[HN Gopher] New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS
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New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS
Author : kasajian
Score : 303 points
Date : 2025-11-20 20:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| Klonoar wrote:
| This has been a slow going effort for a few years now, it's not
| "new".
| skynetv2 wrote:
| > A BSD-based OS project that aims to provide source and binary
| compatibility with macOS(r) and a similar user experience.
|
| I am curious - what is the motivation for this project?
|
| Is it to replicate macOS? - If yes, why?
|
| Is it to provide application compatibility on a non-macOS? If
| yes, why a full OS? Why not take the route like Wine or other
| such layers that make compatibility possible? Also, is there such
| a need for running macOS apps on a non-macOS? Who is the target
| audience?
|
| Would the energy be better spent in making Linux more stable or
| usable for the general public?
|
| If its just a hobby, sure, that is well & good.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| I would much rather emulate linux apps on a more stable and
| consistent OS than vice versa. The sheer number of toolkits and
| window managers leaves my head spinning, and unifying their
| behavior even before you can begin to improve it feels like a
| nightmare.
|
| I personally don't care much about the dock or the look and
| feel or whatever; I just want access to the usability of macos
| without having to accept how closed it is.
| astro1138 wrote:
| If it is no longer closed, it might proliferate just like
| Linux once it gathers a critical amount of users. :)
| eikenberry wrote:
| It's hard to get a more consistent and stable kernel than
| Linux, not counting academic or experimental kernels w/o
| extensive hardware support.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| I'm not referring to the kernel at all. It's the morass of
| the userland--three decades of catering to the expectations
| of IBM PC/windows users have led to... inconsistent and
| underwhelming results. If I wanted to use 1980s UX, I would
| have switched to windows or linux decades ago.
|
| But what am I saying? Consistent emacs bindings across all
| text forms is actually from the 1970s. Maybe I'm the
| problem....
| rhet0rica wrote:
| A lot of these questions are answered here:
| https://ravynos.com/faq
|
| To summarize...
|
| There is a WINE-analogous project, called Darling:
| https://www.darlinghq.org/
|
| The goal for ravynOS is to be analogous to ReactOS. Much like
| ReactOS and WINE, ravynOS and Darling share a lot of Cocoa
| code.
|
| For the problem of OpenStep implementations specifically, a
| bespoke software stack has the benefit of being able to put
| Mach messaging into the kernel, where it is much more
| performant.
|
| They chose the FreeBSD kernel over Darwin for the sake of
| hardware compatibility (though of course NeXT Mach is one of
| the most widely-ported kernels of all time...)
|
| There is also overlap with GNUstep, helloSystem, and other
| projects in the broader "open-source Mac/NeXT" space, though
| ravynOS (obviously) prefers BSD/MIT/Apache-style licensing over
| GNU-style licensing. Nevertheless, ravynOS currently uses the
| GNUstep libobjc2 runtime, a bit like how most of the Unix world
| used to depend on gcc.
| 9dev wrote:
| > There is a WINE-analogous project, called Darling:
| https://www.darlinghq.org/
|
| Missed opportunity to call it Cider.
| mlyle wrote:
| There's already been a Cider; it used some Wine code to
| ease porting games to MacOS.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| For reasons that I do not understand, the company behind
| Cider pivoted to real estate investing, and got out of
| the tech field entirely
| tracker1 wrote:
| Hard Cider
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > of course NeXT Mach is one of the most widely-ported
| kernels of all time...
|
| actually the broader Mach kernel, not specifically the NeXT
| variant, is the one with a documented history of extensive
| portability
| linguae wrote:
| The NeXT variant did run on the following architectures:
|
| 1. Motorola 68k (the original NeXT hardware had 68030 and
| 68040 chips)
|
| 2. Intel x86 (NeXTSTEP 3.1 for Intel was released in 1993)
|
| 3. HP PA-RISC (I have an OPENSTEP 4.2 CD that can run on
| Motorola 68k, x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC hardware)
|
| 4. Sun SPARC
|
| 5. 32-bit PowerPC (Rhapsody, the original Mac OS X 1.0 that
| was essentially still Rhapsody, and of course Mac OS X from
| Cheetah through Leopard)
|
| 6. 64-bit PowerPC (Power Mac G5 and iMac G5)
|
| 7. Intel x86-64 (starting from Mac OS X Tiger all the way
| to macOS Tahoe)
|
| 8. 32-bit ARM (iOS on early iPhones with 32-bit ARM chips)
|
| 9. 64-bit ARM
|
| I could be forgetting other platforms, but these are the
| ones I know from the top of my head.
| rhet0rica wrote:
| Indeed--I meant specifically the NeXT branch of the
| family tree because of this exhaustingly long list.
|
| I would very much like to see that quad-fat OS4.2 CD;
| most NeXT releases around that era drop PA-RISC and are
| only tri-fat. I only have a 3.3 RISC (HPPA+SPARC) ISO for
| HPPA coverage.
|
| The big ones you're missing are the Intel i860 (used as a
| graphics accelerator on NeXTdimension video processing
| boards--also the original target platform for the Win NT
| kernel) and the Motorola 88k family, which was briefly
| explored for the "NeXT RISC machine" in the mid-90s; only
| one prototype is known to exist. There were non-NeXT
| ports of Mach to m88k, which may have influenced the
| decision.
|
| Of course, if we add in the other branches of the Mach
| family the number of ports gets absurd! It originated on
| the VAX; OSF/1 adds MIPS and AXP to the list...
| ultimately RISC-V and Itanium are the only significant
| >=32-bit CPUs of the last forty years to not see some
| kind of Mach port.
|
| But--the ultimate point is that the lion's share of
| actual work porting the kernel to new hardware is thanks
| to NeXT and/or NeXT cosplaying as Apple.
| cestith wrote:
| They had chosen a FreeBSD base. The most recent forum posts
| suggest throwing away most of the FreeBSD base and going with
| Mach-o. That actually makes their goals of getting to macOS
| compatibility a bit simpler but it's less interesting to me.
| linguae wrote:
| I'm not affiliated with ravynOS, but I've been periodically
| following the project for a few years.
|
| The main page (https://ravynos.com/) expresses the philosophy
| of ravynOS:
|
| "We love macOS, but we're not a fan of the ever-closing
| hardware and ecosystem. So, we are creating ravynOS -- an OS
| aimed to provide the finesse of macOS with the freedom of
| FreeBSD."
|
| rayvnOS seems to be designed for people who love macOS,
| particularly its interface, its UI guidelines, and its
| ecosystem of applications, but who do not like the direction
| that Apple has moved toward under Tim Cook (soldered RAM,
| limited and inflexible hardware choices, notarization, iOS-
| influenced interface changes, increased pushiness with
| advertising Apple's subscription services, etc.) and who would
| be unhappy with either Windows or the Linux desktop.
