[jwells89]

In the long run it might be more fruitful to build a FOSS true clone of the Mac desktop for Linux and the BSDs. It’s going to take a massive amount of work to produce something even as smooth as OS X 10.4, 10.6, or 10.9, though.

It’s something I’ve done a little bit of research into, and on top of the usual challenges posed by developing a DE you’d also be fighting the momentum of the two dominant desktop paradigms open *nix software is built for, which is Win9x-type (KDE, Cinnamon, LXDE, and kinda XFCE) or iOS-type (GNOME, Pantheon).

Perhaps the hurdle with the most visible impact is the global menubar, which is currently kind of doable with Qt-based apps, but is broken in GTK apps (plugin is unmaintained) and totally nonfunctional in Wayland. I think that perhaps the best approach to solving this is to build a proof of concept generalized approach for applications to expose their menubars to the desktop environment with and submit it as an XDG standard that hopefully the big guys eventually adopt.

[linguae]

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.

[classichasclass]

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.

[jwells89]

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...

[jwells89]

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.

[linguae]

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.

[logicprog]

> iOS-type (GNOME, Pantheon).

I really don't understand why people keep pushing this misconception. GNOME certainly doesn't have to be for everyone, but this canard is needlessly dismissive and based on a childishly superficial apprehension of GNOME. Just because there is a full screen menu, and the desktop is uncluttered by extranious UI clutter so you can just focus on your task and use the keyboard to control windows and navigate, that makes it "iOS like"? At that point what does that even mean?

If anything, I'd say GNOME is far closer to a tiling window manager. Again, I'm not saying this workflow has to be for you, but it is a consistent, desktop class workflow of its own: a keyboard- and virtual desktop-centric workflow focused on filling the screen with applications via full screens or splits so you can focus on your work, with no extraneous UI elements made obsolete by virtual desktops that only stick around because people are used to them like taskbars, docks, and minimization buttons. The logic of this is excellent IMHO. There is no need for a taskbar to manage minimized or occluded windows if you can just banish windows to other virtual desktops to get them out of the way, but still see them immediately in a multidesktop expose view and fuzzy window search, and new desktops will be fluidly created for you as you fill them up; no minimization button for the same reason; no need for a dock or pinned application icons because an extremely powerful spotlight-style fuzzy application launcher (with built in app menu search, calculator, web search, file search, definition finder, etc) and a dock, combined with a very useful expose and workspace overview conveniently arranged there for you in a single screen, is a single click or key tap away, etc. It seems to me people just assume that since GNOME doesn't have things they're used to from UIs they associate with "work", it's must be a "toy."

[linguae]

I don’t disagree with you, but I believe I know why there is antipathy against GNOME. GNOME 3 isn’t directly inspired by iOS, but it came about during a time when some people thought that traditional Windows- and Mac-like desktops were outmoded and that the industry should move toward more mobile-friendly user interfaces. This led to Windows 8, Ubuntu’s Unity, and the gradual inclusion of iOS elements in macOS. Generally detractors of GNOME 3 are also detractors of these desktops.

Alongside other controversial changes in Linux such as systemd and Wayland, I think some of the antipathy toward GNOME 3 is caused by resentment and the strong network effects these projects have. If GNOME had little influence over other projects, these strong feelings would’ve been much weaker. However, GNOME is one of the most influential projects in the FOSS desktop computing ecosystem, with major consequences even for people who don’t use GNOME. For example, GTK over the years went from a generic toolkit to a much more GNOME-specific one, with consequences for developers and users of GTK-based software who were not fond of GNOME’s major changes beginning with GNOME 3. GNOME also drove the adoption of systemd and Wayland, which is also a source of consternation.

Yes, GNOME developers have the freedom to do what they want with their own software. But there is resentment by some users regarding GNOME’s influence and how the goals of GNOME, Red Hat, and other major players in the Linux ecosystem don’t always align with the Unix philosophy. Change is hard for some people to accept, especially changes people feel are for the worst, whether or not they are actually worse.

[jwells89]

One thing that I think that Unity got more right than others was how not only did it not try to sweep its menubars into hamburger menus, but in fact leaned into menubars with its design and the HUD, which instantly made every program more keyboard-accessible even for those who didn’t know shortcuts. More DEs should copy that aspect.

[logicprog]

Please excuse this incredibly long post. Your post was insightful and polite, so I wanted to respond as thoughtfully as I think it deserves! :D

---

The knee-jerk reaction to the new GNOME interface was, I agree, understandable at the time, given the Zeitgiest — if you're in a time when you're seeing a lot of interfaces move towards being less usable in your eyes, in favor of chasing largely wishful thinking, you might well react strongly to the smallest sign of it in other places. However, I think this reaction was ultimately misguided at the time, and is even moreso now, more maintained by resentment that has long since reached the point of being self-sustaining than anything else, which is what I felt I was responding to originally.

The concessions to touch oriented devices in the design in GNOME 3 are mostly superficial, skin deep changes that are perfectly usable on the desktop and also perfectly explicable by other means then focusing on mobile, and more than made up for by a focus on keyboard navigation (a uniquely desktop-oriented trait).

For instance, if you're scrolling through your applications looking for one, you're not going to have your attention on anything else in the screen, so why does the menu need to take up a small amount of the screen, instead of taking up the whole screen and being able to show you more results?

