19 ms·

RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

769 points by behnamoh 4y ago

spidey1 4y ago
How does this compare to Hello System? [1] [1] https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/ https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/
- Diris 4y ago
  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 https://ravynos.com/faq.html
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    I hope it sticks around. If it's around long enough, it can be an alternative in its own right. Ever since ElementaryOS lost momentum (or really never found it, rather) I have been looking for a "third way". RavynOS could be a great way to develop Mac apps and also target the apps for RavynOS. Could be great for music appliances and whatnot.
  - hjek 4y ago
    Oh, so ravynOS would kind of be for macOS what ReactOS is for Windows?
znpy 4y ago
I looks worthless to me. If you’re doing this kind of things, you’d better be producing and selling your reference laptop/desktop computer too. Otherwise all I expect from seeing the FreeBSD logo is 2005-ish hardware support nightmares (thanks but no thanks, I’m not a teenager anymore).
adastra22 4y ago
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?
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  The greater bulk of the macOS userland is still written in Objective-C.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    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.)
    - boucher 4y ago
      I imagine they are using either GNUStep or Cocotron as the basis for their Cocoa support, not starting fully from scratch.
      - IMcD23 4y ago
        Looks like they have copied and pasted large amounts of code from Cocotron.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  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.
Sakos 4y ago
I don't know why the mobile version crawls when I scroll past the images on my high-end Samsung.
- seabrookmx 4y ago
  Same with my Pixel 5 and FF mobile.
  - elromulous 4y ago
    Chrome on pixel 5 has no issue. Ff is slow for me as well. Maybe specifically an FF issue?
    - kramerger 4y ago
      Runs smooth with FF for Android here. Maybe the issue is something else entirely?
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Running FF for Android on a mid range Samsung tablet and it seems to work fine for me. Maybe it's a GPU driver thing?
- ineedtosleep 4y ago
  The images are svgs. Probably heavy processing from that.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  There is a subtle translucency effect applied to the top bar that picks up and scatters the large svg’s behind it. I haven’t seen how it’s implemented, but it might not be performant on all web engines.
- Kayou 4y ago
  Same on MacOS and Firefox with a 4K screen ans same on Firefox and a Pixel 6, scrolling lags hard on the section with pictures. Making a bad first impression of this new OS.
sneak 4y ago
This is a great idea, but I think they'd be better off aiming for Linux. One of the main benefits of macOS is perfect hardware support. Linux has a definite edge on all other free software kernels here. I hope they succeed, regardless of technical decisions.
- p1necone 4y ago
  > One of the main benefits of macOS is perfect hardware support. Insofar as you have perfect support for the very small subset of hardware that computers running macOS can have. I'm sure you could get similarly perfect hardware support on Linux by being careful about which hardware you run it on.
  - sneak 4y ago
    Nobody did this for Linux on the small subset of Apple-branded macOS-capable x64 machines before, much to my chagrin. I donated to marcan in the hopes that someone now will. There should be a free software OS installer that is as easy to use and supports as much hardware with full functionality as the Apple OS installer. Apple has already done the heavy lifting of a well defined hardware target.
- ggm 4y ago
  Their target is existing MacOS users. Thats a BSD derived kernel and OS API and the model is quite different. Making a Linux kernel look right, is a path ?Gentoo? took some time ago, and I am unsure you can call it an unqualified success. "does it run homebrew" is my lead question
  - sneak 4y ago
    Existing macOS users have Apple hardware. Does FreeBSD support recent x64 Apple gear well? Last I looked even Linux had less than perfect support. The situation is even more Linux-centric on Mx.
    - ggm 4y ago
GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
> built with our core technologies of Cocoa, Qt, and Mach Does this mean a mach emulation layer on top of or in the freebsd kernel?
- dmix 4y ago
  > 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
weikju 4y ago
Looks like this is a rebrand from the Airyx project that was posted before [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068542
- Nursie 4y ago
  Thanks, yeah that slightly confused me because the screenshots on the sight all talk about Airxy, rather than RavynOS. Other than that it looks interesting, a sorta-Mac-aesthetic sorta-BSD.
- dang 4y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: A macOS-like operating system based on FreeBSD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28087092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28087092 - Aug 2021 (67 comments) Airyx OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068542 - Aug 2021 (254 comments)
- schleck8 4y ago
  They had a trademark issue because there is a German company called Airyx that uses an almost identical domain on top of that (airyx.com vs airyx.de)
nikitaga 4y ago
At this point, "Consistent shortcuts" is the main "feature" keeping me on MacOS. Cmd+, opens preferences in every app. Cmd+[ or ] goes "back" and "forward", in every app that has those concepts Cmd+Shift+[ or ] switches tabs, in every app that has tabs, except a handful of stupid chat apps who think they're too good for it. Cmd+W always closes the current tab, if the app has tabs, (or current window, if the app has no tabs), and does not quit the app – that's what Cmd+Q is for. Etc. Also notice how PageUp / PageDn, keys that my keyboard doesn't even have, are not used for crucial shortcuts like these. Seemingly small things, but absolutely maddening when developers don't respect the common convention, or when a common convention does not exist. I always thought this consistency was a feature of the app ecosystem and app developer attitudes rather than the OS itself, so I'm not sure what RavynOS can do to make third party apps obey their idea of consistent shortcuts? The wiki doesn't mention anything about shortcuts despite the language on the home page.
- sofixa 4y ago
  For the tabs Ctrl+tab/Ctrl+shift+tab is the standard on Windows and Linux, so i can see how some apps can forget about macOS' specialness.
  - nikitaga 4y ago
    Speaking of this specialness... having the main system shortcut modifier – Cmd – physically located under both your thumbs is priceless. In contrast, the Ctrl keys are usually located such that they're best accessed with your pinkies. Who thought that making people use their weakest fingers for the most common shortcuts is a good idea? Could you remap your keys to have Ctrl keys under the thumbs in Windows / Linux? Yes, but then: 1) It will become hard to use Ctrl-based text navigation shortcuts (such as Ctrl+left to navigate one word left) with one hand, and 2) Ctrl+Tab will now use the same physical keys as Alt+Tab used to, and your brain will never heal from this (at least mine refuses to).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
bowsamic 4y ago
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.
- daitangio 4y ago
  Agree. Also I see some video on SerenityOS and I find a very good teaching environment/gym to see a such vertical integration. Last but not least HaikuOS deserves some forward look
jetpackjoe 4y ago
Being able to CMD+c to copy things in a terminal is one of my favorite things about programming on a Mac. Ctrl+c to copy everywhere, except the terminal (there it instead is an interrupt) is a major annoyance working in Linux
- jmprspret 4y ago
  I don't use a Mac. How does one interrupt a program if Ctrl+C is bound to copy? At this point when I'm in a terminal Ctrl+C is muslce memory for interrupting a running program.
  - gregsadetsky 4y ago
    On Macs, Cmd+C to copy and Ctrl+C to interrupt in the terminal i.e. they’re different.
  - samtheprogram 4y ago
    Ctrl-C is still bound to an interrupt — it’s Cmd-C (i.e. Super-C / Win-C) that is bound to copy. Most things that a regular user can think of (paste, print, select all, to name a few) that would be control mapped in user facing programs are typically mapped to the “command” key instead.
  - kalleboo 4y ago
    Macs have a Meta key called Command that can be dedicated to the shortcuts defined in GUI applications while leaving Ctrl free to be used by console stuff. So all the GUI copy/paste/windowing etc controls use Command key shortcuts. The original 1984 Mac keyboard did not even have a Ctrl key, it was added to later keyboards as people wanted access to terminal applications.
    - jmprspret 4y ago
      Of course! Sorry, I did know this but I always forget macs have Cmd and Control
  - wodenokoto 4y ago
unixhero 4y ago
Great effort and idea. Don't forget to find a replacement foe OSX Quartz engine.
aldrich 4y ago
I'm curious to know why they have chosen to use FreeBSD as a base as opposed to Darwin/XNU on which macOS itself is based. Nothing against FreeBSD (happy user here) so there's probably some good reasoning behind this.
- gattilorenz 4y ago
  Probably because Darwin is half abandoned, while FreeBSD is actively maintained and with plenty of drivers
  - samtheprogram 4y ago
    Darwin is still open sourced, but mainly because of drivers and differences in certain other things (threads maybe, Mach ports / IPC, etc) that don’t have the integration or implementation with existing software is a major headwind to attempting a full encompassing Darwin OS. PureDarwin was (is?) an attempt that hasn’t been able to break through those headwinds.
    - spyremeown 4y ago
      Is Darwin used for something other than research? I'd really love to see some homebrew stuff with this kernel.
      - jeroenhd 4y ago
        There's https://www.puredarwin.org/ https://www.puredarwin.org/ which is probably great for partial OSX/iOS emulation efforts. That's it as far as I can tell, though.
- jamil7 4y ago
