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RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

ravynos.com

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Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#31

Post by nikitaga »

sofixa wrote: post #21
nikitaga wrote: post #13

At this point, "Consistent shortcuts" is the main "feature" keeping me on MacOS. Cmd+, opens preferences in every app. Cmd+[ or ] goes "back" and "forward", in every app that has those concepts Cmd+Shift+[ or ] switches tabs, in every app that has tabs, except a handful of stupid chat apps who think they're too good for it. Cmd+W always closes the current tab, if the app has tabs, (or current window, if the app has n…

For the tabs Ctrl+tab/Ctrl+shift+tab is the standard on Windows and Linux, so i can see how some apps can forget about macOS' specialness.

Speaking of this specialness... having the main system shortcut modifier – Cmd – physically located under both your thumbs is priceless.

In contrast, the Ctrl keys are usually located such that they're best accessed with your pinkies. Who thought that making people use their weakest fingers for the most common shortcuts is a good idea?

Could you remap your keys to have Ctrl keys under the thumbs in Windows / Linux? Yes, but then:

1) It will become hard to use Ctrl-based text navigation shortcuts (such as Ctrl+left to navigate one word left) with one hand, and

2) Ctrl+Tab will now use the same physical keys as Alt+Tab used to, and your brain will never heal from this (at least mine refuses to).

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#32

Post by samtheprogram »

gattilorenz wrote: post #28
aldrich wrote: post #26

I'm curious to know why they have chosen to use FreeBSD as a base as opposed to Darwin/XNU on which macOS itself is based. Nothing against FreeBSD (happy user here) so there's probably some good reasoning behind this.

Probably because Darwin is half abandoned, while FreeBSD is actively maintained and with plenty of drivers

Darwin is still open sourced, but mainly because of drivers and differences in certain other things (threads maybe, Mach ports / IPC, etc) that don’t have the integration or implementation with existing software is a major headwind to attempting a full encompassing Darwin OS.

PureDarwin was (is?) an attempt that hasn’t been able to break through those headwinds.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#33

Post by kalleboo »

jmprspret wrote: post #24
jetpackjoe wrote: post #18

Being able to CMD+c to copy things in a terminal is one of my favorite things about programming on a Mac. Ctrl+c to copy everywhere, except the terminal (there it instead is an interrupt) is a major annoyance working in Linux

I don't use a Mac. How does one interrupt a program if Ctrl+C is bound to copy? At this point when I'm in a terminal Ctrl+C is muslce memory for interrupting a running program.

Macs have a Meta key called Command that can be dedicated to the shortcuts defined in GUI applications while leaving Ctrl free to be used by console stuff. So all the GUI copy/paste/windowing etc controls use Command key shortcuts.

The original 1984 Mac keyboard did not even have a Ctrl key, it was added to later keyboards as people wanted access to terminal applications.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#36

Post by jamil7 »

aldrich wrote: post #26

I'm curious to know why they have chosen to use FreeBSD as a base as opposed to Darwin/XNU on which macOS itself is based. Nothing against FreeBSD (happy user here) so there's probably some good reasoning behind this.

From the FAQ:

The short answer is "hardware support". ravynOS should run on most commodity x86_64 hardware using FreeBSD's very stable and performant drivers.

The longer answer is that plus I don't see any real advantage to using xnu. We have merged in Mach support now (big thanks to NetBSD, NextBSD and the iX Systems folks for that) so the xnu approach just seems to add complexity and the effort of writing and maintaining drivers.

Considering how big this project is already, I opted to stick with the BSD kernel - at least for now

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#37

Post by eyelidlessness »

adastra22 wrote: post #2

This looks like not a reskin of an existing FreeBSD or Linux windows system, but an actual reimplementation of macOS. Very interesting if they can pull it off! I wonder though, why start with old Objective-C cocoa APIs instead of Swift?

I wonder if Cocoa is that language specific or if it’s become legacy tech. When Swift was announced and when I explored it for personal projects, I was very much calling Cocoa APIs. They definitely catered to ObjC-isms, but my impression was that all of the underlying UI frameworks were being preserved even if they might gain additive APIs to be used less awkwardly in Swift.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#38

Post by fsw »

pabs3 wrote: post #34

Some of the words in the screenshots make it sound like this is a skinned version of KDE. Konsole, Kate, Plasma for example: https://ravynos.com/screenshots.html

> PLEASE NOTE: On 2022-02-14, we decided to abandon the current path of using X11/KDE desktop components and write from scratch a new UI that will align better with our goals. A very early UI on the new WindowServer is starting to take shape as of 2022-07-27. Thanks for your patience as we work to make ravynOS the best possible version.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#39

Post by still_grokking »

nikitaga wrote: post #13

At this point, "Consistent shortcuts" is the main "feature" keeping me on MacOS. Cmd+, opens preferences in every app. Cmd+[ or ] goes "back" and "forward", in every app that has those concepts Cmd+Shift+[ or ] switches tabs, in every app that has tabs, except a handful of stupid chat apps who think they're too good for it. Cmd+W always closes the current tab, if the app has tabs, (or current window, if the app has n…

"Consistent shortcuts" is the main "feature" keeping me on KDE.

Cmd+Shift+, opens preferences in every app.

Alt+Left or Right (or Back or Forward) goes "back" and "forward", in every app that has those concepts

Cmd+Tab or Cmd+Shift-Tab switches tabs, in every app that has tabs.

Cmd+W closes the current tab by default, if the app has tabs, (or current window, if the app has no tabs)

Cmd+Q quits the app.

Etc.

What's again so special about macOS?

One needs only to avoid GTK stuff, Electron, and Windows Software, and one gets perfectly consistent behavior.

And those behaviors can be "even" configured globally! (That's something to mention specially of course when talking to Mac users as such an advanced feature like "configurability" is notoriously missing in the Apple universe).

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#40

Post by eyelidlessness »

sofixa wrote: post #23
ggm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their target is existing MacOS users. Thats a BSD derived kernel and OS API and the model is quite different. Making a Linux kernel look right, is a path ?Gentoo? took some time ago, and I am unsure you can call it an unqualified success. "does it run homebrew" is my lead question

> "does it run homebrew" is my lead question Or even better, a better package manager that isn't slow as hell and understands semver.

Heh. Or even “Xpm install ___” doesn’t mean I want to update thousands of unrelated packages I’ve installed directly or transitively. Regardless of their semver compatibilities.

Edit for people using macOS: if you want to install one thing without waiting to update unfold numbers of other things, hilariously Cakebrew (a GUI frontend for homebrew) will let you do that with homebrew as the package manager.

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