|
| Speaking for myself, I used to daily-drive Macs from 2006
| through 2021, but I now daily-drive PCs running Windows due
| primarily to the lack of upgradable RAM in ARM Macs. I'm not a
| big fan of Windows, but I need some proprietary software
| packages such as Microsoft Office. This makes switching to
| desktop Linux difficult.
|
| It would be awesome using what is essentially a community-
| driven clone of macOS, where I could continue using a Mac-like
| operating system without needing to worry about Apple's future
| directions.
|
| On the Unix side of things, I believe the decision to base
| ravynOS on FreeBSD rather than on Linux may make migrating from
| macOS to ravynOS easier, since macOS is based on a hybrid
| Mach/BSD kernel, and since many of the command-line tools that
| ship with macOS are from the BSDs. This is known as Darwin.
| It's not that a Mac clone can't be built on top of Linux, but
| FreeBSD is closer to Darwin than Linux is.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| So somehow running MacOS in 2025 on hot, loud, horrible
| battery life x86 based computers is a good thing?
|
| Not to mention x86 Mac apps are not long for this world. I
| can't think of a single application I would miss moving from
| Macs to Windows. It's more about the hardware and the
| integration with the rest of my Apple devices.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Notes and Reminders are extremely good at what they do, and
| the synchronization with their iOS equivalents is flawless
| from what I can tell... and fat chance you get to uproot
| such a thing to a non-Apple OS.
|
| Third party apps other than for media editing seem to be
| rare, I think Apple has gobbled or rug pulled much of its
| independent software vendor ecosystem.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Apple Mail also is in my eyes the only generic mail
| client out there that really "gets it".
|
| Thunderbird has always felt clunky in comparison and the
| recent redesign just made it a different kind of clunky.
| Everything else is either too minimal (Geary), tries to
| clone old style Outlook (Evolution), or is tied to/favors
| a particular provider (Gmail, Outlook, etc).
| RussianCow wrote:
| This. I use Linux as my primary OS (with KDE) and my main
| complaint, by far, is the email/calendar situation.
| Mail.app simultaneously _just works_ and gets out of my
| way, and I haven 't seen a Linux email client come close
| to replicating that.
|
| Every few years I convince myself I'll create a better
| email client for Linux, and I always start the project
| enthusiastically and stop soon after, when I get just far
| enough to be reminded of how complicated email is. Maybe
| someday I'll take a sabatical and actually do it...
| andsoitis wrote:
| > I always start the project enthusiastically and stop
| soon after, when I get just far enough to be reminded of
| how complicated email is.
|
| What are some of the things you're thinking of?
| Someone wrote:
| Is there a reason you cannot clone an existing client
| with technically solid mail handling and build a new UI
| on top of it?
| linguae wrote:
| Come to think of it, it just dawned on me that most of
| the proprietary Mac programs I've used on Mac OS X/macOS
| (as opposed to the classic Mac OS) are either from Apple
| (Preview.app, Dictionary.app, iPhoto/Photos, iTunes/Apple
| Music, Keynote, iMovie, GarageBand), Microsoft (Office,
| Teams), or are Electron apps like Zoom and Slack. The
| only non-Microsoft, non-Electron third-party proprietary
| applications I've used on my Macs in the past 19 years
| are from the Omni Group, particularly OmniOutliner (which
| came bundled with my 2006 MacBook) and OmniGraffle.
|
| It seems that what I miss the most about using a Mac
| whenever I'm on Windows or Linux is Apple's bundled apps,
| not necessarily third-party Mac apps since I never used
| them much to begin with. Makes me think harder.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| That's what I was implying when I said the integration.
|
| As far as indie apps, BBEdit will survive the heat death
| of the universe and has made it through every Apple
| transition since at least System 7 in 1992.
|
| Funny enough, I've only had one Apple computer during
| each era - an Apple //e (65C02), a Mac LC II (68K), A
| PowerMac 6100/60 (classic Mac PPC), Mac Mini G4 (OS X
| PPC), a Core Duo Mac Mini (x86) and now a MacBook M2 Air.
|
| I was never really that interested in x86 Macs and I just
| bought cheso Windows PCs that I really didn't use that
| much outside of work except web browsing and back in the
| day iTunes.
| grvbck wrote:
| > BBEdit will survive the heat death of the universe
|
| With GraphicConverter by its side.
| adastra22 wrote:
| This description really resonates with me, so I guess I'm a
| potential user.
|
| I've been running macOS most of my life. In college I ran
| Linux on my laptops, but I switched back to macOS as the user
| experience was better - I could spend far less time messing
| with things and instead rely on system defaults and first
| party apps.
|
| Year by year though I feel more like I don't own my computer.
| I've tried switching back to Linux, but I always give up
| because despite the freedom, it starts feeling like a chore.
| Even Asahi Linux on macOS hardware I couldn't get into.
|
| The rayvnOS vision is something I could get behind. A fully
| packaged, macOS-like user experience, where the default
| settings are good and things work out of the box. I'd LOVE to
| have that as on option.
|
| Linux compatibility or even macOS binary compatibility
| matters less to me than, say, an out of the box Time Machine
| like backup tool based on ZFS snapshots. So FreeBSD makes
| sense from that perspective.
| theodric wrote:
| I guess drivers are important, which is a good reason for
| choosing FreeBSD :)
|
| It's a shame that OpenDarwin didn't continue. PureDarwin
| seems to exist, but progress is understandably slow.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system
|
| https://www.puredarwin.org/#beta
| rollcat wrote:
| > soldered RAM
|
| Hold on a minute.
|
| It's not "soldered". It's _integrated with the SoC_. The
| benefit is memory latency and bandwidth.
|
| If you know Framework, their entire mission is to build
| upgradeable laptops, and they keep delivering. Now they also
| wanted to build an incredibly powerful, but small and quiet
| desktop. They went directly to AMD, asked their engineers to
| make the memory upgradeable. AMD worked really hard and said
| not possible, not unless you want all of these cores to sit
| idle.
|
| https://frame.work/blog/framework-desktop-deep-dive-ryzen-
| ai...
|
| The world has moved on. Just as you no longer have discrete
| cache chips or discrete FPUs, you can't do discrete memory
| anymore - unless you don't need that level of performance, in
| which case CAMM is still an excellent choice.
|
| But that's not what Apple does. M1 redefined the low-end. It
| will remain a great choice in 5 years, even when macOS kills
| it off - Asahi remains very decent.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > The world has moved on
|
| we're talking about laptops, right?
