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You're using open-source Apple code (Darwin) and aiming for Cocoa API compatibility. How are you handling the legal side? Apple's APIs and frameworks are proprietary. Are you reimplementing them from scratch, or using something like GNUstep?
> Developers can port existing Cocoa applications with minimal changes. I wonder how big the actual gap between close to Cocoa App compatibility and full app compatibility is? Being able to run MacOS apps natively would unlock a huge barrier to adoption here.
And if it ever reaches a usable state, I assume it will far behind Apple's current systems.
Seems at least one of the same developers works on both PureDarwin and ravynOS: https://www.puredarwin.org/news/The-Road-to-20-5-0.html (This is the first time I've heard of the latter.)
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Maybe, but ELF doesn't support doing so
One might be interested in the not-very-alive FatELF implementation, though: https://icculus.org/fatelf/
> The format is very simple: it adds some accounting info at the start of the file, and then appends all the ELF binaries after it, adding padding for alignment. The end of the file isn't touched, so you can still do things like self-extracting .zip files for multiple architectures with FatELF.
But I would indeed call it very-not-alive; their demo image is Ubuntu 9.04
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I’m super confused as to what is missing in the FOSS world, how does it “have little to offer?” It really sounds like you just like the macOS style and want a clone of it, and that’s certainly fine as a desire or a request, but if you like macOS, macOS is already available. For what logical reason should a project be copying macOS? I would absolutely agree that a logical reason is to run macOS apps on other platforms…
> You’ve established that a Linux desktop environment in macOS style alone is not sufficient, and that makes me wonder what details of the underpinnings is Linux getting wrong compared to Mac? Is launchd superior to systemd? Pretty much anything is better than systemd. CoreAudio is far superior to anything Linux has. WindowServer is better than Wayland.
You should look into PipeWire for audio in Linux. It can do things that no other audio platform can. Route a browser tab into Audacity while also sending it to a virtual mic for a call, while a synth app feeds a DAW.
I would agree that Wayland has more development time to go to get better, but Wayland is architected better from the start and represents a more modern design. A lot of Wayland’s security advantages are by design where macOS had to tack them on after the fact. You also get a modular, extensible architecture with compositer diversity.
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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…
Is it possible to write device drivers for Ravynos with Driver kit?
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?
Just to clarify, did you mean ‘exciting’ by > Is Darwin really all the exiting? I’ve tried to reread your question, and couldn’t get the sense, before I thought maybe that’s an autocorrection / misprint.