I'm sort of surprised that development is still on X86 instead of moving over to ARM, it looks like the only builds for ARM are for raspberry pi - I know about Asahi but I would have thought that these darwin-based projects would have a leg up on booting even the latest hardware, is Apple not updating darwin anymore?
Maybe someone more familiar with operating systems kernels can answer this: Is Darwin really all the exiting? It is different from both the BSD kernels and Linux, but less so than Windows. Other than the ability to run macOS applications (assuming you can clone the libraries and APIs from macOS) is there some benefit of Darwin that I'm not seeing?
I honestly think the kernel interface is by far the easiest part of building a MacOS compat layer. The userland is gigantic, super complex, and totally closed source. That's the hard part.
AFAIK all macos software only talks to the kernel via userland APIs - so there's no particular benefit to basing ravynOS on XNU anyway. (Just the opinion of a layman.)
from the faq:
> Is this... legally sketchy?
No. Consider projects like ReactOS, a from-scratch effort to create an OS compatible with Microsoft Windows, GNUstep, which provides an open implementation of Cocoa APIs and other things, or Darling, a compatibility layer for running Darwin (macOS) binaries on Linux. ravynOS is similar and stands on the shoulders of many such projects.
as far as i understand it, most companies don’t bother sending cease and desists to projects you’ve never heard of. the fact that the aforementioned projects have avoided the banhammer of Apple should not be an indication that a successful MacOS clone would receive the same treatment.
but on the other hand, maybe that’s a champagne problem. if you can make a macos clone good enough to get the attention of Apple, you’ve already done something incredible.
I think the better example is actually GNU, which endured several challenges as a clean room implementation of unix. I think this is legally sound, but IANAL.
I wager that maybe, probably, possibly, perhaps the GUI of this thing looks like ass and feels even worse. There used to be screenshots, you can google them. But maybe don’t.
Man I used to develop SAAS software using Cappuccino. Since I knew Objc (and JS/CSS) really well it was such a beautiful system for development. I'm sad it never went anywhere
Everyone gets to name their projects for their own reasons. If the pitch is basically an “alternate apple” macOS, I would have chosen one of the other other (alternate) apple varieties as the root of my OS. Missed opportunity I guess.
Real apple-people would'nt consider this anyways. Open source geeks is were they can get traction. Seems like there is plenty of us that would like fbsd quality and vertical integration to the desktop level. There is effort but no breakthroughs.
The more technical side of the Mac user base would probably jump ship if a polished, open macOS analogue appeared. There's been a lot of discontent with changes dating as far back as 10.7 Lion, and has been gradually mounting more rapidly since 10.10 Yosemite and accelerating greatly with 13 Ventura through 26 Tahoe.
There's substantial demand for a spiritual successor to OS X 10.4/10.6/10.9 that isn't being filled.
You're using open-source Apple code (Darwin) and aiming for Cocoa API compatibility. How are you handling the legal side? Apple's APIs and frameworks are proprietary. Are you reimplementing them from scratch, or using something like GNUstep?
> Developers can port existing Cocoa applications with minimal changes.
I wonder how big the actual gap between close to Cocoa App compatibility and full app compatibility is? Being able to run MacOS apps natively would unlock a huge barrier to adoption here.
There used to be a bootable Darwin instance that Apple published, which on paper would've made things a bit easier, but they stopped publishing it a while ago. It never resulted in any serious OS with a UI however.
There was a community around Darwin for a while, and people released Darwin distros that ran X11 and a variety of ported Unix software. You’re right that it never really amounted to anything serious though. Within Apple, open sourcing Darwin seems to mainly have been a marketing ploy to get Unix/Linux people interested in Mac OS X by tying it to the hype around the open source movement. There’s a good article with more information here: http://www.synack.net/~bbraun/writing/osfail.html
The premise of that article is way off base. Darwin didn't fail, because the point wasn't to create a robust open source operating system along the lines of Linux. Apple got everything they needed from the OSS community while providing no more than they were required to. Apple got a bunch of tools, utilities, shells, etc as well as a view that this was a Real UNIX Operating System (TM) (they even got it certified) and that inarguably sold millions of machines
Their goal was never to build a community around Darwin or get a bunch of people outside the company using Darwin sans Mac OS X's proprietary bits, or to get a bunch of people outside the company contributing to Darwin
> The problem was Darwin was a marketing ploy, and nothing more. Marketing thought that by throwing some source files over the wall, they could increase their market share and revenue. And they were right. You go to almost any technical conference these days, and there is an astonishing number of Mac laptops in the crowd. Prior to Mac OS X, people would have been laughed out of the building for having a Mac, but now, with Mac OS X and the magic of open source, it was suddenly OK or even cool. Managerially and culturally, Apple had no intention of becoming involved with any community outside its own walls. There were some well intentioned engineers and even a few low level managers that were duped by their own marketing department, and that was all. These people had given substantial amounts of their free time under the illusion they were doing something Right, something Good, but in the end were simply used by their own company's marketing department.