| doug-moen wrote:
| no, they are talking about high performance desktops,
| mostly. They link to the Framework desktop, which has 256
| GB/s memory bandwith. For comparison, the Apple Mac Pro
| has 800 GB/s memory bandwidth. Neither manufacturer is
| able to achieve these speeds using socketed memory.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > no, they are talking about high performance desktops
|
| then i don't really get the "world has moved on"-claim.
| in my bubble socketed RAM is still the way to-go, be it
| for gaming or graphics work. of course Apple-user will
| use a Mac Pro, but saying that the world _has_ moved on
| when it 's about high-performance, deluxe edge-cases is a
| bit hyperbolic.
|
| but maybe my POV is very outdated or whatever, not sure.
| everforward wrote:
| I think, but am not totally positive, this is primarily a
| concern for local LLM hardware. There are probably other
| niches, but I don't it's something most people need or
| would noticeably benefit from.
| kombine wrote:
| I have the same sentiment. I am forced to use a MacBook in my
| new job while waiting for them to procure a laptop that I can
| put Linux on. I can say that Linux with KDE Plasma desktop is
| in almost every way superior to Mac OS. Much better UX,
| configurability and core applications. And even little things
| are more polished and thought through compared to what a
| trillion dollar company was able to produce. It's really beyond
| me how people use Apple products, and it's the absolute
| majority of them in my field.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| "Better" is largely subjective. For some (including myself),
| a Windows-like paradigm like KDE uses is not desirable, and
| UI papercuts like the many that KDE has are highly visible.
| kombine wrote:
| I don't keep the record of every thing that I don't like
| about MacOS, but here's some:
|
| - cannot keep natural scrolling for trackpad whilst having
| the expected scrolling behaviour for the mouse
|
| - needs an external app for fractional display scaling
|
| - screenshot tool is objectively inferior to that in
| Plasma, eg. not clear how to annotate a screenshot or copy
| it to clipboard
|
| - Dolphin file browser is has cleaner and simpler UI, is
| more configurable and has a built-in terminal which is
| super handy.
|
| ...
| darrenf wrote:
| Can't comment on the others but I copy screenshots to the
| clipboard multiple times a day in macOS and have done for
| years. Very frequently I send them via Screen Sharing to
| another Mac and paste there, something I value hugely.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Dolphin is one of the things about KDE that bothers me,
| due to the way its windows are laid out and how they use
| margins/spacing. It just feels "wrong" in a way that even
| most other Linux file managers (including more full
| featured ones that still have a menubar) don't.
| al_borland wrote:
| macOS has markup tools for screenshots (or any image)
| built right into Quicklook and Preview. It's not as rich
| as something like SnagIt, but it's good enough for adding
| some text, arrows, shapes, redactions, etc.
| rollcat wrote:
| > needs an external app for fractional display scaling
|
| Huh? I go to Settings -> Displays -> Advanced -> Show
| resolutions as list -> Show all resolutions -> you can
| literally pick *whatever* your screen will advertise?
|
| *Maybe* that's one or two clicks too many? Arguably you
| don't want non-technical users to accidentally set up
| blurry text.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > - screenshot tool is objectively inferior to that in
| Plasma, eg. not clear how to annotate a screenshot or
| copy it to clipboard
|
| I'm not sure what to make of this. When you take a
| screenshot (i.e. via cmd-shift-3 or cmd-shift-4), right
| there in the window that pops up are the annotation tools
| and a button to copy to clipboard?
| Aloisius wrote:
| You can also screenshot directly to the clipboard by
| adding control to the keyboard shortcut (e.g. control-
| shift-command-3).
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| There are objective criteria that macOS definitely fails
| at. Various government agencies here in the states can't
| use macs even if they wanted to due to lack of #a11y
| support or the ability to load their own root cert stores.
|
| I agree with you that for MOST people, MOST of the
| complaints boil down to "I just don't like the Mac UX," but
| there are organizations that cannot tolerate the risk of
| forcing employees to use equipment that doesn't follow even
| the basics of section 508 or DoD guidance.
| astrange wrote:
| What accessibility is it missing?
| mrkstu wrote:
| You can import new roots via Keychain, correct?
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Yes.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| You can't install roots for all apps, notably the app
| store. Various government agencies occasionally like to
| install apps that are not web apps.
| Aloisius wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand. What software do they expect
| to install via the App Store that can't be installed with
| the Apple's root certificates? Apple signs everything
| listed on the App Store, does it not?
|
| Also, why would they need the App Store to distribute
| software signed by their own keys anyway?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| That is a quite strange reason, as Mac and iOS have _by
| far_ the most investment in accessibility of any system.
| The amount of accessibility features both systems have is
| bewildering.
|
| Every company using Macs I've ever worked for has MDM and
| their own root certs, that's basic device management. Are
| you thinking of something else?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I use KDE _because_ it lets me emulate a macOS-like
| paradigm better than Gnome or other options can.
| rollcat wrote:
| Tried it for a while, it was death by a thousand
| papercuts.
|
| I wanted the Konsole theme to stay in sync with system
| light/dark theme. I ended up writing a pair of .desktop
| files and a helper program to talk to DBus.
|
| I want to use my computer, not configure it.
| slashdave wrote:
| Except for the trackpad, alas.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Just curious... did your employer agree to getting you a
| Lennucks Bocks 'cause you asked nice or were they frightened
| of running afoul of one of the many #a11y or security
| evaluation frameworks?
| syspec wrote:
| You keep mentioning that in this thread, but a11y on a Mac
| is considered the gold standard.
|
| Security on a Mac, the same (SIP, Keychain, Secure Enclave,
| great tools for fleet management)
|
| What specifically is in violation of "#a11y or security
| evaluation frameworks"?
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| #a11y in Mac used to be a gold standard. And FedPack in
| the 2000s made MacOS-X a good alternative to the
| confusing jumble tha was windows security. This is not
| the case in 2025.
| syspec wrote:
| Source: "trust me bro"
| pjmlp wrote:
| Lucky, here Linux lives on servers, or desktop VMs.
| andai wrote:
| It would be great if it runs on mac too. macOS doesn't have
| much compatibility with itself.
| gs17 wrote:
| > Also, is there such a need for running macOS apps on a non-
| macOS?
|
| Arguably there's a need for running macOS apps on macOS even.
| E.g. my parents are stuck having an old Intel Mac Pro around on
| an old OS for a few 32-bit programs (not sure if it changed,
| but IIRC you couldn't run an OS that supported them as a VM on
| Apple Silicon). Pretty soon Rosetta 2 will go away as well.
| mtillman wrote:
| Mac OS without the background ads garbage or the constant
| blocking of call-home requests would be nice.
| platevoltage wrote:
| Where are you seeing ads?
| mtillman wrote:
| Maps, news, stocks are all installed by default and
| supported by ads. Opting out eliminates personalization.
