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HelloSystem – OS with original Mac philosophy with a modern architecture

324 points by dev_tty01 4y ago

pjmlp 4y ago
How can it have an original Mac philosophy, when it lacks the UI/UX polish and OS frameworks for every level of the programming stack combined in a single development experience?
rob-olmos 4y ago
Relatedly I wish Mac's "mission control" and "app expose" was better, becomes difficult to find frequently used windows.. seems to place windows in random places. It'd be nice if it made it easier to see browser tabs. I liked the the UI/UX of David Gelernter's "Scopeware" layer, that seemed like it would be a nice alternative to either of those.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I'd like to see a return of Spaces as they were in OS X 10.6, where they could be arranged in a 2D grid. That felt really nice and no desktop environment to date has reproduced it exactly, though a few Linux DEs get close.
- dkonofalski 4y ago
  I use Spaces a lot with Mission Control and now Stage Manager. Anything that's vital gets a full-screen space and I can just swap between them with a swipe or with Ctrl+L/R. It's very quick and I never need to search for windows outside of 2 or 3 swipes. I've also turned off the automatic ordering so my calendar is always the last swipe and my email is always the first.
artificial 4y ago
Will have to dig into this. Seems pretty, would be nice to pick apart the API, looks like Python with PyQt is what most utilities are written in. The crux with not being mac/windows is driver performance. It's a bummer it takes such a massive effort to support hardware.
- xwkd 4y ago
  Supporting hardware is pretty much what operating systems are supposed to do. Computation always supports some human end. Humans are doing a lot more with their hardware these days.
- user3939382 4y ago
  It’s based on FreeBSD so maybe the driver support isn’t too bad (?)
  - artificial 4y ago
    Correct, compared to Linux it's a redheaded step child. I love FreeBSD and the resources behind Linux are enormous. I wish things turned out differently in the 90s. Total tangent: If I had Musk level funding to allocate for a pet project it would be Haiku. A purely single user desktop focused OS which happens to featured grafted on FreeBSD hardware support. I'd love to throw a meager billion at it and shake things up ;) I do all my real work on servers as it is and FreeBSD is viable for hardware, just look at the PS4, so no shade at pulling drivers where you're able to.
colanderman 4y ago
OS X "Aqua" theme, 20 years on, looks dated to me in a way that the 40-year-old Susan Kare-era design of the original Mac OS does not. I can't put my finger on why, but I think it has something to do with "arbitrariness".
- jszymborski 4y ago
  It is possible we haven't hit the right part of the nostalgia cycle with the OS X Aqua theme.
  - colanderman 4y ago
    Classic Mac looked equally good to me 20 years ago.
- graypegg 4y ago
  I think arbitrariness is a good way to put it. Was in an era when full colour bitmap graphics were becoming effortless to draw on screen, so let’s make EVERYTHING a high res texture! That will prove how modern and powerful this machine is! But now, it’s less impressive so the sheen doesn’t sparkle as much. Where as maybe the older 1bit display of an old Mac isn’t trying to sell you anything thru UI fancyness. The fact that it’s not impressive technically is maybe less of an issue when it was obviously not the thing they wanted you to focus on.
  - artificial 4y ago
    Reminds me of NeWS [0] which was a Window Manager driven by PostScript. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  Which era of Aqua are we talking about here? I generally group Mac OS X design into four broad buckets: • 10.0 - 10.4 • 10.5 - 10.9 • 10.10 - 10.15 • 11+
  - 4y ago
dang 4y ago
Related: HelloSystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897 - Oct 2021 (39 comments) Hello system, a FreeBSD-based OS designed to resemble Mac - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040 - Feb 2021 (267 comments) Hello: Let’s make a FreeBSD for “mere mortals” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25112820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25112820 - Nov 2020 (1 comment)
criddell 4y ago
What's the permissions model like? I'm on board with "Because we want to run apps from unidentified developers that need no blessing by the operating system vendor" but I also don't want that cool calculator application I just downloaded have access to the network, my webcam or microphone, my photos, email, or really any files outside of the ones in its directory. I do have nostalgia for the way computers used to be, but there have been a lot of OS improvements since then that I don't want to give up.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I agree that third party applications shouldn't be given carte blanche by default. Third parties are best assumed to not be well-behaved, because it's been proven many times over that devs can't be trusted to keep their hands out of the cookie jar and to follow best practices (which I say as a dev myself). The extent of moddability and control afforded by Mac OS 9 extensions with their ability to patch the OS itself in memory as they pleased was incredible, but it was ridiculously insecure and unstable which makes that model untenable today. Applications having full access to everything is no different.
- zzo38computer 4y ago
  > but I also don't want that cool calculator application I just downloaded have access to the network, my webcam or microphone, my photos, email, or really any files outside of the ones in its directory. I think that the way to do should be capability-based security with proxy capabilities, and that can be controlled directly by end users. (The existing ways (user accounts, existing sandboxing systems, etc) have many problems, in my opinion) However, I think this HelloSystem is based on BSD so it would use POSIX. (EDIT: Now I found apparently FreeBSD has a capability mode too, so maybe it can use capabilities.)
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Can't agree. The solution to this problem historically was to only download a shiny new calculator app from trusted sources. So only official builds of open-source or software made by reputable software companies. Too limiting for many people though, in particular techies.
malermeister 4y ago
It feels like if they really wanted to go for the original Mac philosophy, it might've made more sense to use something like GNUStep as the base instead of Qt. There's even some precedent, but it never really took off: http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://etoileos.com/etoile/
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  IIRC the problem with GNUStep is that it got stuck at a version of Objective-C and Cocoa/AppKit roughly equivalent with that of OS X 10.6 and would take a lot of work to even catch up to modern Obj-C and Cocoa, let alone get Swift integrated into.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Which proves the point that this project will never be the Mac philosophy.
