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New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS
- Klonoar 11mo agoThis has been a slow going effort for a few years now, it's not "new".
- skynetv2 11mo ago> A BSD-based OS project that aims to provide source and binary compatibility with macOS® and a similar user experience. I am curious - what is the motivation for this project? Is it to replicate macOS? - If yes, why? Is it to provide application compatibility on a non-macOS? If yes, why a full OS? Why not take the route like Wine or other such layers that make compatibility possible? Also, is there such a need for running macOS apps on a non-macOS? Who is the target audience? Would the energy be better spent in making Linux more stable or usable for the general public? If its just a hobby, sure, that is well & good.
- MangoToupe 11mo agoI would much rather emulate linux apps on a more stable and consistent OS than vice versa. The sheer number of toolkits and window managers leaves my head spinning, and unifying their behavior even before you can begin to improve it feels like a nightmare. I personally don't care much about the dock or the look and feel or whatever; I just want access to the usability of macos without having to accept how closed it is.
- astro1138 11mo agoIf it is no longer closed, it might proliferate just like Linux once it gathers a critical amount of users. :)
- eikenberry 11mo agoIt's hard to get a more consistent and stable kernel than Linux, not counting academic or experimental kernels w/o extensive hardware support.
- MangoToupe 11mo agoI'm not referring to the kernel at all. It's the morass of the userland—three decades of catering to the expectations of IBM PC/windows users have led to... inconsistent and underwhelming results. If I wanted to use 1980s UX, I would have switched to windows or linux decades ago. But what am I saying? Consistent emacs bindings across all text forms is actually from the 1970s. Maybe I'm the problem....
- rhet0rica 11mo agoA lot of these questions are answered here: https://ravynos.com/faq https://ravynos.com/faq To summarize... There is a WINE-analogous project, called Darling: https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/ The goal for ravynOS is to be analogous to ReactOS. Much like ReactOS and WINE, ravynOS and Darling share a lot of Cocoa code. For the problem of OpenStep implementations specifically, a bespoke software stack has the benefit of being able to put Mach messaging into the kernel, where it is much more performant. They chose the FreeBSD kernel over Darwin for the sake of hardware compatibility (though of course NeXT Mach is one of the most widely-ported kernels of all time...) There is also overlap with GNUstep, helloSystem, and other projects in the broader "open-source Mac/NeXT" space, though ravynOS (obviously) prefers BSD/MIT/Apache-style licensing over GNU-style licensing. Nevertheless, ravynOS currently uses the GNUstep libobjc2 runtime, a bit like how most of the Unix world used to depend on gcc.
- 9dev 11mo ago> There is a WINE-analogous project, called Darling: https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/ Missed opportunity to call it Cider.
- mlyle 11mo agoThere's already been a Cider; it used some Wine code to ease porting games to MacOS.
- swiftcoder 11mo agoFor reasons that I do not understand, the company behind Cider pivoted to real estate investing, and got out of the tech field entirely
- tracker1 11mo agoHard Cider
- mistrial9 11mo ago> of course NeXT Mach is one of the most widely-ported kernels of all time... actually the broader Mach kernel, not specifically the NeXT variant, is the one with a documented history of extensive portability
- linguae 11mo agoI'm not affiliated with ravynOS, but I've been periodically following the project for a few years. The main page (https://ravynos.com/ https://ravynos.com/) expresses the philosophy of ravynOS: "We love macOS, but we’re not a fan of the ever-closing hardware and ecosystem. So, we are creating ravynOS — an OS aimed to provide the finesse of macOS with the freedom of FreeBSD." rayvnOS seems to be designed for people who love macOS, particularly its interface, its UI guidelines, and its ecosystem of applications, but who do not like the direction that Apple has moved toward under Tim Cook (soldered RAM, limited and inflexible hardware choices, notarization, iOS-influenced interface changes, increased pushiness with advertising Apple's subscription services, etc.) and who would be unhappy with either Windows or the Linux desktop. Speaking for myself, I used to daily-drive Macs from 2006 through 2021, but I now daily-drive PCs running Windows due primarily to the lack of upgradable RAM in ARM Macs. I'm not a big fan of Windows, but I need some proprietary software packages such as Microsoft Office. This makes switching to desktop Linux difficult. It would be awesome using what is essentially a community-driven clone of macOS, where I could continue using a Mac-like operating system without needing to worry about Apple's future directions. On the Unix side of things, I believe the decision to base ravynOS on FreeBSD rather than on Linux may make migrating from macOS to ravynOS easier, since macOS is based on a hybrid Mach/BSD kernel, and since many of the command-line tools that ship with macOS are from the BSDs. This is known as Darwin. It's not that a Mac clone can't be built on top of Linux, but FreeBSD is closer to Darwin than Linux is.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoSo somehow running MacOS in 2025 on hot, loud, horrible battery life x86 based computers is a good thing? Not to mention x86 Mac apps are not long for this world. I can’t think of a single application I would miss moving from Macs to Windows. It’s more about the hardware and the integration with the rest of my Apple devices.