  From the FAQ: The short answer is "hardware support". ravynOS should run on most commodity x86_64 hardware using FreeBSD's very stable and performant drivers. The longer answer is that plus I don't see any real advantage to using xnu. We have merged in Mach support now (big thanks to NetBSD, NextBSD and the iX Systems folks for that) so the xnu approach just seems to add complexity and the effort of writing and maintaining drivers. Considering how big this project is already, I opted to stick with the BSD kernel - at least for now
ricardobeat 4y ago
Why not pick up where Elementary OS left off, instead of starting from scratch?
- deaddodo 4y ago
  I would argue picking up where GNUStep+Etoile left off, over Elementary. Elementary is just a nice skin with some particular tweaks and add-ons. Etoile’s goal was more akin to what they’re trying to achieve here, an actual Objective-C+Cocoa user space with a Mac compatible open library,
- Shorel 4y ago
  Do you mean having huge useless toolbars eating valuable screen real state? It seriously had worse UI design decisions than Gnome 3.
pabs3 4y ago
Some of the words in the screenshots make it sound like this is a skinned version of KDE. Konsole, Kate, Plasma for example: https://ravynos.com/screenshots.html https://ravynos.com/screenshots.html
- fsw 4y ago
  > 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.
  - still_grokking 4y ago
    Oh, the good old "rewrite the world" approach. Good luck to the developers!
    - adastra22 4y ago
      This is one instance where that approach probably pays dividends, if they can pull it off. Most macOS-like clones that I've tried fall short, due to there being only so much you can do to paper-over the Linux desktop experience. A sort of uncanny valley that I just can't get over and adjust to using.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        To have the full experience they also need to clone the Objective-C and Swift frameworks, and IDE tooling.
        kelnos 4y ago
        The GNUStep project has already done much of the ObjC framework cloning. I wonder if they're using that. Not sure about Swift frameworks, though.
tommica 4y ago
Neat idea, hopefully they are successful!
c4ptnjack 4y ago
I'm curious to see how performative this will manage to actually be... Itd be interesting if it could eventually run audio software and AU plugins at a low latency.
jhoelzel 4y ago
Thanks for your work, i like the design choices you made. I believe that a bigger factor today is the third party support for your system. stuff like teams not working, or netflix not being able to stream in 4k makes me still keep my windows machine, even though at this point its basically a firefox / vscode terminal with extra apps and of course a system level integration of docker. Im pretty sure there is enough room for a true developer OS but it still needs to do all the "little" things that we have grown accustomed to.
yubiox 4y ago
Does it run Better Touch Tool? I use it to resize and move windows with trackpad moves (no click) and modifier keys and also to disable openapple-Q. Does it work well with an apple trackpad?
justthinkhn 4y ago
This is a dead end. FreeBSD, lmao. Why not choose Linux, which supports way more hardware and features. Not promising for the general quality of decision making.
- kryptiskt 4y ago
  FreeBSD is a modern performant OS with broad hardware support. I don't know what feature you had in mind, but FreeBSD comes with kqueue and has largely the same core utils as MacOS, which isn't a lot but why not take the free wins you can get? Not to mention that if they manage to pull this moonshot off, porting the resulting work to Linux would be utterly trivial in comparison. So ingrained Linux fanboys don't have to worry, if this becomes a thing, they'll get in on it.
- nix23 4y ago
  Those Linux fanboy's always remind me of the song from NOFX "The Idiots Are Taking Over" -> Opensource ;)
pjmlp 4y ago
How is this going to have a better future than GNUStep, while being up to date with macOS frameworks?
JacobSeated 4y ago
KDE is a better desktop environment than MacOS, by far. I have had so many usability issues with my Mac that does not exist in KDE/Linux. E.g. Apple confining the GUI and not including basic functionality. Specifically: - I really miss a decent address bar in finder that can be edited directly - some windows on mac are always on top, preventing access to other windows. E.g. Password dialogs for encrypted hard drives. - "Cut" does not work for files in finder, severely complicating moving files - The Maximize button does not maximize, but instead enters full screen, meaning that I never use it - There is a delay of ~100ms when pushing caps lock on the keyboard that can not be turned off without installing karabiner elements - Pressing enter in Finder renames a file instead of opening it, an action that is rarely needed and extremely unintuitive – this erroneous behaviour can also be corrected with karabiner elements - Sometimes audio balance will randomly shift to the left or right with bluetooth headphones, had to install yet another app to auto-fix it every time it happens because Apple is too daft to fix the bug. - There is no delete key on the Mac keyboard, meaning that deleting a file is suddenly a two- key shortcut combo, whereas it is much easier on Windows/Linux (hit delete). Sigh.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ysleepy 4y ago
  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, mac and so on and dislike kde, and gnome3, and all the others. Even mac is really dumb sometimes, but macos is the most polished by far.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    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?
rich_sasha 4y ago
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, but as I spend my time between the terminal and the browser, I'm not sure I'd notice much. I think I'm not alone in this approach; I wonder if this project has the change to be as rock-solid as Apple's offerings. If not, I'm guessing it's not for me.
- croh 4y ago
  I don't know what is the last time you used linux but lately there is great improvements in user experience. I know non-techie people using Linux Mint/ubuntu without any hassels.
  - butterNaN 4y ago
    I'm the de facto IT support for my family and neighbours. They are using Pop OS for about 3 years now. It has been great from both their UX and my maintenance perspective. My father even did the 20.10 to 21.04 LTS upgrade himself! I highly doubt if windows would've been as smooth an experience. (Macs are out of question for us since none of us are rich!)
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      Windows upgrades go so smoothly they've been repackaged as updates. They're also highly fault resistant by default with automated rollbacks out of the box. I'm not saying Pop is bad, but Windows upgrades are super easy and user friendly (if you ignore the privacy risks that come with using Windows). I wish common Linux distros would pack something like system restore by default already! I know these tools (based on BTRFS/ZFS snapshots) exist and work great, but they need to be set up manually and most people won't.
  - rich_sasha 4y ago
mattlutze 4y ago
I struggle with chasing after the MacOS appearance. It feels in passing like a lot of work to build a skin/UI that will always be a few generations of the design language behind and not quite there, just given the volume of staff at Apple and them being the ones defining where their design language goes. Like a choice between a Porsche and, according to Google a Zotye -- they'll look close but one will be the obvious "genuine article." Would it not be better to take all that talent and consider a fresh approach to the user experience of a personal computer?
- d3ckard 4y ago
  As with code, imitate first, improve upon later seems like a reasonable approach.
- Croftengea 4y ago
  > given the volume of staff at Apple Unrelated to RavynOS, but I see the size of the Apple staff more like a weakness not a strength. They became terribly inefficient in the recent years.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    And still they will perform better than any FOSS attempt to clone their work.
    - klabb3 4y ago
      Yeah, FOSS culture is unfortunately neither very good at design, nor attracting good designers for collaboration. Many engineers don't even respect design and/or designers.
      - meltedcapacitor 4y ago
        I find Gnome has been doing quite nicely with design (despite the haters).
      - mschuster91 4y ago
KolmogorovComp 4y ago
Nice project, however I’m worried about their scope (reimplementing the MacOs APIs?) being too large for their team, to achieve that level of ‘finessse’ a billion-worth company has made decades achieving. Moreover in my opinion the contributor pool might be thin, most potentially interested users would prefer using MacOs, and most linux users being notoriously not fond of the lack of configuration. Happy to be proven wrong!
- Underphil 4y ago
  I'd concur on that last part, for sure. As a Linux user, the fit and finish of MacOS really doesn't appeal to me. The hardware, on the other hand...
prmoustache 4y ago
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.
- thatguy27 4y ago
  My UI experience is very limited (Windows and Linux only, I currently use XFCE4). What do you consider to be the best UI(s) currently offered (in an operating system)?
  - thepangolino 4y ago
    The killer feature I saw in the last years was the HUD in that custom desktop environment Ubuntu had for a while before going back to gnome. The ability to just type and search through all menu items saved me so much time!
    - KronisLV 4y ago
      You probably mean the Unity desktop, which now seems to be maintained separately from what I can tell: https://ubuntuunity.org/ https://ubuntuunity.org/ While I think that your take on Apple UI/UX not being good is rather contrarian (given that many quote them as some of the best in the industry), I agree that using Ubuntu with Unity was actually a reasonably pleasant experience, at least in the later years when they had addressed most of the quirks that the earlier versions struggled with. Then again, I'm the kind of person who is also served perfectly well by something as simple as XFCE or LXQt, so maybe I'm a bit biased and my standards aren't the highest. Yet, I really appreciate a UI that's functional and feels snappy.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    I feel gnome3 is a much better/faster/ergonomic. It works great regardless if you are a keyboard, mouse or touchscreen heavy user. My only gripe is I wish firefox would integrate it better instead with an UI similar to (now defunct?) Eolie web browser. Also I haven't spend enough time with it recently but I think kde plasma has the flexibility to be probably as good as gnome. I just don't like the default settings and have always been too lazy to dig deep into it. I used to love kde3.