- tgv 4y ago
  The mac (nextstep?) philosophy contains at least building blocks for common UX tasks, Cocoa, which gradually grew over the various versions of OS X. I remember being quite astonished about what you could do with an array controller or two: parts of the UI practically wrote themselves. And it was all consistent across apps. "Qt on FreeBSD" simply isn't the same, even though it may have copied the rounding and color of the buttons. I get that GNUStep simply isn't there, and will never be, but this looks like three raccoons in a trench coat.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    Yeah I feel like this project should've tried to get GNUStep to a usable state instead of putting a skin on top of Qt.
grishka 4y ago
Original Mac philosophy, yet attention to detail in the UI is severely lacking. The paddings are all over the place, the gradients on buttons and the menu bar are an absolute eyesore, the menus have a 1-pixel white line to the right of the highlight, etc.
- wk_end 4y ago
  The simple sad reality is that Apple's attention to detail was difficult-but-doable...in 1984, on lower resolution screens, in monochrome, on computers that did substantially less, when riding high off Apple ][ money, with radical vision, for hand-selected elite full-time workers being crunched to the bone by said radical visionary. I'm not sure if all the ingredients necessary to brew up that magic could ever come together in quite the same way again. HelloSystem is dealing with a vastly harder problem with vastly fewer resources; it's no surprise that they're not there.
  - n8cpdx 4y ago
    High DPI and a full color palette are no excuse for not getting margins right. Attention to detail is still doable, it just isn’t something that is valued by MBA/PM types. (Being an ambitious personal project made in limited free time is a better excuse, and I commend the project author’s efforts)
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      > valued by MBA/PM type Or by folks who are not seasoned in user experience. Just because you use something doesn't make you an expert - UI is often thought of that way, but it is a real discipline.
      - jahewson 4y ago
        It’s true, though most UI/UX people are not experts in their field. Often they’re less useful to listen to than people who actually use the software. Now an expert - that’s a different matter. An expert will transform your entire sense of what a product even is.
SilentM68 4y ago
I tried to run it in VMWare and VirtualBox and it just kept on rebooting the VMs.
can16358p 4y ago
While I fully agree with the privacy reasons, I frankly think new flat design UI is much better and cleaner. Whenever I see something from pre-flat era either on macOS or iPhone, I want to vomit.
stuaxo 4y ago
What is this using as it's GUI, and file manager etc ?
- wmf 4y ago
  It's using Qt and they're writing their own file manager. I didn't check whether they're starting 20 years behind by using X11.
  - ozten 4y ago
    Are you suggesting they should have chosen Wayland? I think they have a good argument against it: "Wayland: Under development since a long time, it offers no clear advantage over Xorg while it makes things more complicated (e.g, breaks screen recording) --> Use Xorg instead, or (maybe even better) no X server at all but pure framebuffer (like *ELEC does for media centers). Also see https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... " https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-unwelcome-technologies https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-unwelc...
    - wmf 4y ago
      If you think those are good arguments then... enjoy helloSystem I guess.
      - ozten 4y ago
        I am a total newbie in this area. I thought the gist was compelling, demonstrating a lot of screen recording apps that can't or won't support Wayland.
        wmf 4y ago
        Those apps just haven't been updated to use the proper APIs.
whartung 4y ago
I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-. Sort of reading it as "Original MacOS Philosophy". In the early days, there actually was a "better" MacOS. It was the Apple IIGS. The GS system software was second stab at what was MacOS, but with a bit of "clean slate" ethos to it to fix some of the early issues. Its hard to appreciate the marvel and hoops the system and the developers had to jump through on early machines that lacked memory protection. The IIGS was a nice little sojourn further on in trying to make that kind of system a little bit better. The IIGS memory/process manager (which is kind of the heart of all of this) on top of the 65816 is a pretty neat piece of kit.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  IMHO the "better" MacOS was the LisaOS, and came before the Mac. Cooperative multitasking, memory protection, task/object oriented user interface. MacOS took much of the concepts, but was deliberately made "worse", so it could fit in the Mac's tiny ROMs, and not use an MMU. It was built as if it was a one-off with no serious consideration for the future (not an uncommon theme in the time, many companies hadn't really caught onto the "platform" concept yet). (Re: the IIgs, building an elegant OS on the 65816 is annoying as hell with its banked memory architecture, tiny stack that can only be in the bottom 64k of RAM, poverty of registers, and lack of e.g. memory protection mechanisms. But the IIgs stuff was really a valiant effort, pretty cool.)
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  > I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-. I miss proper spatial navigation sometimes. As a Windows owner I was often envious of MacOS up 9's spatial navigation. I briefly had my own spatial navigation on devices I owned in OS/2 WARP and that one time I was running Gnome-based distributions when Nautilus still had a somewhat buggy spatial navigation mode (which I admittedly compromised some of the design reasons behind spatial navigation by eventually switching to a tiling window manager). When I was old enough to finally own a Macintosh and a PC I was disappointed that Mac OS X had dropped some of the things I liked when working on a Macintosh such as spatial navigation.
  - 4y ago
oneplane 4y ago
Sigh, here we go again. These keep popping up and a few months later the projects are dead again because it turns out this isn't all that feasible without both massive engineering capacity and an ecosystem to go with it. Most of them that manage to get to the point of a UI that doesn't look like Fischer-price fail on the ecosystem (i.e. they have no ecosystem at all, or they try to shoehorn an existing one on top like a standard ports/apt/yum repo from another distro). Besides that, the FUD in the README doesn't really help anyone since the masses care very little, and even if they did care, they almost never have what it takes to look at the sources, and even the small subset that does is practically not even checking a single package's sources. If they just stuck to a "we want something that feels like 2005 apple" tagline it would have been a fine project to fiddle with for fun, but as soon as grand statements are made ("reinvent the Mac") we're back into generic "things few people care for"-territory.
