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RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source

ravynos.com

121–130 of 148 posts

Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source

#121

Maybe someone more familiar with operating systems kernels can answer this: Is Darwin really all the exiting? It is different from both the BSD kernels and Linux, but less so than Windows. Other than the ability to run macOS applications (assuming you can clone the libraries and APIs from macOS) is there some benefit of Darwin that I'm not seeing?

IMO the Mach virtual memory API is much nicer than the Linux one.

Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source

#122
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now that I have walked over the whole website: Why not a single screenshot anywhere?

Because there is nothing to screenshot. Others have speculated that the UI looks like ass. Some have said "Mac OS window chrome with Win 95 GUI controls. Yeah, no. See for yourself. This is the most recent release on their github page. I considered posting it to my Youtube account to gain some of that much-needed eyeballs and attention, but it's 11pm and I'm not doing that shit, I'm not playing that game. Here is wha…

At least it displays a logo...

Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source

#123
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XNU has some interesting features. It’s Mach based, so it has Mach ports, which are an IPC system that is fairly heavily used by macOS. It has DriverKit, which is a C++ framework for drivers that’s got morecsuppirt than the usual Unix driver model. Mach-O does more than ELF, and enables the two-layer namespacing that makes macOS able to manage dynamic linking dependencies better than ELF. Nothing really earth-shatter…

> Mach-O does more than ELF, and enables the two-layer namespacing that makes macOS able to manage dynamic linking dependencies better than ELF. I've always admired that mach-o supports fat binaries.

It's more that Darwin does. A fat binary is just two independent Mach-O binaries concatenated with a small header.

Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man I used to develop SAAS software using Cappuccino. Since I knew Objc (and JS/CSS) really well it was such a beautiful system for development. I'm sad it never went anywhere

May I ask what made it special? It does look awful "elegant" and well put together ...

when Cappuccino was written, Apple was still using the Objective-C + AppKit stack. It had been honing this stack for years, every WWDC brought useful and deliberate improvements. Back then macOS development was much more niche (and tech in general). They could take their time. MacOS releases happened every couple of years, not every year. Not the kind of outcome we have nowadays where changes are rushed because of demand.

Cappuccino improved upon javascript by using a different language (objective-j) that added many features js didn't have, and it used the same (mostly) well-honed api as AppKit. In comparison to other js UI frameworks of its time, it was lightyears ahead.

Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source

#125

Maybe someone more familiar with operating systems kernels can answer this: Is Darwin really all the exiting? It is different from both the BSD kernels and Linux, but less so than Windows. Other than the ability to run macOS applications (assuming you can clone the libraries and APIs from macOS) is there some benefit of Darwin that I'm not seeing?

Most kernels are kind of the same really. Some have slightly fancier inter-process communication. Leading to my all-time favorite YouTube video, an explainer on Android IPC cut like a spy thriller. I'm not even joking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb4UoqXPEtI

Er, uhm… I have to disagree really. You have monolithic kernels versus micro kernels, I’ve used weird stuff such as DragonFlyBSD, Plan9, and BeOS. Even the Windows NT kernel (now mainline Windows) is a very unusual piece of software engineering.

Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source

#126
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, real apps use Mach messaging directly. i.e.: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ipc...

Chrome is an outlier to how most apps will do things.

Any launchd task that declares any MachServices does.

Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source

#127
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not saying $TECHCO doesn’t know about X project. i’m just saying that if the average person doesn’t know about it, it’s unlikely to get shut down, as it poses no threat.

Maybe. But Microsoft get the bulk of their licensing from enterprise offerings. And Windows comes preinstalled on consumer machines anyway. So I don’t think there’s any risk of ReactOS becoming a problem for MS. And with Apple, they’ve always approached the market as a hardware company first and foremost. Which is why macOS has always been free vs Windows which, until recently, was not. Platforms like Linux was alway…

You may be broadly correct, but “macOS has always been free” is definitely not true: all the Big Cat releases of Mac OS X were paid-for, right up until MacOS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” released in 2012. Only later, from Mavericks in 2013 onwards, were upgrades free. And further back in time I remember buying a software update for my first-generation iPod Touch up to par with the first-generation iPhone way back in 2008. Apple still sells or provides subscriptions to a lot of software (Final Cut Pro, Logic, et cetera) and back in the day I paid a lot of money for some of their more niche offerings Xsan, for example, which I remember cost me an eye-watering thousand bucks per node. Xgrid on the other hand was free, and it’s extremely unfortunate they killed it because in this day and age of Thunderbolt-interconnected Mac Studios with unified memory architectures running AI workloads “here’s a bunch of Macs regard them as a unified computing resource” would be extremely useful (but I digress from the digression).

Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source

#129
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. But Microsoft get the bulk of their licensing from enterprise offerings. And Windows comes preinstalled on consumer machines anyway. So I don’t think there’s any risk of ReactOS becoming a problem for MS. And with Apple, they’ve always approached the market as a hardware company first and foremost. Which is why macOS has always been free vs Windows which, until recently, was not. Platforms like Linux was alway…

You may be broadly correct, but “macOS has always been free” is definitely not true: all the Big Cat releases of Mac OS X were paid-for, right up until MacOS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” released in 2012. Only later, from Mavericks in 2013 onwards, were upgrades free. And further back in time I remember buying a software update for my first-generation iPod Touch up to par with the first-generation iPhone way back in 2008.…

Logic, Final Cut, Xcode etc aren’t really the same thing because they’re applications rather than the OS (which we were talking about).

But i didn’t realise Apple used to charge for OS upgrades. So thanks for the correction there.

Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask what made it special? It does look awful "elegant" and well put together ...

when Cappuccino was written, Apple was still using the Objective-C + AppKit stack. It had been honing this stack for years, every WWDC brought useful and deliberate improvements. Back then macOS development was much more niche (and tech in general). They could take their time. MacOS releases happened every couple of years, not every year. Not the kind of outcome we have nowadays where changes are rushed because of de…

The entire pace of releases itself made everything more "breathable" and (ostensibly) higher quality.-

PS: Compare to today, with code slop (and good agent-mediated code: It also increases overall speed).-

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