| One needs to install an app like lulu to block background
| calls even with personalization turned off. This started
| with the twitter integration many years again and while
| social is no longer tightly integrated, the philosophy
| around user fingerprinting "while not being tied to your
| identity" is still very much alive and well in a default
| macOS install.
| cestith wrote:
| That's all ad-supported shovelware. I use a Mac all day
| long for work. I never use Maps, News, or Stocks. I also
| don't use Weather, Music, Mail, Pages, Numbers, FaceTime,
| Keynotes, Contacts, Reminders, Photo Booth, Books,
| Dictionary, Stickies, Voice Memos, AppleTV, GarageBand,
| or Image Playground.
|
| I do use Preview quite a bit. I sometimes use TextEdit,
| Terminal, or Safari, but I more often use Vim, iTerm2,
| Firefox, DuckDuckGo Browser, or sometimes Chrome.
|
| It helps not to judge a whole OS by three free apps
| included with it. Microsoft meanwhile puts ads in the
| main menu and in the task bar. I wouldn't be surprised if
| the Windows desktop wallpaper on the Home editions become
| ads.
| Aloisius wrote:
| There aren't any ads in Maps - at least, not yet.
| deva502 wrote:
| what are you smoking ?
| ramon156 wrote:
| Spelled windows wrong
| danans wrote:
| > Would the energy be better spent in making Linux more stable
| or usable for the general public?
|
| Linux is stable and widely used, whether as Android, Ubuntu,
| WSL on Windows or Crostini on ChromeOS (itself Linux under the
| hood).
|
| The general public buy _products_ like Macs, Lenovos, Steam
| Decks, Chromebooks or Frameworks. Nobody buys a "Linux".
|
| Linux and it's ecosystem are _features_ of those products, not
| products themselves.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Obviously the idea was about a Linux desktop - whether that
| means investment in toolkits like Gnome, KDE, core infra like
| X11 or Wayland, or distributions like Debian.
| danans wrote:
| Yes, but Linux's desktop environment(s) is a _feature_ of a
| product, not a product itself. You can see that Framework
| themselves markets Linux that way: https://frame.work/linux
|
| If the goal is to make the Linux desktop more popular with
| the general public as the previous comment suggested, then
| you must create a product built exclusively around it that
| is marketed to the general public. There doesn't seem to be
| much interest in this
| opengrass wrote:
| Can it run stock macOS programs like Photos? I want a non-chaotic
| way to import my old fart's iPhone galleries without a Mac Mini
| (HEIC and Lives are annoying), and docker-osx/vm's don't work for
| everyone.
| prmoustache wrote:
| They say source-compatible, not binary-compatible.
|
| GNUstep failed to get traction, I doubt they can do much
| better.
| darkwater wrote:
| It's a totally different path but you could try Immich to do
| that.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| This is so cool, the little mini screenshots look gorgeous
| because it replicates MacOS. I'm not sure if a lot of people feel
| the same but over the years I always thought it was a shame that
| Linux' overall UX and aesthetics seemed a little bit more rushed
| and "crowd sourced" (in the sense that it felt diverse in terms
| of ui opinions and taste etc). It almost makes me want to try
| Linux again just for that look and feel (because I love my Mac's
| but would like something different and more free)
| niek_pas wrote:
| > the little mini screenshots look gorgeous because it
| replicates MacOS.
|
| I have the opposite reaction. To me the screenshots look like
| someone tried to replicate macOS but failed. The text
| antialiasing is off, the font is different (and worse), the
| border-radii on menus are off, etc.
|
| Besides, the actual screenshots of the current OS
| (https://ravynos.com/screenshots) are... really rough.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| i didn't expect it to look so...dated[0]? the things are
| approximately where they are on MacOS, but it looks like
| Window 2000/ME/98.
|
| [0]or retro, for anyone who's offended by me calling it
| dated.
| mig39 wrote:
| To me, it looks a lot like Uncanny Valley macOS. Yes, it's
| macOS, but something's just not right. Maybe the fonts don't
| look right, or the spacing of the icons on the dock?
| nogridbag wrote:
| Those mini screenshots do not look like anything like what's in
| the "Screenshots" section:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/svQaeCa
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| Wow that looks very different to what's on the front page!
| Where did you find that and where can we see how it really
| looks then?
| linguae wrote:
| I've been paying attention to this project periodically over the
| past few years. It would be nice to have a FOSS clone of macOS,
| similar to how FreeDOS, ReactOS, and Haiku are FOSS clones of MS-
| DOS, Windows, and BeOS, respectively.
|
| The only thing is that this project has been quite slow going,
| which is similar to the histories of FreeDOS, ReactOS, and Haiku,
| where it took a long time for those projects to get to a usable
| state. It is a lot of work cloning an operating system,
| especially with an aim for binary compatibility. The Linux kernel
| benefited from the fact that there was an entire GNU ecosystem of
| tools that can run on Unix, and even in that case, the GNU
| ecosystem was seven years in the making in 1991 when the first
| version of the Linux kernel was released. It would've taken much
| longer for Linux to have been developed had GNU tools not
| existed.
|
| Writing an entire operating system is long, hard work, even when
| provided the resources of companies like Microsoft, Apple, and
| Google. Hopefully projects like ravynOS and the similar
| HelloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) will lead to
| FOSS clones of macOS eventually, even if we need to wait another
| 5-10 years.
| wwweston wrote:
| Sometimes it strikes me that something like this might be one
| of the better litmus tests for AI -- if it's really good enough
| to start 10x-ing engineers (let alone replacing them) it should
| be more common for more projects like this _should_ begin to
| accelerate to practical usability.
|
| If not, maybe the productivity dividends are mostly shallow.
| adastra22 wrote:
| This was my thought here as well. Getting one piece of
| software to match another piece of software is something that
| agentic AI tools are _really_ good at. Like, the one area
| where they are truly better than humans.
|
| I expect that with the right testing framework setup and
| accessible to Claude Code or Codex, you could iterate your
| way to full system compatibility in a mostly automated way.
|
| If anyone on the team is interested in doing this, I'd love
| to speak to them.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Sure. In the meantime productivity is still useful.
| atherton94027 wrote:
| The problem is that many of these clean room
| reimplementations require contributors to not have seen any
| of the proprietary source. You can't guarantee that with ai
| because who knows which training data was used
| soared wrote:
| Are those OSes actually that strict about contributors?
| That's got to be impossible to verify and I've only seen
| clean room stuff when a competitor is straight up copying
| another competitor and doesn't want to get sued
| pseudalopex wrote:
| ReactOS froze development to audit their code.[1]
| Circumstantial evidence was enough to call code not
| clean. WINE are strict as well. It is impossible to
| verify beyond all doubt of course.
|
| [1] https://reactos.org/wiki/Audit
| pjmlp wrote:
| We should add that the Windows source leaked, thus
| ReactOS had to be extra careful regarding contributions.
