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New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS

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Re: New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS

#101

Post by pjmlp »

linguae wrote: post #50
randyfox wrote: post #43

Why is every new OS project just a rehash of 60/70's tech. What about something new that actually attempts to move the field forward.

My dream is to work on an operating system that at least gets us to the 1990s and 2000s when it comes to research ideas. I have a soft spot for the Smalltalk-80 environment and Lisp machines. They had a single address space. In my opinion, the two most interesting things about these environments are (1) their facilitation for component-based software based on live, dynamic objects, and (2) the malleability of the sys…

I share the sentiment, which is why someone I ended up gravitating around technologies somehow related to it like Java, .NET, and the related languages on their ecosystems.

Also why despite not agreeing how Google went down with Java in Android, I appreciate their approach, because this kind of platforms apparently only get adoption with such kind of hard pushes, otherwise it would be yet another tiny UNIX clone.

Ironically is probably the closest we have on the market from Inferno/Limbo ideas on a mainstream OS.

Re: New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS

#102

Post by wltr »

Perhaps I need to understand something first, but at this point in time I see no value in projects like this. Beyond the obvious fact of hacking. Ideally, I don’t even want, say, Linux to have any binary compatibility with Windows. I want native apps, games included. I don’t want to see Photoshop working on Linux, I want Gimp to become successful (maybe, start with the name change), or, well, Krita then. Same with macOS. I don’t miss any app from macOS, I want to run so badly. I want Linux to catch up where it isn’t.

Re: New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS

#103

Post by ricardobeat »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #33
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Better” is largely subjective. For some (including myself), a Windows-like paradigm like KDE uses is not desirable, and UI papercuts like the many that KDE has are highly visible.

There are objective criteria that macOS definitely fails at. Various government agencies here in the states can't use macs even if they wanted to due to lack of #a11y support or the ability to load their own root cert stores. I agree with you that for MOST people, MOST of the complaints boil down to "I just don't like the Mac UX," but there are organizations that cannot tolerate the risk of forcing employees to use e…

That is a quite strange reason, as Mac and iOS have by far the most investment in accessibility of any system. The amount of accessibility features both systems have is bewildering.

Every company using Macs I’ve ever worked for has MDM and their own root certs, that’s basic device management. Are you thinking of something else?

Re: New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS

#104

Post by ramon156 »

mtillman wrote: post #40
skynetv2 wrote: post #3

> A BSD-based OS project that aims to provide source and binary compatibility with macOS® and a similar user experience. I am curious - what is the motivation for this project? Is it to replicate macOS? - If yes, why? Is it to provide application compatibility on a non-macOS? If yes, why a full OS? Why not take the route like Wine or other such layers that make compatibility possible? Also, is there such a need for r…

Mac OS without the background ads garbage or the constant blocking of call-home requests would be nice.

Spelled windows wrong

Re: New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS

#105

Post by theodric »

linguae wrote: post #15
skynetv2 wrote: post #3

> A BSD-based OS project that aims to provide source and binary compatibility with macOS® and a similar user experience. I am curious - what is the motivation for this project? Is it to replicate macOS? - If yes, why? Is it to provide application compatibility on a non-macOS? If yes, why a full OS? Why not take the route like Wine or other such layers that make compatibility possible? Also, is there such a need for r…

I'm not affiliated with ravynOS, but I've been periodically following the project for a few years. The main page ( https://ravynos.com/ ) expresses the philosophy of ravynOS: "We love macOS, but we’re not a fan of the ever-closing hardware and ecosystem. So, we are creating ravynOS — an OS aimed to provide the finesse of macOS with the freedom of FreeBSD." rayvnOS seems to be designed for people who love macOS, parti…

I guess drivers are important, which is a good reason for choosing FreeBSD :)

It's a shame that OpenDarwin didn't continue. PureDarwin seems to exist, but progress is understandably slow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system

https://www.puredarwin.org/#beta

Re: New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS

#106

Post by __d »

fithisux wrote: post #76

Apple releases part of the source code of XNU, it would make much more sense to me, to re-create something like the original Darwin CD out of this for x86-64. There are a number of MacOS CLI tools and drivers for x86_64. It may be a motivation to continue work. Even commercially it could be something interesting. I am not sure if it is easier though. PureDarwin seems to do very slow progress.