fourstepper 4y ago
Hi, I just wanted to let you know that the ravynos.com's top part of the page performs very poorly under Firefox, most likely due to some animation overload. Was firefox considered in the tests?
- bogwog 4y ago
  It's due to the use of the blur backdrop-filter which seems to have been enabled by default on release builds of Firefox relatively recently. Interestingly, it's a feature introduced to CSS way back in 2015. There must have been some major blockers on getting that out the door if it took ~7 years.
drKarl 4y ago
That seems like a lot of work. If what you want is to be able to run MacOS X apps on a free (like in free speech) environment, there's https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/ which is like Wine but for MacOs X apps. If what you want is to replicate the MacOS X UI you can customize the UI of your DE on Linux, or use something like ElementaryOS or use Pantheon. What are the goals of this project?
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  Cool. What kind of GUI apps work ? The FAQ doesn't say much except basic. Could we use Mac compatible apps in place of windows ones if Linux isn't available? Games? Productivity?
  - drKarl 4y ago
    I admit that I haven't personally used Darling but it would be rather pointless if it only worked for commander line apps. All command line apps I use on MacOs X are from homebrew and are available in Linux so for me it only makes sense for GUI apps. Also, I never really missed a MacOs X specific app when I use Linux, most apps I use are multi platform anyway, and the rare one that is not, it usually has a decent equivalent for Linux.
  - gabegm 4y ago
    From their GitHub page[0]: "Please note that most GUI applications will not run at the moment." [0] https://github.com/darlinghq/darling https://github.com/darlinghq/darling
- moondev 4y ago
  I find this gtk application theme and shell theme to go even further than elementary. The developer releases all sorts of themes with insane quality. You can even tweak them to suit your preference such as sidebar width and compact header size https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme
fguerraz 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Cwizard 4y ago
  Yes.. but FreeBSD is used by a lot of people! It’s used on a lot of servers. Netflix’ CDN for example runs FreeBSD.
  - nix23 4y ago
    And FreeNAS/TrueNAS probably the most used selfmade NAS.
- brigandish 4y ago
  Software that everybody uses can be affected by terrible bugs - Heartbleed couldn't have happened otherwise - so what is the magic level of usage needed to avoid bugs and be stable?
- arghwhat 4y ago
  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 a positive thing. This pattern repeats, with OS's smaller than FreeBSD having good reason to be chosen in production. Fun fact: Apple used NetBSD on their Airport product series.
  - wink 4y ago
    I'm not sure you should plainly compare FreeBSD on a limited choice of Hardware doing server things with "a general purpose GUI desktop OS". OP didn't say FreeBSD was bad in my reading, but as a somewhat irregular user you just notice 1000 papercuts (which are not the OS's fault per se for the most part) but which detract from the overall experience. Every nth software package you use for the first time needs a (small, 3-line) patch which is mostly because the people develop on Linux. Sometimes it's better if they develop on OSX, sometimes it doesn't matter.
vdchuyen 4y ago
oleganza 4y ago
I don't get it. The landing page promises finesse and then the very first screenshot displays horror typography and UI a-la linux 1998. https://ravynos.com/images/airyx_0.3_installer_confirm.png https://ravynos.com/images/airyx_0.3_installer_confirm.png
- netr0ute 4y ago
  The website didn't actually claim they had implemented those features yet, just that it's their goals.
- pramsky 4y ago
  Those are screenshots from the old GUI which used X11/KDE. They are working on a new one which do not have any screenshots up yet.
awill 4y ago
I generally really dislike when companies make comparisons like this. They pick a market leader, and imply their v1 is just as good. It never is. The Google of X The Apple of Y The Amazon of Z It's almost always hype and it's annoying. It's as if they think they deserve credit for the intent, or the goal, rather than the actual product.
ThinkBeat 4y ago
I am confused. Domain and headline and frontpage says RayvnOS but by the screen shots it says airyxOS?
- andrem 4y ago
  They rebranded due to legal reasons - https://twitter.com/ravynsoft/status/1520779114336071680 https://twitter.com/ravynsoft/status/1520779114336071680
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mlindner 4y ago
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.
- stormking 4y ago
  You obviously did not even look at this project because that's exactly what they're aiming at.
toucaninsights 4y ago
[flagged]
Dave3of5 4y ago
Lawsuit from apple incoming in 3 ... 2 ...
SantiagoElf 4y ago
Enough of those half-assed attempts at an "OS". Either use Windows with WSL2, or Debian, or FreeBSD with some GUI, or MacOS. Regardless of what OS you use - you will be using a Browser, Terminal, File Manager and VS Code/Rider/Visual Studio, emacs/vim. GASP Enough of this distro hopping - it is the moder-day procrastination.
- anthk 4y ago
  This distro will implement Cocoa and a Mach-O ELF loader...
oxplot 4y ago
Hmm, looking at the screenshots and comparing with my current Gnome on Wayland, the latter is way more beautiful and with better utility.
rickstanley 4y ago
I was recently searching for something "EndeavourOS" like to try FreeBSD. Thi looks nice!
rattray 4y ago
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).
- LeSaucy 4y ago
  The biggest gap from developers will be the lack of docker on freebsd.
  - sleepybrett 4y ago
    You could do what docker does on the mac, put it in a linux vm.
  - BirAdam 4y ago
    Personally, I find that to be an asset not a failure.
  - hericium 4y ago
    > lack of docker on freebsd 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 https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve [2] https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl [3] https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase
    - rattray 4y ago
      Has anyone packaged this into a single, easy-to-use command/application? (Like "Docker for Mac")
Kukumber 4y ago
no KDE/GTK, no system-d global menu swift as a first class language swiftUI like API and you get my support! i'll donate
KoftaBob 4y ago
Nice to see more options for polished and user friendly Linux distros! Another one that has those qualities, and which I use often: https://zorin.com/ https://zorin.com/ Edit: my mistake, RavynOS isn't a Linux distro!
- haolez 4y ago
  RavynOS is not a Linux distro.
29athrowaway 4y ago
ElementaryOS had similar goals on the desktop experience side. You may also want to take a look at OpenStep and Window Maker.
Naracion 4y ago
Ex graphic designer here, but don't (and never have) used Mac. I highly respect this project and initiative, and the following is more a commentary on my own reaction than your product. I read the title--finesse of MacOS. I open the link, and the first thing I see at the top is the circular raven logo vertically misaligned with the header on mobile. That made me think, okay let's try desktop version instead, so I switched to desktop render (still on mobile browser) -- this time the logo is vertically aligned but the padding / margin on top and bottom are lower than on the left. This is of course nitpicking in the larger scheme of things--I haven't tried the OS, but the screenshots look great and definitely look like MacOS. However, with the title setting up expectations and the first impression being of a misaligned logo made me (unfairly) dismiss the project since I felt you were trying to claim a level of finesse that might not be there. I don't use Linux, so I'll never really use this product, but it's interesting to me--why do people / projects/teams (in general--not just this product) try to emulate the "finesse" of Apple products? To me, it sets up unrealistic expectations from that product, and I might dismiss an otherwise excellent solution if it doesn't live up to that comparison.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  I'm not sure that caring about the design of a desktop environment and website are equivalent - if nothing else, they're different skills to implement. And in any event, it's an early-stage project; that their goals aren't realized yet is hardly surprising.
- lucideer 4y ago
  I noticed the logo misalignment but the rest of the website was pretty good so I figured it was a one-off issue (rather than representative of a trend). Was there other issues that bothered you?
- eddieroger 4y ago
  > why do people / projects/teams (in general--not just this product) try to emulate the "finesse" of Apple products Because people like them. Why do all sedans look kind of alike? Why are there dozens knock-off chairs that emulate the Aeron? Some people, myself included, really like the look and feel of macOS, but may want to run *nix instead. Enough of those people got together and made an OS.
DiggyJohnson 4y ago
"Can I run Photoshop?"
- rovr138 4y ago
  > Can I run macOS apps on ravynOS? > No - not yet. This is a major goal and we're working towards it. So far, some trivial "hello world" binaries in C and Objective-C have been compiled on macOS Big Sur and the resulting Mach-O binaries ran on ravynOS using our in-dev Hybrid linker without any Frameworks or tools from macOS. Source code of some simple Cocoa AppKit-based applications have been built on ravynOS and run as native applications (e.g. Install ravynOS.app). While this is all very exciting, you will have to wait a bit longer to run Photoshop or Xcode. first question, https://ravynos.com/faq.html https://ravynos.com/faq.html
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Awesome - thank you for the comprehensive response. Best of luck to you and the project.
ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