| platevoltage wrote:
| I had never thought of this until now. Is the clean-room
| approach officially done with? I guess we have to wait for
| a case to be ruled on.
| skissane wrote:
| > You can't guarantee that with ai because who knows which
| training data was used
|
| There are no guarantees in life, but with macOS you can
| know it is rather unlikely any AI was trained on (recent)
| Apple proprietary source code - because very little of it
| has been leaked to the general public - and if it hasn't
| leaked to the general public, the odds are low any
| mainstream AI would have been trained on it. Now,
| significant portions of macOS have been open-sourced - but
| presumably it is okay for you to use that under its open
| source license - and if not, you can just compare the AI-
| generated code to that open source code to evaluate
| similarity.
|
| It is different for Windows, because there have been
| numerous public leaks of Windows source code, splattered
| all over GitHub and other places, and so odds are high a
| mainstream AI has ingested that code during training (even
| if only by accident).
|
| But, even for Windows - there are tools you can use to
| compare two code bases for evidence of copying - so you can
| compare the AI-generated reimplementation of Windows to the
| leaked Windows source code, and reject it if it looks too
| similar. (Is it legal to use the leaked Windows source code
| in that way? Ask a lawyer-is someone violating your
| copyright if they use your code to do due diligence to
| ensure they're not violating your copyright? Could be "fair
| use" in jurisdictions which have such a concept-although
| again, ask a lawyer to be sure. And see A.V. ex rel.
| Vanderhye v. iParadigms, L.L.C., 562 F.3d 630 (4th Cir.
| 2009))
|
| In fact, I'm pretty sure there are SaaS services you can
| subscribe to which will do this sort of thing for you, and
| hence they can run the legal risk of actually possessing
| leaked code for comparison purposes rather than you having
| to do it directly. But this is another expense which an
| open source project might not be able to sustain.
|
| Even for Windows - the vast majority of the leaked Windows
| code is >20 years old now - so if you are implementing some
| brand new API, odds of accidentally reusing leaked Windows
| code is significantly reduced.
|
| Other options: decompile the binary, and compare the
| decompiled source to the AI-generated source. Or compile
| the AI-generated source and compare it to the Windows
| binary (this works best if you can use the exact same
| compiler, version and options as Microsoft did, or as close
| to the same as is manageable.)
| throawayonthe wrote:
| yknow what would be funny, if a project like ReactOS or
| WINE relied on the Copilot Copyright Commitment[0] for
| protection against _microsoft_ lawyers
|
| [0]https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-
| issues/2023/09/07/copilot...
|
| (though they definitely should not lol)
| mxkopy wrote:
| I've been thinking a long time about using AI to do binary
| decompilation for this exact purpose. Needless to say we're
| short of a fundamental leap forward from doing that
| willtemperley wrote:
| The organisational bottleneck still remains though. People
| need to discuss and coordinate at human speed.
|
| I think AI will likely create more fragmentation initially,
| if a 10x developer is forced to run at 0.1x they're going to
| fork a project.
|
| I believe in the AI 10x developer, but I suspect it only
| works for individuals or small teams at the moment.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| In an actual business environment, you are right that its
| not a 10x gain, more like 1.5-2x. Most of my job as an
| engineer is gathering and understanding requirements,
| testing, managing expectations, making sure everyone is on
| the same page etc...it seems only 10-20% is writing actual
| code. If I do get AI to write some code, I still need to do
| all of these other things.
|
| I have used it for my solo startups much more effectively,
| no humans to get in the way. I've used AI to replace things
| like designers and the like that I didn't have to hire (nor
| did I have the funds for that).
|
| I can build mini AI agents with my engineering skills for
| simple non-engineering tasks that might otherwise need a
| human specialist.
| TheDong wrote:
| There's also a cost problem here.
|
| Who's paying $30 to run an AI agent to run a single
| experiment that has a 20% chance of success?
|
| On large code-bases like this, where a lot of context gets
| pulled in, agents start to cost a lot very quickly, and open
| source projects like this are usually quite short on money.
| fooker wrote:
| > Who's paying $30 to run an AI agent to run a single
| experiment that has a 20% chance of success?
|
| Someone who stands to make or save (significantly) more
| than 150$ if it's successful.
|
| It doesn't have to be an unemployed contributer or student.
| Someone deploying it on a data center is the archetype
| you're looking for.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I have the unpopular opinion that like I have witness in
| person the transition from Assembly into high level
| languages, eventually many tasks that we manually write
| programs for, will be done with programable agents of some
| sort.
|
| In an AI driven OS, there will be less need for bare bones
| "classical" programming, other than the AI infrastructure.
|
| Now is this possible today, not really as the misteps from
| Google, Apple and Microsoft are showing, however eventually
| we might be there with a different programming paradigm.
|
| Having LLMs generate code is a transition step, just like we
| run to Compiler Explorer to validate how good the compiler
| optimizer happens to be.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| The website looks sleek, I get the impression that the ui for the
| os will be the same. But then when I look at the screenshots, it
| look like macOS stuck in 2008.
| wmf wrote:
| The Mac UI only got worse after that.
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| Nah. Mavericks was peak.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Who cares about sleekness? Linux has looked sleek for decades
| but still behaves like ass
| simondotau wrote:
| "Looks sleek" was only ever a surface level reason why macOS
| was a good UI. Far more important was that it was highly
| opinionated, and those opinions were very consistently
| applied, resulting in a highly predictable interface.
|
| This has been degrading over the past decade, unfortunately.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Opinionated design is a big one, but another that's equally
| as big and even more unusual in the Linux world is
| _progressive disclosure_.
|
| It basically amounts to adding lots of little power user
| features, but placing them ever so slightly out of the way
| so that newbies and less technical users don't get
| overwhelmed, but they're still within reach of those who
| can make use of them and reveal themselves as users grow
| and become more technically capable.
|
| Linux desktops tend to take a much more binary approach:
| ultra-minimalist and stripped back so far that even iPadOS
| is more capable out of the box (GNOME) or everything and
| the kitchen sink on full display (KDE).
| MangoToupe wrote:
| So long as they don't take my emacs keybindings away, they
| can do whatever they want.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > still behaves like ass
|
| huh?
| andai wrote:
| https://ravynos.com/screenshots.html
| steeleduncan wrote:
| It doesn't seem to be their focus, but this could be amazing for
| macOS build machines, and servers. There have been a number of
| changes in recent years focussed on improving the security of
| macOS when used as a Desktop OS. These work well for their
| intended purpose, but they have made macOS harder and harder to
| deploy headlessly, and use as a server.
|
| I hope to see this become an open source OS that runs the full
| xcode command line suite, deploys easily to headless machines,
| and inherits FreeBSD's server hardware compatibility.
