This looks like not a reskin of an existing FreeBSD or Linux windows system, but an actual reimplementation of macOS. Very interesting if they can pull it off!
I wonder though, why start with old Objective-C cocoa APIs instead of Swift?
Objective-C is the ABI of all UI-related macOS frameworks and it would probably always be. Even if you're writing in Swift, as long as you're using AppKit, you're using Objective-C classes under the hood. There's no such thing as "Swift Cocoa APIs". And SwiftUI is an abstraction layer on top of, again, AppKit/UIKit/WatchKit, which are themselves all written in Objective-C.
Yeah but they expose the same ABI. If you can write in Objective-C, you could write it Swift and externally it'd be no different. And since they're reimplementing this stuff from scratch, I'm surprised they didn't just do that.
(I'm saying this as someone who would be more inclined to contribute if it was written in Swift.)
It's a BSD. (Knowing that, you probably wouldn't ask them, "Why C and not C++?") As a language (and ecosystem*) Objective-C is mature and lacks complexity in a way that doesn't apply to Swift.
* They definitely did not start with Objective-C and a blank slate here; they're folding in monumental amounts of third-party code
I wonder if Cocoa is that language specific or if it’s become legacy tech. When Swift was announced and when I explored it for personal projects, I was very much calling Cocoa APIs. They definitely catered to ObjC-isms, but my impression was that all of the underlying UI frameworks were being preserved even if they might gain additive APIs to be used less awkwardly in Swift.
I really hope they build some kind of application registry, including listing projects that don't yet work on RavynOS, so that the community can see which packages are most in-demand, what % of apps that people want are supported, reviews from others on stability for the platform, etc.
Could bootstrap this by looking at everything in Homebrew (including casks) and sharing whether it seems to work on RavynOS yet (or whether it's ambiguous, and how you can help disambiguate).
I'm using sysutils/docker on FreeBSD with DOCKER_HOST env var set to "ssh://user@linuxvm" where linuxvm is a local VM running on bhyve[1]. Part of local FreeBSD filesystem is shared with the Linux VM via virtio-9p passthrough. Everything plays together nicely.
nerdctl[2] works with sysutils/containerd. You can't run Linux images on FreeBSD kernel (Linux jails may be an option) but there are FreeBSD images. Pkgbase[3] aims to make FreeBSD more modular, divided in chunks smaller than "base", "ports", "src"; feasible for containers.
Personally I find this kind of idea to be a dead end, since so much of what makes macOS special is really beyond the capabilities of anyone other than Apple. For example, total vertical integration, e.g. calling up kernel team and ask them to make a change for WebKit. SerenityOS also does this because Andreas Kling worked at Apple, realising that vertical integration is fundamental. But then there are other things, like incredible hardware integration with things like the trackpad and CoreAudio, as well as precise control over the CPU and power. I'll be interested to see if this goes anywhere but in my opinion there are better places to go, such as for example SerenityOS, which I think is a kind of operating system that is far more suitable for the space of people who don't want to buy Apple.
I'm generally a bit sceptical of this "copy macOS" idea. It isn't a particularly amazing operating system, it is mainly just very well supported by third parties considering that it is a unix. You won't have that if you recreate it in this way, and I'm not sure if you will be left with a very good experience.
Hmm. I'm not sure what to think of all this special build stuff. I moved from macOS to FreeBSD + KDE mainly because I felt that macOS was becoming too dumbed down.
And I actually like the UI and configurability of KDE.
So no, I'm not going to use it but it probably could have made me move to FreeBSD a few years earlier. But with this kind of 'copycat' I always wonder if they manage to support a large enough ecosystem to make it work well. After all the biggest selling point of macOS is traditionally the 'just works' principle. Using FreeBSD as a daily driver I know the hardware/driver side needs a lot of tinkering. Which I don't mind, but macOS users would.
I also wonder about their business model, it seems to be a company?
I tried running this last night on an i7-8550u, and eh, I didn’t get far. I got it to boot to a GUI, but nothing else loaded, not even an installer. And because the screen was 4k, my cursor (and everything else) was tiny. I think this is a cool project but just worth noting that this is a proof of concept right now rather than a complete thing. Best of luck to the RavynOS team.
Can it get the font rendering to the level that macOS or iOS have? If yes, then it's getting there.
The few things that scream to me that I'm not using a mac:
1. Antialiasing of fonts, how crisp and clear does it look on my screen? Windows has struggled with this especially after ClearType.
2. Alignment of elements in various applications. The traffic light window controls look way too far into the app's header. Find a happy medium, copy macOS's spacing.
3. Is the contrast in colors strong enough to tell me this was designed by someone who has some design (hopefully color theory background) or was it just an attempt to use many colors?
It's basically impossible to have crisp fonts without a high DPI integer scaled monitor. The target monitor hardware for Windows and MacOS is vastly different.
> The traffic light window controls look way too far into the app's header. Find a happy medium, copy macOS's spacing.
I noticed that too on the screenshots page. And it's weird cause it looks right under the "features you'd love" section on the main page. It looks like most of those images (the traffic light buttons, global menus, folder icons) are faked to look like macOS but then the screenshots don't actually look like that.
1. Doesn't macOS turn off font antialiasing for retina displays? I believe retina displays (with desktop scaling) is the real solution to crispy fonts.
apple was using grayscale shape-acxurate smoothing, it works on any display with any arrangement of subpixels
windows clear type is using pixel-accurate subpixel smoothing, it works only in one direction with correct subpixel pattern
what people (including me) dislike about windows fonts is aggressive hinting, that is snapping font shape to pixel grid, it made sense in displays around VGA (640x480) but does not make sense on FHD screen
It is interesting how you only have purely visual "signs" on your list ). It can't be only this for a tech crowd.