- forgetfulness 11mo agoNotes and Reminders are extremely good at what they do, and the synchronization with their iOS equivalents is flawless from what I can tell… and fat chance you get to uproot such a thing to a non-Apple OS. Third party apps other than for media editing seem to be rare, I think Apple has gobbled or rug pulled much of its independent software vendor ecosystem.
- kombine 11mo agoI have the same sentiment. I am forced to use a MacBook in my new job while waiting for them to procure a laptop that I can put Linux on. I can say that Linux with KDE Plasma desktop is in almost every way superior to Mac OS. Much better UX, configurability and core applications. And even little things are more polished and thought through compared to what a trillion dollar company was able to produce. It's really beyond me how people use Apple products, and it's the absolute majority of them in my field.
- cosmic_cheese 11mo ago“Better” is largely subjective. For some (including myself), a Windows-like paradigm like KDE uses is not desirable, and UI papercuts like the many that KDE has are highly visible.
- kombine 11mo agoI don't keep the record of every thing that I don't like about MacOS, but here's some: - cannot keep natural scrolling for trackpad whilst having the expected scrolling behaviour for the mouse - needs an external app for fractional display scaling - screenshot tool is objectively inferior to that in Plasma, eg. not clear how to annotate a screenshot or copy it to clipboard - Dolphin file browser is has cleaner and simpler UI, is more configurable and has a built-in terminal which is super handy. ...
- darrenf 11mo agoCan’t comment on the others but I copy screenshots to the clipboard multiple times a day in macOS and have done for years. Very frequently I send them via Screen Sharing to another Mac and paste there, something I value hugely.
- cosmic_cheese 11mo agoDolphin is one of the things about KDE that bothers me, due to the way its windows are laid out and how they use margins/spacing. It just feels “wrong” in a way that even most other Linux file managers (including more full featured ones that still have a menubar) don’t.
- andai 11mo agoIt would be great if it runs on mac too. macOS doesn't have much compatibility with itself.
- gs17 11mo ago> Also, is there such a need for running macOS apps on a non-macOS? Arguably there's a need for running macOS apps on macOS even. E.g. my parents are stuck having an old Intel Mac Pro around on an old OS for a few 32-bit programs (not sure if it changed, but IIRC you couldn't run an OS that supported them as a VM on Apple Silicon). Pretty soon Rosetta 2 will go away as well.
- mtillman 11mo agoMac OS without the background ads garbage or the constant blocking of call-home requests would be nice.
- platevoltage 11mo agoWhere are you seeing ads?
- mtillman 11mo agoMaps, news, stocks are all installed by default and supported by ads. Opting out eliminates personalization. One needs to install an app like lulu to block background calls even with personalization turned off. This started with the twitter integration many years again and while social is no longer tightly integrated, the philosophy around user fingerprinting “while not being tied to your identity” is still very much alive and well in a default macOS install.
