RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD

It just looks bad. You want to be MacOS? Actually go and copy it, as close to pixel perfect as you fancy.<p>I&#x27;ve personally experimented with replicating UIs using just a &quot;device&quot; object to a graphical API, so I know very well that it is possible. What prevents this project from just... going out and actually doing what they&#x27;re trying to achieve? Take high resolution screenshots, carefully understand what&#x27;s going on, and re-implement it.<p>The hardest part would probably be compositing (if they do it from scratch), but even before getting there, there&#x27;s so much wrong already. This really does not have the same finesse of MacOS, has anybody even looked at the screenshots picked by the developers??

I dont entirely understand what this is.<p>I think this is an effort to create a skin, or graphics layer &#x2F; window layer to FreeBSD that looks and feels like Apple.<p>But then it says the project uses the Mach kernel. Does that mean that they have a version of FreeBSD running on top of the Mach kernel? That sounds cool.<p>Are they creating a clone of Cocoa that will have the same interface as the original? Or is Cocoa a open sourced from Apple?<p>Near the top it reads:<p>&quot;&quot;RavynOS aims to be compatible with macOS applications&quot;&quot;<p>Ok well that sounds cool.<p>Then farther down:<p>&quot;&quot;Trivial macOS and Darwin applications may run directly on ravynO&quot;&quot;<p>I guess it can be a goal that is a long way off still. I dont know why they would bother with Linux compatibility. FreeBSD and Mac has to be the most important ones?

Maybe this is just me but I never considered Apples approach to software installs to be elegant. And I’m not a fan of their unified menu bar (or most aspected of their desktop environment for that matter).<p>What I’d love to see would be a whole new desktop environment for macOS (homebrew has its warts but is a “good enough” package manager for my day to day needs)

It&#x27;s nice that more people in the FOSS community take note of macOS&#x27;s design and (historically, at least) attention to detail. However, this project (judging by the screenshots, which is how everyone is going to judge you if you claim to be inspired by Apple&#x27;s work), they&#x27;re already making serious (but fixable) mistakes:<p>&lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ravynos.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;ravyn_0.4.0_pre_desktop.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ravynos.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;ravyn_0.4.0_pre_desktop.png</a>&gt;<p>- What the actual heck is that window border around the terminal<p>- Horizontal spacing on the fonts is too dense, the text rendering is absolutely awful - maybe it&#x27;s just the font but I wouldn&#x27;t suffer through reading a full paragraph<p>- The buttons in the installer dialog look like a cheap knockoff of Windows 95<p>- Different colors for window background, title bar, dock, but somehow the window background and menu bar are the same<p>- The 3 visible dock icons mix 3 different art styles, the fourth icon is an empty space?...<p>- Where&#x27;s the shadows to tell stacked windows apart? Windows did this in the late 90s<p>&lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ravynos.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;firefox_global_menu.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ravynos.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;firefox_global_menu.jpg</a>&gt;<p>- The padding of the window controls is all messed up, with different offsets on all 3 sides; no unified window&#x2F;tab bar in the browser (even though Firefox under both X11 and Wayland can do it just fine); again different window frame and background colors<p>- Bright white window borders (absolute worst aspect of the Big Sur redesign), although I&#x27;ll give them credit for going a notch below #ffffff<p>- Very poor way to show off the transparent menu bar (the choice of wallpaper + no blur), visually distracts from the contents of the menu bar itself; note that all macOS default wallpapers have a pretty uniform sky color across the top, so the transparent menu bar can be a bit less of a mess<p>Again, this is all fixable, but the real problem is that half of these things are trivially improved by changing the font, the color, or the padding. But it&#x27;s this <i>lack</i> of attention to detail (and the fact that despite these glaring issues they&#x27;ve still decided to use these screenshots) that speaks about the project&#x27;s commitment to details.<p>It&#x27;s pretty cool that you&#x27;ve got AppImages or an ObjC compiler, but you&#x27;re not allowed to use the word &quot;finesse&quot; and make these mistakes!

How does this differ from helloSystem?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hellosystem.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hellosystem.github.io&#x2F;</a>

&gt; We’ve got your apps covered<p>No you dont, RavynOS and HelloSystem are mediocre wrapper projects.<p>Put your efforts towards GNUStep, don’t run with it and making something pretty.<p>If GNUStep worked, it could be ran on Unix like systems people actually use like Ubuntu.<p>This project is going to fail with “finesse”.

What about hellosystem ? Ravyn focuses more on compatibility with MacOS I guess ?

