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Comment by peutetre | Hacker News Reader

> 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/

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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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