- charlie0 4y ago
  Ah yes the whole "we are going to reinvent this", when "this" has taken decades and 100s of millions of dollars to build. I appreciate the efforts, but good luck.
- jackson1442 4y ago
  Agreed. And even in their cherry-picked screenshot there are several UI bugs/inconsistencies that would drive me insane as a daily user. I'll just take KDE plasma.
  - smm11 4y ago
    I'll be good if that Linux install I did in maybe 2000 that used full-screen Navigator as the file manager and desktop itself came back to life.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
More discussion: a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897 2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040
r00fus 4y ago
The readme seems out of date - the privacy issue for CSAM is essentially not an issue anymore - Apple has no plans to do on-device scanning.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  Correction, Apple has given no public commitment to completely shelve their on-device scanning. There's no guarantee they won't try boiling the frog with their CSAM scanning plans.
  - goodSteveramos 4y ago
    I wish they would enable the CSAM scanner for children’s accounts when parental guidance is turned on. That makes so much sense. If my child is being abused I want to be notified. But instead they shelved it because they couldn't get their spyware installed. Shows how much apple really cares about children and how much they care about spying on us.
SkyMarshal 4y ago
I appreciate the intent here and don't want to be overly critical, but this appears to be attempting a nicer UI for FreeBSD. Not a bad goal, but I'd like to see a page somewhere that lists not just the grievances with Apple that led to this project, but also how this project improves on a standard Linux config. Or better yet, a Linux config hardened as much as possible without losing compatibility with its software ecosystem or with Wine/Proton. Replacing Apple with a more privacy-preserving alternative is not really about UI minutia. UI/UX is mostly solved, for 2D displays at least. Gnome, KDE, Elementary OS's Pantheon, and others all offer usable and customizable variations on this tech that get you 90% of the way to Apple's standard. Incremental improvements in 2D UI/UX are reaching a point of diminishing returns, where it's more annoying for users to have to learn new interaction mechanics than to simply stick with the ones they know, even if the new mechanics are slightly better in some way. Rather, I think the area that really needs focused developer attention, and with bigger and more meaningful payoffs, is in bringing the most secure and hardened base systems up to full compatibility with the broadest possible application ecosystem/s. The best option for that right now appears to be Linux + Wine/Proton, ideally using a hardened Linux base like Qubes or SEL4 or similar and Nix/Guix-like reproducible builds, while integrating the extensive work already put into existing UI/UX/DE's. I think if hackers want to achieve this objective, then that's where they need to start and build a community around.
- knighthack 4y ago
  > Gnome, KDE, Elementary OS's Pantheon, and others all offer usable and customizable variations on this tech that get you 90% of the way to Apple's standard. And that's assuming that Apple's standard is the 'gold standard'. Which I don't think it is, at all. MacOS has many inconsistencies, which are remedied or fixed by other desktop systems, and it is not a benchmark to measure by.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  >Rather, I think the area that really needs focused developer attention, and with bigger and more meaningful payoffs, is in bringing the most secure and hardened base systems up to full compatibility with the broadest possible application ecosystem/s. Do you have thoughts on the idea of HelloSystem re-implementing the Cocoa APIs so that it can run Mac apps "natively"?
ozten 4y ago
I am very attracted to this idea. I want a clean desktop daily driver that prioritizes UX. I love many of the UX-focused priorities, but a much larger % of their priorities such as Linux vs FreeBSD aren't high for me and don't seem end-user focused. An interesting idea I had never thought to question was considering "App Stores" as package managers. "Package managers for end-user applications: Those are aimed at "managing the system", whereas everything that is to be managed on our system can be managed in the file manager and/or other GUI elements. --> Use package managers to produce a system image, which is considered immutable for the end user (like on almost every embedded system/software appliance)" https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-unwelcome-technologies https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-unwelc... Good food for thought. Elsewhere they criticize App Stores for their commercial and centralized aspects. But I don't really see an issue with Ubuntu's App Store. It is just a GUI instead of only offering CLI, right?
r00fus 4y ago
Honestly I really liked Aqua. Flat UI may be easier to work with (debatable) but seems so characterless. Something to be said about the right amount of chrome in your UI to remind you "where you're at" instead of getting lost in the content.
boxed 4y ago
I switched to the mac (back before the intel transition) because I became more productive writing apps after ~1 week of hobby fiddling, than I was at my day job doing win32 programming that I had done for several years. This project doesn't tackle the reason macOS was so great: Cocoa.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  I understand that the Supreme Court said in Google v Oracle that the use of APIs is fair use. Does that mean HelloSystem could re-implement all the Cocoa APIs and have Mac apps compile & run seamlessly?
  - brirec 4y ago
    Theoretically, sure! But that's an enormous effort. This is actually what the goal of GNUstep is and has been from the start, and I kind of doubt there's even a single codebase (apart from, maybe, example code) that will compile on both Xcode and GNUstep without major changes. Edit: To be clear, GNUstep is something like 6 years _older_ than Mac OS X, so it's had plenty of time to catch up. The problem is really that these APIs are constantly changing and being extended. The goalpost is moving far too fast to ever meet it.
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      Microsoft tried porting GNUStep to Windows as part of the Windows 10 "iOS Bridge". They gave up, which is actually kind of sad.
      - tymscar 4y ago
        Wow, do you have any source on that? Would love to read more about it!
        kmeisthax 4y ago
