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RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

ravynos.com

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Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#161

Post by sharikous »

rich_sasha wrote: post #67

The one thing keeping me on MacOS is that it is "*nix that works". I have never found Ubuntu / Linux to be as stable; worrying about updates breaking things, updates indeed breaking things, drivers randomly stopping working, googling in desperation for half-baked fixes online, randomly trying different options in some dotfile until stuff works etc. Mac just works; maybe there are features that Linux would give me, bu…

I agree but the *nix part became less and less significant. Bundled Unix tools are ancient. Compiling your own kernel is almost an anathema (it is possible but you will have nonstop hurdles, you will lose a lot of features and you will have to fight the security system too many times to remain sane).

Even the UI conventions that let you use the keyboard instead of the mouse are now often broken by Apple itself (it impacts power users more than impaired people since accessibility features are still good).

And no containers - those require you to run a different kernel on a VM.

Frankly I feel that macOS went back to being like Mac OS 9 in a lot of aspects - it's just enormously bigger and has a proper foundation but the UI is again mouse centric and proprietary and the system is more tightly coupled than ever with the hardware

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#162

Post by prvc »

prmoustache wrote: post #93

Looks like lots of efforts to recreate the crappy MacOS X UI and user experience. I mean it was fine and less a mess than windows has ever been but it barely evolved since Nextstep in term of UI paradigm and feels dated nowadays. The interesting part in Apple products is mostly the hardware.

Particularly the "simple installs" graphic on that page. Who wants to, using a mouse cursor, after opening an installer "shortcut", click and drag an icon onto some other icon, presumably representing a shortcut to an "app" folder, simply in order to install a program? What is that even supposed to represent, anyway? Big step backwards for package management.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#163

Post by mlindner »

The problem with all these things is that they only visually look like macOS. Once you try to use them, you find that nothing works as it is supposed to. Drag and drop is severely limited, programs don't share a common set of norms, or if they do, it's not the one you're used to. The hardware itself that you need to run it in is horrible in comparison (especially touchpads). Finally there's always the tremendous numbers of sharp edges shared by any of these types of OSes that will ruin the rest of your day as you try to figure out how to get past whatever the problem is so you can get on with what you were originally trying to do at the beginning of your day.

Stop chasing the look of MacOS. Replicate it's functionality and feel first.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#164

Post by Diris »

spidey1 wrote: post #144

How does this compare to Hello System? [1] [1] https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/

From the FAQ[0]

----------------

helloSystem: We have been in fact working with helloSystem! As some people have noticed, Release 0.2.X was basically helloSystem. (That was the second PoC. The first had been built on vanilla FreeBSD and had no GUI at all.) Under the hood, however, release 0.2.2 has a partial implementation of Cocoa, a modified compiler & linker that support frameworks, and several other additions that make it distinct. We have similar philosophies, and share technology and cooperate where it makes sense (e.g. Filer), but the project goals are quite different.

helloSystem wants to create a computer that is simple to use, open, elegant, small and fast. Older Mac OS X and Classic are an inspiration to what that might look like, but they are not explicitly trying to create an open-source Mac. In fact, they're mostly avoiding Objective-C and XML plists and other Mac technology in favor of simpler and/or more modern ways (e.g. Qt, C++, JSON).

ravynOS is explicitly trying to be compatible with Mac software at a source and eventually a binary level, without losing support for FreeBSD/X11 software, and to implement a very similar experience on the desktop and at the command line. For example, on ravynOS you can type open -a MyApp image.jpg and have image.jpg open in MyApp. You will find things in (mostly) the same directories as a Mac, like ~/Library or /System/Library/Fonts. This project is not as concerned about keeping the OS as small and simple as possible, and more concerned about making it clean, secure, performant, and compatible - implementing many of the features I use daily in macOS while skipping the lock-in and "tabletization" of the computer.

Some of the more technical differences between ravynOS and hello are:

- ravynOS uses a patched kernel with support for Mach, just like xnu, and a compiler suite that supports Frameworks and has preliminary support for Mach-O as well as

- ravynOS has a package repo with software built to "standard" paths like /System, /etc, and /usr instead of the FreeBSD repos which are built into /usr/local

- ravynOS desktop is being written from scratch with Cocoa, Mach, and OpenGL on a Wayland compositor, where hello's desktop is based on openbox, Menu and Filer (originally from LXQt) plus other lightweight services for notifications (dunst), screen color temperature (redshift) etc

- helloSystem uses a simplified .app structure whereas ravynOS uses real Bundles for .app

- helloSystem tends to use typical Unix paths and files, while ravynOS is moving towards typical Mac paths and files

- ravynOS tries to provide the same APIs as macOS

[0] https://ravynos.com/faq.html

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#165

Post by adrianmsmith »

arghwhat wrote: post #142
fguerraz wrote: post #107

Quoted post unavailable.

You do realize that Netflix uses FreeBSD, right? That a good chunk of NAS builds, diy or not, use FreeBSD? That high performance network solutions often use FreeBSD because of what is commonly seen as a better/more mature network stack? Having a smaller user base than the world's most used kernel (Linux) doesn't mean it has a small user base in absolute terms. And being a smaller kernel in lines of code is certainly…

Not to mention the PlayStation 4 OS as well - not a small number of installs there.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#166

Post by pseudalopex »

alana314 wrote: post #57
eyelidlessness wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cmd+` to switch windows within an app. For those more familiar with Windows and probably most Linux conventions, Home/End won’t behave how you want but they move to the start/end of a scrollable view (which IMO is more useful). In most any app ^a will be your Home equivalent and ^e will be your End equivalent. If that sounds weird or weirdly familiar… a subset of emacs key bindings are built in for basically all nati…

Woah, I love this thread. I didn't know about the tab or preference shortcuts. And I used ^A and ^E in terminal but didn't know it worked in other apps. Are these all documented somewhere?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#167

Post by stormking »

mlindner wrote: post #163

The problem with all these things is that they only visually look like macOS. Once you try to use them, you find that nothing works as it is supposed to. Drag and drop is severely limited, programs don't share a common set of norms, or if they do, it's not the one you're used to. The hardware itself that you need to run it in is horrible in comparison (especially touchpads). Finally there's always the tremendous numb…

You obviously did not even look at this project because that's exactly what they're aiming at.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#169

Post by pseudalopex »

michaelmrose wrote: post #95
ysleepy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those are bugs, just differences. sounds like you tried for a day and were annoyed it's not exactly as you are used to. Most of your issues simply work differently on macos, and many have been since before kde existed. Sure some could be better, but changing these would upset the whole user base. (And mac users could claim those things broken in kde in the same way) I have used windows, gnome2, gnome3, xfce,…

Most entries in posters list are complaints with how things work. Two of these seem like bugs. > Sometimes audio balance will randomly shift to the left or right with bluetooth headphones > There is a delay of ~100ms when pushing caps lock Another seems objective not subjective > Pressing enter in Finder renames a file instead of opening it Who thinks the enter to rename is reasonable?

Audio balance seems like a bug. Caps Lock delay seems like accidental activation prevention. Who thinks F2 to rename is reasonable?
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