By referencing the 90s it is a reminder that Mac started on an entirely closed source kernel. It's a regression towards the Mac mean more than a regression away from it.
Correct, but to dismiss the NeXT contributions from BSD into modern mac and Darwin would be to dismiss Darwin entirely. Macintosh from the System7 days was a dramatically different beast.
Imagine the world where open-source is collaborating instead of fragmenting. Single Linux distribution, single compartibility layer for other OSes, single graphics API, single package manager...
I mean, yes, that might get more folks working on a single project - which _might_ lead to shipping more quickly (might - more devs doesn't always equal speed). But I think what we'd end up with is Gnome; something that works fairly well, yet the committee won't allow simple things that the community wants. So we have the whole, "fine, I'll fork this project and add it myself" followed by, "why don't you spend your time HELPING the project instead of creating your own". It sounds a bit like a doom-loop.
I'm kinda on the opposite end of the spectrum. I love this world where 45 people try to race toward the same goal. Sometimes the best ideas win. Sometimes the fastest to the first goal wins. Sometimes everyone gives up. Sometimes we have competing standards we have to sift through. It's a mess, but it's a beautiful mess.
That world is terrible. Thank deity no one has the power to actually inflict and enforce their particular bankrupt oppressive idea of the one true world on everyone else.
Variety and change is basically the definition of life itself. Uniformity and stasis are pretty good definitions of death.
Kooky offshoots and dead-ends are not waste, they are the very definition of life.
Imagine a world without life? Sure, absoulutely do imagine that, so that you can understand how and why you would never want that and should never suggest it, and know exactly how to respond to anyone who comes along and tries to float this genius idea of efficiency.
The Mac GUI is closed source. You're not cloning it without being sued by Apple's turbo lawyers or at the very least receive a C&D. This is for console applications?
macOS will now be ARM-only. If you buy Apple hardware you already have a license for the real thing.
Why run a TBD meme OS when you could run Darwin, FreeBSD, Linux, etc. or real macOS to accomplish whatever unclear goals are presented here?
*sigh* This is for no one, there is no viable use case. The ReactOS team will be sending a fruit basket.
Perhaps the biggest reason is that the existing FOSS OS world has little to offer for people who like a Mac-style desktop. It's possible to customize DEs to have a very shallow visual resemblance but the details are all wrong, with Windows, legacy Linux desktops, and even mobile operating systems (in e.g. the case of GNOME) exerting the greater bulk of design influence.
The question might then, "why not make this a DE instead?" to which the answer is that Mac users also like how the underpinnings of the OS work (or have worked in older releases) and would like to continue to use their favorite Mac apps, which isn't going to happen as long as any traditional Linux distribution is involved. Mac apps also have a design ethos that's rare among current native Linux apps, which drives demand for alternatives.
To do this properly it really needs to be a whole-OS endeavor.
EndeavorOS. I think it's actually the userspace though, which this aims to emulate. The problem is that if you're using a macbook for final cut pro, then endeavorOS doesn't solve your problem.
Hmm, isn't EndeavorOS in the same vein as CachyOS? Mainly a pre-configured Arch variant with a custom point-and-click configurator built in? I don't see where it'd be of particular interest to would-be switchers using macOS.
I’m super confused as to what is missing in the FOSS world, how does it “have little to offer?” It really sounds like you just like the macOS style and want a clone of it, and that’s certainly fine as a desire or a request, but if you like macOS, macOS is already available. For what logical reason should a project be copying macOS?
I would absolutely agree that a logical reason is to run macOS apps on other platforms, but other than that, the macOS operating system and its design is nothing incredibly exciting, unique, or unattainable elsewhere.
You’ve established that a Linux desktop environment in macOS style alone is not sufficient, and that makes me wonder what details of the underpinnings is Linux getting wrong compared to Mac? Is launchd superior to systemd? Is Metal superior to Vulkan? Is container superior to docker/podman in Linux? I think in a lot of cases the macOS underpinnings are quite inferior to those on offer by the FOSS world. Not in every case, of course, but a whole lot of Apple’s low level tools are half-baked and weird.
I think we need to articulate what is actually wrong with Linux or other FOSS alternatives as far as their underpinnings because I am really coming up short.
Heck, macOS and FOSS alternatives share a whole lot of identical low level tools underpinnings, like how you can run your favorite shell in either OS or even install Homebrew on Linux. (Another hot take: Linux package management is vastly superior to macOS or any other operating system on the market).
