Comment by cosmic_cheese

Comment by cosmic_cheese 2 days ago

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I have a soft spot for Mavericks too. It’s not 100% perfect (as post notes, scroll bars have been flattened and by then sidebar item icons had lost their color), but otherwise visually its probably the closest thing possible to “perfect” Aqua era OS X. It feels very refined in several ways that the earlier versions didn’t.

In my opinion the runner-up in terms of visuals is actually 10.4 Tiger, though — the dark grays ubiquitous throughout 10.5 and 10.6 have always felt kinda dingy and depressing in a similar manner to the dark gray Windows 95/98 (which, as an aside, is why I find the Windows 2000 variant of that look preferable, with its base gray being lighter and more cheery). That said I miss the 2D grid that 10.5 and 10.6 used for virtual desktops even today… the simplified 1D linear virtual desktops that’ve been in place since 10.7 feels needlessly watered down.

Funny enough that version of OS X can also run what to this day I’ve found to be the best implementation of a Quake terminal anywhere, in the form of the haxie Visor/TotalTerminal which added this functionality to the Apple terminal. The way it handled window focus and everything was so smooth and better than iTerm’s as well as any of the Linux dropdown terminals I’ve used.

On the note of Linux, I wish that there were Linux DEs that went the extra mile to produce a true OS X 10.4-10.9 analogue, but no such thing exists. The closest is elementary/Pantheon which is stylistically in the same ballpark but shares too much of its design roots with GNOME’s oversimplified iPadOS-like design. Everything else in the Linux world is Windows-type desktops or minimal WMs, both with flat UI themes.

linguae 2 days ago

On the BSD side there has been efforts such as helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) and rayvnOS (https://ravynos.com/) that aim to provide a FOSS recreation of the Jobs-era Mac OS X experience. Both can be considered BSDs as opposed to mere desktop environments. helloSystem uses X11 and Qt, while rayvnOS uses its own version of Cocoa.

However, it’s been a few years since I’ve seriously investigated these projects, and a cursory glance at them shows that they still have a while to go before they become replacements for existing desktop Linux environments. Both are rather ambitious passion projects from their creators, similar to Haiku, a re-creation of BeOS.

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  • philistine 2 days ago

    Both those projects can only go skin deep. The macOS experience is not only how it looks, but the depth of its interactivity and the thoughtful implementations within that depth.

    I still shudder when I see the limitations of dragging files in Windows. The fact I can drag a folder to a save dialog to jump to that folder is so natural to me, and Windows and Linux never bothered with those details.

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    • josephg a day ago

      Yep. And you can drag from the title bar in a lot of applications to get the open file. And all the shortcut keys are consistent across applications.

      I daily drive Linux mint. I can’t use ctrl+C in the terminal for Copy because that’s reserved for the interrupt signal. Fine - I’ll use meta+C. But I can’t use meta+C to copy in IntelliJ because the meta key isn’t a modifier key in Java. I’ve ended up needing to memorise different keys for copy+paste in every program I use. I mess it up on a daily basis. It’s madness!

      Linux is like that everywhere. I like smooth scrolling. Some applications support it properly. Some half support it, or add scrolling lag for no reason (Firefox) and some break completely, assuming every scroll event should scroll a few lines down. I eventually solved my software problems by buying a worse mouse without smooth scrolling support.

      Alt+mouse drag moves windows around. I love that feature! I can’t believe windows and macOS are missing it! But - oops. Alt+click is a thing in davinci resolve for adding keyframes. Urgh. It’s this. Over and over again constantly.

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      • rollcat a day ago

        > I can’t use ctrl+C in the terminal for Copy because that’s reserved for the interrupt signal.

        It's not reserved - the terminal emulator is free to handle any key, in any way, however it wants. Some examples:

        1. The XFCE terminal allows you to specify whether Alt+[X] means Meta-[X], or whether it should trigger a menu shortcut.

        2. macOS's Terminal.app: use System Settings to rebind Copy to Ctrl-C - when some text is selected, it copies that text; when there is no selection, it passes the ^C along.