        Ok, I'm very much paraphrasing from "shit I read on Wikipedia", but WinObjC does exist and it did use parts of GNUStep: https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/issues/116 https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/issues/116
donatj 4y ago
The hero here I see, that isn't shown on that page is Application Bundles. Being able to drop a single .app in the Applications folder and have it work is one of the biggest selling points of macOS imho. https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/developer/application-bundles.html https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/developer/application-bun... The docs page have a lot of interesting technical details that the linked page either gloss over or do not touch. It's worth a look to see why this is seemingly more than a skin on FreeBSD.
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
  >Easily be understood by switchers coming from other operating systems with similar application distribution formats Interesting use of the plural form of _operating systems_ here.
torstenvl 4y ago
I think a much better approach would be porting Pantheon to FreeBSD, and patching Pantheon to allow a global menu as an compile-time option or user configuration. All the other stuff can come later. IMO it's a bit overly ambitious (I'd be happy to be wrong!) and I fear it dying prematurely.
snvzz 4y ago
>Modern Architecture I wouldn't call FreeBSD (or any UNIX(1971)-like system) modern. A modern architecture would be something like Genode[0], a multi-server system built around the concept of capabilities. 0. https://www.genode.org/ https://www.genode.org/
- Findecanor 4y ago
  FreeBSD does have Capsicum [0] though — with file descriptors as capabilities. FDs can be passed between programs over UNIX datagram sockets. Processes can enter "capability mode" where only open (or rather: active) file descriptors can be used. There used to be an alternative runtime for FreeBSD called CloudABI [1], with which native programs could be started in capability mode, but it was discontinued in favour of WASI [2] (server-side Webassembly) — which adopted CloudABI's libc API. 0: <https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/> 1: <https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudabi https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudabi> 2: <https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI>
  - snvzz 4y ago
    It does and that's great, but it's not the root from which the system is constructed. FreeBSD is a clone of UNIX, and all it takes is a single kernel bug for the system to break down as a whole. Yet, considering the kernel's size, it's not hard to extrapolate that there is far more than one bug. This is not a very good architecture. In 2023, it is very far from the state of the art, and absolutely cannot be called modern.
    - steve1977 4y ago
      That's probably why NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X were partly based on a mix of BSD and the Mach microkernel. Not sure of how much of that is still in current incarnations.
      - snvzz 4y ago
        It is a step; with OSX we're at the 80s instead of the 70s, in operating system architecture. OSX is still very far from modern.
neruthes 4y ago
Much as I respect and appreciate these efforts in maintaining compatible alternatives to canonical Mac OS X and Mac OS XI, in modern days I would prefer to run Mac OS X/XI applications in my GNU/Linux system over some compatibility layer (FoundationLibc, CorePulse, PicQuartz, Melkan, etc), because, in the years after leaving Mac OS X, I have establish new workflows which are mainly GNU-based. I still want GarageBand and perhaps Processing / Glyph, but I prefer embedding those Mac OS X/XI apps in my GNU workflows. Rebooting to another OS wastes time and virtualization has performance penalty; neither is fun.
qwerty456127 4y ago
I doubt this is going to be practically useful but the manifesto is worth reading.
kemayo 4y ago
Might make sense to change the title? It's making a claim that the website itself doesn't -- it just says "Desktop system for creators with a focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. Based on FreeBSD. Less, but better!" "Original Mac" this is not. "Original OSX", maybe.
nsonha 4y ago
> simplicity, elegance, and usability Yet it copied low usability UI elements such as global menu bar and that big ass wasteful dock. What is the innovation here?
wejick 4y ago
The Readme so busy explaining what Apple are than what's this about.
sdwvit 4y ago
Tried it, it's far from alpha. Too bad, I hoped it would at least recognize my hardware. (wifi card and gpu not recognized)
holistio 4y ago
I've been using a Mac since 2013 and I've become so distanced from everything else that a few weeks ago I was surprised to hear that Windows 11... exists. Before then, I spent a considerable amount of my teenage days trying to make various Linux distributions look like OS X. This doesn't really feel much more than what I did back then. The reason we prefer a Mac is because the whole ecosystem works the same way, follows the same guidelines and, most importantly in recent years: because if you bought yourself into the Apple ecosystem, it just works together. One example which HelloSystem will probably never be able to do: I open an authenticator app on my iPhone, tap the code and then just hit Cmd-V on the Mac. I do this several times a day. _This_ is the Mac experience's edge today, not the rounded corners and whatnot.
- savy91 4y ago
  Curiously the example you mention is exactly what you get by using Linux with KDE and an Android phone using KDE Connect.
nequo 4y ago
Unix-like WMs and DEs have an unceasing fascination with replicating the Windows and MacOS UIs. But one of the things that made MacOS/NeXTSTEP noteworthy was its out-of-the-box thinking. It would be much better to experiment with what the UI could be rather than copying what it was. To some extent GNOME seems to be doing this. I haven’t used Windows in too many years to count. But as I recall it, the GNOME of today bears little resemblance to it. Keyboard focused, minimalistic, yet has a modern aesthetic and it is multi-monitor ready. It would be good if there were more DEs that were courageous or experimentative enough to follow suit and break with Windows and MacOS UIs. Do something that’s different. Something that’s neither GNOME nor those things. That would be the original Mac philosophy.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  They never replicate the developer experience, of whole stack frameworks with quite nice productive tooling and modern languages. I guess nowadays KDE is the only one that comes close, GNOME doesn't really know what they want to be and everyone else never cared about full stack experience. The way pixels are rendered is a tiny part of the OS experience.
jevgeni 4y ago
Please don't quote Snowden as some authority on privacy
lykahb 4y ago
Does this project make more sense as a desktop environment, rather than an operating system? That'd allow focusing more on the Mac philosophy for the user interface.
renewedrebecca 4y ago
What exactly about this is the 'original Mac philosophy'?