There is so much more about the way software is shipped, configured & used.
Also, the hardware. (It is much harder to make it work reasonably well across so many platforms without an army of full time devs.)
Do you mean that for a tech crowd, you'd expect people to have a more robust list of desires?
That's a genuine question, I just read yours in a few different ways.
However, I'd argue that relatively small details just fall into the category of overall interface polish. Not just aesthetic people polish, but the category of things that make you put your hands to your face and scream in frustration.
But yes, there are definitely important details in other layers that are worth considering. I think that when people make comparison's though, beetween macOS' level of finesse and something else, that finesse is defined by polish at most levels of interface with that hardware and so on.
> PLEASE NOTE: On 2022-02-14, we decided to abandon the current path of using X11/KDE desktop components and write from scratch a new UI that will align better with our goals. A very early UI on the new WindowServer is starting to take shape as of 2022-07-27. Thanks for your patience as we work to make ravynOS the best possible version.
Today's KDE can be almost identical to a MacOS desktop, if you customize it properly.
I'm a KDE user since 2010 and a week ago I purchased an M1 Pro (hopefully to install Asahi in the future). My desktop was basically a top bar with global menu, a few widgets and Latte Dock.
If I didn't know that Mac came up with the functionality before, I would think that it is Mac that feels like a skinned KDE
Readit News
I wonder though, why start with old Objective-C cocoa APIs instead of Swift?
(I'm saying this as someone who would be more inclined to contribute if it was written in Swift.)
* They definitely did not start with Objective-C and a blank slate here; they're folding in monumental amounts of third-party code
Around minute 4, or go through the transcript.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/102/
Could bootstrap this by looking at everything in Homebrew (including casks) and sharing whether it seems to work on RavynOS yet (or whether it's ambiguous, and how you can help disambiguate).
I'm using sysutils/docker on FreeBSD with DOCKER_HOST env var set to "ssh://user@linuxvm" where linuxvm is a local VM running on bhyve[1]. Part of local FreeBSD filesystem is shared with the Linux VM via virtio-9p passthrough. Everything plays together nicely.
nerdctl[2] works with sysutils/containerd. You can't run Linux images on FreeBSD kernel (Linux jails may be an option) but there are FreeBSD images. Pkgbase[3] aims to make FreeBSD more modular, divided in chunks smaller than "base", "ports", "src"; feasible for containers.
[1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve
[2] https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl
[3] https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase
I'm generally a bit sceptical of this "copy macOS" idea. It isn't a particularly amazing operating system, it is mainly just very well supported by third parties considering that it is a unix. You won't have that if you recreate it in this way, and I'm not sure if you will be left with a very good experience.
Last but not least HaikuOS deserves some forward look
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068542
A macOS-like operating system based on FreeBSD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28087092 - Aug 2021 (67 comments)
Airyx OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068542 - Aug 2021 (254 comments)
Other than that it looks interesting, a sorta-Mac-aesthetic sorta-BSD.
And I actually like the UI and configurability of KDE.
So no, I'm not going to use it but it probably could have made me move to FreeBSD a few years earlier. But with this kind of 'copycat' I always wonder if they manage to support a large enough ecosystem to make it work well. After all the biggest selling point of macOS is traditionally the 'just works' principle. Using FreeBSD as a daily driver I know the hardware/driver side needs a lot of tinkering. Which I don't mind, but macOS users would.
I also wonder about their business model, it seems to be a company?
1. Antialiasing of fonts, how crisp and clear does it look on my screen? Windows has struggled with this especially after ClearType.
2. Alignment of elements in various applications. The traffic light window controls look way too far into the app's header. Find a happy medium, copy macOS's spacing.
3. Is the contrast in colors strong enough to tell me this was designed by someone who has some design (hopefully color theory background) or was it just an attempt to use many colors?
I noticed that too on the screenshots page. And it's weird cause it looks right under the "features you'd love" section on the main page. It looks like most of those images (the traffic light buttons, global menus, folder icons) are faked to look like macOS but then the screenshots don't actually look like that.
If you find your fonts rendered to thin compared to macOS you may try changing some of the freetype settings, such as:
windows clear type is using pixel-accurate subpixel smoothing, it works only in one direction with correct subpixel pattern
what people (including me) dislike about windows fonts is aggressive hinting, that is snapping font shape to pixel grid, it made sense in displays around VGA (640x480) but does not make sense on FHD screen
Also, the hardware. (It is much harder to make it work reasonably well across so many platforms without an army of full time devs.)
That's a genuine question, I just read yours in a few different ways.
However, I'd argue that relatively small details just fall into the category of overall interface polish. Not just aesthetic people polish, but the category of things that make you put your hands to your face and scream in frustration.
But yes, there are definitely important details in other layers that are worth considering. I think that when people make comparison's though, beetween macOS' level of finesse and something else, that finesse is defined by polish at most levels of interface with that hardware and so on.
https://ravynos.com/screenshots.html
Good luck to the developers!
I'm a KDE user since 2010 and a week ago I purchased an M1 Pro (hopefully to install Asahi in the future). My desktop was basically a top bar with global menu, a few widgets and Latte Dock.
If I didn't know that Mac came up with the functionality before, I would think that it is Mac that feels like a skinned KDE