>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. I get the desire to avoid X11, but why write a GUI from scratch instead of using Wayland?
- hollerith 4y ago
  My guess is that it would take a lot of work to get Wayland working with FreeBSD.
  - ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
    That still sounds like less work than writing the whole thing from scratch.
shortformblog 4y ago
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.
jklinger410 4y ago
Interesting that they decided not to just spin Pantheon onto BSD but develop their own DE.
foxbee 4y ago
This looks promising but I can't get the installer to load. Would love to get updates on progress.
hiccuphippo 4y ago
Does MacOS really have that finesse they try to emulate? First thing I noticed when I started using a mac is that double clicking the Finder titlebar only expands it vertically while every other app expands both vertically and horizontally. Second thing, when I close a window and then press Cmd+tab, the icon is still there, and if I select it nothing shows up. There's more of these everyday things that work sloppy so I wonder why does the mac have that image of finesse when I don't really see it.
- chrisoverzero 4y ago
  > […] double-clicking the Finder titlebar only expands it vertically […] This behavior is called “Zoom”, and it’s defined per-application by that application. You could change that system-wide to minimize. > […] when I close a window and then press Cmd+tab, the icon is still there, and if I select it nothing shows up. Yes, the application hasn’t quit. You’ve only closed its last window.
  - Forricide 4y ago
    > Yes, the application hasn’t quit. You’ve only closed its last window. To further expand on this, this is also application-defined behaviour. The application can choose whether it wants to stay open or close. This is no different from Windows (e.g. closing a Spotify window will just minimize it to taskbar), it's just that Cmd+Tab by default shows all running applications, whereas Win+Tab/Alt+Tab on Windows by default shows open windows.
- rewgs 4y ago
  Your second point is by design. macOS lets apps run without windows. Hold Option while once you select the app via Cmd+tab and it’ll open a new window.
- ireflect 4y ago
  > double clicking the Finder titlebar only expands it vertically while every other app expands both vertically and horizontally For me it fits-to-content both vertically and horizontally. I just tested in both list- and icon-view. Mac OS 12. > When I close a window and then press Cmd+tab, the icon is still there This is because the Mac UI application/document conceptual model, which has been consistent since at least the 1980s. An application is either open or not. If you have multiple documents open, they are open within a single instance of the application. You can also have zero documents open. The application doesn't quit automatically when you close the last document. Other operating systems flatten these two concepts into one, such that each new document appears as a new instance of the application. I'm not suggesting one is better than the other. Just that I don't consider this a lack-of-finesse since it's been my mental model for 25+ years. I'm also not disagreeing with your overall point. I can think of plenty of inconsistencies and lack-of-finesse in modern Mac OS UI, to be sure!
Sunspark 4y ago
This is a very cool project and I wish them success. From a technical standpoint, maybe it won't matter, but I am concerned about the fact that they're using (at this time) a Wayland compositor. I have read that Wayland has some problematic technical design decisions (which were not known when it was conceived) and now today we have the awful situation where most apps in my experience run better in X.org and some are ok in Wayland. From an eyestrain perspective, I find x.org less straining to look at than Wayland. This may have something to do with the drivers but the compositor plays a role for sure. I don't use Wayland by choice. Name a widely used app? Sure, Firefox web browser. Turn on "Use autoscrolling" in the preferences and see how it is. On X.org it is smooth, on Wayland it uses XWayland instead and is not smooth. Both projects are years old. Every single X11 app requires programmers to re-write/convert them to native Wayland. It should have just broken compatibility from day 1 and started from scratch. BSD DRI drivers are copied over from Linux, just older versions of them, so I don't have a lot of hope that there will be new drivers or a new compositor (likely years away). Apple, while Darwin is a direct descendant of FreeBSD, Apple is not using Linux DRI drivers, they have enough NDA access that they have their own closed drivers, and instead of using X11, they made their own GUI stack. I want to say what should be done is to do what Apple did, make a brand new gui stack on top, but that's incredibly difficult with limited resources. With Apple or MS you have endless amounts of money and developers, with X.org & Wayland you have years and years of incremental development. It's tough.
- WhyNotHugo 4y ago
  Wayland doesn't have broken technical decisions, they're just different and require applications to adapt. A typical examples is global hotkeys. On X11, any application can monitor all keystrokes at any time. On Wayland, applications only get keyboard events if they're in foreground. Global hotkeys must be done via a separate compositor API. This breaks applications which expect to be able to detect keystrokes when they're in background, but the "feature" they relied on also allows any random application to include a keylogger. Such applications need to update. You mention Firefox uses XWayland. Firefox also has native Wayland support (I'm writing on it right now!). This is likely a mis-configuration at some level, or maybe the Firefox version is too old. OTOH, things like scaling are completely broken on X11, and while the hacks around it improve over the years using a HiDPI display will likely never be as smooth as on Wayland. And if you have a laptop with a HiDPI display and a LowDPI external monitor, one of them is going to suck forever on Xorg. We are, of course, on a transitional period. A lot of applications still need refinement. Qt in particular still has lots of bugs on Wayland. But these can be fixed, there's no broken design decision which makes them unfixable.
smm11 4y ago
If they nail drag-drop .app installs, that's pretty cool. Otherwise, Elementary GUI on Gnustep is pretty much it.
amrox 4y ago
For the page: > You will need real hardware to run it. Why doesn't it work in a VM?
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  It is strange. Just downloaded and tried to boot in a KVM+Qemu VM targeting FreeBSD 13 (virsh). Booted but kernel hung with an obscure launchd dispatching job message. I haven't used FreeBSD consistently since the 4.x days so I have no idea what this means. Looks interesting enough to play around with but for such an ambitious project VM support should be one of the first dev priorities not only for dev and testing but for users wanting to take it for a spin.
_abox 4y ago
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?
zinclozenge 4y ago
Does it also mimic the macOS command meta key? Ie cmd+c for copy, cmd+v for paste etc?
potatopotarto 4y ago
Finesse? This is one of the least attractive MacOS rip off builds I've seen.
nu11ptr 4y ago
I like the honest, modest, realistic goals of this project. Looks interesting.
stakkur 4y ago
The challenge of course will always be hardware—notice the evolution of Asahi Linux on Apple hardware and how difficult it is. Then, throw in the device driver hellscape (wifi cards, drives, sound, video, etc.) This OS sounds like a dream for me, but I have to imagine it will take many years and a lot of willing experimenters to make it usable. I wish I had that kind of time.
numbers 4y ago
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?
- graphenus 4y ago
  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.
  - kiicia 4y ago
    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
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      I think what you are used to has a big impact. I use a 22" 1200p screen and still like the aggressive hinting; I've tuned my fontconfig to be more like windows. Mac style rendering just looks fuzzy to me. As an aside the PPI of my screen isn't that different from the PPI of my 15" CRT running 1024x768 (both are about 100). Note that there was less than 15" of usable space since CRTs were rated based on the tube size, not the visible size.
- hbn 4y ago
  > 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.
oliv__ 4y ago
The website looks better than the actual OS...
noSyncCloud 4y ago
>we’re not a fan Oh, ok :)
andsoitis 4y ago
Technically interesting, but I don't see many people using it. Why? Because it will always be (far-ish) behind macOS features.
tailspin2019 4y ago
I’m going to do some good old Hacker News bike-shedding here… Whenever I see something that looks like a poor copy of something else, it has an immediate (negative) effect on me from quite deep down. It’s a variation of the uncanny valley I think. The UI screenshots on the landing page all look like “best effort” copies of macOS UI elements but are just slightly off and that “slightly off” feeling really sits badly with me. This is not a intellectual judgement but an instinctive gut reaction. I totally get what they’re trying to do, but I think it would be worth creating just a tiny bit more distance from the macOS design language because if you try to be a direct carbon copy of macOS, it’s just going to fail at at that. It’s a bit like when you see cheap knock-off products replicating those of mainstream brands. The knock-offs could actually be quite well made but because they’re imitating other products they just don’t ever look right, and the failed imitation aspect overshadows everything else. I wonder what others think (especially the macOS users amongst us). Aside from that, I think the idea of the project is cool. It just needs more of its own identity I think.
musicale 4y ago
I always thought GNUstep was cool and deserved more development and use.
shortrounddev2 3y ago
Could use screenshots
- jaclaz 3y ago
  There are some (actually a single one of the proper ravynos, the other ones are of airyxos) on the .com site: https://ravynos.com/screenshots.html https://ravynos.com/screenshots.html
rastafarigpu 3y ago
What are the licensing terms if I want to contribute?