324 points by dev_tty01 4y ago

How can it have an original Mac philosophy, when it lacks the UI/UX polish and OS frameworks for every level of the programming stack combined in a single development experience?

rob-olmos 4y ago

Relatedly I wish Mac's "mission control" and "app expose" was better, becomes difficult to find frequently used windows.. seems to place windows in random places. It'd be nice if it made it easier to see browser tabs. I liked the the UI/UX of David Gelernter's "Scopeware" layer, that seemed like it would be a nice alternative to either of those.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
I'd like to see a return of Spaces as they were in OS X 10.6, where they could be arranged in a 2D grid. That felt really nice and no desktop environment to date has reproduced it exactly, though a few Linux DEs get close.
dkonofalski 4y ago
I use Spaces a lot with Mission Control and now Stage Manager. Anything that's vital gets a full-screen space and I can just swap between them with a swipe or with Ctrl+L/R. It's very quick and I never need to search for windows outside of 2 or 3 swipes. I've also turned off the automatic ordering so my calendar is always the last swipe and my email is always the first.

artificial 4y ago

Will have to dig into this. Seems pretty, would be nice to pick apart the API, looks like Python with PyQt is what most utilities are written in. The crux with not being mac/windows is driver performance. It's a bummer it takes such a massive effort to support hardware.

xwkd 4y ago
Supporting hardware is pretty much what operating systems are supposed to do. Computation always supports some human end. Humans are doing a lot more with their hardware these days.
user3939382 4y ago
It’s based on FreeBSD so maybe the driver support isn’t too bad (?)
- artificial 4y ago
  Correct, compared to Linux it's a redheaded step child. I love FreeBSD and the resources behind Linux are enormous. I wish things turned out differently in the 90s. Total tangent: If I had Musk level funding to allocate for a pet project it would be Haiku. A purely single user desktop focused OS which happens to featured grafted on FreeBSD hardware support. I'd love to throw a meager billion at it and shake things up ;) I do all my real work on servers as it is and FreeBSD is viable for hardware, just look at the PS4, so no shade at pulling drivers where you're able to.

colanderman 4y ago

OS X "Aqua" theme, 20 years on, looks dated to me in a way that the 40-year-old Susan Kare-era design of the original Mac OS does not. I can't put my finger on why, but I think it has something to do with "arbitrariness".

jszymborski 4y ago
It is possible we haven't hit the right part of the nostalgia cycle with the OS X Aqua theme.
- colanderman 4y ago
  Classic Mac looked equally good to me 20 years ago.
graypegg 4y ago
I think arbitrariness is a good way to put it. Was in an era when full colour bitmap graphics were becoming effortless to draw on screen, so let’s make EVERYTHING a high res texture! That will prove how modern and powerful this machine is! But now, it’s less impressive so the sheen doesn’t sparkle as much. Where as maybe the older 1bit display of an old Mac isn’t trying to sell you anything thru UI fancyness. The fact that it’s not impressive technically is maybe less of an issue when it was obviously not the thing they wanted you to focus on.
- artificial 4y ago
  Reminds me of NeWS [0] which was a Window Manager driven by PostScript. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
Which era of Aqua are we talking about here? I generally group Mac OS X design into four broad buckets: • 10.0 - 10.4 • 10.5 - 10.9 • 10.10 - 10.15 • 11+
- 4y ago

dang 4y ago

Related: HelloSystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897 - Oct 2021 (39 comments) Hello system, a FreeBSD-based OS designed to resemble Mac - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040 - Feb 2021 (267 comments) Hello: Let’s make a FreeBSD for “mere mortals” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25112820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25112820 - Nov 2020 (1 comment)

criddell 4y ago

What's the permissions model like? I'm on board with "Because we want to run apps from unidentified developers that need no blessing by the operating system vendor" but I also don't want that cool calculator application I just downloaded have access to the network, my webcam or microphone, my photos, email, or really any files outside of the ones in its directory. I do have nostalgia for the way computers used to be, but there have been a lot of OS improvements since then that I don't want to give up.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
I agree that third party applications shouldn't be given carte blanche by default. Third parties are best assumed to not be well-behaved, because it's been proven many times over that devs can't be trusted to keep their hands out of the cookie jar and to follow best practices (which I say as a dev myself). The extent of moddability and control afforded by Mac OS 9 extensions with their ability to patch the OS itself in memory as they pleased was incredible, but it was ridiculously insecure and unstable which makes that model untenable today. Applications having full access to everything is no different.
zzo38computer 4y ago
> but I also don't want that cool calculator application I just downloaded have access to the network, my webcam or microphone, my photos, email, or really any files outside of the ones in its directory. I think that the way to do should be capability-based security with proxy capabilities, and that can be controlled directly by end users. (The existing ways (user accounts, existing sandboxing systems, etc) have many problems, in my opinion) However, I think this HelloSystem is based on BSD so it would use POSIX. (EDIT: Now I found apparently FreeBSD has a capability mode too, so maybe it can use capabilities.)
phendrenad2 4y ago
Can't agree. The solution to this problem historically was to only download a shiny new calculator app from trusted sources. So only official builds of open-source or software made by reputable software companies. Too limiting for many people though, in particular techies.

