| extremely limited. Would be interesting to have a modern version
| of 9.2. I would give it a proper go.
| vlod wrote:
| Not sure if you can find it, but there used to be "Cyberdog".
| Maybe that will fit your needs?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog
| stuaxo wrote:
| Lovely, the older versions did indeed exude more wonder.
|
| It's a shame they have let some of these parts die and locked
| down other bits.
|
| Having a media player that doesn't accept other codeca by default
| is just mean.
| xattt wrote:
| I don't think there's a modern-day equivalent of the joy and
| breath of fresh air that was the first couple of months of my MBP
| 3,1. There was the clever use of magnets throughout the design,
| the Front Row UI for "Netflix-and-chilling" before Netflix was
| widespread, and iTunes and iSync that just worked with your own
| devices (albeit with some intermediary software).
|
| I was coming from a decade of Windows and a summer of Ubuntu 7.04
| that I would, from time-to-time, spend hours customizing to look
| like Mac OS. Also coming to terms that I just wanted, and could
| afford, the real thing was very freeing.
| linguae wrote:
| My feelings about Mac OS X are similar to the author's. I
| switched from a Windows XP/FreeBSD dual boot configuration to Mac
| OS X Tiger back in 2006 when I bought my first modern Mac, a Core
| Duo MacBook. I've remained a Mac OS X user from Tiger all the way
| to Mojave. Mac OS X in the 2000s to me was heads-and-shoulders
| better than the competition. It had a well-designed user
| interface, and most applications conformed to the Apple Human
| Interface Guidelines. It also provided me a Unix shell whenever I
| needed it. In my opinion Mac OS X peaked at Snow Leopard; in
| fact, I'd be comfortable using Snow Leopard (or even Tiger) as my
| daily driver today if it supported current hardware and if there
| were a modern web browser for it. It was a nice marriage of NeXT
| technology and an updated version of the venerable Macintosh user
| interface. It felt much more pleasant than Windows of the era
| (though I admit I liked Windows 7), and the desktop environments
| for Linux and the BSDs simply didn't compare.
|
| Then came the Tim Cook era, and with it came the gradual locking
| down of the Mac, both in terms of hardware (for example, the
| soldering of formerly upgradable components such as RAM and
| storage) and software (for example, notarization). The user
| interface also gradually started adopting more iOS influences,
| which I think take away from the desktop experience. Due to my
| disappointment with Apple's direction (especially since roughly
| 2016), I opted not to upgrade my aging 2013 MacBook Air and 2013
| Mac Pro with new Macs, instead switching to a Microsoft Surface
| Pro (running Windows 10) and a custom Ryzen 3900X build (which
| runs both Windows 10 and FreeBSD). I miss macOS, but I enjoy the
| openness of PCs, and I enjoy the flexibility of Windows and
| FreeBSD.
|
| I am keeping an eye on two very interesting projects that attempt
| to replicate the spirit of early Mac OS X: helloSystem
| (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) and airyxOS
| (https://airyx.org/). Both projects are based on a FreeBSD
| foundation, but the major difference between the projects is
| airyxOS is a much more ambitious attempt to reimplement macOS's
| infrastructure (even going as far as to aim for supporting
| "trivial" Cocoa applications), while helloSystem has different
| (Qt) underpinnings, with an emphasis on replicating the Mac OS X
| look-and-feel and promoting adherence to the Macintosh Human
| Interface Guidelines. If these projects become successful, this
| will provide people who desire the early Mac OS X experience
| modern systems that will maintain that experience.
| lostgame wrote:
| I cannot use Linux or BSD, as - for instance - I am an almost
| 20-year daily user of Logic Pro.
|
| I'd lose access to 20 or so years of musical projects, and I'd
| have to get used to some completely new DAW, none of which
| appeal to me.
|
| I also do iOS and WatchOS development as my main source of
| income, meaning I'm completely stuck on MacOS. I make a lot of
| money doing it and it's kept me solidly employed for a decade.
