> I really wish the community would take over and fork MacOS at its lowest opensource/forkable denominator to start a free-as-in-Linux, MacOS binary-compatible

> I really wish the community would take over and fork MacOS at its lowest opensource/forkable denominator to start a free-as-in-Linux, MacOS binary-compatible alternative. As your Quora link points out - it's not feasible to do this. The killer features of macOS - the UI framework, all other OS frameworks, the interesting drivers integrating all of this - are not available. macOS more than other OSes is an integrated package. And that stuff is not open source. The parts of macOS that are open source are just sufficient to allow you to make your own Unix-like distro. OpenDarwin and PureDarwin are efforts that bolt on open source tools, X11 and desktop environments on top of Darwin. The result is an open source desktop like FreeBSD or some Linux distro. Then it turns out that the macOS kernel is not really a killer feature of anything, and if you're looking at an open source desktop you'd better run FreeBSD or a Linux distro anyway. Technically, PureDarwin is binary compatible with macOS. You can take the macOS version of, say, tar or grep, and it will run on PureDarwin. Any command line utility that doesn't integrate with macOS specific frameworks (i.e. all the stuff they import from FreeBSD, stuff from MacPorts) will probably work. That's not very interesting though. All that stuff is there on Linux and FreeBSD too. Your Quora link gives some big time and team requirements for this to happen, but it also touches on the fact that there's really no business model and lots of legal risks involved. At this point, I don't think an open source clone of macOS is ever going to happen. If we're going to get something that's close, it's not going to be based on the Darwin kernel, but something in the direction of Darling [1]. [1]: https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/