| randyfox wrote:
| Why is every new OS project just a rehash of 60/70's tech. What
| about something new that actually attempts to move the field
| forward.
| ape4 wrote:
| How about the immutable OSes like Fedora Silverblue
| linguae wrote:
| My dream is to work on an operating system that at least gets
| us to the 1990s and 2000s when it comes to research ideas.
|
| I have a soft spot for the Smalltalk-80 environment and Lisp
| machines. They had a single address space. In my opinion, the
| two most interesting things about these environments are (1)
| their facilitation for component-based software based on live,
| dynamic objects, and (2) the malleability of the system, where
| every aspect of the system can be modified by the user in real
| time.
|
| Of course, a critical downside of Smalltalk-80 and Lisp machine
| environments is the lack of security; any piece of code can
| modify the system. There are two solutions to this that I'm
| thinking about: (1) capability-based security for objects in
| the system, and (2) work on single-address space operating
| systems that still have memory protection (Opal was a research
| system that had this design; see _Sharing and Protection in a
| Single-Address-Space Operating System_ [Chase et al. 1994]).
|
| One of the nice things about Lisp is its metaprogramming
| facilities, from macros to the metaobject protocol.
| Metaprogramming makes it feasible to implement domain-specific
| languages that make expressing problems more aligned to their
| domains.
|
| During the late 2000s and early 2010s, Alan Kay's Viewpoints
| Research Institute had a project named STEPS that investigated
| the pervasive use of DSLs to implement an entire desktop
| environment. They did not use Lisp as a substrate, but they did
| use OMeta (https://tinlizzie.org/ometa/) for handling parsing
| expression grammars (PEGs), which are used to describe many of
| the systems in STEPS. Two DSLs that immediately come to mind
| are one for describing the 2D graphics system and another for
| describing TCP.
|
| So now I've described my dream substrate: a single-address
| operating system with capability-based security, where each
| subsystem is expressed as a live object, ideally coded in a
| DSL.
|
| Now comes the interface. The programmer's interface would be
| similar to Smalltalk-80 and Lisp machines, with a live REPL for
| interactive coding. All objects can be accessed
| programmatically by sending messages to them. The end-user
| interface would be heavily based on the classic Mac OS, and
| applications would conform to human interface guidelines
| similar to System 7.5, but with some updates to reflect usage
| patterns and lessons in UI/UX that weren't known at the time.
| Application software would be similar to the OpenDoc vision,
| where components can be combined based on the user's wishes.
|
| The end result sounds like a synthesis of various Apple
| projects from the late 1980s until 1996: component-based
| applications backed by a live object system with capability-
| based security.
|
| This is my dream and is a side project I'd love to create.
| jjuran wrote:
| If you're okay with a System 6 appearance, I've already made
| one <https://github.com/jjuran/metamage_1/tree/master/68k/mod
| ules...>, for Advanced Mac Substitute
| <https://www.v68k.org/ams/>.
|
| I do appreciate Alan Kay's thinking, in particular his talk
| "Normal Considered Harmful"
| <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc>
|
| My own high-level language, Varyx, has somewhat LISPy
| internals and is very dynamic -- for example, you can
| annotate a variable with a type that's determined only at run
| time -- and has an eval() that insulates the caller from the
| payload and vice versa. You can sequester mutable state
| within a closure, which can't be cracked open. Using an
| experimental Varyx build with some bindings for Apple's Core
| Graphics API, I wrote a script that rendered an arrow cursor
| (which I donated to the ravynOS project).
|
| Perhaps we should talk. :-)
| pjmlp wrote:
| I share the sentiment, which is why someone I ended up
| gravitating around technologies somehow related to it like
| Java, .NET, and the related languages on their ecosystems.
|
| Also why despite not agreeing how Google went down with Java
| in Android, I appreciate their approach, because this kind of
| platforms apparently only get adoption with such kind of hard
| pushes, otherwise it would be yet another tiny UNIX clone.
|
| Ironically is probably the closest we have on the market from
| Inferno/Limbo ideas on a mainstream OS.
| __d wrote:
| So ... is this MallowOS?
| lathiat wrote:
| I would argue that iPadOS (built on iPhone's coat tails) moved
| the field forward significantly in terms of isolation and user
| security.
|
| While this has left a long tail of inconveniences, many
| resolved and some not, I am very confident that using 1 app on
| my iPhone/iPad will not leak data to another in any case that I
| am likely to care about as a non-significantly interesting
| person (political figure, etc).
|
| ... and for those people Apple even makes lockdown mode to move
| the bar, while acknowledging it adds extra inconvenience:
| https://support.apple.com/en-au/105120
|
| I have no such confidence about macOS, Linux or Windows, in
| fact the reverse. macOS has done the best at trying to bolt on
| some sandboxing (and linux has it too) but that's still very
| holey and not all-in like iOS/iPadOS has ended up.
|
| Yes, I know there have been many bugs and leaks in iOS but the
| security level is far and above the desktops currently, and
| designed that way from the ground up. So when they finally make
| something work like copy and paste or sharing between apps,
| etc... it's by and large done very well.
|
| It's been very difficult to add that kind of thing to Linux
| because you're trying to do the reverse and lock things down
| and it breaks everything... making it very challenging.. as
| opposed to Apple where basically nothing useful worked at the
| start (no copy/paste, one app at a time, no meaningful
| filesystem, etc).. but managed to get the product successful in
| the limited state and has slowly unlocked that stuff over time.
| Admittedly very slowly.
|
| I cannot speak for Android as I just have never used it or
| surrounded myself in info about it's design, security, etc.. it
| may well be very similar although they from my casual
| observation seemed to do a much worse job at granular privacy
| permissions (e.g. for the longest time permissions were all
| granted at install time, and so many apps want so many most
| people are blind to it.. as opposed to Apple's model where even
| if notarised for something on the app store in most cases you
| have to agree to it when the app first uses it.. I know they
| fixed that a while back but I have no idea how well things have
| transitioned to that now). As a very techy person deeply
| knowledge in many things, and using desktop Linux since 2002,
| it's kindof a hilarious personal failing that I have never used
| Android.. I really should try and resolve that at some point.
| sneak wrote:
| > _While this has left a long tail of inconveniences, many
| resolved and some not, I am very confident that using 1 app
| on my iPhone /iPad will not leak data to another in any case
| that I am likely to care about as a non-significantly
| interesting person (political figure, etc)._
|
| Log in to YouTube with one Google account. Log in to Google
| Drive with a different one.
|
| Google knows that both accounts are owned by the same person,
| because Apple lets Google's apps access the data of the
| others on the same system.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't think it's something special that Google is doing.
| I suspect they are just using the built-in _App Groups_
| functionality.