|
| So - while I personally can't jump over to any alternative OS
| without shooting myself in the foot - maybe I can suggest these
| to friends who possibly could, or are thinking about
| alternatives to MacOS. :)
| redwall_hp wrote:
| I don't use Logic, but I fairly recently decided to pick up
| digital music as a hobby (I like Studio one and Reaper) and
| have found that VSTs are a huge issue with that. I own
| Arturia's Analog Lab, which I don't imagine works on
| Linux...and buying a non-Intel Mac in the future is also a
| point of issue since I don't imagine Vocaloid4 voice banks
| work on M1 without running your entire DAW in Rosetta mode.
|
| Once again, it's clear that despite my preference for MacOS
| and Linux, Windows is the only way forward for long-term
| compatibility with software that isn't produced as an ongoing
| service. Whether it's specialty software that isn't updated
| constantly forever, or games, the lack of commitment to
| backwards compatibility is destructive.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I feel bad for the people locked-in to MacOS for petty
| reasons like that. On switching to Linux I had to leave
| behind a couple years of Ableton Live project files which was
| disappointing, but it also pushed me to use Bitwig which
| besides being better in most respects, had cross-platform
| project files. I sympathize with you, and I'm glad you're
| sharing this message. Vendor lock-in is a sin against god.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Those two projects are super cool! I'm more than a little
| disappointed that their visual designs appear be to be inspired
| by modern flat macOS, as opposed to classic aqua (either in its
| earliest form or its Leopard incarnation).
| [deleted]
| bluedino wrote:
| This is a simple, but elegant design for a site
| leonry wrote:
| I once tried to get Perian working on High Sierra. Unfortunately,
| it always ran indefinitely without playing any video whatsoever.
| I eventually ended up calling ffplay from the terminal. I might
| try one of the solutions that are on the site if needed again.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Author here! You need QuickTime 10.2 (Mountain Lion) or older
| to use third party codecs like Perian or my updated FFusion. I
| managed to patch QuickTime 10.2 to work on Mavericks (on the
| website), but I would not expect it to work on High Sierra.
|
| You _can_ use QuickTime 7 on High Sierra with third party
| codecs. I am not a fan of QuickTime 7.
| leonry wrote:
| Ah, that explains it! Thank you for the insight. I'd stick to
| ffplay then.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| What, no Tiger/PPC?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I prefer older Apple software, but I have no particular
| affection for older _hardware_ , except insofar as it allows me
| to run my favorite OS. (See also:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31206278)
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| I've been working on a little thing :) https://leopard.sh/
| userbinator wrote:
| Ironically, the Hackintosh community might be helpful if you want
| to run older OS X on newer hardware, since they have lots of
| knowledge about drivers (and have even written some.)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I'm actually using a Hackintosh! Mavericks is my favorite
| operating system, but there's no question that modern CPUs are
| superior to older and slower ones. OS X releases won't boot on
| Intel platforms newer than what existed at the time of their
| introduction. Someone with deep knowledge of XNU could fix this
| with a custom kernel and/or runtime patches, but I'm not that
| person.
|
| When I decided to downgrade to Mavericks, my initial plan was
| to use a type 1 hypervisor with GPU passthrough for close-to-
| bare-metal performance on modern Intel platforms.
| Unfortunately, I have never been able make GPU passthrough work
| under Mavericks. I tried two different Mavericks-compatible
| graphics cards, a GTX 780 6GB and a GTX 780 Ti. In both cases,
| passthrough works fine in High Sierra, but not in the older
| releases I wanted to run.
|
| Then I discovered that in 2017, a developer named Bronya had
| released a custom Mavericks kernel with Ryzen compatibility, to
| little fanfare. I ran down to microcenter and bought the just-
| released 16-core Ryzen 3950x, and went about building what
| would probably have been the most powerful Mavericks machine on
| the planet. It _worked_ , but only when graphics acceleration
| was disabled. My GTX 780 Ti froze after logging in. My GTX 780
| displayed a beautiful desktop in full resolution, but the
| entire machine slowed to a crawl when it was in use. Opening
| new Finder windows took upwards of 60 seconds, perhaps related
| to a cryptic message that kept appearing in the console:
| "kernel: NVDA: Channel Timeout!"
|
| I suspect that Bronya's kernel has some sort of bug with
| Kepler-series nVidia GPUs, in which case, a different
| Mavericks-compatible GPU would have worked. Unfortunately, I
| could not get my hands on an alternate GPU in time for
| Microcenter's 7-day return window, and I decided to cut my
| losses and return everything. Bronya's kernel is also closed
| source.