It appears they’ve actually made that decision: making FreeBSD Mach-O is too much, so XNU is the new plan …

Re: New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS

#107

Post by fooker »

pjmlp wrote: post #93
heavyset_go wrote: post #84

Wine works because Microsoft spends billions on backwards compatibility and APIs are stable over time. Apple regularly deprecates frameworks and adds new ones at rapid rates. It's a moving target with the added complication of moving build targets. If you implement your own version of Apple's XyzKit, that might only be used in macOS 12 to 14, and not before or after that, so you put in a lot of work to essentially su…

Wine works, because it doesn't cover many modern APIs, I would assess. New Microsoft under Satya has a different stance on anything WinRT related, or even newer Win32/COM APIs since Windows 8. Also .NET Framework is the Python 2 of .NET, the breaking changes are a reason there are still new projects being done in .NET Framework 4.8.x.

You can desugar all the modern stuff to windows api with first party DLLs

Re: New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS

#108

Post by fooker »

TheDong wrote: post #88
wwweston wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it strikes me that something like this might be one of the better litmus tests for AI — if it’s really good enough to start 10x-ing engineers (let alone replacing them) it should be more common for more projects like this should begin to accelerate to practical usability. If not, maybe the productivity dividends are mostly shallow.

There's also a cost problem here. Who's paying $30 to run an AI agent to run a single experiment that has a 20% chance of success? On large code-bases like this, where a lot of context gets pulled in, agents start to cost a lot very quickly, and open source projects like this are usually quite short on money.

> Who's paying $30 to run an AI agent to run a single experiment that has a 20% chance of success?

Someone who stands to make or save (significantly) more than 150$ if it's successful.

It doesn't have to be an unemployed contributer or student. Someone deploying it on a data center is the archetype you're looking for.

Re: New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS

#109

Post by __d »

linguae wrote: post #50
randyfox wrote: post #43

Why is every new OS project just a rehash of 60/70's tech. What about something new that actually attempts to move the field forward.

My dream is to work on an operating system that at least gets us to the 1990s and 2000s when it comes to research ideas. I have a soft spot for the Smalltalk-80 environment and Lisp machines. They had a single address space. In my opinion, the two most interesting things about these environments are (1) their facilitation for component-based software based on live, dynamic objects, and (2) the malleability of the sys…

So … is this MallowOS?

Re: New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS

#110

Post by skissane »

atherton94027 wrote: post #60
wwweston wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it strikes me that something like this might be one of the better litmus tests for AI — if it’s really good enough to start 10x-ing engineers (let alone replacing them) it should be more common for more projects like this should begin to accelerate to practical usability. If not, maybe the productivity dividends are mostly shallow.

The problem is that many of these clean room reimplementations require contributors to not have seen any of the proprietary source. You can't guarantee that with ai because who knows which training data was used

> You can't guarantee that with ai because who knows which training data was used

There are no guarantees in life, but with macOS you can know it is rather unlikely any AI was trained on (recent) Apple proprietary source code – because very little of it has been leaked to the general public – and if it hasn't leaked to the general public, the odds are low any mainstream AI would have been trained on it. Now, significant portions of macOS have been open-sourced – but presumably it is okay for you to use that under its open source license – and if not, you can just compare the AI-generated code to that open source code to evaluate similarity.

It is different for Windows, because there have been numerous public leaks of Windows source code, splattered all over GitHub and other places, and so odds are high a mainstream AI has ingested that code during training (even if only by accident).

But, even for Windows – there are tools you can use to compare two code bases for evidence of copying – so you can compare the AI-generated reimplementation of Windows to the leaked Windows source code, and reject it if it looks too similar. (Is it legal to use the leaked Windows source code in that way? Ask a lawyer–is someone violating your copyright if they use your code to do due diligence to ensure they're not violating your copyright? Could be "fair use" in jurisdictions which have such a concept–although again, ask a lawyer to be sure. And see A.V. ex rel. Vanderhye v. iParadigms, L.L.C., 562 F.3d 630 (4th Cir. 2009))

In fact, I'm pretty sure there are SaaS services you can subscribe to which will do this sort of thing for you, and hence they can run the legal risk of actually possessing leaked code for comparison purposes rather than you having to do it directly. But this is another expense which an open source project might not be able to sustain.

Even for Windows – the vast majority of the leaked Windows code is >20 years old now – so if you are implementing some brand new API, odds of accidentally reusing leaked Windows code is significantly reduced.

Other options: decompile the binary, and compare the decompiled source to the AI-generated source. Or compile the AI-generated source and compare it to the Windows binary (this works best if you can use the exact same compiler, version and options as Microsoft did, or as close to the same as is manageable.)

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