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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

#71

Post by platevoltage »

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.

Where are you seeing ads?

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

#72

Post by platevoltage »

ethin wrote: post #58
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.

Because writing even a remotely modern OS is really really hard. I speak from experience. Even getting old hardware from the 90s and early 00s to work is a pain. Then of course you have the more modern standards (although even SATA is still modern for some definition of modern, but AHCI is a nightmare), and then you have things like modern NICs and GPUs which has documentation that is very hard to find, or in the cas…

Even Apple got to a point where they needed to acquire another company because they hit a brick wall with MacOS.

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

#73

Post by willtemperley »

wwweston wrote: post #16
linguae wrote: post #6

I've been paying attention to this project periodically over the past few years. It would be nice to have a FOSS clone of macOS, similar to how FreeDOS, ReactOS, and Haiku are FOSS clones of MS-DOS, Windows, and BeOS, respectively. The only thing is that this project has been quite slow going, which is similar to the histories of FreeDOS, ReactOS, and Haiku, where it took a long time for those projects to get to a us…

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 organisational bottleneck still remains though. People need to discuss and coordinate at human speed.

I think AI will likely create more fragmentation initially, if a 10x developer is forced to run at 0.1x they're going to fork a project.

I believe in the AI 10x developer, but I suspect it only works for individuals or small teams at the moment.

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

#74

Post by sneak »

lathiat wrote: post #51
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.

I would argue that iPadOS (built on iPhone's coat tails) moved the field forward significantly in terms of isolation and user security. While this has left a long tail of inconveniences, many resolved and some not, I am very confident that using 1 app on my iPhone/iPad will not leak data to another in any case that I am likely to care about as a non-significantly interesting person (political figure, etc). ... and fo…

> While this has left a long tail of inconveniences, many resolved and some not, I am very confident that using 1 app on my iPhone/iPad will not leak data to another in any case that I am likely to care about as a non-significantly interesting person (political figure, etc).

Log in to YouTube with one Google account. Log in to Google Drive with a different one.

Google knows that both accounts are owned by the same person, because Apple lets Google's apps access the data of the others on the same system.

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

#75

Post by RussianCow »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #31
forgetfulness wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notes and Reminders are extremely good at what they do, and the synchronization with their iOS equivalents is flawless from what I can tell… and fat chance you get to uproot such a thing to a non-Apple OS. Third party apps other than for media editing seem to be rare, I think Apple has gobbled or rug pulled much of its independent software vendor ecosystem.

Apple Mail also is in my eyes the only generic mail client out there that really “gets it”. Thunderbird has always felt clunky in comparison and the recent redesign just made it a different kind of clunky. Everything else is either too minimal (Geary), tries to clone old style Outlook (Evolution), or is tied to/favors a particular provider (Gmail, Outlook, etc).

This. I use Linux as my primary OS (with KDE) and my main complaint, by far, is the email/calendar situation. Mail.app simultaneously just works and gets out of my way, and I haven't seen a Linux email client come close to replicating that.

Every few years I convince myself I'll create a better email client for Linux, and I always start the project enthusiastically and stop soon after, when I get just far enough to be reminded of how complicated email is. Maybe someday I'll take a sabatical and actually do it...

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

#76

Post by fithisux »

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.

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

#77

Post by fithisux »

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.

I think the idea is take what you can and evolve.

Keeping it x86_64 for now makes sense in many respects.

But it could become a real uKernel OS in the long run.

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

#78

Post by cosmic_cheese »

simondotau wrote: post #63
MangoToupe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about sleekness? Linux has looked sleek for decades but still behaves like ass

“Looks sleek” was only ever a surface level reason why macOS was a good UI. Far more important was that it was highly opinionated, and those opinions were very consistently applied, resulting in a highly predictable interface. This has been degrading over the past decade, unfortunately.

Opinionated design is a big one, but another that's equally as big and even more unusual in the Linux world is progressive disclosure.

It basically amounts to adding lots of little power user features, but placing them ever so slightly out of the way so that newbies and less technical users don't get overwhelmed, but they're still within reach of those who can make use of them and reveal themselves as users grow and become more technically capable.

Linux desktops tend to take a much more binary approach: ultra-minimalist and stripped back so far that even iPadOS is more capable out of the box (GNOME) or everything and the kitchen sink on full display (KDE).

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

#79

Post by andsoitis »

RussianCow wrote: post #75
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Mail also is in my eyes the only generic mail client out there that really “gets it”. Thunderbird has always felt clunky in comparison and the recent redesign just made it a different kind of clunky. Everything else is either too minimal (Geary), tries to clone old style Outlook (Evolution), or is tied to/favors a particular provider (Gmail, Outlook, etc).

This. I use Linux as my primary OS (with KDE) and my main complaint, by far, is the email/calendar situation. Mail.app simultaneously just works and gets out of my way, and I haven't seen a Linux email client come close to replicating that. Every few years I convince myself I'll create a better email client for Linux, and I always start the project enthusiastically and stop soon after, when I get just far enough to b…

> I always start the project enthusiastically and stop soon after, when I get just far enough to be reminded of how complicated email is.

What are some of the things you’re thinking of?

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

#80

Post by aussieguy1234 »

willtemperley wrote: post #73
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 organisational bottleneck still remains though. People need to discuss and coordinate at human speed. I think AI will likely create more fragmentation initially, if a 10x developer is forced to run at 0.1x they're going to fork a project. I believe in the AI 10x developer, but I suspect it only works for individuals or small teams at the moment.

In an actual business environment, you are right that its not a 10x gain, more like 1.5-2x. Most of my job as an engineer is gathering and understanding requirements, testing, managing expectations, making sure everyone is on the same page etc...it seems only 10-20% is writing actual code. If I do get AI to write some code, I still need to do all of these other things.

I have used it for my solo startups much more effectively, no humans to get in the way. I've used AI to replace things like designers and the like that I didn't have to hire (nor did I have the funds for that).

I can build mini AI agents with my engineering skills for simple non-engineering tasks that might otherwise need a human specialist.

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