769 points by behnamoh 4y ago

spidey1 4y ago

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

Diris 4y ago
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 https://ravynos.com/faq.html
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  I hope it sticks around. If it's around long enough, it can be an alternative in its own right. Ever since ElementaryOS lost momentum (or really never found it, rather) I have been looking for a "third way". RavynOS could be a great way to develop Mac apps and also target the apps for RavynOS. Could be great for music appliances and whatnot.
- hjek 4y ago
  Oh, so ravynOS would kind of be for macOS what ReactOS is for Windows?

znpy 4y ago

I looks worthless to me. If you’re doing this kind of things, you’d better be producing and selling your reference laptop/desktop computer too. Otherwise all I expect from seeing the FreeBSD logo is 2005-ish hardware support nightmares (thanks but no thanks, I’m not a teenager anymore).

adastra22 4y ago

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?

kitsunesoba 4y ago
The greater bulk of the macOS userland is still written in Objective-C.
- adastra22 4y ago
  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.)
  - boucher 4y ago
    I imagine they are using either GNUStep or Cocotron as the basis for their Cocoa support, not starting fully from scratch.
    - IMcD23 4y ago
      Looks like they have copied and pasted large amounts of code from Cocotron.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
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.

Sakos 4y ago

I don't know why the mobile version crawls when I scroll past the images on my high-end Samsung.

seabrookmx 4y ago
Same with my Pixel 5 and FF mobile.
- elromulous 4y ago
  Chrome on pixel 5 has no issue. Ff is slow for me as well. Maybe specifically an FF issue?
  - kramerger 4y ago
    Runs smooth with FF for Android here. Maybe the issue is something else entirely?
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Running FF for Android on a mid range Samsung tablet and it seems to work fine for me. Maybe it's a GPU driver thing?
ineedtosleep 4y ago
The images are svgs. Probably heavy processing from that.
mattnewton 4y ago
There is a subtle translucency effect applied to the top bar that picks up and scatters the large svg’s behind it. I haven’t seen how it’s implemented, but it might not be performant on all web engines.
Kayou 4y ago
Same on MacOS and Firefox with a 4K screen ans same on Firefox and a Pixel 6, scrolling lags hard on the section with pictures. Making a bad first impression of this new OS.

sneak 4y ago

This is a great idea, but I think they'd be better off aiming for Linux. One of the main benefits of macOS is perfect hardware support. Linux has a definite edge on all other free software kernels here. I hope they succeed, regardless of technical decisions.

p1necone 4y ago
> One of the main benefits of macOS is perfect hardware support. Insofar as you have perfect support for the very small subset of hardware that computers running macOS can have. I'm sure you could get similarly perfect hardware support on Linux by being careful about which hardware you run it on.
- sneak 4y ago
  Nobody did this for Linux on the small subset of Apple-branded macOS-capable x64 machines before, much to my chagrin. I donated to marcan in the hopes that someone now will. There should be a free software OS installer that is as easy to use and supports as much hardware with full functionality as the Apple OS installer. Apple has already done the heavy lifting of a well defined hardware target.
ggm 4y ago
Their target is existing MacOS users. Thats a BSD derived kernel and OS API and the model is quite different. Making a Linux kernel look right, is a path ?Gentoo? took some time ago, and I am unsure you can call it an unqualified success. "does it run homebrew" is my lead question
- sneak 4y ago
  Existing macOS users have Apple hardware. Does FreeBSD support recent x64 Apple gear well? Last I looked even Linux had less than perfect support. The situation is even more Linux-centric on Mx.
  - ggm 4y ago

GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago

> built with our core technologies of Cocoa, Qt, and Mach Does this mean a mach emulation layer on top of or in the freebsd kernel?

dmix 4y ago
> 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

weikju 4y ago

Looks like this is a rebrand from the Airyx project that was posted before [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068542

Nursie 4y ago
Thanks, yeah that slightly confused me because the screenshots on the sight all talk about Airxy, rather than RavynOS. Other than that it looks interesting, a sorta-Mac-aesthetic sorta-BSD.
dang 4y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: A macOS-like operating system based on FreeBSD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28087092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28087092 - Aug 2021 (67 comments) Airyx OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068542 - Aug 2021 (254 comments)
schleck8 4y ago
They had a trademark issue because there is a German company called Airyx that uses an almost identical domain on top of that (airyx.com vs airyx.de)

nikitaga 4y ago

At this point, "Consistent shortcuts" is the main "feature" keeping me on MacOS. Cmd+, opens preferences in every app. Cmd+[ or ] goes "back" and "forward", in every app that has those concepts Cmd+Shift+[ or ] switches tabs, in every app that has tabs, except a handful of stupid chat apps who think they're too good for it. Cmd+W always closes the current tab, if the app has tabs, (or current window, if the app has no tabs), and does not quit the app – that's what Cmd+Q is for. Etc. Also notice how PageUp / PageDn, keys that my keyboard doesn't even have, are not used for crucial shortcuts like these. Seemingly small things, but absolutely maddening when developers don't respect the common convention, or when a common convention does not exist. I always thought this consistency was a feature of the app ecosystem and app developer attitudes rather than the OS itself, so I'm not sure what RavynOS can do to make third party apps obey their idea of consistent shortcuts? The wiki doesn't mention anything about shortcuts despite the language on the home page.

sofixa 4y ago
For the tabs Ctrl+tab/Ctrl+shift+tab is the standard on Windows and Linux, so i can see how some apps can forget about macOS' specialness.
- nikitaga 4y ago
  Speaking of this specialness... having the main system shortcut modifier – Cmd – physically located under both your thumbs is priceless. In contrast, the Ctrl keys are usually located such that they're best accessed with your pinkies. Who thought that making people use their weakest fingers for the most common shortcuts is a good idea? Could you remap your keys to have Ctrl keys under the thumbs in Windows / Linux? Yes, but then: 1) It will become hard to use Ctrl-based text navigation shortcuts (such as Ctrl+left to navigate one word left) with one hand, and 2) Ctrl+Tab will now use the same physical keys as Alt+Tab used to, and your brain will never heal from this (at least mine refuses to).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

bowsamic 4y ago

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.

daitangio 4y ago
Agree. Also I see some video on SerenityOS and I find a very good teaching environment/gym to see a such vertical integration. Last but not least HaikuOS deserves some forward look

jetpackjoe 4y ago

Being able to CMD+c to copy things in a terminal is one of my favorite things about programming on a Mac. Ctrl+c to copy everywhere, except the terminal (there it instead is an interrupt) is a major annoyance working in Linux

jmprspret 4y ago
I don't use a Mac. How does one interrupt a program if Ctrl+C is bound to copy? At this point when I'm in a terminal Ctrl+C is muslce memory for interrupting a running program.
- gregsadetsky 4y ago
  On Macs, Cmd+C to copy and Ctrl+C to interrupt in the terminal i.e. they’re different.
- samtheprogram 4y ago
  Ctrl-C is still bound to an interrupt — it’s Cmd-C (i.e. Super-C / Win-C) that is bound to copy. Most things that a regular user can think of (paste, print, select all, to name a few) that would be control mapped in user facing programs are typically mapped to the “command” key instead.
- kalleboo 4y ago
  Macs have a Meta key called Command that can be dedicated to the shortcuts defined in GUI applications while leaving Ctrl free to be used by console stuff. So all the GUI copy/paste/windowing etc controls use Command key shortcuts. The original 1984 Mac keyboard did not even have a Ctrl key, it was added to later keyboards as people wanted access to terminal applications.
  - jmprspret 4y ago
    Of course! Sorry, I did know this but I always forget macs have Cmd and Control
- wodenokoto 4y ago

unixhero 4y ago

Great effort and idea. Don't forget to find a replacement foe OSX Quartz engine.

aldrich 4y ago

I'm curious to know why they have chosen to use FreeBSD as a base as opposed to Darwin/XNU on which macOS itself is based. Nothing against FreeBSD (happy user here) so there's probably some good reasoning behind this.