|
| Instead, I built a new Hackintosh around an Intel Core i7 4790K
| (4C 8T 4 Ghz), the GTX 780 6 GB I already had, and 32 GB of the
| fastest DDR3 memory I could find (2400 MHz). This is the
| machine I'm typing on right now, and I think it's just about
| the fastest hardware Mavericks can run on if single-core
| performance is prioritized. It more than holds its own against
| modern hardware.
|
| I mostly haven't been able to ask for help in Hackintosh
| forums, because no one else is interested in trying to run such
| old releases. If anyone else is trying to build a Mavericks-
| compatible Hackintosh, please get in touch and I'll do my best
| to help.
|
| I would like to try Ryzen again some day, with an AMD GPU.
| rexreed wrote:
| I have a Mac mini on OSX 10.10.5 (Yosemite) that can't be
| upgraded for various reasons (in part due to VMWare Fusion 6).
| Slowly the number of apps I have been using on that machine has
| been dying. I can't run Discord native Mac app, and have had to
| resort to the web app, among other things. I understand why
| companies drop support for older OS versions from their
| products,but it would be nice to provide some continued lifeline
| when there's practical reasons for not being able to do an OS
| upgrade.
| sgt wrote:
| That's really cool, although I don't share the feelings about
| macOS with the author.
|
| People have been complaining about Apple ever since I started
| using Mac OS X in 2003, and of course before that as well. For
| each release, someone on Slashdot was complaining about it being
| too Windows-like, or too locked down, or the UX was just all
| wrong.
|
| All in all, I feel it's been a ride well worth being a part of.
| Right now I'm on Mojave and to me that's probably the most ideal
| macOS experience I've ever seen.
| danieldk wrote:
| For me it is a curved function.
|
| I started in the Tiger/Leopard era (2007) and I loved the
| hardware and OS X. After the introduction of the iPad there was
| a slow and painful decline, culminating in the terrible
| butterfly keyboard and really buggy macOS versions. I dabbled
| in Linux desktops again and mostly prepared to abandon the
| Apple ecosystem.
|
| The last few years Apple seems to care about the Mac again.
| Apple Silicon is awesome and the last two macOS versions have
| been stellar for me (especially on M1 CPUs). The macOS
| ecosystem is very exciting again.
| sgt wrote:
| Yes, I am planning an M1 as well. You are right, times in the
| Apple world is super exciting right now. Mac is the soul of
| Apple.
| azalemeth wrote:
| I'm also on 10.14. The combination of 32-bit app support (hello
| Illustrator CS6 that I have a legal license for), a filesystem
| that trusts me and snappy-as-hell performance is all I need.
| I'm annoyed that some apps are starting to have 10.15 as a
| minimum requirement, but, honestly, I'm pretty happy.
| icedchai wrote:
| I still run 10.14 because I have an app I'm too cheap to
| upgrade. Also it runs great on my 2014 iMac 5K.
| [deleted]
| asdff wrote:
| I still use a 2012 macbook pro that I've kept on mojave. 16gb of
| ram and an ssd (two internal sata 3.0 bays in fact when you
| remove the superdrive) means hardware updates aren't very
| compelling. the lack of 32 bit support and more security hoops i
| have to jump through with new versions means os updates aren't
| very compelling either. If there are beefy compute things to do
| its not going to be done locally for my work anyhow so I'm not
| feeling limited by the cpu or integrated graphics. Here I remain
| typing on this thing until the wheels fall off. I just replaced
| the battery too so I'm hoping for another 10 years. Love to see
| more software support for these old OSs. They still work and have
| users.
| mch82 wrote:
| Is there any need for original OS X install discs? I've got a set
| headed to electronics recycling.
|
| Edit: from around 2001
| icybox wrote:
| maybe get in touch with folks at archive.org ?
| (https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-
| donat...)
| lproven wrote:
| Sell them!
|
| Or offer them online, for instance in the FB VintageMacs group,
| or the LowEndMac.com mailing lists, or somewhere.
|
| I am sure you will find many takers.
|
| Never ever throw away or recycle working computer kit. Someone
| somewhere will want it.
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