Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 170 posts

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

#131

Post by throawayonthe »

skissane wrote: post #110
atherton94027 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, signific…

yknow what would be funny, if a project like ReactOS or WINE relied on the Copilot Copyright Commitment[0] for protection against microsoft lawyers

[0]https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot...

(though they definitely should not lol)

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

#132

Post by mxkopy »

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

I’ve been thinking a long time about using AI to do binary decompilation for this exact purpose. Needless to say we’re short of a fundamental leap forward from doing that

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

#133

Post by mtillman »

platevoltage wrote: post #71
mtillman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Where are you seeing ads?

Maps, news, stocks are all installed by default and supported by ads. Opting out eliminates personalization. One needs to install an app like lulu to block background calls even with personalization turned off. This started with the twitter integration many years again and while social is no longer tightly integrated, the philosophy around user fingerprinting “while not being tied to your identity” is still very much alive and well in a default macOS install.

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

#134

Post by mig39 »

daniel_iversen wrote: post #5

This is so cool, the little mini screenshots look gorgeous because it replicates MacOS. I’m not sure if a lot of people feel the same but over the years I always thought it was a shame that Linux’ overall UX and aesthetics seemed a little bit more rushed and “crowd sourced” (in the sense that it felt diverse in terms of ui opinions and taste etc). It almost makes me want to try Linux again just for that look and feel…

To me, it looks a lot like Uncanny Valley macOS. Yes, it's macOS, but something's just not right. Maybe the fonts don't look right, or the spacing of the icons on the dock?

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

#135

Post by tsimionescu »

danans wrote: post #48
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…

> Would the energy be better spent in making Linux more stable or usable for the general public? Linux is stable and widely used, whether as Android, Ubuntu, WSL on Windows or Crostini on ChromeOS (itself Linux under the hood). The general public buy products like Macs, Lenovos, Steam Decks, Chromebooks or Frameworks. Nobody buys a "Linux". Linux and it's ecosystem are features of those products, not products themsel…

Obviously the idea was about a Linux desktop - whether that means investment in toolkits like Gnome, KDE, core infra like X11 or Wayland, or distributions like Debian.

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

#136

Post by danans »

tsimionescu wrote: post #135
danans wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would the energy be better spent in making Linux more stable or usable for the general public? Linux is stable and widely used, whether as Android, Ubuntu, WSL on Windows or Crostini on ChromeOS (itself Linux under the hood). The general public buy products like Macs, Lenovos, Steam Decks, Chromebooks or Frameworks. Nobody buys a "Linux". Linux and it's ecosystem are features of those products, not products themsel…

Obviously the idea was about a Linux desktop - whether that means investment in toolkits like Gnome, KDE, core infra like X11 or Wayland, or distributions like Debian.

Yes, but Linux's desktop environment(s) is a feature of a product, not a product itself. You can see that Framework themselves markets Linux that way: https://frame.work/linux

If the goal is to make the Linux desktop more popular with the general public as the previous comment suggested, then you must create a product built exclusively around it that is marketed to the general public. There doesn't seem to be much interest in this

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

#137

Post by wowczarek »

jjuran wrote: post #94
wowczarek wrote: post #57

This is all nice and well, while https://www.puredarwin.org/wiki/#/news/Support-Cliff-Sekel Wouldn't it be more natural if this project made use of XNU/Darwin... But with the way things are going, with XNU going more and more proprietary, I suppose FreeBSD is "close enough". In any case, there's nothing we can do about it but these "macOS" alternatives are too fragmented. I would love to see "The" macOS clone.

You're in luck: https://github.com/ravynsoft/ravynos/discussions/529 > ravynOS is moving to Darwin.

Oh, nice!

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

#138

Post by leidenfrost »

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…

The solution for that is to decide which period do you want to build support for.

Trying to be binary-compatible with Tahoe may not be worth it. But you could make a distro binary-compatible with Snow Leopard.

Or better, make it compatible with Ventura apps without the bloat of MacOS Ventura.

That could give new life to old Macs. It can also give a PC a MacOS-like environment without having to deal with Hackintosh.

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

#139

Post by tracker1 »

mlyle wrote: post #27
9dev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a WINE-analogous project, called Darling: https://www.darlinghq.org/ Missed opportunity to call it Cider.

There's already been a Cider; it used some Wine code to ease porting games to MacOS.

Hard Cider

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

#140

Post by netfortius »

leidenfrost wrote: post #138
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…

The solution for that is to decide which period do you want to build support for. Trying to be binary-compatible with Tahoe may not be worth it. But you could make a distro binary-compatible with Snow Leopard. Or better, make it compatible with Ventura apps without the bloat of MacOS Ventura. That could give new life to old Macs. It can also give a PC a MacOS-like environment without having to deal with Hackintosh.

This won't work simply because majority of apps follow "the new trend". Take calibre, for example. I found myself having to OCLP my calibre server, simply because the hardware won't "take" the new macOS version required by the app, but the app new features are only available in the new versions.
Post reply on HN