Or, similarly, if we look at title bars, all GNOME did was essentially merge the tab bar, action button bar, and title bar into one — a move that necessitated larger title bars to maintain button sizes in line with those in the application window itself, which makes sense, since they now ARE application buttons, but in return unified a number of often stacked UI bars with overlapping purposes into a single cohesive entity, probably overall decreasing the amount of space taken up by the header area of many applications overall. In light of this change, moving menus into a hamburger also makes perfect sense: if every application now has an action bar, all the common menu bar actions will be covered there, arguably more discoverable and convenient than before, so being forced to make room for those action buttons by putting the rest of the menus behind a universally understood, common icon (adding at most one click, and likely actually being a wash, since hamburger menus in GNOME tend to be flatter), is a small price to pay, especially since, again, it also helps merge two bars into one, actually saving space.

The network effects criticism seems like a much more reasonable one to me, but I still don't find it particularly convincing, and I suspect it often serves as rationalization for self perpetuating resentment and fear of change.

First of all, I don't see the problem with having various projects take advantage of each other's functionality where it makes sense, and in fact I think one of the major things that was holding the Linux desktop back is the heretofore all too common focus on making everything a completely generic and replaceable component that doesn't really integrate well with anything else or fully use the features of anything else. Instead, I think it's a very good thing to have a relatively unified, well integrated Linux platform all the way from the kernel up to the DE, as long as it does allow for things to be switched out within reason, has a unidirectional flow of dependencies downward (so no kernel depending on window manager), each platform component is managed as a separate entity with relatively defined interfaces, and allows for alternative platforms to exist. Indeed I think the fear of a unified platform stack being merely extant or popular, as if its mere existence will make dependency chains invert and our systems completely brittle and unyielding, or as if that will erase the existence of alternative Linux distributions that use different stacks (how could you put a stop to that anyway? I think the Gentoo and Void people are far too hardy a breed for that <3), is I think based on paranoia and conspiratorial thinking.

In fact, secondly, I also think the network effect is greatly overstated — it's pretty clear that the lower level systems in the FreeDesktop stack can work perfectly well without the higher level ones, meaning as you approach closer and closer to the parts of the system that actually affect users, modularity grows more and more; and even the higher level ones can often work perfectly well without the lower ones — for instance, Wayland and GNOME both work perfectly well without systemd as far as I know, considering that they both run fine on for instance Void Linux. So the FreeDesktop stack does indeed meet the criteria I mentioned in the first point.

Thirdly, I think the opposition to the specific programs that make up the FreeDesktop (let's call it) stack is mostly based on hidebound traditionalism and fear of change, an almost cargo cult like devotion to the "UNIX philosophy" (most strongly to be seen amongst the suckless crowd, who judge the quality of software by how few lines it contains, irrespective of its problem domain and features, and set themselves arbitrary line limits). Conversely, I tend to believe that "doing one thing well" is oft-misunderstood by that crowd, since IMO it often requires completely and holistically solving a problem from first principles, instead of writing a beautiful, minimal art piece in C that solves only about 80% of the problem (myopically defined) and does so by relying on a zoo of tools that only half work for that solution (like relying on shell scripts for an init system) and leaves the lost 20% of edge cases and nice to have features and the rest of the surrounding problem unsolved so that you have to cobble together a whole another zoo of tools to solve it, and the fear of doing this is mostly just a cargo cult devotion to a just one out of many great software traditions. In essence, I subscribe more to the "GNU philosophy", and agree with Rob Pike when he said that the Unix philosophy is dead and Perl killed it.

Fourth, even if there was a tight interconnection between those platform components, that doesn't really constitute a network effect, just a dependency chain: a network effect would be some means of keeping distro maintainers or users — depending on which perspective you take — on that stack as opposed to any other, but as far as I know there's not really much of that at all, it just so happens that that stack is the most polished and featureful for users, and the most powerful and easy to maintain for distro maintainers and system administrators. It seems perfectly possible to switch to an entirely different one if you so choose, as demonstrated by distributions like Void Linux (a real best of breed for its type if distro imo, it looks pretty damn nice if you wanna graybeard it IMO).

[Aside: this is especially the case since someone who objects to one part of the stock is likely to object to all of them, and so having to give up the others in order to give up the one they most strongly object to isn't likely going to be any big misery for them. Someone who doesn't like systemD or Wayland probably wouldn't want to use GNOME anyway, at most they probably be using MATE.]

So really it doesn't seem like this complaint is about network effects at all, but about the very idea of dependencies between things, which just goes back to my comment before about this obsession with modularity to the detriment of making a featureful, reliable system that is actually capable of taking advantage of its own strong points. For instance, why shouldn't an init system take advantage of the unique features and capabilities of its kernel? The idea that everything should be written in is generic manner is so strange to me. Complaints about that, and just about the fact that the free desktop platform dominates the Linux world, but that's more a function of its quality and the amount of work that goes into it, in my opinion.

--- Signed, a happy Fedora Silverblue + nushell + Emacs user.

[linguae]

Thank you for your response. As someone who leans more traditionalist in my computing preferences, this is one of the most thorough and thought-provoking defenses of the GNOME and modern Linux ways of designing systems I’ve read.

[jwells89]

“iOS like” is not meant to be an insult. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time using GNOME and I find that iPadOS is its closest analogue — to me, it feels like what you’d get if someone were tasked with taking iPadOS and making it workable for desktop usage. There are a great deal of similarities between the two.

[logicprog]

Fair enough! I've never used iPad OS so I wouldn't really have any means of evaluating that it, but the way you frame it seems perfectly reasonable, since it seems like you're granting that GNOME is at least adapted for desktop use. I definitely have seen that statement leveled in a dismissive way, though, quite possibly by people who have never used iPad OS or even regular iPhone OS, so I was assuming it was that again :P

[type0]

> "iOS like"? At that point what does that even mean?

optimized for touch screens