- cestith 11mo agoThat’s all ad-supported shovelware. I use a Mac all day long for work. I never use Maps, News, or Stocks. I also don’t use Weather, Music, Mail, Pages, Numbers, FaceTime, Keynotes, Contacts, Reminders, Photo Booth, Books, Dictionary, Stickies, Voice Memos, AppleTV, GarageBand, or Image Playground. I do use Preview quite a bit. I sometimes use TextEdit, Terminal, or Safari, but I more often use Vim, iTerm2, Firefox, DuckDuckGo Browser, or sometimes Chrome. It helps not to judge a whole OS by three free apps included with it. Microsoft meanwhile puts ads in the main menu and in the task bar. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Windows desktop wallpaper on the Home editions become ads.
- Aloisius 11mo agoThere aren't any ads in Maps - at least, not yet.
- deva502 11mo agowhat are you smoking ?
- danans 11mo ago> Would the energy be better spent in making Linux more stable or usable for the general public? Linux is stable and widely used, whether as Android, Ubuntu, WSL on Windows or Crostini on ChromeOS (itself Linux under the hood). The general public buy products like Macs, Lenovos, Steam Decks, Chromebooks or Frameworks. Nobody buys a "Linux". Linux and it's ecosystem are features of those products, not products themselves.
- tsimionescu 11mo agoObviously the idea was about a Linux desktop - whether that means investment in toolkits like Gnome, KDE, core infra like X11 or Wayland, or distributions like Debian.
- danans 11mo agoYes, but Linux's desktop environment(s) is a feature of a product, not a product itself. You can see that Framework themselves markets Linux that way: https://frame.work/linux https://frame.work/linux If the goal is to make the Linux desktop more popular with the general public as the previous comment suggested, then you must create a product built exclusively around it that is marketed to the general public. There doesn't seem to be much interest in this
- opengrass 11mo agoCan it run stock macOS programs like Photos? I want a non-chaotic way to import my old fart's iPhone galleries without a Mac Mini (HEIC and Lives are annoying), and docker-osx/vm's don't work for everyone.
- prmoustache 11mo agoThey say source-compatible, not binary-compatible. GNUstep failed to get traction, I doubt they can do much better.
- darkwater 11mo agoIt's a totally different path but you could try Immich to do that.
- daniel_iversen 11mo agoThis is so cool, the little mini screenshots look gorgeous because it replicates MacOS. I’m not sure if a lot of people feel the same but over the years I always thought it was a shame that Linux’ overall UX and aesthetics seemed a little bit more rushed and “crowd sourced” (in the sense that it felt diverse in terms of ui opinions and taste etc). It almost makes me want to try Linux again just for that look and feel (because I love my Mac’s but would like something different and more free)
- niek_pas 11mo ago> the little mini screenshots look gorgeous because it replicates MacOS. I have the opposite reaction. To me the screenshots look like someone tried to replicate macOS but failed. The text antialiasing is off, the font is different (and worse), the border-radii on menus are off, etc. Besides, the actual screenshots of the current OS (https://ravynos.com/screenshots https://ravynos.com/screenshots) are... really rough.
- 4ggr0 11mo agoi didn't expect it to look so...dated[0]? the things are approximately where they are on MacOS, but it looks like Window 2000/ME/98. [0]or retro, for anyone who's offended by me calling it dated.
- mig39 11mo agoTo me, it looks a lot like Uncanny Valley macOS. Yes, it's macOS, but something's just not right. Maybe the fonts don't look right, or the spacing of the icons on the dock?
- nogridbag 11mo agoThose mini screenshots do not look like anything like what's in the "Screenshots" section: https://imgur.com/a/svQaeCa https://imgur.com/a/svQaeCa
- daniel_iversen 11mo agoWow that looks very different to what’s on the front page! Where did you find that and where can we see how it really looks then?
- linguae 11mo agoI've been paying attention to this project periodically over the past few years. It would be nice to have a FOSS clone of macOS, similar to how FreeDOS, ReactOS, and Haiku are FOSS clones of MS-DOS, Windows, and BeOS, respectively. The only thing is that this project has been quite slow going, which is similar to the histories of FreeDOS, ReactOS, and Haiku, where it took a long time for those projects to get to a usable state. It is a lot of work cloning an operating system, especially with an aim for binary compatibility. The Linux kernel benefited from the fact that there was an entire GNU ecosystem of tools that can run on Unix, and even in that case, the GNU ecosystem was seven years in the making in 1991 when the first version of the Linux kernel was released. It would've taken much longer for Linux to have been developed had GNU tools not existed. Writing an entire operating system is long, hard work, even when provided the resources of companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Hopefully projects like ravynOS and the similar HelloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/ https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) will lead to FOSS clones of macOS eventually, even if we need to wait another 5-10 years.
