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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

As I was reading through the article, a thought experiment occurred: if a new Eazel emerged tomorrow (another Linux-focused startup led by ex-Apple "rock stars"), how would they best contribute to the Linux desktop? Join GNOME? Join KDE? Would any of their Apple-influenced paradigms even be accepted among the developers of mature DEs? Would they go create their own desktop environment ala Pantheon/elementaryOS? Would they go distro-agnostic and just contribute some "polish" to major Linux applications?

It unfortunately strikes me that the window when such a team might have had a major influence on the Linux ecosystem has passed, and most of the distros are happily entrenched in their own little fiefdoms.

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I think you can see how this would go by looking at an Eazel that already emerged and found substantial success. Does this sound familiar?

- Founders from early Apple and Apple spinoff General Magic.

- Built a new Linux-based operating system.

- Their OS used an all-new, consumer-focused UI toolkit and userspace, and avoided playing around with any of the existing concepts from legacy linux distros, using GTK or QT, etc.

- They were acquired by Google.

- By many measures, the Linux operating system they built is the most popular OS on the planet, with more devices than macOS, iOS, or Windows.

Even with all that success, I'm not sure I'd say they had a major influence on the existing open-source linux distro "desktop environment" community.

> if a new Eazel emerged tomorrow (another Linux-focused startup led by ex-Apple "rock stars"), how would they best contribute to the Linux desktop?

Probably by joining elementary OS:

https://elementary.io/

Or instead of Linux they could join something FreeBSD-based, like ravynOS

https://ravynos.com/

> 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.

Imagine former Apple employees joining them! That’d be so awesome!

Other players as well:

https://github.com/helloSystem/hello

The most recent release of ravyn seems to be from 2022. I'm not sure they'd take this on if they started tomorrow.

The more reason for a bunch of experts from Apple to join, right? ;)

To bring their expertise and help out with challenges that are currently blocking this project from progress.

Elementary's aesthetics are in the right place, but Pantheon is probably too closely coupled with GNOME to allow the degree of freedom such a group would desire. Depending on GTK, which has become well known for pulling rugs from underneath devs using it, is also a liability.

Considering these things I believe such a group would be best served by starting their own DE project and likely writing their own UI framework with first-class C bindings, because while Qt doesn't break things as often as GTK does it's restrictive in the languages it can be used with.

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