gattilorenz 4y ago
Probably because Darwin is half abandoned, while FreeBSD is actively maintained and with plenty of drivers
- samtheprogram 4y ago
  Darwin is still open sourced, but mainly because of drivers and differences in certain other things (threads maybe, Mach ports / IPC, etc) that don’t have the integration or implementation with existing software is a major headwind to attempting a full encompassing Darwin OS. PureDarwin was (is?) an attempt that hasn’t been able to break through those headwinds.
  - spyremeown 4y ago
    Is Darwin used for something other than research? I'd really love to see some homebrew stuff with this kernel.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      There's https://www.puredarwin.org/ https://www.puredarwin.org/ which is probably great for partial OSX/iOS emulation efforts. That's it as far as I can tell, though.
jamil7 4y ago
From the FAQ: The short answer is "hardware support". ravynOS should run on most commodity x86_64 hardware using FreeBSD's very stable and performant drivers. The longer answer is that plus I don't see any real advantage to using xnu. We have merged in Mach support now (big thanks to NetBSD, NextBSD and the iX Systems folks for that) so the xnu approach just seems to add complexity and the effort of writing and maintaining drivers. Considering how big this project is already, I opted to stick with the BSD kernel - at least for now

ricardobeat 4y ago

Why not pick up where Elementary OS left off, instead of starting from scratch?

deaddodo 4y ago
I would argue picking up where GNUStep+Etoile left off, over Elementary. Elementary is just a nice skin with some particular tweaks and add-ons. Etoile’s goal was more akin to what they’re trying to achieve here, an actual Objective-C+Cocoa user space with a Mac compatible open library,
Shorel 4y ago
Do you mean having huge useless toolbars eating valuable screen real state? It seriously had worse UI design decisions than Gnome 3.

pabs3 4y ago

Some of the words in the screenshots make it sound like this is a skinned version of KDE. Konsole, Kate, Plasma for example: https://ravynos.com/screenshots.html https://ravynos.com/screenshots.html

fsw 4y ago
> 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.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  Oh, the good old "rewrite the world" approach. Good luck to the developers!
  - adastra22 4y ago
    This is one instance where that approach probably pays dividends, if they can pull it off. Most macOS-like clones that I've tried fall short, due to there being only so much you can do to paper-over the Linux desktop experience. A sort of uncanny valley that I just can't get over and adjust to using.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      To have the full experience they also need to clone the Objective-C and Swift frameworks, and IDE tooling.
      - kelnos 4y ago
        The GNUStep project has already done much of the ObjC framework cloning. I wonder if they're using that. Not sure about Swift frameworks, though.

tommica 4y ago

Neat idea, hopefully they are successful!

c4ptnjack 4y ago

I'm curious to see how performative this will manage to actually be... Itd be interesting if it could eventually run audio software and AU plugins at a low latency.

jhoelzel 4y ago

Thanks for your work, i like the design choices you made. I believe that a bigger factor today is the third party support for your system. stuff like teams not working, or netflix not being able to stream in 4k makes me still keep my windows machine, even though at this point its basically a firefox / vscode terminal with extra apps and of course a system level integration of docker. Im pretty sure there is enough room for a true developer OS but it still needs to do all the "little" things that we have grown accustomed to.

yubiox 4y ago

Does it run Better Touch Tool? I use it to resize and move windows with trackpad moves (no click) and modifier keys and also to disable openapple-Q. Does it work well with an apple trackpad?

justthinkhn 4y ago

This is a dead end. FreeBSD, lmao. Why not choose Linux, which supports way more hardware and features. Not promising for the general quality of decision making.

kryptiskt 4y ago
FreeBSD is a modern performant OS with broad hardware support. I don't know what feature you had in mind, but FreeBSD comes with kqueue and has largely the same core utils as MacOS, which isn't a lot but why not take the free wins you can get? Not to mention that if they manage to pull this moonshot off, porting the resulting work to Linux would be utterly trivial in comparison. So ingrained Linux fanboys don't have to worry, if this becomes a thing, they'll get in on it.
nix23 4y ago
Those Linux fanboy's always remind me of the song from NOFX "The Idiots Are Taking Over" -> Opensource ;)

pjmlp 4y ago

How is this going to have a better future than GNUStep, while being up to date with macOS frameworks?

JacobSeated 4y ago

KDE is a better desktop environment than MacOS, by far. I have had so many usability issues with my Mac that does not exist in KDE/Linux. E.g. Apple confining the GUI and not including basic functionality. Specifically: - I really miss a decent address bar in finder that can be edited directly - some windows on mac are always on top, preventing access to other windows. E.g. Password dialogs for encrypted hard drives. - "Cut" does not work for files in finder, severely complicating moving files - The Maximize button does not maximize, but instead enters full screen, meaning that I never use it - There is a delay of ~100ms when pushing caps lock on the keyboard that can not be turned off without installing karabiner elements - Pressing enter in Finder renames a file instead of opening it, an action that is rarely needed and extremely unintuitive – this erroneous behaviour can also be corrected with karabiner elements - Sometimes audio balance will randomly shift to the left or right with bluetooth headphones, had to install yet another app to auto-fix it every time it happens because Apple is too daft to fix the bug. - There is no delete key on the Mac keyboard, meaning that deleting a file is suddenly a two- key shortcut combo, whereas it is much easier on Windows/Linux (hit delete). Sigh.

deleted 4y ago
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ysleepy 4y ago
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, mac and so on and dislike kde, and gnome3, and all the others. Even mac is really dumb sometimes, but macos is the most polished by far.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  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?

rich_sasha 4y ago

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, but as I spend my time between the terminal and the browser, I'm not sure I'd notice much. I think I'm not alone in this approach; I wonder if this project has the change to be as rock-solid as Apple's offerings. If not, I'm guessing it's not for me.

croh 4y ago
I don't know what is the last time you used linux but lately there is great improvements in user experience. I know non-techie people using Linux Mint/ubuntu without any hassels.
- butterNaN 4y ago
  I'm the de facto IT support for my family and neighbours. They are using Pop OS for about 3 years now. It has been great from both their UX and my maintenance perspective. My father even did the 20.10 to 21.04 LTS upgrade himself! I highly doubt if windows would've been as smooth an experience. (Macs are out of question for us since none of us are rich!)
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Windows upgrades go so smoothly they've been repackaged as updates. They're also highly fault resistant by default with automated rollbacks out of the box. I'm not saying Pop is bad, but Windows upgrades are super easy and user friendly (if you ignore the privacy risks that come with using Windows). I wish common Linux distros would pack something like system restore by default already! I know these tools (based on BTRFS/ZFS snapshots) exist and work great, but they need to be set up manually and most people won't.
- rich_sasha 4y ago

mattlutze 4y ago

I struggle with chasing after the MacOS appearance. It feels in passing like a lot of work to build a skin/UI that will always be a few generations of the design language behind and not quite there, just given the volume of staff at Apple and them being the ones defining where their design language goes. Like a choice between a Porsche and, according to Google a Zotye -- they'll look close but one will be the obvious "genuine article." Would it not be better to take all that talent and consider a fresh approach to the user experience of a personal computer?

d3ckard 4y ago
As with code, imitate first, improve upon later seems like a reasonable approach.
Croftengea 4y ago
> given the volume of staff at Apple Unrelated to RavynOS, but I see the size of the Apple staff more like a weakness not a strength. They became terribly inefficient in the recent years.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  And still they will perform better than any FOSS attempt to clone their work.
  - klabb3 4y ago
    Yeah, FOSS culture is unfortunately neither very good at design, nor attracting good designers for collaboration. Many engineers don't even respect design and/or designers.
    - meltedcapacitor 4y ago
      I find Gnome has been doing quite nicely with design (despite the haters).
    - mschuster91 4y ago

KolmogorovComp 4y ago

Nice project, however I’m worried about their scope (reimplementing the MacOs APIs?) being too large for their team, to achieve that level of ‘finessse’ a billion-worth company has made decades achieving. Moreover in my opinion the contributor pool might be thin, most potentially interested users would prefer using MacOs, and most linux users being notoriously not fond of the lack of configuration. Happy to be proven wrong!

