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Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

There are two projects that you may be interested in:

- helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) —- an OS inspired by macOS that uses FreeBSD as its base and uses the Qt toolkit for rendering UI elements. - ravynOS (https://ravynos.com/) —- a more ambitious attempt to create a FOSS clone of macOS. FreeBSD is still the base, but it does not use X11 at all for windowing.

There is also the venerable GNUstep project, which aims to provide a FOSS implementation of the Cocoa API.

These are massive undertakings. I haven’t kept up with these projects in a while, so I don’t know their current status.

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My main issue with these two (and don't get me wrong: I'm delighted people are trying) is that they hit the uncanny valley pretty hard. They get enough of it right that the small differences really stick out, particularly things like font and text positioning. It almost makes me wonder if a Aqua-esque window manager with window buttons on the left -- and stopping there -- would be more successful than trying to get all the quirks in.

At minimum, to escape the uncanny valley it’d be necessary to develop a new suite of standard utility apps that closely follow the older, more detailed OS X HIG[0]. Forking existing apps and modifying them could also work, but details are almost certainly going to be missed.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140603021344/https://developer...

Have been keeping my eye on these too. The approaches taken by the first two aren’t how I think I’d go about it, but I don’t have a project yet so what do I know haha.

GNUStep is interesting but I don’t see it gaining a significant following with Swift sucking up the majority of air out of the room for apple-platform-adjacent projects.

For years I’ve wanted a FOSS macOS clone, but in recent years my interest has shifted away from that and toward what inspired NeXT (and the Mac) in the first place: the Smalltalk environment. I’ve dug down deep rabbit holes exploring Smalltalk, Lisp machines (particularly the Symbolics Genera and Xerox Interlisp-D environments), HyperCard, Apple’s Lisp-inspired work in the 1990s (Dylan, SK8), and the OpenDoc component-based software framework.

My dream OS would be something with malleable, component-based underpinnings (like a Lisp machine or the Smalltalk environment, but with everything we’ve learned about security, type systems, parallelism, and other concerns since the 1980s when Lisp machines and Smalltalk were in vogue), extensive support for programmability (everything is an object), and with an interface inspired by Mac OS 8 (I love Tiger, but from an interface point of view I prefer the classic Mac OS more). Unfortunately my free time is limited, so I haven’t done much work at all, but it hasn’t stopped me from dreaming and writing a few occasional documents.

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