malermeister 4y ago

It feels like if they really wanted to go for the original Mac philosophy, it might've made more sense to use something like GNUStep as the base instead of Qt. There's even some precedent, but it never really took off: http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://etoileos.com/etoile/

kitsunesoba 4y ago
IIRC the problem with GNUStep is that it got stuck at a version of Objective-C and Cocoa/AppKit roughly equivalent with that of OS X 10.6 and would take a lot of work to even catch up to modern Obj-C and Cocoa, let alone get Swift integrated into.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Which proves the point that this project will never be the Mac philosophy.
tgv 4y ago
The mac (nextstep?) philosophy contains at least building blocks for common UX tasks, Cocoa, which gradually grew over the various versions of OS X. I remember being quite astonished about what you could do with an array controller or two: parts of the UI practically wrote themselves. And it was all consistent across apps. "Qt on FreeBSD" simply isn't the same, even though it may have copied the rounding and color of the buttons. I get that GNUStep simply isn't there, and will never be, but this looks like three raccoons in a trench coat.
- malermeister 4y ago
  Yeah I feel like this project should've tried to get GNUStep to a usable state instead of putting a skin on top of Qt.

grishka 4y ago

Original Mac philosophy, yet attention to detail in the UI is severely lacking. The paddings are all over the place, the gradients on buttons and the menu bar are an absolute eyesore, the menus have a 1-pixel white line to the right of the highlight, etc.

wk_end 4y ago
The simple sad reality is that Apple's attention to detail was difficult-but-doable...in 1984, on lower resolution screens, in monochrome, on computers that did substantially less, when riding high off Apple ][ money, with radical vision, for hand-selected elite full-time workers being crunched to the bone by said radical visionary. I'm not sure if all the ingredients necessary to brew up that magic could ever come together in quite the same way again. HelloSystem is dealing with a vastly harder problem with vastly fewer resources; it's no surprise that they're not there.
- n8cpdx 4y ago
  High DPI and a full color palette are no excuse for not getting margins right. Attention to detail is still doable, it just isn’t something that is valued by MBA/PM types. (Being an ambitious personal project made in limited free time is a better excuse, and I commend the project author’s efforts)
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    > valued by MBA/PM type Or by folks who are not seasoned in user experience. Just because you use something doesn't make you an expert - UI is often thought of that way, but it is a real discipline.
    - jahewson 4y ago
      It’s true, though most UI/UX people are not experts in their field. Often they’re less useful to listen to than people who actually use the software. Now an expert - that’s a different matter. An expert will transform your entire sense of what a product even is.

SilentM68 4y ago

I tried to run it in VMWare and VirtualBox and it just kept on rebooting the VMs.

can16358p 4y ago

While I fully agree with the privacy reasons, I frankly think new flat design UI is much better and cleaner. Whenever I see something from pre-flat era either on macOS or iPhone, I want to vomit.

stuaxo 4y ago

What is this using as it's GUI, and file manager etc ?

wmf 4y ago
It's using Qt and they're writing their own file manager. I didn't check whether they're starting 20 years behind by using X11.
- ozten 4y ago
  Are you suggesting they should have chosen Wayland? I think they have a good argument against it: "Wayland: Under development since a long time, it offers no clear advantage over Xorg while it makes things more complicated (e.g, breaks screen recording) --> Use Xorg instead, or (maybe even better) no X server at all but pure framebuffer (like *ELEC does for media centers). Also see https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... " https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-unwelcome-technologies https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-unwelc...
  - wmf 4y ago
    If you think those are good arguments then... enjoy helloSystem I guess.
    - ozten 4y ago
      I am a total newbie in this area. I thought the gist was compelling, demonstrating a lot of screen recording apps that can't or won't support Wayland.
      - wmf 4y ago
        Those apps just haven't been updated to use the proper APIs.

whartung 4y ago

I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-. Sort of reading it as "Original MacOS Philosophy". In the early days, there actually was a "better" MacOS. It was the Apple IIGS. The GS system software was second stab at what was MacOS, but with a bit of "clean slate" ethos to it to fix some of the early issues. Its hard to appreciate the marvel and hoops the system and the developers had to jump through on early machines that lacked memory protection. The IIGS was a nice little sojourn further on in trying to make that kind of system a little bit better. The IIGS memory/process manager (which is kind of the heart of all of this) on top of the 65816 is a pretty neat piece of kit.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
IMHO the "better" MacOS was the LisaOS, and came before the Mac. Cooperative multitasking, memory protection, task/object oriented user interface. MacOS took much of the concepts, but was deliberately made "worse", so it could fit in the Mac's tiny ROMs, and not use an MMU. It was built as if it was a one-off with no serious consideration for the future (not an uncommon theme in the time, many companies hadn't really caught onto the "platform" concept yet). (Re: the IIgs, building an elegant OS on the 65816 is annoying as hell with its banked memory architecture, tiny stack that can only be in the bottom 64k of RAM, poverty of registers, and lack of e.g. memory protection mechanisms. But the IIgs stuff was really a valiant effort, pretty cool.)
WorldMaker 4y ago
> I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-. I miss proper spatial navigation sometimes. As a Windows owner I was often envious of MacOS up 9's spatial navigation. I briefly had my own spatial navigation on devices I owned in OS/2 WARP and that one time I was running Gnome-based distributions when Nautilus still had a somewhat buggy spatial navigation mode (which I admittedly compromised some of the design reasons behind spatial navigation by eventually switching to a tiling window manager). When I was old enough to finally own a Macintosh and a PC I was disappointed that Mac OS X had dropped some of the things I liked when working on a Macintosh such as spatial navigation.
- 4y ago

oneplane 4y ago

Sigh, here we go again. These keep popping up and a few months later the projects are dead again because it turns out this isn't all that feasible without both massive engineering capacity and an ecosystem to go with it. Most of them that manage to get to the point of a UI that doesn't look like Fischer-price fail on the ecosystem (i.e. they have no ecosystem at all, or they try to shoehorn an existing one on top like a standard ports/apt/yum repo from another distro). Besides that, the FUD in the README doesn't really help anyone since the masses care very little, and even if they did care, they almost never have what it takes to look at the sources, and even the small subset that does is practically not even checking a single package's sources. If they just stuck to a "we want something that feels like 2005 apple" tagline it would have been a fine project to fiddle with for fun, but as soon as grand statements are made ("reinvent the Mac") we're back into generic "things few people care for"-territory.

