Live data from Hacker News

RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

ravynos.com

141–150 of 186 posts

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#141

> We’ve got your apps covered No you dont, RavynOS and HelloSystem are mediocre wrapper projects. Put your efforts towards GNUStep, don’t run with it and making something pretty. If GNUStep worked, it could be ran on Unix like systems people actually use like Ubuntu. This project is going to fail with “finesse”.

I remember 20 years ago Gnome or even KDE were toys compared to the very structured but slow moving GNUStep. GNUStep was also hard to install (no rpms), ugly but very snappy. But nobody big put any money or devs on GNUStep. Even Sun invested in Gnome (!), what did not made sense at the time because they had invested in OpenStep & the whole thing was Java friendly (I believe Java was a first class citizen in early rel…

> I always wondered if it might have been because there were some legal risks...

What was in it for Sun to invest in GNUStep? Jobs was always resistant towards supporting other platforms. So it’s clear OpenStep was the last attempt at making use of the dying Next line.

I could maybe imagine a sales pitch scenario like “port your Mac apps to Solaris”. But when OSX came around, Cocoa was steered more towards the consumer market, not workstations.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RavynOS aims for partial binary compatibility with macOS.

What does that mean? It can partially run some trivial macOS apps? The amount of effort just to get basic programs working seems like a ton of effort, for a end project that is just buggy implement of a moving target. Unlike Windows, MacOS has no problem ignoring backward compatibility. So Wine works be rewriting older APIs and Microsoft always works on backward compatibility, MacOS does not do that. It just works or…

What about something like winapps which transparently runs apps in a VM. I know you can't legally run MacOS in a VM on a non mac but it would be hard to enforce against a software project that merely provides the capability so long as it doesn't provide the copyrighted software itself.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#143
post #88

Meh 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…

You are describing MacOS 9. The ribbon had all the settings for the OS, and was always a click away. Finder worked out of the box. These days, copy-paste is hit or miss, and the window manager can’t be reliably controlled via the keyboard. Also, even in first party apps, keyboard shortcuts are completely inconsistent. Command-0 no longer reliably restores the main window. In maps, Command-L doesn’t focus the location…

Now imagine that the thing in the OP has even less finesse than what you call a bunch of Shoggoths. More like putting lipstick on a earthworm.

All those projects, hellosystem, this one, I guess I've seen one or two more before — all of them are just kind of missing the whole point.

I would say the current KDE Plasma is somewhat starting to approach any amount of finesse at all. Hope they continue, at least they've learned from the whole KDE4 kerfuffle.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#144

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…

At the pace they are going, they are years from a usable system. The screenshots you are looking at are from an abandoned approach to doing the GUI tech.

The level of polish that you are advocating seems completely premature to the current level of development.

This is not just a visual design shell. They are proposing a macOS mimic much more deeply at the OS level.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it only devolved from Mac OS 9 by adding a bunch of unpolished NeXT GUIs, and the development necessitated the temporary removal of features and apps that were already polished.

I‘ve never really worked with Rhapsody, so I couldn’t tell. I came to Mac OS X from NeXTSTEP and FreeBSD, the first version I actually used as a daily driver (with the odd boot to Mac OS 9 for some stuff) was the public beta in 2000 (which was Aqua already of course).

Rhapsody was an unholy mix of NeXTstep implementation with a bastardized version of Apple's Platinum theme, which wasn't designed to support NeXT's UI and display technologies. Steve hated it and continued to use OpenStep on a ThinkPad.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rhapsody looked pretty decent IMHO… http://toastytech.com/guis/rhap.html

Yes, but it only devolved from Mac OS 9 by adding a bunch of unpolished NeXT GUIs, and the development necessitated the temporary removal of features and apps that were already polished.

[deleted]

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#147
I dont entirely understand what this is.

I think this is an effort to create a skin, or graphics layer / window layer to FreeBSD that looks and feels like Apple.

But then it says the project uses the Mach kernel. Does that mean that they have a version of FreeBSD running on top of the Mach kernel? That sounds cool.

Are they creating a clone of Cocoa that will have the same interface as the original? Or is Cocoa a open sourced from Apple?

Near the top it reads:

""RavynOS aims to be compatible with macOS applications""

Ok well that sounds cool.

Then farther down:

""Trivial macOS and Darwin applications may run directly on ravynO""

I guess it can be a goal that is a long way off still. I dont know why they would bother with Linux compatibility. FreeBSD and Mac has to be the most important ones?

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#148
post #24

Maybe this is just me but I never considered Apples approach to software installs to be elegant. And I’m not a fan of their unified menu bar (or most aspected of their desktop environment for that matter). What I’d love to see would be a whole new desktop environment for macOS (homebrew has its warts but is a “good enough” package manager for my day to day needs)

I don't mind the idea of installing applications by dragging the icon to the folder. The problem is that many applications simply don't have the Application folder show up in that window. Seems like Apple relies on developers to make this interaction consistent, which obviously doesn't work.

click on app, command-c, shift-command-A, command-V

if you find yourself looking for faster routes to an end, MacOS almost always has several levels of shortcuts waiting for your muscle memory.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#149

Frankly I think these days a Linux based emulator like Wine would be a smarter decision .

Really goes to show the demand of exclusive MacOS software. To be fair, if something is on Mac, it is usually on Linux. Windows is a bit different.

that's a pretty wild assertion. I'm immediately thinking of music software: 99% of all plugins, the #1-4 DAWs, drivers for 2/3 of all hardware, at least... not on linux.

Re: RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

#150

Frankly I think these days a Linux based emulator like Wine would be a smarter decision .

Really goes to show the demand of exclusive MacOS software. To be fair, if something is on Mac, it is usually on Linux. Windows is a bit different.

Also... Preview is not available on any other platform and is, imo, the single best executed application of all time.
Post reply on HN