I know some of this is personal taste, but to me macOS really doesn't feel finessed. It feels confusing, distracting and annoying. I suppose a large part of the problem is that I want a useful tool, whereas macOS is designed to be a lifestyle.
RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD
51–60 of 186 posts
Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD
#52> ravynOS (previously called airyxOS) Subjectively, I find both names terrible. There’s zero chance I’ll vocalise either to someone and they’ll know how to spell it. The current one in particular is bound to have people typing “ravenous”. But the idea is interesting, and even though the screenshots don’t yet inspire confidence (the typeface is too thin, folder icons are too square, …) I wish the team the best of luck…
> The current one in particular is bound to have people typing “ravenous”.
I'd guess it was probably intended, and that makes things worse.
I know - as someone else was commenting - that naming things is hard, but for something like this, finding a name that is easy to pronounce, and easy to spell, should be a high priority.
Off the top of my head, playing with the fact that it is an OS, it runs on a Mac, and is based on FreeBSD (where BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution [0]), a couple of quick suggestions:
- BerkeleyOS (let's honor Berkeley)
- FinOS (a play on finess - easy to spell?)
- SteveOS (obvious reference - might be disliked by many - but is it Jobs or Woz? Perhaps WozOS would be better?)
- BillOS or JoyOS (Bill Joy founded BSD in 1976)
- JordanOS (Jordan Hubbard coined the term FreeBSD)
etc.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD
#53Not a chance this gathers any traction. You can just hear: can I run 'popular macOS application' on it? No. The average user, for starters, doesn't use a computer (most consumer tasks are done on a phone), and won't know how to install a different OS even if they do. Run FreeBSD on the server and use the macOS Terminal to connect to it over ssh.
They do mention implementing Cocoa APIs so there is a theoretical future where it can run some macOS apps. But that would be a very heavy lift (not quite ReactOS heavy but still) for little reward. And you’ll probably find everyone is using SwiftUI by the time it’s complete.
Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think you’re going a bit overboard. I am not. I speak from vast experience of trying multiple approaches. Maybe English is the first language wherever you live. That’s not the case for the majority of the world. Even if my friends and I have a good grasp of the English language, switching mid-sentence causes a delay in understanding. It’s not just “raven with a y instead of an e”¹ but “raven, as in ², but with a…
We can agree to disagree. By your logic every small open source project needs to hire a marketing firm to ensure their naming convention is easy to understand and inoffensive in every language on the planet. I think that’s overboard. The project is clearly being built by someone that speaks English and is targeting English speakers. Notice their website and documentation is all in English?
> By your logic every small open source project needs to hire a marketing firm to ensure their naming convention is easy to understand and inoffensive in every language on the planet.
That’s a straw man. It’s not what I said at all.
Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD
#55I can see the freedom of FreeBSD part, but not the finesse of macOS. And without that, why not just use FreeBSD?
One moderately frustrating thing about using FreeBSD is that it's always been treated as sort of a second-class citizen by GNOME, and therefore Gtk, and therefore most of the Linux ecosystem which depends on Gtk. So probably the most popular desktop environment is KDE, and it's nice, but it is a certain kind of interface which doesn't appeal to everyone.
Meanwhile, OS X shares a little code with FreeBSD and was partially derived from it around 30 years ago. And the design philosophy of OS X is roughly the opposite of KDE. This situation has engendered at least half a dozen projects over the years, most of which are never really complete, to make a FreeBSD-first DE/UI that works like Mac. And if it can run Mac applications, so much the better!
Unfortunately, this is really hard. Cocoa is a moving target, and contra Wine, Apple is not as pertinaciously obsessed with backwards compatibility as Microsoft. Even much less ambitious (in my estimation) projects like enlightenment 17 and Wayland have struggled to replace major components of the desktop from the ground up.
Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD
#56This is incredibly awesome. I would love to see a lot of this on Linux, too. Apple has always had the best compositor in the business.
The marketing page is a little more generous to this project than the actual screenshots though, lol.
Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD
#57I know some of this is personal taste, but to me macOS really doesn't feel finessed. It feels confusing, distracting and annoying. I suppose a large part of the problem is that I want a useful tool, whereas macOS is designed to be a lifestyle.