- wwweston 11mo agoSometimes it strikes me that something like this might be one of the better litmus tests for AI — if it’s really good enough to start 10x-ing engineers (let alone replacing them) it should be more common for more projects like this should begin to accelerate to practical usability. If not, maybe the productivity dividends are mostly shallow.
- adastra22 11mo agoThis was my thought here as well. Getting one piece of software to match another piece of software is something that agentic AI tools are really good at. Like, the one area where they are truly better than humans. I expect that with the right testing framework setup and accessible to Claude Code or Codex, you could iterate your way to full system compatibility in a mostly automated way. If anyone on the team is interested in doing this, I’d love to speak to them.
- MangoToupe 11mo agoSure. In the meantime productivity is still useful.
- s3rv3rsi7e 11mo ago[flagged]
- GrantMoyer 11mo agoTest successful?
- Alifatisk 11mo agoThe website looks sleek, I get the impression that the ui for the os will be the same. But then when I look at the screenshots, it look like macOS stuck in 2008.
- wmf 11mo agoThe Mac UI only got worse after that.
- rogerrogerr 11mo agoNah. Mavericks was peak.
- MangoToupe 11mo agoWho cares about sleekness? Linux has looked sleek for decades but still behaves like ass
- simondotau 11mo ago“Looks sleek” was only ever a surface level reason why macOS was a good UI. Far more important was that it was highly opinionated, and those opinions were very consistently applied, resulting in a highly predictable interface. This has been degrading over the past decade, unfortunately.
- cosmic_cheese 11mo agoOpinionated design is a big one, but another that's equally as big and even more unusual in the Linux world is progressive disclosure. It basically amounts to adding lots of little power user features, but placing them ever so slightly out of the way so that newbies and less technical users don't get overwhelmed, but they're still within reach of those who can make use of them and reveal themselves as users grow and become more technically capable. Linux desktops tend to take a much more binary approach: ultra-minimalist and stripped back so far that even iPadOS is more capable out of the box (GNOME) or everything and the kitchen sink on full display (KDE).
- andai 11mo agohttps://ravynos.com/screenshots.html https://ravynos.com/screenshots.html
- steeleduncan 11mo agoIt doesn't seem to be their focus, but this could be amazing for macOS build machines, and servers. There have been a number of changes in recent years focussed on improving the security of macOS when used as a Desktop OS. These work well for their intended purpose, but they have made macOS harder and harder to deploy headlessly, and use as a server. I hope to see this become an open source OS that runs the full xcode command line suite, deploys easily to headless machines, and inherits FreeBSD's server hardware compatibility.
- randyfox 11mo agoWhy is every new OS project just a rehash of 60/70's tech. What about something new that actually attempts to move the field forward.
