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RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

ravynos.com

151–160 of 387 posts

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#151

I struggle with chasing after the MacOS appearance. It feels in passing like a lot of work to build a skin/UI that will always be a few generations of the design language behind and not quite there, just given the volume of staff at Apple and them being the ones defining where their design language goes. Like a choice between a Porsche and, according to Google a Zotye -- they'll look close but one will be the obvious…

> given the volume of staff at Apple Unrelated to RavynOS, but I see the size of the Apple staff more like a weakness not a strength. They became terribly inefficient in the recent years.

And still they will perform better than any FOSS attempt to clone their work.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, the good old "rewrite the world" approach. Good luck to the developers!

This is one instance where that approach probably pays dividends, if they can pull it off. Most macOS-like clones that I've tried fall short, due to there being only so much you can do to paper-over the Linux desktop experience. A sort of uncanny valley that I just can't get over and adjust to using.

To have the full experience they also need to clone the Objective-C and Swift frameworks, and IDE tooling.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from the Windows and Linux worlds, I had similar frustrations with the primitive Mac UI. Mostly a better keyboard shortcuts/window timer fixed them for me (Magnet). There are still some issues but they are relatively minor. What made me stick with the platform though was never having to worry about drivers, and updates being polite and patient, and not being bombarded with a billion ads everywhere like in Wind…

Linux works with M1

Absolutely not ready for production environments. A lot of driver support is lacking. Audio is disabled since it could blow up the speakers. Wifi doesn't always work (for me at least). And that's without talking about GPU support or even Thunderbolt support.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#154

Quoted post unavailable.

From Wikipedia: > Today, FreeBSD is used by many IT companies such as IBM, Nokia, Juniper Networks, and NetApp to build their products.[16][17] Certain parts of Apple's Mac OS X operating system are based on FreeBSD.[18] Both the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Switch operating system also borrow certain components from FreeBSD,[7][8] while the PlayStation 4 operating system is derived from FreeBSD 9.[19] Netflix,[20] Wha…

As that quote clearly puts out, it is mostly cherry picked components, and not a proper FreeBSD distribution.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#155
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given the volume of staff at Apple Unrelated to RavynOS, but I see the size of the Apple staff more like a weakness not a strength. They became terribly inefficient in the recent years.

And still they will perform better than any FOSS attempt to clone their work.

Yeah, FOSS culture is unfortunately neither very good at design, nor attracting good designers for collaboration. Many engineers don't even respect design and/or designers.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#156
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Oh, the good old "rewrite the world" approach. Good luck to the developers!

> Oh, the good old "rewrite the world" approach. Good luck to the developers!

Yes, they definitely need some good luck, but sometimes rewriting the world is necessary to one day invent something new, or just eliminate architectural issues that are too entrenched in the old code to be easily circumvented without adding bloat and/or bugs. The price to pay is lagging behind the competition, with a potential bigger payoff only later, for those who persist. I see roughly a similar approach with the PinePhone: they probably went like "the heck with reverse engineering other phones, we make our own one from scratch!"; the result as of today is a ~90% working slow phone that very few among non tech users would want, but we see the much bigger potential if and when they'll reach hardware performance at least comparable to known brands. It takes courage, perseverance, and luck.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#157

Looks like lots of efforts to recreate the crappy MacOS X UI and user experience. I mean it was fine and less a mess than windows has ever been but it barely evolved since Nextstep in term of UI paradigm and feels dated nowadays. The interesting part in Apple products is mostly the hardware.

That's highly subjective point of view. I've used windows since high school (about 4-5y) until Win7, then Ubuntu for 7 more years, after that Mac. Switch was always hard, but now I would never go to neither Win nor Ubuntu. Mac's UI is so superior in my opinion - for my work and productivity, that I would never switch back. People often talk bad about some Mac UI stuff like they are "bad" because they are "different" than people are used to on Win or some imaginative "this is how it is supposed to be" stance, and I get puzzled because those are precisely features I like and I want.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#158

Quoted post unavailable.

You do realize that Netflix uses FreeBSD, right? That a good chunk of NAS builds, diy or not, use FreeBSD? That high performance network solutions often use FreeBSD because of what is commonly seen as a better/more mature network stack? Having a smaller user base than the world's most used kernel (Linux) doesn't mean it has a small user base in absolute terms. And being a smaller kernel in lines of code is certainly…

I'm not sure you should plainly compare FreeBSD on a limited choice of Hardware doing server things with "a general purpose GUI desktop OS".

OP didn't say FreeBSD was bad in my reading, but as a somewhat irregular user you just notice 1000 papercuts (which are not the OS's fault per se for the most part) but which detract from the overall experience. Every nth software package you use for the first time needs a (small, 3-line) patch which is mostly because the people develop on Linux. Sometimes it's better if they develop on OSX, sometimes it doesn't matter.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#159
post #4

I don't know why the mobile version crawls when I scroll past the images on my high-end Samsung.

Same on MacOS and Firefox with a 4K screen ans same on Firefox and a Pixel 6, scrolling lags hard on the section with pictures. Making a bad first impression of this new OS.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#160
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Oh, the good old "rewrite the world" approach. Good luck to the developers!

I will never understand the people think you can never do a fresh start (in software, but not limited to it). Many very successful projects started as a green field. Sometimes I would even go so far as saying they would have failed if the had tried to build onto the existing code base. Also important to note: there is no "start from 0" most likely the work will be based on existing work, the ideas, code, or parts, modules, graphics can be reused. I see everyday in my job how this kind of thinking leads to code with parts that are over 20 years old, and are not changed because of fear that something could break.
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