ElementaryOS had similar goals on the desktop experience side.
You may also want to take a look at OpenStep and Window Maker.
RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD
221–230 of 387 posts
Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD
#222KDE is a better desktop environment than MacOS, by far. I have had so many usability issues with my Mac that does not exist in KDE/Linux. E.g. Apple confining the GUI and not including basic functionality. Specifically: - I really miss a decent address bar in finder that can be edited directly - some windows on mac are always on top, preventing access to other windows. E.g. Password dialogs for encrypted hard drives.…
100% with you. KDE is the only desktop environment, all platforms confounded, that hasn't sacrificed power user functionality on the altar of streamlined / dumbed-down "design".
It's like a race to the bottom to please an elusive lowest common denominator class of users that doesn't exist. I find these other "modern" UIs incredibly condescending.
Instead, discoverability should be #1, creating soft, natural learning curve that welcomes new users without capping or hiding advanced functionality.
Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD
#223Looks like this is a rebrand from the Airyx project that was posted before [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068542
They had a trademark issue because there is a German company called Airyx that uses an almost identical domain on top of that (airyx.com vs airyx.de)
Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s also funny to think of companies like Apple, MS, etc. as having 1 opinion or even tactic. I know they say it. But they’re made up of 100s-1000s of groups. And at Apple especially, many of these groups are not allowed to talk to each other. From the outside it’s easy to see companies that way. But if you’ve ever been inside a large company, you know what I’m talking about. That’s not unique to tech, either. And r…
.net being a good example of this I'm sure I still have CD case with 'Windows .net' printed on it which contains Windows 2000 and SQL Server... .net? The marketers really went to town on that one, would have loved to be in the creative pitch meetings for that swag. '.net, what is it??' 'Who knows??! But if we print .net in multicolour on enough stuff, somebody might figure it out!'
> The marketers really went to town on that one,
To be fair, the developers at Microsoft went to town on it as well, adopting C# for parts of Windows Blackcomb, including the File Manager, the Desktop Manager, and (some of) WinFS. It turned into a fiasco and the .NET adoption was mostly dropped, as far as I remember, when they did the "reset" and pivoted to Vista.
Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD
#225I'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 maint…
Regarding hardware support, will this run on actual Apple silicon? If not, it seems like Linux would have been the better choice for maximizing hardware support, if only for Asahi Linux's work.
(btw, I don't know much about this kind of work, so I have no idea if it's feasible to port the drivers from Asahi to FreeBSD, or if they'll have to start mostly from scratch)
Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD
#226Some 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
Today's KDE can be almost identical to a MacOS desktop, if you customize it properly.
I'm a KDE user since 2010 and a week ago I purchased an M1 Pro (hopefully to install Asahi in the future). My desktop was basically a top bar with global menu, a few widgets and Latte Dock.
If I didn't know that Mac came up with the functionality before, I would think that it is Mac that feels like a skinned KDE
Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD
#227This 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?
Objective-C is the ABI of all UI-related macOS frameworks and it would probably always be. Even if you're writing in Swift, as long as you're using AppKit, you're using Objective-C classes under the hood. There's no such thing as "Swift Cocoa APIs". And SwiftUI is an abstraction layer on top of, again, AppKit/UIKit/WatchKit, which are themselves all written in Objective-C.
Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD
#228Hi, I just wanted to let you know that the ravynos.com's top part of the page performs very poorly under Firefox, most likely due to some animation overload. Was firefox considered in the tests?
It's due to the use of the blur backdrop-filter which seems to have been enabled by default on release builds of Firefox relatively recently.
Interestingly, it's a feature introduced to CSS way back in 2015. There must have been some major blockers on getting that out the door if it took ~7 years.
Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except several systems have been rewritten in Swift for Ventura, also mentioned in other talks. Besides this is nothing new in the industry, some Android business units and Windows ones, are quite adverse to touch anything besides C++, regardless of the guidelines to the rest of us.
While there are parts of Swift that I like, I am more and more convinced as time goes on that Swift in general, and specific sub areas of Swift (like SwiftUI or Swift Charts) are destined to follow the trajectory of .NET as decried by Spolsky in How Microsoft Lost The API War [1]. To the extent this is true, it is likely smarter long term to avoid Swift except in cases where Apple has enforced its usage (like the wat…
The more I use Swift, the more I miss Objective-C. I tend to like opinionated languages that take firm stances - all method calls are messages, everything really is an object, fail early, etc.
Swift seems to be more and more a kitchen sink language. Compile time linking, v-tables, and dynamic dispatch? Sure! There’s so much syntactic sugar masking seemingly unchangeable implementation details (throws/try/catch) and odd implementation choices (protocols associated types vs structs and classes generics). Builder methods are just plain weird, imho.
I had a lot of hope for Swift early on, but it seems like a rudderless ship.
Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
To have the full experience they also need to clone the Objective-C and Swift frameworks, and IDE tooling.
The GNUStep project has already done much of the ObjC framework cloning. I wonder if they're using that. Not sure about Swift frameworks, though.
They mention in the faq that they do not use GNUStep's implementation of the frameworks, but they do use GNUStep's implementation of the libobjc2 runtime. There's licensing and goal issues. Apparently their Cocoa implementation comes from "the same source" as Darling's, but I don't know what that means. (Cross referencing with Darling's faq, I guess it's The Cocotron.)