Meh<p>macOS is more than shiny traffic lights buttons on your windows, global menus, and dock.<p>It&#x27;s also a clipboard that works everywhere and not like &quot;oh you cannot do this because X11 this or wayland that&quot;, it&#x27;s also human interface guidelines (the old ones, the new ones are unparseable shit) that make bloody sure that the OK&#x2F;Cancel buttons appear where you expect them to appear.<p>It&#x27;s also some bloody keyboard shortcuts that work everywhere the same and not every bloody app bringing in their own and their own little ways to configure them or none at all. Yeah chrome, I&#x27;m looking at you.<p>It&#x27;s also that the most used system stuff can be configured pointy-clicky and that stuff that the system can figure out on its own is what it bloody figures out on its own, without me having to drop down to command line (although it is an avenue too, and command line and GUI must be in sync).<p>It&#x27;s also that it&#x27;s accessible out of the box. Try blindfolding yourself, inserting your installer usb stick, and installing your thing and using it successfully. Come on. OS X could do it since Leopard, I think, which was in... 2007?<p>In other words, macOS could abandon their Aqua looks and go for industrial NeXTStep looks, and still be ahead of almost everything else in terms of consistency, accessibility, and general lack of fuckness.

Frankly I think these days a Linux based emulator like Wine would be a smarter decision .

So much awful. Bad font rendering. Icons look pixelated. White semi-transparent things look weird. Active and inactive windows look too similar. Instead of just coloring in the window buttons greying the text there should be some more obvious visual change to the actual header. Curve in top of window is pixelate. Very rounded top and share hard rectangle is jarring. Dock is perfectly rectangular with no border. Icons are bad.<p>On the interface side the global menu is not only a mediocre UI when universally implemented its unlikely to be properly implemented in countless apps making impossible to make consistent.

This is incredibly awesome. I would love to see a lot of this on Linux, too. Apple has always had the best compositor in the business.<p>The marketing page is a little more generous to this project than the actual screenshots though, lol.

Abandonware? Last release was June 2022.

Don’t these projects seem to come and go every several years?<p>While a nice idea wouldn’t it would be more efficient to improve virtualization and have something akin to Parallel’s “seamless” mode?

Well done for runining my weekend! I will give it a try. However, still struggling with NVidia drivers on FreeBSD. For the life of me I can&#x27;t get them to work.

IS there Something that I’m not getting about the Shortcut “SHIFT-S” that’S Shown on the page?

Why not build on PureDarwin?

You know, I have and old macbook pro (2009) that I can make macos work for the life of me after the original hard disk died, and I had to replace it.<p>Might as well try this, since is currently running linux mint.

The work is still going on Core work is done by one person at a moment and the GUI is not upto mark but it is close to what we expected!

Not a chance this gathers any traction.<p>You can just hear: can I run &#x27;popular macOS application&#x27; on it? No.<p>The average user, for starters, doesn&#x27;t use a computer (most consumer tasks are done on a phone), and won&#x27;t know how to install a different OS even if they do.<p>Run FreeBSD on the server and use the macOS Terminal to connect to it over ssh.

This looks very promising! Thinking of putting it on something.

Huhh this is really cool. Never heard of it. And FreeBSD is actually my daily driver.<p>So apparently it can run macOS apps? More or less. Cool. It&#x27;ll be hard to find those compiled for intel though going forward. But we&#x27;ll see.<p>I&#x27;m actually quite happy with KDE on FreeBSD but perhaps their compatibility work can also be applied to vanilla FreeBSD. The only thing I really miss from macOS is Pixelmator.

&gt; ravynOS (previously called airyxOS)<p>Subjectively, I find both names terrible. There’s zero chance I’ll vocalise either to someone and they’ll know how to spell it. The current one in particular is bound to have people typing “ravenous”.<p>But the idea is interesting, and even though the screenshots don’t yet inspire confidence (the typeface is too thin, folder icons are too square, …) I wish the team the best of luck in making their vision come to light.

I can see the freedom of FreeBSD part, but not the finesse of macOS. And without that, why not just use FreeBSD?

My basic opinion is that there are really no great desktop operating systems currently being made anymore. Mac OS used to be it but started losing me after Snow Leopard to be completely honest.<p>I feel both desktop producing companies that actually matter (can run all the productivity apps I need to do my job) have put this space on the back burner for cloud (Microsoft) or consumer electronics (Apple).<p>No year has ever been the year of the Linux Desktop and all the Desktop stuff for Linux is too Linux specific to work well portably on FreeBSD.<p>All I can say is I hope Apple makes iPads able to run full development suites because the desktop appears to be dying a slow death in general.<p>Or, maybe I’m wrong (would love to be) and things start getting better again.

I know some of this is personal taste, but to me macOS really doesn&#x27;t feel finessed. It feels confusing, distracting and annoying. I suppose a large part of the problem is that I want a useful tool, whereas macOS is designed to be a lifestyle.