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Airyx OS

airyx.org

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Re: Airyx OS

#81

Post by comex »

fluxem wrote: post #56
DavidSJ wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One advantage of a global menu bar is that items at the top of the screen are effectively an infinitely large target, so you can rapidly move the mouse to them without worrying about overshooting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

But you want to select a specific menu and not just click somewhere on the whole menubar. So, it's no longer an infinitly large target and you need precision

You need a precise angle but not a precise speed. I can't speak for mice myself, but on my MacBook Pro trackpad, this is still much faster. Indeed, if I try to get the mouse cursor from somewhere near the middle of the screen to somewhere near the top, unless I go very slowly, it's essentially impossible to do it without overshooting and hitting the top. At that point I can turn around and move the cursor back down to the spot I'm trying to hit, but that requires waiting a fraction of a second, or else the high speed I accumulated from accelerating quickly will 'bounce' off the top and send me too far back down.

…Honestly, I don't know why the trackpad acceleration curve behaves that way. I've never consciously noticed this problem before right now, though, so it can't be that bad.

Anyway, of course my experience also differs in that my MacBook Pro does not have a 27" monitor. I could be using a desktop with a large monitor, but I prefer to be able to work from any chair or couch or even lying on the floor. I can see why the global menu bar would be more of a hindrance with a large monitor. But speak for yourself about what people "usually" have. :)

Re: Airyx OS

#82

Post by endofreach »

peatmoss wrote: post #32
vzaliva wrote: post #9

Projects like these will be always one step behind the thing they are trying to replicate (MacOS in this case). It is better to spend one's creative energy innovating and coming up with better solutions rather than re-implementing what Apple is doing.

I disagree. NeXT / macOS has been a pretty stable target for a very, very long time. If you’re going to clean room implement anything, a stable thing is a great target. macOS has, however, been making superficial changes that people don’t care about. A free macOS desktop alternative would build on a stable set of core technologies, and let people do the crazy things that they want, and not do the crazy things that th…

The „good thing“ is, that Apple seems to be heading in wrong directions. So yes, it will be behind. Until suddenly it stops following and have it‘s own direction. It is way overdue for a change in the ecosystem again. There should be more choices for the average user. I urge everyone who has some demanded skills to get involved in projects like this. It is time.

Re: Airyx OS

#84

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

I think macOS has too large of an API nowadays to try to copy. There are a whole smorgasbord of frameworks. This can only really help with the simplest of Cocoa applications.

This might be OK though, because I think what a hacker interested in this is really interested is the parts of macOS that are common with NextSTEP. Which are all the parts 20+ years old!

Re: Airyx OS

#85

Post by forgotpwd16 »

>It builds on the solid foundations of FreeBSD

Why not build on Darwin which basically forms macOS's core?

And how it differs from helloSystem?

Re: Airyx OS

#86

Post by KronisLV »

kottaram wrote: post #83

Why cant you guys add some screenshots?

Seconding this! Having some screenshots on the homepage would be very useful, since most other OS distros out there offer that.

Some other users in this thread did link some Imgur galleries of the live CD, though:

  - https://imgur.com/a/OsxT3GI ( from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28070125 )
  - https://imgur.com/a/q3hp0np ( from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068895 )

Re: Airyx OS

#87

Post by forgotpwd16 »

orionblastar wrote: post #30
DanAtC wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu's Unity was a lot more macOS-like with the default global menu bar, then they gave up on it :( Gnome doesn't even have a menu bar anymore, preferring apps use a single hamburger menu.

Unity was designed more for touchscreens, so that Ubuntu could make smartphones based on it. It didn't work out apparently.

It was designed for touchscreens and desktops; a so called convergent interface. For example HUD, which allowed you to search any menu option (ref: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD#Overview), and its Dash, a desktop search utility, were clearly keyboard-oriented. The bigger icons that launcher and dash had were probably made that way for touchscreens.

Re: Airyx OS

#88

Post by eafer »

fn1 wrote: post #75
eafer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> compatible with macOS filesystems (HFS+ and APFS) How far along is this? I think she's underestimating how hard it is to implement a modern filesystem that won't eat users' data. I've been working on a Linux APFS driver[0] for several years, and it's not fully functional yet. It's a pity that she is working with FreeBSD, or it could have been of use to her. [0] https://github.com/eafer/linux-apfs-rw

> how hard it is to implement a modern filesystem that won't eat users' data. Why is that so hard? Because of edge-cases? Caching/Timing considerations?

The main problem is simply that people really really really don't like losing their data after they saved it to disk. A simple app that corrupts its in-memory state once a year is probably acceptable. A filesystem that corrupts its on-disk state once a year is pure garbage. You basically need to aim for zero bugs.

How hard this is, it depends on the filesystem. Something like FAT, for example, is pretty much designed for ease of implementation, with few edge cases. Modern filesystems are not like that at all, the data structures are very complicated, so they must be extremely well tested before they are good enough to use. That would probably require an fsck to check for subtle inconsistencies; in the case of APFS you can use mine, but it's still very incomplete. Apple's published fsck is not very thorough.

As an example of the kind of problems to expect, I recall a bug in the Linux HFS+ driver. If you had a drive with lots of short filenames and lots of long filenames, and you started deleting the short filenames, eventually you would lose half of your files. This kind of things happen because HFS+ has variable-length keys in the index nodes of its trees, so deleting a record may trigger a complicated cascade of node splits. APFS inherited this feature, and it was very annoying to implement.

But HFS+ is very well documented; APFS is not, and that doesn't help.

Re: Airyx OS

#89

Post by qwerty456127 »

orionblastar wrote: post #30
DanAtC wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu's Unity was a lot more macOS-like with the default global menu bar, then they gave up on it :( Gnome doesn't even have a menu bar anymore, preferring apps use a single hamburger menu.

Unity was designed more for touchscreens, so that Ubuntu could make smartphones based on it. It didn't work out apparently.

Vanilla GNOME3 looks and feels a lot like it was designed for tablets as the primary target, keyboard users as the secondary and mouse users only as the third.

Ubuntu Unity did not - it was great for classic desktop usage with Mac-like (most importantly, not a mediocre attempt to mimic but even better than the original in some aspects) UX + advanced supports for keyboard lovers + keeping the mobile in mind.

IMHO late years Unity was the best Linux UI yet. If only they would add Pop_OS!-like tiling + some more little Mac goodies only experienced Mac users know it would be perfect. And I absolutely can not say the same about GNOME3 although I actually want a GNOME3 tablet.

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