- ape4 11mo agoHow about the immutable OSes like Fedora Silverblue
- linguae 11mo agoMy dream is to work on an operating system that at least gets us to the 1990s and 2000s when it comes to research ideas. I have a soft spot for the Smalltalk-80 environment and Lisp machines. They had a single address space. In my opinion, the two most interesting things about these environments are (1) their facilitation for component-based software based on live, dynamic objects, and (2) the malleability of the system, where every aspect of the system can be modified by the user in real time. Of course, a critical downside of Smalltalk-80 and Lisp machine environments is the lack of security; any piece of code can modify the system. There are two solutions to this that I'm thinking about: (1) capability-based security for objects in the system, and (2) work on single-address space operating systems that still have memory protection (Opal was a research system that had this design; see Sharing and Protection in a Single-Address-Space Operating System [Chase et al. 1994]). One of the nice things about Lisp is its metaprogramming facilities, from macros to the metaobject protocol. Metaprogramming makes it feasible to implement domain-specific languages that make expressing problems more aligned to their domains. During the late 2000s and early 2010s, Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute had a project named STEPS that investigated the pervasive use of DSLs to implement an entire desktop environment. They did not use Lisp as a substrate, but they did use OMeta (https://tinlizzie.org/ometa/ https://tinlizzie.org/ometa/) for handling parsing expression grammars (PEGs), which are used to describe many of the systems in STEPS. Two DSLs that immediately come to mind are one for describing the 2D graphics system and another for describing TCP. So now I've described my dream substrate: a single-address operating system with capability-based security, where each subsystem is expressed as a live object, ideally coded in a DSL. Now comes the interface. The programmer's interface would be similar to Smalltalk-80 and Lisp machines, with a live REPL for interactive coding. All objects can be accessed programmatically by sending messages to them. The end-user interface would be heavily based on the classic Mac OS, and applications would conform to human interface guidelines similar to System 7.5, but with some updates to reflect usage patterns and lessons in UI/UX that weren't known at the time. Application software would be similar to the OpenDoc vision, where components can be combined based on the user's wishes. The end result sounds like a synthesis of various Apple projects from the late 1980s until 1996: component-based applications backed by a live object system with capability-based security. This is my dream and is a side project I'd love to create.
- ctslypsmstc 11mo agoThe RavynOS project would have a good chance at being binary compatible with Mac OSX if it copied all the Darwin libraries from the Darling project and used LLVM to generate all the appropriate dylibs. That's something I would support and contribute to. It could get to the point where it could run macOS console based applications. But if macOS binary compatibility is not the goal, then there's no need for a Mach-O loader - it brings nothing to the table. Just use ELF binaries. Although at that point there's nothing macOS about it - it's just a Mac-like UI facade for FreeBSD distro with a different API. If Ravyn doesn't want to be to macOS like WINE is to Windows, I don't see the point.
- stephenr 11mo ago> copied all the Darwin libraries from the Darling project and used LLVM to generate all the appropriate dylibs I'm just starting for the day and misread that as "...used LLM to generate...", and I wondered what kind of crack you were smoking.
- simondotau 11mo agoIn future, your OS will be an agentic LLM which runs software by YOLOing the binaries, and then continuously fixing and refining the environment until it runs without crashing.
- adastra22 11mo agoFrankly I was a bit surprised that was not what they were doing. As a user I’d prefer a “mere” macOS UI on top of FreeBSD, so long as its quality is of the same. Use Darling as a compatibility loader, like WINE/Proton in SteamOS.
- wowczarek 11mo agoThis is all nice and well, while https://www.puredarwin.org/wiki/#/news/Support-Cliff-Sekel https://www.puredarwin.org/wiki/#/news/Support-Cliff-Sekel Wouldn't it be more natural if this project made use of XNU/Darwin... But with the way things are going, with XNU going more and more proprietary, I suppose FreeBSD is "close enough". In any case, there's nothing we can do about it but these "macOS" alternatives are too fragmented. I would love to see "The" macOS clone.
- fithisux 11mo agoI think the idea is take what you can and evolve. Keeping it x86_64 for now makes sense in many respects. But it could become a real uKernel OS in the long run.
- jjuran 11mo agoYou're in luck: <https://github.com/ravynsoft/ravynos/discussions/529 https://github.com/ravynsoft/ravynos/discussions/529> ravynOS is moving to Darwin.
- wowczarek 11mo agoOh, nice!
- PaulDavisThe1st 11mo agoIf you don't provide CoreFoo (for Foo in *), there's not really much point in talking about compatibility with macOS. I see no sign that they provide any of the possible CoreFoo libraries/frameworks.
- diebillionaires 11mo agoi’d do anything for an open source mac os clone i can run on my arm macbook pro. i’m sick of apple.
- fithisux 11mo agoApple releases part of the source code of XNU, it would make much more sense to me, to re-create something like the original Darwin CD out of this for x86-64. There are a number of MacOS CLI tools and drivers for x86_64. It may be a motivation to continue work. Even commercially it could be something interesting. I am not sure if it is easier though. PureDarwin seems to do very slow progress.
