Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

ravynos.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 186 posts

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#91

Post by krylon »

jdiff wrote: post #17
krylon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vaguely recall reading about a project trying to achieve just that on HN a while back. Unfortunately, that is all I remember about it. Back then, it apparently was not quite there, yet, but that must have been at least five years ago, so the situation might be a lot better today.

Unfortunately not. Darling [0] is still at the point that it can only run command line applications. Only the most basic GUI applications are supported. That's still a massive accomplishment that I don't want to diminish, but it's nowhere near the point that WINE was at even quite a long time ago. [0] https://www.darlinghq.org/

I would imagine with Wine the number of people interested to see Windows applications run under Linux/BSD/etc is significantly larger than with macOS/Darling.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#92

Post by replete »

rollcat wrote: post #58

It'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 bo…

Do you think operating systems look polished early in development? Of course they didn't. Most of the work going on isn't visible in a UI. From what I gather in the discord there have been some quite large refactors going on under the hood

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#93

Post by I_Am_Nous »

grey_earthling wrote: post #51

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.

I get the impression that MacOS is kind of like Gnome in that they aren't really designed with multitasking in mind. On MacOS, the green button in the corner of the window expands the app to fullscreen. Opening an app in Gnome likewise goes fullscreen.

There are some workflows where that would be OK, but to do my job I have to be in and out of multiple windows constantly. I gave up on Gnome when I was trying to find one of 5 different terminal windows in the exploded window view and it was clear that they'd rather I cycled through them all one at a time instead of what I do on XFCE which is scroll up on the terminal icon in my dock, which quickly cycles through them and brings them to focus.

Personal preference for finesse will always differ so I tend to focus more on the usability aspect of it and accept any finesse that comes along for the ride as a kind of luxury experience lol

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#94

Post by jwells89 »

scythe wrote: post #55
steve1977 wrote: post #14

I 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 parti…

Not only is Cocoa a moving target, it’s deep and wide. The amount of functionality it offers is staggering and extensive enough that for many types of apps, a dev may not need to import any third party libraries if they don’t want to, with no negative impact on the quality of the final product.

That’s extremely difficult to reimplement, even if you lock compatibility to a particular macOS release.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#95

Post by replete »

steve1977 wrote: post #14

I can see the freedom of FreeBSD part, but not the finesse of macOS. And without that, why not just use FreeBSD?

Because its still in major development? Huge refactors are going on still under the hood. It's a project with a small team working in their free time with a big goal and its some way off. I mean, a BSD-based open source OS binary compatible with mach binaries ... it's very cool IMO and I hope more people get involved

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#96

Post by bjelkeman-again »

henriquez wrote: post #42
blackhaz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an OS finesse?

It appears like they’ve aped some of MacOS design language, but it’s clear they’re engineers, not designers. There’s enough “uncanny valley” between this OS and actual modern Apple UI design that it comes off a bit like all those versions of KDE that tried to look and act exactly like Windows XP and always felt a bit “off.” Their screenshots page is a Frankenstein mess of poor font quality and Apple themes mixed toge…

Apple’s UI design certainly has flaws. I really don’t understand why they changed the way the System Settings in Ventura/Sonoma(?) now looks like and behaves more like iOS, as an example.

However, as someone who has used GUIs from SunView/Irix Desktop/DECwindows to iPadOS/MacOS, via Windows 2.0/3.0/95/NT/etc. I am of the opinion that Apple is still the most consistent and easy to learn GUI. Even my 80-year old mother manages quite well with her Mac and iPhone.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#97

Post by gumballindie »

hospitalJail wrote: post #48
gumballindie wrote: post #8

Well done for runining my weekend! I will give it a try. However, still struggling with NVidia drivers on FreeBSD. For the life of me I can't get them to work.

This is why I went to Fedora.

Well yeah but FreeBSD is not Linux, and I don't see the connection with your comment. I also use a Linux distro as a daily driver, but I love playing with FreeBSD every now and then.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#100

Post by cristeigabriel »

It just looks bad. You want to be MacOS? Actually go and copy it, as close to pixel perfect as you fancy.

I've personally experimented with replicating UIs using just a "device" object to a graphical API, so I know very well that it is possible. What prevents this project from just... going out and actually doing what they're trying to achieve? Take high resolution screenshots, carefully understand what's going on, and re-implement it.

The hardest part would probably be compositing (if they do it from scratch), but even before getting there, there's so much wrong already. This really does not have the same finesse of MacOS, has anybody even looked at the screenshots picked by the developers??

Post reply on HN