Underphil 4y ago
I'd concur on that last part, for sure. As a Linux user, the fit and finish of MacOS really doesn't appeal to me. The hardware, on the other hand...

prmoustache 4y ago

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.

thatguy27 4y ago
My UI experience is very limited (Windows and Linux only, I currently use XFCE4). What do you consider to be the best UI(s) currently offered (in an operating system)?
- thepangolino 4y ago
  The killer feature I saw in the last years was the HUD in that custom desktop environment Ubuntu had for a while before going back to gnome. The ability to just type and search through all menu items saved me so much time!
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    You probably mean the Unity desktop, which now seems to be maintained separately from what I can tell: https://ubuntuunity.org/ https://ubuntuunity.org/ While I think that your take on Apple UI/UX not being good is rather contrarian (given that many quote them as some of the best in the industry), I agree that using Ubuntu with Unity was actually a reasonably pleasant experience, at least in the later years when they had addressed most of the quirks that the earlier versions struggled with. Then again, I'm the kind of person who is also served perfectly well by something as simple as XFCE or LXQt, so maybe I'm a bit biased and my standards aren't the highest. Yet, I really appreciate a UI that's functional and feels snappy.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  I feel gnome3 is a much better/faster/ergonomic. It works great regardless if you are a keyboard, mouse or touchscreen heavy user. My only gripe is I wish firefox would integrate it better instead with an UI similar to (now defunct?) Eolie web browser. Also I haven't spend enough time with it recently but I think kde plasma has the flexibility to be probably as good as gnome. I just don't like the default settings and have always been too lazy to dig deep into it. I used to love kde3.

fourstepper 4y ago

Hi, I just wanted to let you know that the ravynos.com's top part of the page performs very poorly under Firefox, most likely due to some animation overload. Was firefox considered in the tests?

bogwog 4y ago
It's due to the use of the blur backdrop-filter which seems to have been enabled by default on release builds of Firefox relatively recently. Interestingly, it's a feature introduced to CSS way back in 2015. There must have been some major blockers on getting that out the door if it took ~7 years.

drKarl 4y ago

That seems like a lot of work. If what you want is to be able to run MacOS X apps on a free (like in free speech) environment, there's https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/ which is like Wine but for MacOs X apps. If what you want is to replicate the MacOS X UI you can customize the UI of your DE on Linux, or use something like ElementaryOS or use Pantheon. What are the goals of this project?

2Gkashmiri 4y ago
Cool. What kind of GUI apps work ? The FAQ doesn't say much except basic. Could we use Mac compatible apps in place of windows ones if Linux isn't available? Games? Productivity?
- drKarl 4y ago
  I admit that I haven't personally used Darling but it would be rather pointless if it only worked for commander line apps. All command line apps I use on MacOs X are from homebrew and are available in Linux so for me it only makes sense for GUI apps. Also, I never really missed a MacOs X specific app when I use Linux, most apps I use are multi platform anyway, and the rare one that is not, it usually has a decent equivalent for Linux.
- gabegm 4y ago
  From their GitHub page[0]: "Please note that most GUI applications will not run at the moment." [0] https://github.com/darlinghq/darling https://github.com/darlinghq/darling
moondev 4y ago
I find this gtk application theme and shell theme to go even further than elementary. The developer releases all sorts of themes with insane quality. You can even tweak them to suit your preference such as sidebar width and compact header size https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme

fguerraz 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
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Cwizard 4y ago
Yes.. but FreeBSD is used by a lot of people! It’s used on a lot of servers. Netflix’ CDN for example runs FreeBSD.
- nix23 4y ago
  And FreeNAS/TrueNAS probably the most used selfmade NAS.
brigandish 4y ago
Software that everybody uses can be affected by terrible bugs - Heartbleed couldn't have happened otherwise - so what is the magic level of usage needed to avoid bugs and be stable?
arghwhat 4y ago
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 a positive thing. This pattern repeats, with OS's smaller than FreeBSD having good reason to be chosen in production. Fun fact: Apple used NetBSD on their Airport product series.
- wink 4y ago
  I'm not sure you should plainly compare FreeBSD on a limited choice of Hardware doing server things with "a general purpose GUI desktop OS". OP didn't say FreeBSD was bad in my reading, but as a somewhat irregular user you just notice 1000 papercuts (which are not the OS's fault per se for the most part) but which detract from the overall experience. Every nth software package you use for the first time needs a (small, 3-line) patch which is mostly because the people develop on Linux. Sometimes it's better if they develop on OSX, sometimes it doesn't matter.

vdchuyen 4y ago

oleganza 4y ago

I don't get it. The landing page promises finesse and then the very first screenshot displays horror typography and UI a-la linux 1998. https://ravynos.com/images/airyx_0.3_installer_confirm.png https://ravynos.com/images/airyx_0.3_installer_confirm.png

netr0ute 4y ago
The website didn't actually claim they had implemented those features yet, just that it's their goals.
pramsky 4y ago
Those are screenshots from the old GUI which used X11/KDE. They are working on a new one which do not have any screenshots up yet.

awill 4y ago

I generally really dislike when companies make comparisons like this. They pick a market leader, and imply their v1 is just as good. It never is. The Google of X The Apple of Y The Amazon of Z It's almost always hype and it's annoying. It's as if they think they deserve credit for the intent, or the goal, rather than the actual product.

ThinkBeat 4y ago

I am confused. Domain and headline and frontpage says RayvnOS but by the screen shots it says airyxOS?

andrem 4y ago
They rebranded due to legal reasons - https://twitter.com/ravynsoft/status/1520779114336071680 https://twitter.com/ravynsoft/status/1520779114336071680
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

mlindner 4y ago

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.

stormking 4y ago
You obviously did not even look at this project because that's exactly what they're aiming at.

toucaninsights 4y ago

[flagged]

Dave3of5 4y ago

Lawsuit from apple incoming in 3 ... 2 ...

SantiagoElf 4y ago

Enough of those half-assed attempts at an "OS". Either use Windows with WSL2, or Debian, or FreeBSD with some GUI, or MacOS. Regardless of what OS you use - you will be using a Browser, Terminal, File Manager and VS Code/Rider/Visual Studio, emacs/vim. GASP Enough of this distro hopping - it is the moder-day procrastination.

anthk 4y ago
This distro will implement Cocoa and a Mach-O ELF loader...

oxplot 4y ago

Hmm, looking at the screenshots and comparing with my current Gnome on Wayland, the latter is way more beautiful and with better utility.

rickstanley 4y ago

I was recently searching for something "EndeavourOS" like to try FreeBSD. Thi looks nice!

rattray 4y ago

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).

LeSaucy 4y ago
The biggest gap from developers will be the lack of docker on freebsd.
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  You could do what docker does on the mac, put it in a linux vm.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  Personally, I find that to be an asset not a failure.
- hericium 4y ago
  > lack of docker on freebsd 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 https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve [2] https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl [3] https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase
  - rattray 4y ago
    Has anyone packaged this into a single, easy-to-use command/application? (Like "Docker for Mac")

Kukumber 4y ago

no KDE/GTK, no system-d global menu swift as a first class language swiftUI like API and you get my support! i'll donate

KoftaBob 4y ago

Nice to see more options for polished and user friendly Linux distros! Another one that has those qualities, and which I use often: https://zorin.com/ https://zorin.com/ Edit: my mistake, RavynOS isn't a Linux distro!

haolez 4y ago
RavynOS is not a Linux distro.

29athrowaway 4y ago

ElementaryOS had similar goals on the desktop experience side. You may also want to take a look at OpenStep and Window Maker.

Naracion 4y ago

Ex graphic designer here, but don't (and never have) used Mac. I highly respect this project and initiative, and the following is more a commentary on my own reaction than your product. I read the title--finesse of MacOS. I open the link, and the first thing I see at the top is the circular raven logo vertically misaligned with the header on mobile. That made me think, okay let's try desktop version instead, so I switched to desktop render (still on mobile browser) -- this time the logo is vertically aligned but the padding / margin on top and bottom are lower than on the left. This is of course nitpicking in the larger scheme of things--I haven't tried the OS, but the screenshots look great and definitely look like MacOS. However, with the title setting up expectations and the first impression being of a misaligned logo made me (unfairly) dismiss the project since I felt you were trying to claim a level of finesse that might not be there. I don't use Linux, so I'll never really use this product, but it's interesting to me--why do people / projects/teams (in general--not just this product) try to emulate the "finesse" of Apple products? To me, it sets up unrealistic expectations from that product, and I might dismiss an otherwise excellent solution if it doesn't live up to that comparison.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
I'm not sure that caring about the design of a desktop environment and website are equivalent - if nothing else, they're different skills to implement. And in any event, it's an early-stage project; that their goals aren't realized yet is hardly surprising.
lucideer 4y ago
I noticed the logo misalignment but the rest of the website was pretty good so I figured it was a one-off issue (rather than representative of a trend). Was there other issues that bothered you?
eddieroger 4y ago
> why do people / projects/teams (in general--not just this product) try to emulate the "finesse" of Apple products Because people like them. Why do all sedans look kind of alike? Why are there dozens knock-off chairs that emulate the Aeron? Some people, myself included, really like the look and feel of macOS, but may want to run *nix instead. Enough of those people got together and made an OS.

DiggyJohnson 4y ago

"Can I run Photoshop?"

rovr138 4y ago
> Can I run macOS apps on ravynOS? > No - not yet. This is a major goal and we're working towards it. So far, some trivial "hello world" binaries in C and Objective-C have been compiled on macOS Big Sur and the resulting Mach-O binaries ran on ravynOS using our in-dev Hybrid linker without any Frameworks or tools from macOS. Source code of some simple Cocoa AppKit-based applications have been built on ravynOS and run as native applications (e.g. Install ravynOS.app). While this is all very exciting, you will have to wait a bit longer to run Photoshop or Xcode. first question, https://ravynos.com/faq.html https://ravynos.com/faq.html
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  Awesome - thank you for the comprehensive response. Best of luck to you and the project.