- __d 11mo agoIt appears they’ve actually made that decision: making FreeBSD Mach-O is too much, so XNU is the new plan …
- pjmlp 11mo agoRepo has zero Objective-C or C++ (IO, DriverKit, MSL), hardly anything relevant if the goal is macOS compatibility. This considering the last macOS version before Swift was announced as goal.
- mk89 11mo agoI think it's in the frameworks folder, e.g., https://github.com/ravynsoft/ravynos/tree/main/Frameworks/AppKit https://github.com/ravynsoft/ravynos/tree/main/Frameworks/Ap... Edit: also CoreServices https://github.com/ravynsoft/ravynos/tree/main/CoreServices/WindowServer https://github.com/ravynsoft/ravynos/tree/main/CoreServices/... Well, there is actually a lot of ObjC.
- pjmlp 11mo agoI stand corrected, you will notice that it isn't visible on the languages colour bar, nor C++.
- mk89 11mo agoFrom the mobile version I see a 10% other and 16.1% C++. I think GH might have some issues because those two folders contain a lot of code (there is also C in between, but still), I don't know if I want to believe it's less than 2.6% Perl. [0]. "It's fixed". [0]: https://github.com/github-linguist/linguist/issues/1626 https://github.com/github-linguist/linguist/issues/1626
- pjmlp 11mo agoStupid me, it appears to be affected by screen layout, and I completly missed C++. Thanks for the issue link.
- heavyset_go 11mo agoWine works because Microsoft spends billions on backwards compatibility and APIs are stable over time. Apple regularly deprecates frameworks and adds new ones at rapid rates. It's a moving target with the added complication of moving build targets. If you implement your own version of Apple's XyzKit, that might only be used in macOS 12 to 14, and not before or after that, so you put in a lot of work to essentially support binaries that were released between X date and Y date and that's it. And you have to do that for a sliding window of dates, macOS versions and framework releases and deprecations.
- pjmlp 11mo agoWine works, because it doesn't cover many modern APIs, I would assess. New Microsoft under Satya has a different stance on anything WinRT related, or even newer Win32/COM APIs since Windows 8. Also .NET Framework is the Python 2 of .NET, the breaking changes are a reason there are still new projects being done in .NET Framework 4.8.x.
- virajk_31 11mo agoReplicating MacOS is more than just a nice UI, there’s a lot of sw/hw engineering under the hood. Hopefully these guys get closer to that over time.
- wltr 11mo agoPerhaps I need to understand something first, but at this point in time I see no value in projects like this. Beyond the obvious fact of hacking. Ideally, I don’t even want, say, Linux to have any binary compatibility with Windows. I want native apps, games included. I don’t want to see Photoshop working on Linux, I want Gimp to become successful (maybe, start with the name change), or, well, Krita then. Same with macOS. I don’t miss any app from macOS, I want to run so badly. I want Linux to catch up where it isn’t.
- swiftcoder 11mo agoDoes it key the command and control keys separate? That's maybe the biggest thing I can't get today from a linux-based MacOS replacement
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- shevy-java 11mo agoCan Linux replace macOS? What would be required to achieve this? I guess one thing macOS users like is the default UI. So this is probably an area where Linux lacks - both GNOME and KDE have shortcomings when compared to that UI. (They are mostly fine if one does not have that as a use case, though I find GNOME to really want to simplify everything to the point of having almost no features left.)
- Thev00d00 11mo agoMy issue is that the quality of the macos UI is degrading over time. They can't even get rounding consistent, not quite at windows levels of mismatching yet though. Also no one bothers making the beautiful native apps now, everything is electron, which is equally inconsistent everywhere. So I think the advantage over time Vs a Linux system is diminishing... Slowly.
- MisterTea 11mo ago> both GNOME and KDE have shortcomings when compared to that UI One persons shortcomings is another persons normal work flow. To me this is simply a matter of adjusting to a different environment. I went form Windows 7 to Linux and the key part was that I always use open source software where possible such as FreeCAD, KiCAD, Libre Office, Firefox, Krita, Gimp, etc. This makes transitioning very painless. I also dont customize, no dotfiles, media managers, themes, prompts, shells, or reliance on OS features, etc. I keep it primitive.
- fithisux 11mo agoAnyone remember the Cocotron?