I think you find macOS confusing, distracting, and annoying because it hasn’t had strong design applied to it in over a decade.
It does get features to sustain people’s interest in Apple hardware and services, which I guess is a lifestyle. But it’s an “Apple lifestyle” not a MacOS one.
A lot of commentators don’t really seem to appreciate how Apple is a consumer electronics manufacturer now, and still evaluate it like people did ca. 2003. Apple could shut down their desktop/notebook computing division entirely and still make a bundle. (They probably would lose phone market share, though.)
Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD
#58It's nice that more people in the FOSS community take note of macOS's design and (historically, at least) attention to detail. However, this project (judging by the screenshots, which is how everyone is going to judge you if you claim to be inspired by Apple's work), they're already making serious (but fixable) mistakes:
https://ravynos.com/images/ravyn_0.4.0_pre_desktop.png>
- What the actual heck is that window border around the terminal
- Horizontal spacing on the fonts is too dense, the text rendering is absolutely awful - maybe it's just the font but I wouldn't suffer through reading a full paragraph
- The buttons in the installer dialog look like a cheap knockoff of Windows 95
- Different colors for window background, title bar, dock, but somehow the window background and menu bar are the same
- The 3 visible dock icons mix 3 different art styles, the fourth icon is an empty space?...
- Where's the shadows to tell stacked windows apart? Windows did this in the late 90s
https://ravynos.com/images/firefox_global_menu.jpg>
- The padding of the window controls is all messed up, with different offsets on all 3 sides; no unified window/tab bar in the browser (even though Firefox under both X11 and Wayland can do it just fine); again different window frame and background colors
- Bright white window borders (absolute worst aspect of the Big Sur redesign), although I'll give them credit for going a notch below #ffffff
- Very poor way to show off the transparent menu bar (the choice of wallpaper + no blur), visually distracts from the contents of the menu bar itself; note that all macOS default wallpapers have a pretty uniform sky color across the top, so the transparent menu bar can be a bit less of a mess
Again, this is all fixable, but the real problem is that half of these things are trivially improved by changing the font, the color, or the padding. But it's this lack of attention to detail (and the fact that despite these glaring issues they've still decided to use these screenshots) that speaks about the project's commitment to details.
It's pretty cool that you've got AppImages or an ObjC compiler, but you're not allowed to use the word "finesse" and make these mistakes!
Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD
#59Meh macOS is more than shiny traffic lights buttons on your windows, global menus, and dock. It's also a clipboard that works everywhere and not like "oh you cannot do this because X11 this or wayland that", it's also human interface guidelines (the old ones, the new ones are unparseable shit) that make bloody sure that the OK/Cancel buttons appear where you expect them to appear. It's also some bloody keyboard short…
> Try blindfolding yourself, inserting your installer usb stick, and installing your thing and using it successfully. I don't understand this. Are you saying its hard to install Linux? Has this ever been true? Usually you smash the Next button. There is a partioning screen, but that is some serious changes you are going to make. I don't care what OS religion you follow, I'm taking the blindfold off during partioning.
Yes. You need to be very technical. E.g. there is a keyboard selection thing with multiple ambiguous options while on Mac you have to press like one key to identify it.
Even windows somehow works without requiring a PhD in keyboard layouts.
Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD
#60> ravynOS (previously called airyxOS) Subjectively, I find both names terrible. There’s zero chance I’ll vocalise either to someone and they’ll know how to spell it. The current one in particular is bound to have people typing “ravenous”. But the idea is interesting, and even though the screenshots don’t yet inspire confidence (the typeface is too thin, folder icons are too square, …) I wish the team the best of luck…
> The current one in particular is bound to have people typing “ravenous”. I'd guess it was probably intended, and that makes things worse. I know - as someone else was commenting - that naming things is hard, but for something like this, finding a name that is easy to pronounce, and easy to spell, should be a high priority. Off the top of my head, playing with the fact that it is an OS, it runs on a Mac, and is base…
JoyOS is particularly good. It’s short, has a clear cadence that helps to identify its parts (joy-o-s) as has multiple positive reads. At first you’ll just assume “it’s a joy to use” (which could be a slogan) but then has the historical reference that makes the name even better and more meaningful once you learn it.