|
| Basically, it's a way for different apps from the same
| developer to share information via a data container.
| TowerTall wrote:
| Microsoft came close with Midori but bailed out and canned the
| product just before it should have been released in alfa / beta
| 1
|
| > Midori is an experimental managed code operating system that
| was in development until 2015. A joint effort by Microsoft and
| Microsoft Research, it had been reported to be a possible
| commercial implementation of the OS Singularity, a research
| project begun in 2003 to build a highly dependable OS whose
| kernel, device drivers, and application software would all be
| written in managed code. It was designed for concurrency, and
| would run a program spread across multiple nodes at once.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)
|
| https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/
| pjmlp wrote:
| Mostly because of internal politics, it was used in
| production for Bing.
|
| > While never reaching commercial release, at one time Midori
| powered all of Microsoft's natural language search service
| for the West Coast and Asia.
|
| From https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/research/project/singularity...
|
| Enjoy this recording of an internal presentation, while it is
| still available on YouTube,
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37WgsoZpf3k
|
| Joe Duffy also did a few presentations, on one of them (too
| lazy to search for the exact moment), he mentions that even
| with Midori running in front of them, the Windows team was
| very sceptical of it,
|
| "RustConf 2017 - Closing Keynote: Safe Systems Software and
| the Future of Computing by Joe Duffy"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k
|
| "Safe Systems Programming in C# and .NET"
|
| https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-
| programmi...
| delfinom wrote:
| It takes an astronomical amount of work to not only write an OS
| but handle 30 years worth of both hardware, and lessons
| learned.
|
| People do write new OSes from scratch all the time, you can see
| the result of no popularity/usage because they can't do much
| for even enthusiasts.
|
| Not to mention, if you want users, you need apps, and that
| involves trying to run what already exists or making it as easy
| as possible to port. All of that shapes the OS.
| ethin wrote:
| Because writing even a remotely modern OS is really really
| hard. I speak from experience. Even getting old hardware from
| the 90s and early 00s to work is a pain. Then of course you
| have the more modern standards (although even SATA is still
| modern for some definition of modern, but AHCI is a nightmare),
| and then you have things like modern NICs and GPUs which has
| documentation that is very hard to find, or in the case of even
| modern Intel GPUs, documentation that is 13 plus volumes and is
| absolutely massive... And the list just goes on and on and on.
| Before you know it your codebase is 100k LoC and like 80-90
| percent of it is device drivers alone. And if you thought all
| that was bad, wait until you get into ACPI...
|
| Yeah. OS dev is, I think it's safe to say, the hardest and most
| difficult project a software engineer could do, right alongside
| a modern compiler if you ditched LLVM and decided to make your
| own backend.
| platevoltage wrote:
| Even Apple got to a point where they needed to acquire
| another company because they hit a brick wall with MacOS.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Copland's failure wasn't a technology one.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Because many open an UNIX book, and rather copy what was
| already done.
|
| Note that Smalltalk, Interlisp-D, Mesa, Cedar, safe systems
| programming are also 60/70's tech, but these ones hardly anyone
| bothers to copy in such attempts.
| ctslypsmstc wrote:
| The RavynOS project would have a good chance at being binary
| compatible with Mac OSX if it copied all the Darwin libraries
| from the Darling project and used LLVM to generate all the
| appropriate dylibs. That's something I would support and
| contribute to. It could get to the point where it could run macOS
| console based applications.
|
| But if macOS binary compatibility is not the goal, then there's
| no need for a Mach-O loader - it brings nothing to the table.
| Just use ELF binaries. Although at that point there's nothing
| macOS about it - it's just a Mac-like UI facade for FreeBSD
| distro with a different API. If Ravyn doesn't want to be to macOS
| like WINE is to Windows, I don't see the point.
| stephenr wrote:
| > copied all the Darwin libraries from the Darling project and
| used LLVM to generate all the appropriate dylibs
|
| I'm just starting for the day and misread that as "...used LLM
| to generate...", and I wondered what kind of crack you were
| smoking.
| simondotau wrote:
| In future, your OS will be an agentic LLM which runs software
| by YOLOing the binaries, and then continuously fixing and
| refining the environment until it runs without crashing.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Frankly I was a bit surprised that was not what they were
| doing. As a user I'd prefer a "mere" macOS UI on top of
| FreeBSD, so long as its quality is of the same. Use Darling as
| a compatibility loader, like WINE/Proton in SteamOS.
| wowczarek wrote:
| This is all nice and well, while
| https://www.puredarwin.org/wiki/#/news/Support-Cliff-Sekel
|
| Wouldn't it be more natural if this project made use of
| XNU/Darwin... But with the way things are going, with XNU going
| more and more proprietary, I suppose FreeBSD is "close enough".
| In any case, there's nothing we can do about it but these "macOS"
| alternatives are too fragmented. I would love to see "The" macOS
| clone.
| fithisux wrote:
| I think the idea is take what you can and evolve.
|
| Keeping it x86_64 for now makes sense in many respects.
|
| But it could become a real uKernel OS in the long run.
| jjuran wrote:
| You're in luck:
| <https://github.com/ravynsoft/ravynos/discussions/529>
|
| ravynOS is moving to Darwin.
| wowczarek wrote:
| Oh, nice!
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| If you don't provide CoreFoo (for Foo in *), there's not really
| much point in talking about compatibility with macOS. I see no
| sign that they provide any of the possible CoreFoo
| libraries/frameworks.
| diebillionaires wrote:
| i'd do anything for an open source mac os clone i can run on my
| arm macbook pro. i'm sick of apple.
| fithisux wrote:
| Apple releases part of the source code of XNU, it would make much
| more sense to me, to re-create something like the original Darwin
| CD out of this for x86-64.
|
| There are a number of MacOS CLI tools and drivers for x86_64.
|
| It may be a motivation to continue work.
|
| Even commercially it could be something interesting.
|
| I am not sure if it is easier though.
|
| PureDarwin seems to do very slow progress.
| __d wrote:
| It appears they've actually made that decision: making FreeBSD
| Mach-O is too much, so XNU is the new plan ...
| pjmlp wrote:
| Repo has zero Objective-C or C++ (IO, DriverKit, MSL), hardly
| anything relevant if the goal is macOS compatibility.
|
| This considering the last macOS version before Swift was
| announced as goal.
| mk89 wrote:
| I think it's in the frameworks folder, e.g.,
| https://github.com/ravynsoft/ravynos/tree/main/Frameworks/Ap...
|
| Edit: also CoreServices
| https://github.com/ravynsoft/ravynos/tree/main/CoreServices/...
|
| Well, there is actually a lot of ObjC.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I stand corrected, you will notice that it isn't visible on
| the languages colour bar, nor C++.