charlie0 4y ago
Ah yes the whole "we are going to reinvent this", when "this" has taken decades and 100s of millions of dollars to build. I appreciate the efforts, but good luck.
jackson1442 4y ago
Agreed. And even in their cherry-picked screenshot there are several UI bugs/inconsistencies that would drive me insane as a daily user. I'll just take KDE plasma.
- smm11 4y ago
  I'll be good if that Linux install I did in maybe 2000 that used full-screen Navigator as the file manager and desktop itself came back to life.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

More discussion: a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897 2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040

r00fus 4y ago

The readme seems out of date - the privacy issue for CSAM is essentially not an issue anymore - Apple has no plans to do on-device scanning.

giantrobot 4y ago
Correction, Apple has given no public commitment to completely shelve their on-device scanning. There's no guarantee they won't try boiling the frog with their CSAM scanning plans.
- goodSteveramos 4y ago
  I wish they would enable the CSAM scanner for children’s accounts when parental guidance is turned on. That makes so much sense. If my child is being abused I want to be notified. But instead they shelved it because they couldn't get their spyware installed. Shows how much apple really cares about children and how much they care about spying on us.

SkyMarshal 4y ago

I appreciate the intent here and don't want to be overly critical, but this appears to be attempting a nicer UI for FreeBSD. Not a bad goal, but I'd like to see a page somewhere that lists not just the grievances with Apple that led to this project, but also how this project improves on a standard Linux config. Or better yet, a Linux config hardened as much as possible without losing compatibility with its software ecosystem or with Wine/Proton. Replacing Apple with a more privacy-preserving alternative is not really about UI minutia. UI/UX is mostly solved, for 2D displays at least. Gnome, KDE, Elementary OS's Pantheon, and others all offer usable and customizable variations on this tech that get you 90% of the way to Apple's standard. Incremental improvements in 2D UI/UX are reaching a point of diminishing returns, where it's more annoying for users to have to learn new interaction mechanics than to simply stick with the ones they know, even if the new mechanics are slightly better in some way. Rather, I think the area that really needs focused developer attention, and with bigger and more meaningful payoffs, is in bringing the most secure and hardened base systems up to full compatibility with the broadest possible application ecosystem/s. The best option for that right now appears to be Linux + Wine/Proton, ideally using a hardened Linux base like Qubes or SEL4 or similar and Nix/Guix-like reproducible builds, while integrating the extensive work already put into existing UI/UX/DE's. I think if hackers want to achieve this objective, then that's where they need to start and build a community around.

knighthack 4y ago
> Gnome, KDE, Elementary OS's Pantheon, and others all offer usable and customizable variations on this tech that get you 90% of the way to Apple's standard. And that's assuming that Apple's standard is the 'gold standard'. Which I don't think it is, at all. MacOS has many inconsistencies, which are remedied or fixed by other desktop systems, and it is not a benchmark to measure by.
ShredKazoo 4y ago
>Rather, I think the area that really needs focused developer attention, and with bigger and more meaningful payoffs, is in bringing the most secure and hardened base systems up to full compatibility with the broadest possible application ecosystem/s. Do you have thoughts on the idea of HelloSystem re-implementing the Cocoa APIs so that it can run Mac apps "natively"?

ozten 4y ago

I am very attracted to this idea. I want a clean desktop daily driver that prioritizes UX. I love many of the UX-focused priorities, but a much larger % of their priorities such as Linux vs FreeBSD aren't high for me and don't seem end-user focused. An interesting idea I had never thought to question was considering "App Stores" as package managers. "Package managers for end-user applications: Those are aimed at "managing the system", whereas everything that is to be managed on our system can be managed in the file manager and/or other GUI elements. --> Use package managers to produce a system image, which is considered immutable for the end user (like on almost every embedded system/software appliance)" https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-unwelcome-technologies https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-unwelc... Good food for thought. Elsewhere they criticize App Stores for their commercial and centralized aspects. But I don't really see an issue with Ubuntu's App Store. It is just a GUI instead of only offering CLI, right?

r00fus 4y ago

Honestly I really liked Aqua. Flat UI may be easier to work with (debatable) but seems so characterless. Something to be said about the right amount of chrome in your UI to remind you "where you're at" instead of getting lost in the content.

boxed 4y ago

I switched to the mac (back before the intel transition) because I became more productive writing apps after ~1 week of hobby fiddling, than I was at my day job doing win32 programming that I had done for several years. This project doesn't tackle the reason macOS was so great: Cocoa.

ShredKazoo 4y ago
I understand that the Supreme Court said in Google v Oracle that the use of APIs is fair use. Does that mean HelloSystem could re-implement all the Cocoa APIs and have Mac apps compile & run seamlessly?
- brirec 4y ago
  Theoretically, sure! But that's an enormous effort. This is actually what the goal of GNUstep is and has been from the start, and I kind of doubt there's even a single codebase (apart from, maybe, example code) that will compile on both Xcode and GNUstep without major changes. Edit: To be clear, GNUstep is something like 6 years _older_ than Mac OS X, so it's had plenty of time to catch up. The problem is really that these APIs are constantly changing and being extended. The goalpost is moving far too fast to ever meet it.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Microsoft tried porting GNUStep to Windows as part of the Windows 10 "iOS Bridge". They gave up, which is actually kind of sad.
    - tymscar 4y ago
      Wow, do you have any source on that? Would love to read more about it!
      - kmeisthax 4y ago
        Ok, I'm very much paraphrasing from "shit I read on Wikipedia", but WinObjC does exist and it did use parts of GNUStep: https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/issues/116 https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/issues/116

donatj 4y ago

The hero here I see, that isn't shown on that page is Application Bundles. Being able to drop a single .app in the Applications folder and have it work is one of the biggest selling points of macOS imho. https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/developer/application-bundles.html https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/developer/application-bun... The docs page have a lot of interesting technical details that the linked page either gloss over or do not touch. It's worth a look to see why this is seemingly more than a skin on FreeBSD.

