Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

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I feel the exact same way. I've been a Mac user for over ten years largely because of OS X, but I've been disappointed in Apple's direction for the past few years, and yesterday's MacBook Pro announcement was the last straw for me.

Linux is a wonderful server OS, and in fact I do most of my development inside of a VirtualBox VM running Debian, but in order for me to move to a full Linux workflow, I need to use some proprietary software packages like Microsoft Office and Apple Keynote (while I find LibreOffice Writer to be a suitable replacement for Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel fits my needs better than Calc, and Impress is behind both PowerPoint and Keynote).

In line with a paid, polished Linux experience, another thing that would be nice for me and other disgruntled Mac users is a Wine-like compatibility layer that allows Linux users to run Cocoa programs. There's already a project called Darling (http://www.darlinghq.org/introduction/) that has some of the basic functionality implemented. If this project had more contributors, then it could develop into a working solution for running my Mac programs.

My dream OS would have a Unix-like foundation (like Linux or FreeBSD) with an interface similar to Mac OS 8/9 (with various features from OS X added like Spotlight, Expose, and the Dock) and with Don Norman's UI advice (http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/apples_products_are.html) taken seriously.

I'm actually interested in contributing to such efforts toward an alternative OS for disgruntled Mac users; I have experience with systems and kernel programming. If there is enough interest, maybe an alternative OS will materialize.

I actually think that this is likely to happen over the next 2-3 years. Every single one of these companies is now going in the wrong direction in a specific way--which opens up a real desire for a real alternative.

We all used to love Mac, we all see that Apple has lost its way and seems to be heading more and more confidently in the wrong direction, and that may be just the push the community needs to actually build something.

And what an amazing achievement it would be--an actually open alternative that runs on lots of (powerful) hardware with the beauty of Mac OS (before Lion lol).

I really think it's going to happen because I think a very large percentage of the community now realizes that there is no existing private company heading in the right direction. So we now have to take the steering of the ship into our own hands.

Abracadabra.

I agree. In my opinion Snow Leopard was the high water mark of Mac OS X (although there are some features of later versions I like such as the auto-save feature of open documents between reboots). From a UI standpoint each subsequent version of OS X has been a deviation from the ideal user interface.

A fully open community "Mac" operating system that runs on any x86-64 hardware would be an excellent thing. I believe the best way of getting there is contributing to the GNUstep and Darling projects so that the underpinnings are fully functioning, as well as working on a Snow Leopard-esque interface.

I have some free time over the next week or so; I'm going to start developing a plan for making this idea a reality!

I'd buy it!

Who's going to fund the upfront development? "We're going to make a new desktop OS that takes on both Apple and Microsoft" sounds like a hard sell for the VC crowd.

And that's the hard part....OS/2, NEXTSTEP/x86, and BeOS were examples of alternative OSes that failed to successfully take on Microsoft in the 1990s. It would be difficult for a VC firm to fund a business model that has failed multiple times in the 1990s. Moreover, the desktop market as a whole is shrinking, and my understanding is VC firms are interested in growing markets. An alternative OS dedicated to power users is definitely a niche market.

I wonder, though, if these is enough interest in the FOSS community to make such an idea a reality, where the project could be started by volunteers and donations could be requested?

It could be, but it seems like that would depend on the brand awareness / credentials of the team writing the software. Note that KDE, Gnome, etc. have been trying to do exactly that for decades, with only marginal success.

So if you got the team that wrote the Apple Aqua UI on board to write it, and have great PR, then maybe. If you get the KDE or Gnome team, no way.

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