| mk89 wrote:
| From the mobile version I see a 10% other and 16.1% C++.
|
| I think GH might have some issues because those two folders
| contain a lot of code (there is also C in between, but
| still), I don't know if I want to believe it's less than
| 2.6% Perl. [0]. "It's fixed".
|
| [0]: https://github.com/github-
| linguist/linguist/issues/1626
| pjmlp wrote:
| Stupid me, it appears to be affected by screen layout,
| and I completly missed C++.
|
| Thanks for the issue link.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Wine works because Microsoft spends billions on backwards
| compatibility and APIs are stable over time.
|
| Apple regularly deprecates frameworks and adds new ones at rapid
| rates. It's a moving target with the added complication of moving
| build targets.
|
| If you implement your own version of Apple's XyzKit, that might
| only be used in macOS 12 to 14, and not before or after that, so
| you put in a lot of work to essentially support binaries that
| were released between X date and Y date and that's it. And you
| have to do that for a sliding window of dates, macOS versions and
| framework releases and deprecations.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Wine works, because it doesn't cover many modern APIs, I would
| assess.
|
| New Microsoft under Satya has a different stance on anything
| WinRT related, or even newer Win32/COM APIs since Windows 8.
|
| Also .NET Framework is the Python 2 of .NET, the breaking
| changes are a reason there are still new projects being done in
| .NET Framework 4.8.x.
| fooker wrote:
| You can desugar all the modern stuff to windows api with
| first party DLLs
| pjmlp wrote:
| First party DLLs have copyright.
| fooker wrote:
| No, these are specifically 'redistributables'.
|
| In the rare case they aren't, you just require the user
| to obtain it, wink and nod.
| zorked wrote:
| Typically in Microsoft redistributables there are terms
| in the license that says they can only be licensed for
| use with a Windows license.
| geocar wrote:
| Here's the Visual Studio redistributable licensing
| requirements:
|
| https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/license-
| terms/vs2026-ga-v...
|
| There's nothing about Windows licenses in there. There is
| a specious claim that I can't modify the DLL in some
| circumstances, but I doubt that's enforceable in any
| jurisdiction Microsoft could reach me, and to the careful
| reader the license almost admits as such.
|
| If I'm NVidia in this case, these would be pretty easy to
| follow. Now I redistribute the DLL: My user downloads the
| DLL and uses my software (with the DLL) in Wine. Good for
| them. I have a happy customer. _Maybe_ Microsoft is
| unhappy, but I'm not sure what they can do besides pound
| sand: _I_ haven't violated those terms, and my user
| doesn't have any relationship with Microsoft.
|
| If I've made a mistake and the Visual Studio
| redistributable isn't typical, what exactly do you think
| _is_ a typical license from Microsoft that has the force
| you suggest?
| pjmlp wrote:
| You are missing all the OS DLLs, COM and WinRT
| components, .NET libraries, that are covered by Windows
| EULA.
|
| Also the ones downloaded directly via Windows Update from
| Microsoft servers.
| geocar wrote:
| That's not how copyright law works in the slightest.
|
| You can absolutely download a file from Microsoft's
| website and run that file on Wine and Microsoft cannot
| get a judge to hold you to any "license terms" elsewhere
| on that website. I am not your lawyer and this is not
| legal advice, you are just a moron if you think
| otherwise.
|
| Furthermore, I also don't think Microsoft would claim
| otherwise! But you are still welcome to prove me wrong by
| providing just _one_ example on their website of a
| license that you think could force me to do anything at
| all, because of a DLL _you_ can give to me (aka "a
| redistributable")
| Dwedit wrote:
| Microsoft redistributables are just the standard library.
| Most of the rest of the new DLLs are not backed by any
| system calls, just by API calls. Except of course for the
| D3DKMT stuff, that stuff is the real system calls used by
| Direct3D.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| The solution for that is to decide which period do you want to
| build support for.
|
| Trying to be binary-compatible with Tahoe may not be worth it.
| But you could make a distro binary-compatible with Snow
| Leopard.
|
| Or better, make it compatible with Ventura apps without the
| bloat of MacOS Ventura.
|
| That could give new life to old Macs. It can also give a PC a
| MacOS-like environment without having to deal with Hackintosh.
| netfortius wrote:
| This won't work simply because majority of apps follow "the
| new trend". Take calibre, for example. I found myself having
| to OCLP my calibre server, simply because the hardware won't
| "take" the new macOS version required by the app, but the app
| new features are only available in the new versions.
| zer0zzz wrote:
| I don't think it's as fast breaking as you suggest but
| certainly big changes like 32Bit support dropping, OpenGL
| deprecation, and move to arm64 are huge breaks.
|
| Generally their "availability" macros in swift and objc keep
| things working across versions in a forward compatible way.
| virajk_31 wrote:
| Replicating MacOS is more than just a nice UI, there's a lot of
| sw/hw engineering under the hood. Hopefully these guys get closer
| to that over time.
| wltr wrote:
| Perhaps I need to understand something first, but at this point
| in time I see no value in projects like this. Beyond the obvious
| fact of hacking. Ideally, I don't even want, say, Linux to have
| any binary compatibility with Windows. I want native apps, games
| included. I don't want to see Photoshop working on Linux, I want
| Gimp to become successful (maybe, start with the name change),
| or, well, Krita then. Same with macOS. I don't miss any app from
| macOS, I want to run so badly. I want Linux to catch up where it
| isn't.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Does it key the command and control keys separate? That's maybe
| the biggest thing I can't get today from a linux-based MacOS
| replacement
| shevy-java wrote:
| Can Linux replace macOS?
|
| What would be required to achieve this?
|
| I guess one thing macOS users like is the default UI. So this is
| probably an area where Linux lacks - both GNOME and KDE have
| shortcomings when compared to that UI. (They are mostly fine if
| one does not have that as a use case, though I find GNOME to
| really want to simplify everything to the point of having almost
| no features left.)
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| My issue is that the quality of the macos UI is degrading over
| time. They can't even get rounding consistent, not quite at
| windows levels of mismatching yet though.
|
| Also no one bothers making the beautiful native apps now,
| everything is electron, which is equally inconsistent
| everywhere.
|
| So I think the advantage over time Vs a Linux system is
| diminishing... Slowly.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > both GNOME and KDE have shortcomings when compared to that UI
|
| One persons shortcomings is another persons normal work flow.
| To me this is simply a matter of adjusting to a different
| environment.
|
| I went form Windows 7 to Linux and the key part was that I
| always use open source software where possible such as FreeCAD,
| KiCAD, Libre Office, Firefox, Krita, Gimp, etc. This makes
| transitioning very painless. I also dont customize, no
| dotfiles, media managers, themes, prompts, shells, or reliance
| on OS features, etc. I keep it primitive.
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