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RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

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Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a joke that one of the hardest problems is naming things. So many promising products and businesses shoot themselves in the foot by choosing a name that hurts adoption.

My personal example of this is the security company “Thycotic”. They could be greatest InfoSec company in the world, but I really hate their name. It looks like the word psychotic said with a lisp.

Thycotic merged with Centrify to form ... ThycoticCentrify? CentrifyThycotic? I forget. Anyway, the merged entity is now called Delinea.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#112

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…

It’s designed to multitask, just not in the Win9X-ish style that most people are accustomed to at this point. There are plenty of Mac users who juggle tasks users all day long without issue.

It’s designed around letting windows that are sized to fit content overlap and be at least partially visible if they’re relevant in any way. If there gets to be too many windows to manage (which happens in other desktop environments too; the usability of Windows alt-tab for instance scales incredibly badly as the number of open windows increases), that’s when you start tossing windows into another virtual desktop (“space” in Mac nomenclature), perhaps organizing windows into desktops based on task.

To opt out of fullscreen on the green button, hold down Option/Alt before clicking it. The behavior of the button in that situation is defined by the developer of the program you’re using though so YMMV. Maximizing windows is possible by double-clicking their titlebars, except in Electron apps that have replaced the system titlebar with a fake one that’s missing functionality.

As for GNOME, I’d say it compares to iPadOS much more closely than macOS due to missing or oversimplified functionality. It feels like it’s more oriented towards tablets and small laptops than desktops or even midsize-to-large laptops.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#113

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.

Same here. I don't see the finesse in macOS. Half the time I have to fight the window manager to get what I want, the other half I have to use 3rd party tools. It doesn't even have very basic stuff like a volume mixer.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#114
My basic opinion is that there are really no great desktop operating systems currently being made anymore. Mac OS used to be it but started losing me after Snow Leopard to be completely honest.

I feel both desktop producing companies that actually matter (can run all the productivity apps I need to do my job) have put this space on the back burner for cloud (Microsoft) or consumer electronics (Apple).

No year has ever been the year of the Linux Desktop and all the Desktop stuff for Linux is too Linux specific to work well portably on FreeBSD.

All I can say is I hope Apple makes iPads able to run full development suites because the desktop appears to be dying a slow death in general.

Or, maybe I’m wrong (would love to be) and things start getting better again.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#115

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, a…

This screenshot[1] is a great example of what you're talking about. * Awful typography (especially bold text) * Ugly gray background in foreground window * Windows 95-era buttons in the foreground window * Weird left padding in the (ugly) dock * Terminal window has window controls on the right for some reason, and they look like they're from Windows? All that said, it's still in preview (v0.4pre4), and these things c…

I think there is a critical error in the judgement you make here, we can see that they advertise[0] the finesse of macOS. But what does this really mean? Let's think about it.

But before that, they clearly must be aware that... it's just bad (lightly put), yet it comes off very clearly that they're trying to copy[1] visual elements of Mac. So what does the author think finesse mean?

For my perspective, I'll quote the first definition I get on a Google search, "impressive delicacy and skill." We can argue that Mac does provide this (I believe it does, the experience is very opinionated (which also leads to stuff being intentional) and seamless across their devices, consistent (more than just the potential for consistency, which is what Windows provides), and so on, and so forth.

But, this is nothing like what we see in the current RavynOS. Nothing feels intentional. The advertising is misleading, and I don't think that it's something solvable in the future unless the person responsible for advertising and guaranteeing the presence of this "finesse" update their understanding of the word and clearly defines what that should mean in practice.

Update1: to add to my previous points, if my perception of the word "finesse" is correct, for something to have the "finesse of macOS," it wouldn't even have to look like it, but just achieve the same goal in it's own way (or Apple's way, that's "fine" but leaves a bad taste.)

[0] - https://ravynos.com/ "Finesse of macOS. [...]"

[1] - https://ravynos.com/screenshots

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s designed to multitask, just not in the Win9X-ish style that most people are accustomed to at this point. There are plenty of Mac users who juggle tasks users all day long without issue. It’s designed around letting windows that are sized to fit content overlap and be at least partially visible if they’re relevant in any way. If there gets to be too many windows to manage (which happens in other desktop environme…

Thanks for the tips :) I believe you pout into words the reason I don't like GNOME - it fell victim to "let's make it touchscreen friendly" at the expense of the way people have been using computers for a long time. Again, it has uses (iPads are perfectly functional and easy to use) but you feel the limitations a lot more when you try to do more advanced things.

My opinion that MacOS wasn't "designed" for multitasking is heavily biased by how I multitask (as you mentioned it's the Win9x style, stemming from using Windows for my formative computing years) so I am not trying to discount MacOS at all - I use it for my music production because Core Audio is rock solid. But then, that's a relatively singular task and as a result I treat it as though its only job is running Ableton at the time.

Multitasking is also different now, since so much of what we do is in the browser anyway.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#117
post #68

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.

My main problem with MacOS is that, on careful inspection, almost everything is buggy or clunky. I wish someone would just clone the headline features and app UIs (not the UI toolkit) but apply more attention to details like regression testing.

It just doesn't look that great either. If you glance at a screenshot then, sure, it looks slick - but you'll routinely run into developer UIs (for example, the settings app prior to Ventura - which has now become pretty to the degree of uselessness).

It's nice from far, but far from nice.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#118
post #83

Abandonware? Last release was June 2022.

Most of OS are doomed from the start. It's a waste of everybodys time, except for those that build these systems and learn about OS development. We don't need a new OS, much less one trying to compete with Mac (lol, no chance). What we need is for the popular ones to continuously improve. Windows 11 is better than 10 and 7 and vista and xp... (yes I skipped 8) Most people that work in tech use Mac or windows, some us…

I read a comment once that enumerated all the ways even spinning your own linux distro is doomed to fail. It's far more work to properly develop a distro for security and if your distro is just "Ubuntu minus stuff I don't like" then you aren't really maintaining anything that couldn't just be a script you have people run on base Ubuntu.
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