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Comment by steve1977 | Hacker News Reader

steve1977

I can see the freedom of FreeBSD part, but not the finesse of macOS. And without that, why not just use FreeBSD?

One moderately frustrating thing about using FreeBSD is that it's always been treated as sort of a second-class citizen by GNOME, and therefore Gtk, and therefore most of the Linux ecosystem which depends on Gtk. So probably the most popular desktop environment is KDE, and it's nice, but it is a certain kind of interface which doesn't appeal to everyone.

Meanwhile, OS X shares a little code with FreeBSD and was partially derived from it around 30 years ago. And the design philosophy of OS X is roughly the opposite of KDE. This situation has engendered at least half a dozen projects over the years, most of which are never really complete, to make a FreeBSD-first DE/UI that works like Mac. And if it can run Mac applications, so much the better!

Unfortunately, this is really hard. Cocoa is a moving target, and contra Wine, Apple is not as pertinaciously obsessed with backwards compatibility as Microsoft. Even much less ambitious (in my estimation) projects like enlightenment 17 and Wayland have struggled to replace major components of the desktop from the ground up.

> OS X shares a little code with FreeBSD and was partially derived from it around 30 years ago.

The first release of FreeBSD was 30 years ago, OS X a little over 20.

Well Rhapsody was released 25 years ago. So you’re both right, now go back playing ;-)

OS X is derived from NeXTSTEP, first released in 1989 and based on 4.3BSD-Tahoe. Meanwhile, this was updated to 4.3BSD-Reno and ported to the x86 as 386BSD, from which NetBSD was forked in early 1993; it was subsequently reorganized to become FreeBSD in late 1993. NeXTSTEP and OS X later imported a few system components from FreeBSD, while replacing others, particularly replacing parts of the kernel with Mach.

Not only is Cocoa a moving target, it’s deep and wide. The amount of functionality it offers is staggering and extensive enough that for many types of apps, a dev may not need to import any third party libraries if they don’t want to, with no negative impact on the quality of the final product.

That’s extremely difficult to reimplement, even if you lock compatibility to a particular macOS release.

What is an OS finesse?

In the case of macOS, for me it’s for example things like automation via AppleScript, a coherent UI for native apps, the „polish“ of the interface if that makes any sense

My interpretation would be that it's about the same level of polish ux/ui-wise as macOS. As with OP, unfortunately I don't see it either - the screenshots show some resemblance with macOS but without any of the finesse.

It's not completed yet. The features are listed under the section "project goals" and the download button has a note calling it a developer preview image.

In my experience with some Linux distros goals alone don't necessarily work out, but the approach with trying to be compatible with actual Mac OS apps is already more notable than an Ubuntu reskin.

It will never be completed. GNUstep has been failing at that for decades already.

It appears like they’ve aped some of MacOS design language, but it’s clear they’re engineers, not designers. There’s enough “uncanny valley” between this OS and actual modern Apple UI design that it comes off a bit like all those versions of KDE that tried to look and act exactly like Windows XP and always felt a bit “off.” Their screenshots page is a Frankenstein mess of poor font quality and Apple themes mixed together dating back to OS X.1

I think it’s better when a team actually has designers working for them and comes up with their own real UI standards, (see Pop!_OS). IMO Apple’s UI design isn’t particularly good so it’s not like some holy grail we should copy and paste to Linux.

> IMO Apple’s UI design isn’t particularly good so it’s not like some holy grail we should copy and paste to Linux.

It may not be perfect, but it’s pretty darn good - as especially visible when comparing to this effort presented here. There’s a lot of detail and polish in MacOS interface design and UX people don’t realise until it’s missing.

And that’s exactly what I would call „finesse“

> IMO Apple’s UI design isn’t particularly good so it’s not like some holy grail we should copy and paste to FreeBSD.

Fixed that for you…

Apple’s UI design certainly has flaws. I really don’t understand why they changed the way the System Settings in Ventura/Sonoma(?) now looks like and behaves more like iOS, as an example.

However, as someone who has used GUIs from SunView/Irix Desktop/DECwindows to iPadOS/MacOS, via Windows 2.0/3.0/95/NT/etc. I am of the opinion that Apple is still the most consistent and easy to learn GUI. Even my 80-year old mother manages quite well with her Mac and iPhone.

To me that is kind of the key strength and why Apple has such a good UI story. Its not necessarily that they perfected the UI. There are certainly parts I dislike. But, its consistent. I have to use Windows 11 at work. It is amazing how some windows have been brought up to date with the new design language of Windows 11, but I open up the Windows Event viewer and still has like the Windows 7 design language.

Because its still in major development? Huge refactors are going on still under the hood. It's a project with a small team working in their free time with a big goal and its some way off. I mean, a BSD-based open source OS binary compatible with mach binaries ... it's very cool IMO and I hope more people get involved

Apple‘s secret sauce is not mach binaries but Cocoa. And tons of resources. And clear leadership.

We have decades-old projects like GNOME, KDE and GNUstep and none of them come close to macOS in terms of „finesse“. Despite some of them having corporate backing.

So I just don’t see that happening for a project with a small team working on it in their free time. Far too ambitious, I‘ve seen projects like this fail too often in the last two decades.

Yeah, its just a nod to their fellow Apple believers.

Its fascinating to watch their members behave.

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