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
>Easily be understood by switchers coming from other operating systems with similar application distribution formats Interesting use of the plural form of _operating systems_ here.

torstenvl 4y ago

I think a much better approach would be porting Pantheon to FreeBSD, and patching Pantheon to allow a global menu as an compile-time option or user configuration. All the other stuff can come later. IMO it's a bit overly ambitious (I'd be happy to be wrong!) and I fear it dying prematurely.

snvzz 4y ago

>Modern Architecture I wouldn't call FreeBSD (or any UNIX(1971)-like system) modern. A modern architecture would be something like Genode[0], a multi-server system built around the concept of capabilities. 0. https://www.genode.org/ https://www.genode.org/

Findecanor 4y ago
FreeBSD does have Capsicum [0] though — with file descriptors as capabilities. FDs can be passed between programs over UNIX datagram sockets. Processes can enter "capability mode" where only open (or rather: active) file descriptors can be used. There used to be an alternative runtime for FreeBSD called CloudABI [1], with which native programs could be started in capability mode, but it was discontinued in favour of WASI [2] (server-side Webassembly) — which adopted CloudABI's libc API. 0: <https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/> 1: <https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudabi https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudabi> 2: <https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI>
- snvzz 4y ago
  It does and that's great, but it's not the root from which the system is constructed. FreeBSD is a clone of UNIX, and all it takes is a single kernel bug for the system to break down as a whole. Yet, considering the kernel's size, it's not hard to extrapolate that there is far more than one bug. This is not a very good architecture. In 2023, it is very far from the state of the art, and absolutely cannot be called modern.
  - steve1977 4y ago
    That's probably why NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X were partly based on a mix of BSD and the Mach microkernel. Not sure of how much of that is still in current incarnations.
    - snvzz 4y ago
      It is a step; with OSX we're at the 80s instead of the 70s, in operating system architecture. OSX is still very far from modern.

neruthes 4y ago

Much as I respect and appreciate these efforts in maintaining compatible alternatives to canonical Mac OS X and Mac OS XI, in modern days I would prefer to run Mac OS X/XI applications in my GNU/Linux system over some compatibility layer (FoundationLibc, CorePulse, PicQuartz, Melkan, etc), because, in the years after leaving Mac OS X, I have establish new workflows which are mainly GNU-based. I still want GarageBand and perhaps Processing / Glyph, but I prefer embedding those Mac OS X/XI apps in my GNU workflows. Rebooting to another OS wastes time and virtualization has performance penalty; neither is fun.

qwerty456127 4y ago

I doubt this is going to be practically useful but the manifesto is worth reading.

kemayo 4y ago

Might make sense to change the title? It's making a claim that the website itself doesn't -- it just says "Desktop system for creators with a focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. Based on FreeBSD. Less, but better!" "Original Mac" this is not. "Original OSX", maybe.

nsonha 4y ago

> simplicity, elegance, and usability Yet it copied low usability UI elements such as global menu bar and that big ass wasteful dock. What is the innovation here?

wejick 4y ago

The Readme so busy explaining what Apple are than what's this about.

sdwvit 4y ago

Tried it, it's far from alpha. Too bad, I hoped it would at least recognize my hardware. (wifi card and gpu not recognized)

holistio 4y ago

I've been using a Mac since 2013 and I've become so distanced from everything else that a few weeks ago I was surprised to hear that Windows 11... exists. Before then, I spent a considerable amount of my teenage days trying to make various Linux distributions look like OS X. This doesn't really feel much more than what I did back then. The reason we prefer a Mac is because the whole ecosystem works the same way, follows the same guidelines and, most importantly in recent years: because if you bought yourself into the Apple ecosystem, it just works together. One example which HelloSystem will probably never be able to do: I open an authenticator app on my iPhone, tap the code and then just hit Cmd-V on the Mac. I do this several times a day. _This_ is the Mac experience's edge today, not the rounded corners and whatnot.

savy91 4y ago
Curiously the example you mention is exactly what you get by using Linux with KDE and an Android phone using KDE Connect.

nequo 4y ago

Unix-like WMs and DEs have an unceasing fascination with replicating the Windows and MacOS UIs. But one of the things that made MacOS/NeXTSTEP noteworthy was its out-of-the-box thinking. It would be much better to experiment with what the UI could be rather than copying what it was. To some extent GNOME seems to be doing this. I haven’t used Windows in too many years to count. But as I recall it, the GNOME of today bears little resemblance to it. Keyboard focused, minimalistic, yet has a modern aesthetic and it is multi-monitor ready. It would be good if there were more DEs that were courageous or experimentative enough to follow suit and break with Windows and MacOS UIs. Do something that’s different. Something that’s neither GNOME nor those things. That would be the original Mac philosophy.

pjmlp 4y ago
They never replicate the developer experience, of whole stack frameworks with quite nice productive tooling and modern languages. I guess nowadays KDE is the only one that comes close, GNOME doesn't really know what they want to be and everyone else never cared about full stack experience. The way pixels are rendered is a tiny part of the OS experience.

jevgeni 4y ago

Please don't quote Snowden as some authority on privacy

lykahb 4y ago

Does this project make more sense as a desktop environment, rather than an operating system? That'd allow focusing more on the Mac philosophy for the user interface.

renewedrebecca 4y ago

What exactly about this is the 'original Mac philosophy'?