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Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

mavericksforever.com

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Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#42
> Cylindrical "Trash Can" Mac Pro

My favorite Mac, by far. I upgraded the RAM in it. Can you even imagine a Mac that has upgradeable RAM? Pearl clutching. I also tried plugging 4 different 4K monitors into it just for the novelty. I miss my trashcan

Also, if you were to serve your get.sh (et al) as text/plain it would enable browing them versus them downloading and having to open it locally. Or, as your footer implied, linking to GitHub would also be super handy

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#43
post #26

> Don't you love how hackable everything is? Removing stock apps from the Applications folder is completely safe—nothing will break—and this is your computer, so you should make it your own. You can always restore apps later using Time Machine. Just don't delete System Preferences, or anything in the Utilities folder. This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will bre…

running a funky chmod command recursively on my root dir and then learning how to fix it, probably taught me more about how linux works than any tutorial or article i've ever read.

have fun! break things!

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#44

You know, there comes a journey in every developers life where all roads lead to hackintosh. It’s like a right of passage. I did it back during the Snow Leopard years with NForce motherboards (wrote some kernel extensions). Now, it’s just out of nostalgia.

I have fond memories of my Hackintosh years. Over time the frustration of updating to the latest OS and having to deal with breaking changes just sucked all the joy from it. Especially when I really needed to use the computer for something. I might tinker again some time soon. I had thought of building a Mac mini for a home theatre setup but then again Apple TV just works so well

I hackintoshed a few times over the years too. It could be frustrating at times, but when you had a solid setup that updated cleanly and everything it felt like a cheat code. Just as stable as a real Mac, but more capable, quiet, and expandable.

One of the laptops I hacked for a while had a 15.4” 1920x1200 screen panel (much nicer than on contemporary 15” MacBooks), 4 USB-A ports, FireWire, Ethernet, an eSATA port, a full size DisplayPort, EC and PCMCIA slots, and an SD card reader and could dock to more than double the number of ports, plus two hot swap drive bays, and it all worked as expected under hackintoshed Mavericks which was incredible. It was like having a portable Mac Pro.

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#45
post #26

> Don't you love how hackable everything is? Removing stock apps from the Applications folder is completely safe—nothing will break—and this is your computer, so you should make it your own. You can always restore apps later using Time Machine. Just don't delete System Preferences, or anything in the Utilities folder. This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will bre…

This is a hallmark of having achieved comfortable familiarity within a system: You think you have total freedom because, mentally, you’ve excluded the off-limits things from consideration.

It reminds me of a couple jobs where management would tell us we had so much freedom that we could work on whatever we wanted. Choose your own destiny here! Except when you chose something that wasn’t among the short list of acceptable tasks, you were scolded for choosing something that was obviously not an option (to them). They knew the rules so deeply that the set of acceptable things seemed like the entire frontier of possibilities in their minds.

Like you said, it would be more helpful for everyone if the system actually clarified what was allowed and what was not so we didn’t have to guess. Drop the illusion of total freedom and replace it with clear rules that leave nothing to guessing.

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#46

I have a soft spot for Mavericks too. It’s not 100% perfect (as post notes, scroll bars have been flattened and by then sidebar item icons had lost their color), but otherwise visually its probably the closest thing possible to “perfect” Aqua era OS X. It feels very refined in several ways that the earlier versions didn’t. In my opinion the runner-up in terms of visuals is actually 10.4 Tiger, though — the dark grays…

On the BSD side there has been efforts such as helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) and rayvnOS (https://ravynos.com/) that aim to provide a FOSS recreation of the Jobs-era Mac OS X experience. Both can be considered BSDs as opposed to mere desktop environments. helloSystem uses X11 and Qt, while rayvnOS uses its own version of Cocoa.

However, it’s been a few years since I’ve seriously investigated these projects, and a cursory glance at them shows that they still have a while to go before they become replacements for existing desktop Linux environments. Both are rather ambitious passion projects from their creators, similar to Haiku, a re-creation of BeOS.

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#47
post #46

I have a soft spot for Mavericks too. It’s not 100% perfect (as post notes, scroll bars have been flattened and by then sidebar item icons had lost their color), but otherwise visually its probably the closest thing possible to “perfect” Aqua era OS X. It feels very refined in several ways that the earlier versions didn’t. In my opinion the runner-up in terms of visuals is actually 10.4 Tiger, though — the dark grays…

On the BSD side there has been efforts such as helloSystem ( https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/ ) and rayvnOS ( https://ravynos.com/ ) that aim to provide a FOSS recreation of the Jobs-era Mac OS X experience. Both can be considered BSDs as opposed to mere desktop environments. helloSystem uses X11 and Qt, while rayvnOS uses its own version of Cocoa. However, it’s been a few years since I’ve seriously investigated t…

I’ve been keeping an eye on these projects too. My hunch is that helloSystem is going to find Qt limiting as it matures, and while ravynOS’ approach is more likely to produce a high fidelity analogue, it’s also much larger in scope and likely to get bogged down in achieving compatibility with existing Mac binaries. I wish the best for both though, because they’re filling an extremely empty niche in the FOSS desktop space.

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#48
post #42

> Cylindrical "Trash Can" Mac Pro My favorite Mac, by far . I upgraded the RAM in it. Can you even imagine a Mac that has upgradeable RAM? Pearl clutching. I also tried plugging 4 different 4K monitors into it just for the novelty. I miss my trashcan Also, if you were to serve your get.sh (et al) as text/plain it would enable browing them versus them downloading and having to open it locally. Or, as your footer impli…

> Also, if you were to serve your get.sh (et al) as text/plain it would enable browing them versus them downloading and having to open it locally.

Thanks, I'll look into this! I'm not immediately sure how to do it. The site is hosted via a very minimal Cloudflare worker, because it's free for static assets but unlike e.g. Github pages supports unencrypted http (which is useful when bootstrapping a new Mavericks system). I haven't changed the content type of anything.

My Github is https://github.com/wowfunhappy but you actually won't find either script there, the website is the canonical version! This type of thing is why my github isn't linked!

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#49
post #43
post #26

> Don't you love how hackable everything is? Removing stock apps from the Applications folder is completely safe—nothing will break—and this is your computer, so you should make it your own. You can always restore apps later using Time Machine. Just don't delete System Preferences, or anything in the Utilities folder. This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will bre…

running a funky chmod command recursively on my root dir and then learning how to fix it, probably taught me more about how linux works than any tutorial or article i've ever read. have fun! break things!

One time I somehow set the permissions of the sudo executable to lower than they needed to be (0600?). Fixing that was fun :)

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#50
post #43
post #26

> Don't you love how hackable everything is? Removing stock apps from the Applications folder is completely safe—nothing will break—and this is your computer, so you should make it your own. You can always restore apps later using Time Machine. Just don't delete System Preferences, or anything in the Utilities folder. This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will bre…

running a funky chmod command recursively on my root dir and then learning how to fix it, probably taught me more about how linux works than any tutorial or article i've ever read. have fun! break things!

I broke enough things in my early Linux days and learned a lot, but enjoying that, seeing it as a positive, or even having the willingness and time to spend on such fixes is far from universal. Most people have severe mental blocks to doing anything on the command-line for fear of breaking everything. Having an environment where they can’t break anything is a fantastic way to help them build confidence and learn how the computer works.

There is a time and place for each approach. Recognising which is appropriate for each situation and user is a good skill to cultivate.

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