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RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

ravynos.com

241–250 of 387 posts

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#241

Ex graphic designer here, but don't (and never have) used Mac. I highly respect this project and initiative, and the following is more a commentary on my own reaction than your product. I read the title--finesse of MacOS. I open the link, and the first thing I see at the top is the circular raven logo vertically misaligned with the header on mobile. That made me think, okay let's try desktop version instead, so I swi…

I'm not sure that caring about the design of a desktop environment and website are equivalent - if nothing else, they're different skills to implement. And in any event, it's an early-stage project; that their goals aren't realized yet is hardly surprising.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#242
post #199

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

It isn't an annoyance for me: just select text and paste it with middle click? Why bother with ctrl+c ?

Then you can select other text to paste over.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#243

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…

> Also not having to drop into the command line to change monitor settings is nice. I can't remember the last time I had to do this on Linux. Sometime in the the 90's, I think.

I had to do it multiple times with hidpi monitors just a few years back. Not sure about ultrawide, hdr, high refresh rate, gsync, etc.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 ag…

> One needs only to avoid GTK stuff, Electron, and Windows Software, and one gets perfectly consistent behavior. So as long as one avoids all the inconsistencies then one gets consistent shortcuts? ;) Only using Qt apps on Linux is very hard. A lot of good apps are GTK or Electron. On macOS there is no GTK & Qt divide and Electron apps are very good at implementing macOS shortcuts. Hence you get more consistent bindi…

Which is true on MacOS too. Emacs doesn't care about Mac keybindings. Even worse, the MacOS "Emacs keybindings" for things like text fields aren't totally consistent with actual Emacs. Oh and Emacs was until super recently bundled into the OS too so even out of the box it wasn't totally consistent.

I'm sure there's other programs on MacOS that don't follow the global key bindings.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#245

KDE 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.…

Note that you can do "Cut" in Finder by doing "Copy (Cmd-C)" but then using "Alt-Cmd-V". It'll move the file instead of copying. Also, you can also fix the "caps lock" issue by remapping it to "control". Completely fixes the "caps lock" button. It works on Linux too! ;)

It only just dawned on me reading this—Windows doesn't actually "cut" files, does it? The behavior's different from "cutting" text. The files remain until you paste, right? Mac's choice makes a ton more sense, in that case, since actually cutting files is probably a bad idea (if you forget to paste, they're gone)

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The greater bulk of the macOS userland is still written in Objective-C.

Yeah but they expose the same ABI. If you can write in Objective-C, you could write it Swift and externally it'd be no different. And since they're reimplementing this stuff from scratch, I'm surprised they didn't just do that. (I'm saying this as someone who would be more inclined to contribute if it was written in Swift.)

I imagine they are using either GNUStep or Cocotron as the basis for their Cocoa support, not starting fully from scratch.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#247

Ex graphic designer here, but don't (and never have) used Mac. I highly respect this project and initiative, and the following is more a commentary on my own reaction than your product. I read the title--finesse of MacOS. I open the link, and the first thing I see at the top is the circular raven logo vertically misaligned with the header on mobile. That made me think, okay let's try desktop version instead, so I swi…

I noticed the logo misalignment but the rest of the website was pretty good so I figured it was a one-off issue (rather than representative of a trend).

Was there other issues that bothered you?

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#248
>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.

I get the desire to avoid X11, but why write a GUI from scratch instead of using Wayland?

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#249
I tried running this last night on an i7-8550u, and eh, I didn’t get far. I got it to boot to a GUI, but nothing else loaded, not even an installer. And because the screen was 4k, my cursor (and everything else) was tiny. I think this is a cool project but just worth noting that this is a proof of concept right now rather than a complete thing. Best of luck to the RavynOS team.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That used to be true. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/realitykit/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/GroupActivities

Then a question: how does one call these APIs from another language? You can use Objective-C frameworks from anything that can call C functions, by manually doing objc_msgSend and all the related stuff. But will you have to write a Swift wrapper for these?

On macOS, the Swift ABI is stable. It is different from the C or C++ ABI. Somebody would need to implement the Swift ABI for another language. Which is kinda tricky because Swift has many features that other languages don’t have. Rust could probably do it, or C++ with a ton of templates I guess.
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