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Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

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Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#51

Post by bapak »

latexr wrote: 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…

That comment really sounds like how pissed off I was when Windows Vista told me I wasn't allowed to do something.

Funny thing is that you're still allowed to change things in the latest macOS, just disable SIP. On Mavericks you can because there's no SIP at all.

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#52

Post by JKCalhoun »

> There is no modern mainstream browser engine that works in Snow Leopard.

Sadly this too will be true in Mavericks soon enough. If you decide to web browse on a separate machine though, you can still have your Mavericks machine be your main one.

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#53

Post by nutjob2 »

latexr wrote: 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 was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will break”, then in the same paragraph “but don’t do this specific thing”.

I think you're being a bit pedantic. There is no contradiction.

You can indeed delete System Preferences and nothing will break, ditto for utilities, it just makes life difficult if you do. For a locked down system for say a child though it might make sense. Also reversing the problem isn't hard, you can just copy in the apps from elsewhere.

macOS isn't perfect, but it does have a nice, clean, logical implementation in many ways.

One huge demonstration of that is the way it runs on commodity hardware so well (ie Hackintoshes). Apple could have easily baked in very hardware specific support in the OS, but instead they mostly implemented a general system that follows PC standards. Security lock downs are orthogonal to that.

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#54

Post by Wowfunhappy »

bangonkeyboard wrote: post #41

Can you touch on how some of these patches were made/backported from and to closed-source binaries? Which underlying proxy is Aqua Proxy built on?

> Which underlying proxy is Aqua Proxy built on?

Aqua Proxy's source code is here: https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/AquaProxy/tree/master. It mostly leverages the Go standard library.

One thing I really like is that it won't MITM any requests that use TLS 1.3 or HTTP2. Since Mavericks doesn't support these protocols natively, the proxy knows this traffic must be coming from a relatively-modern app that ships its own TLS implementation and doesn't need any help.

> Can you touch on how some of these patches were made/backported from and to closed-source binaries?

The Mail plugin just disables a feature via Objective-C swizzling. Swizzling is fun, you can replace any method in any app with your own version. I usually use class-dump to get a list of methods in the original app, read the method names to guess at what each one does, and try the ones that look promising. More recently I've begun using Hopper (a proper decompiler/disassembler) more heavily, particularly because Claude is very good at reading both assembly and decompiler babble and can direct me.

The font patch is just a hex edit. To quote the readme:

>> The patch removes the `fnt_adjust` TrueType instruction from Apple's font rendering code. This instruction has not been used by legitimate fonts since the 90s. After CVE-2023-41990 was published, Apple responded by removing this instruction from modern macOS. This patch merely does the same on Mavericks.

The patched library replaces the vulnerable instruction with a no-op.

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#55

Post by Wowfunhappy »

bapak wrote: post #51
latexr wrote: 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…

That comment really sounds like how pissed off I was when Windows Vista told me I wasn't allowed to do something. Funny thing is that you're still allowed to change things in the latest macOS, just disable SIP. On Mavericks you can because there's no SIP at all.

Unfortunately, you have to do a lot more than disable SIP nowadays because of the signed system volume stuff.

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#56

Post by mdaniel »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #48
mdaniel wrote: 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 syste…

https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/static-assets/head... alleges it honors the c-type of the asset when it was uploaded, just like S3

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#57

Post by bangonkeyboard »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #54
bangonkeyboard wrote: post #41

Can you touch on how some of these patches were made/backported from and to closed-source binaries? Which underlying proxy is Aqua Proxy built on?

> Which underlying proxy is Aqua Proxy built on? Aqua Proxy's source code is here: https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/AquaProxy/tree/master . It mostly leverages the Go standard library. One thing I really like is that it won't MITM any requests that use TLS 1.3 or HTTP2. Since Mavericks doesn't support these protocols natively, the proxy knows this traffic must be coming from a relatively-modern app that ships its own T…

Thanks.

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#58

Post by Wowfunhappy »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #36

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…

Tiger is cool! The other neat thing about the visuals is, if you think about Apple's industrial design in that era, the UI feels a perfect extension of the hardware itself.

And as much as I love Mavericks, I agree, I would absolutely jump to a Linux distro that recreated the experience faithfully. There really isn't anything though, especially when you add in the larger app ecosystem—I like using Aperture a lot more than Digikam, for example.

Edit: Oh, and:

> and by then sidebar item icons had lost their color

But you can bring the color back with the ColorfulSidebar SIMBL plugin!

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#59

Post by carlosjobim »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #52

> There is no modern mainstream browser engine that works in Snow Leopard. Sadly this too will be true in Mavericks soon enough. If you decide to web browse on a separate machine though, you can still have your Mavericks machine be your main one.

Aren't there old versions of those browsers?

Re: Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

#60

Post by os2warpman »

My favorite thing about MacOS is how it has never changed how it changes.

It's like the game Civilization.

Every new version is worse than the last. Every new version is more bloated. Every new version has changes that ruin it.

Every new version is "less snappy". Every new version ruins everything.

Not even with OS X, we're talking back to the System 6 days, almost 40 years ago, it has always been the same.

System 6 uses too much RAM I'm staying with System 5.

System 7 is bloated I'm staying with System 6.

System 8 is a disaster I'm staying with System 9.

System 9 is a buggy mess I'm staying with System 8.

System, err, OS X v10.0 has no apps I'm staying with System 9.

And then oh boy the OS X/macOS versions!

Every generation gets so much worse, buggier, and "less snappy" than the last that surely our computers must be traveling backwards through time by now!

Every Civ game past III, the one I spent the most time playing during college and am most used to and like the most for totally not arbitrary reasons, has just been the worst, amirite?

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