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago

>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. I get the desire to avoid X11, but why write a GUI from scratch instead of using Wayland?

hollerith 4y ago
My guess is that it would take a lot of work to get Wayland working with FreeBSD.
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
  That still sounds like less work than writing the whole thing from scratch.

shortformblog 4y ago

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.

jklinger410 4y ago

Interesting that they decided not to just spin Pantheon onto BSD but develop their own DE.

foxbee 4y ago

This looks promising but I can't get the installer to load. Would love to get updates on progress.

hiccuphippo 4y ago

Does MacOS really have that finesse they try to emulate? First thing I noticed when I started using a mac is that double clicking the Finder titlebar only expands it vertically while every other app expands both vertically and horizontally. Second thing, when I close a window and then press Cmd+tab, the icon is still there, and if I select it nothing shows up. There's more of these everyday things that work sloppy so I wonder why does the mac have that image of finesse when I don't really see it.

chrisoverzero 4y ago
> […] double-clicking the Finder titlebar only expands it vertically […] This behavior is called “Zoom”, and it’s defined per-application by that application. You could change that system-wide to minimize. > […] when I close a window and then press Cmd+tab, the icon is still there, and if I select it nothing shows up. Yes, the application hasn’t quit. You’ve only closed its last window.
- Forricide 4y ago
  > Yes, the application hasn’t quit. You’ve only closed its last window. To further expand on this, this is also application-defined behaviour. The application can choose whether it wants to stay open or close. This is no different from Windows (e.g. closing a Spotify window will just minimize it to taskbar), it's just that Cmd+Tab by default shows all running applications, whereas Win+Tab/Alt+Tab on Windows by default shows open windows.
rewgs 4y ago
Your second point is by design. macOS lets apps run without windows. Hold Option while once you select the app via Cmd+tab and it’ll open a new window.
ireflect 4y ago
> double clicking the Finder titlebar only expands it vertically while every other app expands both vertically and horizontally For me it fits-to-content both vertically and horizontally. I just tested in both list- and icon-view. Mac OS 12. > When I close a window and then press Cmd+tab, the icon is still there This is because the Mac UI application/document conceptual model, which has been consistent since at least the 1980s. An application is either open or not. If you have multiple documents open, they are open within a single instance of the application. You can also have zero documents open. The application doesn't quit automatically when you close the last document. Other operating systems flatten these two concepts into one, such that each new document appears as a new instance of the application. I'm not suggesting one is better than the other. Just that I don't consider this a lack-of-finesse since it's been my mental model for 25+ years. I'm also not disagreeing with your overall point. I can think of plenty of inconsistencies and lack-of-finesse in modern Mac OS UI, to be sure!

Sunspark 4y ago

This is a very cool project and I wish them success. From a technical standpoint, maybe it won't matter, but I am concerned about the fact that they're using (at this time) a Wayland compositor. I have read that Wayland has some problematic technical design decisions (which were not known when it was conceived) and now today we have the awful situation where most apps in my experience run better in X.org and some are ok in Wayland. From an eyestrain perspective, I find x.org less straining to look at than Wayland. This may have something to do with the drivers but the compositor plays a role for sure. I don't use Wayland by choice. Name a widely used app? Sure, Firefox web browser. Turn on "Use autoscrolling" in the preferences and see how it is. On X.org it is smooth, on Wayland it uses XWayland instead and is not smooth. Both projects are years old. Every single X11 app requires programmers to re-write/convert them to native Wayland. It should have just broken compatibility from day 1 and started from scratch. BSD DRI drivers are copied over from Linux, just older versions of them, so I don't have a lot of hope that there will be new drivers or a new compositor (likely years away). Apple, while Darwin is a direct descendant of FreeBSD, Apple is not using Linux DRI drivers, they have enough NDA access that they have their own closed drivers, and instead of using X11, they made their own GUI stack. I want to say what should be done is to do what Apple did, make a brand new gui stack on top, but that's incredibly difficult with limited resources. With Apple or MS you have endless amounts of money and developers, with X.org & Wayland you have years and years of incremental development. It's tough.

WhyNotHugo 4y ago
Wayland doesn't have broken technical decisions, they're just different and require applications to adapt. A typical examples is global hotkeys. On X11, any application can monitor all keystrokes at any time. On Wayland, applications only get keyboard events if they're in foreground. Global hotkeys must be done via a separate compositor API. This breaks applications which expect to be able to detect keystrokes when they're in background, but the "feature" they relied on also allows any random application to include a keylogger. Such applications need to update. You mention Firefox uses XWayland. Firefox also has native Wayland support (I'm writing on it right now!). This is likely a mis-configuration at some level, or maybe the Firefox version is too old. OTOH, things like scaling are completely broken on X11, and while the hacks around it improve over the years using a HiDPI display will likely never be as smooth as on Wayland. And if you have a laptop with a HiDPI display and a LowDPI external monitor, one of them is going to suck forever on Xorg. We are, of course, on a transitional period. A lot of applications still need refinement. Qt in particular still has lots of bugs on Wayland. But these can be fixed, there's no broken design decision which makes them unfixable.

smm11 4y ago

If they nail drag-drop .app installs, that's pretty cool. Otherwise, Elementary GUI on Gnustep is pretty much it.

amrox 4y ago

For the page: > You will need real hardware to run it. Why doesn't it work in a VM?

kkielhofner 4y ago
It is strange. Just downloaded and tried to boot in a KVM+Qemu VM targeting FreeBSD 13 (virsh). Booted but kernel hung with an obscure launchd dispatching job message. I haven't used FreeBSD consistently since the 4.x days so I have no idea what this means. Looks interesting enough to play around with but for such an ambitious project VM support should be one of the first dev priorities not only for dev and testing but for users wanting to take it for a spin.

_abox 4y ago

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?

zinclozenge 4y ago

Does it also mimic the macOS command meta key? Ie cmd+c for copy, cmd+v for paste etc?

potatopotarto 4y ago

Finesse? This is one of the least attractive MacOS rip off builds I've seen.

nu11ptr 4y ago

I like the honest, modest, realistic goals of this project. Looks interesting.

stakkur 4y ago

The challenge of course will always be hardware—notice the evolution of Asahi Linux on Apple hardware and how difficult it is. Then, throw in the device driver hellscape (wifi cards, drives, sound, video, etc.) This OS sounds like a dream for me, but I have to imagine it will take many years and a lot of willing experimenters to make it usable. I wish I had that kind of time.

numbers 4y ago

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?

graphenus 4y ago
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.
- kiicia 4y ago
  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
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I think what you are used to has a big impact. I use a 22" 1200p screen and still like the aggressive hinting; I've tuned my fontconfig to be more like windows. Mac style rendering just looks fuzzy to me. As an aside the PPI of my screen isn't that different from the PPI of my 15" CRT running 1024x768 (both are about 100). Note that there was less than 15" of usable space since CRTs were rated based on the tube size, not the visible size.
hbn 4y ago
> 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.

oliv__ 4y ago

The website looks better than the actual OS...

noSyncCloud 4y ago

>we’re not a fan Oh, ok :)

andsoitis 4y ago

Technically interesting, but I don't see many people using it. Why? Because it will always be (far-ish) behind macOS features.

tailspin2019 4y ago

I’m going to do some good old Hacker News bike-shedding here… Whenever I see something that looks like a poor copy of something else, it has an immediate (negative) effect on me from quite deep down. It’s a variation of the uncanny valley I think. The UI screenshots on the landing page all look like “best effort” copies of macOS UI elements but are just slightly off and that “slightly off” feeling really sits badly with me. This is not a intellectual judgement but an instinctive gut reaction. I totally get what they’re trying to do, but I think it would be worth creating just a tiny bit more distance from the macOS design language because if you try to be a direct carbon copy of macOS, it’s just going to fail at at that. It’s a bit like when you see cheap knock-off products replicating those of mainstream brands. The knock-offs could actually be quite well made but because they’re imitating other products they just don’t ever look right, and the failed imitation aspect overshadows everything else. I wonder what others think (especially the macOS users amongst us). Aside from that, I think the idea of the project is cool. It just needs more of its own identity I think.

musicale 4y ago

I always thought GNUstep was cool and deserved more development and use.

shortrounddev2 3y ago

Could use screenshots

jaclaz 3y ago
There are some (actually a single one of the proper ravynos, the other ones are of airyxos) on the .com site: https://ravynos.com/screenshots.html https://ravynos.com/screenshots.html

rastafarigpu 3y ago

What are the licensing terms if I want to contribute?