        Unfortunately, few people question the status quo of terminal emulator design. Look at all the other emulators around you: quick save/load, customisable hotkeys (including gamepads), speed up/slow down, mute specific audio channels, enable/disable sprite/layer rendering, peek/poke memory, and so on. An average GBA or SNES emulator gives you better tools than most terminal emulators, and the latter are what is actually being used to get work done.

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      • cosmic_cheese a day ago

        Wait, if meta isn’t a modifier in Java how do key shortcuts in Java apps (including IntelliJ) work under macOS? Is this maybe just an oversight on Jetbrains’ part for the Linux versions of their IDEs?

        But yes, inconsistency being the only consistent thing in Linux is annoying to me too. It’s bad enough that I think a distro with a central feature of maintaining forks of everything to polish all of those little paper cuts would probably do well, particularly among switchers.

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    • linguae 2 days ago

      I agree. There have long been macOS-style skins for KDE, GNOME, and other desktop environments, and some of them do a good job at capturing the look of macOS. However, it’s the feel of macOS that makes macOS special. Additionally, it’s the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and the ecosystem of conformant apps on macOS that also contributes to the overall experience.

      That’s the core challenge with efforts like ElementaryOS, helloSystem, and ravynOS; it’s not enough to provide a polished desktop if we still have to deal with non-compliant apps.

      Of course, this is a challenge even for macOS in an era of Electron apps, and in the Windows ecosystem there’s much less of an emphasis on conformance to UI/UX guidelines.

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      • cosmic_cheese 2 days ago

        At least Electron apps populate the menubar under macOS. They do no such thing under Linux even if you’ve got a setup that features a global menubar (as KDE is capable of).

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    • robertoandred 2 days ago

      Unfortunately that experience keeps getting degraded. The hiding of proxy icons is crazy to me.

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    • pacifika 2 days ago

      This works in elementary OS

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      • favorited 2 days ago

        That tracks. Elementary's file browser is one of the only GUI options on Linux if you want Miller Columns. Your options at this point are basically Elementary/Pantheon Files, or GWorkspace...

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  • cosmic_cheese 2 days ago

    I’ve been keeping an eye on these projects too. My hunch is that helloSystem is going to find Qt limiting as it matures, and while ravynOS’ approach is more likely to produce a high fidelity analogue, it’s also much larger in scope and likely to get bogged down in achieving compatibility with existing Mac binaries. I wish the best for both though, because they’re filling an extremely empty niche in the FOSS desktop space.

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replete a day ago

I relied on the TotalVisor - every system I have I will hack together something to get this functionality:

- Windows hotkey bottom file explorer: https://github.com/replete/productivity-ahk/blob/main/Bottom...

- MacOS hotkey bottom Finder: https://gist.github.com/replete/245986ddfb5a912f0bc71f5708be...

There's XtraFinder which promises something similar, but now all modern macs require disabling security features, which seems a bit much for a convenient hotkey.

I have also requested TotalFinder-like feature for PathFinder(https://cocoatech.io/) which is the closest thing to what TotalVisor did.

Wild how tiny little utilities can change your expectations of using a computer. Simply cannot get by without quake terminal and bottom file explorer anymore, on any machine I daily drive.

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Wowfunhappy 2 days ago

Tiger is cool! The other neat thing about the visuals is, if you think about Apple's industrial design in that era, the UI feels a perfect extension of the hardware itself.

And as much as I love Mavericks, I agree, I would absolutely jump to a Linux distro that recreated the experience faithfully. There really isn't anything though, especially when you add in the larger app ecosystem—I like using Aperture a lot more than Digikam, for example.

Edit: Oh, and:

> and by then sidebar item icons had lost their color

But you can bring the color back with the ColorfulSidebar SIMBL plugin!

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