This idea of the design ethos being superior on Mac…was that true with Liquid Glass too? Are we going to exclude from our analysis every time Apple rushes out the next big Ui redesign to meet marketing deadlines and fixes it in subsequent updates like they’ve done multiple times in the past?
I look at befuddling aspects of the macOS design ethos like the fact that the menu bar will just silently truncate items when you run out of space or the fact that there’s a giant notch on the screen as evidence that maybe the macOS design ethos is nothing to envy.
Maybe macOS design is merely “pretty good” and not actually something that significantly far above and beyond its competitors.
Again, I applaud the idea of making software to run macOS apps outside of the propriety ecosystem just like the tools we use to run Windows apps in FOSS operating systems. However, I don’t think users looking for macOS design ethos or platform quality are starved of options.
macOS isn't perfect, particularly in its incarnations since Ventura, though gripes have been piling up since the "great flattening" with Yosemite, which is why Mac users might be interested in a similar alternative.
As a whole however, it works really well for some people. Better than Windows and Windows-like desktops (of which most DEs are closest to) and better than the desktoppified-mobile-OS shape of GNOME/Pantheon or tiling WM sort of thing.
The value lies more in the collection of frameworks referred to as Cocoa (primarily AppKit) and the desktop and third party apps built with it. The global menubar and perks it brings (such as a standardized menu API, which then enables things like System Settings allowing any menu item in any app to have its key shortcut remapped), the application-document process model, the windowing model that's built around windows overlapping with just the relevant bits remaining visible, first and third party GUI apps all being scriptable via AppleScript, high level of adherence to a central HIG, among many other things.
Many of these aren't unique but the particular combination is and doesn't really exist in the Linux desktop world… the best you can do is light mimicry and even that takes considerable manual configuration on the user's behalf, not to mention fighting against the grain and the awkwardness that brings.
I haven't downloaded or played with it because I'd rather not toy with software so obviously full of landmines, but from what I've seen it also falls into the "surface level" bucket. It goes a little further than one might get by e.g. enabling KDE's global menubar and installing one of the Mac-themed Breeze forks, but not much.
That's what this is. Darwin isn't installable today. Apple just dumps a bunch of source code. Previous attempts at making Darwin bootable didn't go far and had no GUI.
Four years and still pre-alpha. Stick a fork in it.
There's also PureDarwin (?) which had been around forever but last I recall the lone developer was seriously ill and the project was not receiving help. I don't see how this would be any different.
To everyone here cheering this on: when will you be contributing? Or are you just waiting to download it, run it once for the lulz, and drag it to the Trash?
(For those not catching on that the claim was written in jest, the person commenting here is not the creator of this project nor have they committed any code.)
why do anything? why Linux? why FreeBSD? why Mac at all? Why build your own wind turbine when corporations make large ones? Why build a cyclekart when you own a car? Why workout when everyone's going to die?
With that mindset, everything is useless and nothing has a point. Have I made my point?
I regret to actually say this, and mean no controversy - but, I have been actually asking myself just that - and, not in the "workout or not" sense, alone. In the "does anything have a point", way. Apologies.-
PS. To indeed contribute something: I am a big fan of the "doing things because of the joy of doing things" itself theory of it all, which is, seemingly, an antidote.-
In general, things have meaning because people assign meanings to them. Nothing inherently has meaning as meaning exists only within the human mind/soul. If you are searching for meaning, you will find nothing.
"This is a huge effort. Y'all must be crazy!
Yes. Here's to the crazy ones... because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that do.
In all seriousness, though, it's not my first rodeo. I have no illusions about the scale of building an OS or how long projects like Haiku, ReactOS or GNUStep took to get usable. This is just something I like doing in my Copious Spare Time™ and that I hope will be useful someday.
I've always liked Apple's design and elegance, but am not thrilled with the direction of recent macOS® or how closed the hardware has become. And I'm a big believer in open source. So ... let's build something that feels as elegant, without all the lock-in, and maybe (just maybe) I can get it to a point that reasonably useful Mac apps build & run on it. And if not, we'll build a lot of cool pieces along the way and learn a ton. I'm OK with that."
New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45997212 - Nov 2025 (165 comments)
RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485596 - Dec 2023 (176 comments)
RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32492514 - Aug 2022 (366 comments)
It’s Mach based, so it has Mach ports, which are an IPC system that is fairly heavily used by macOS.
It has DriverKit, which is a C++ framework for drivers that’s got morecsuppirt than the usual Unix driver model.
Mach-O does more than ELF, and enables the two-layer namespacing that makes macOS able to manage dynamic linking dependencies better than ELF.
Nothing really earth-shattering but interesting enough. And far easier to build a macOS environment on than FreeBSD.
AFAIK all macos software only talks to the kernel via userland APIs - so there's no particular benefit to basing ravynOS on XNU anyway. (Just the opinion of a layman.)
Just FYI, the https://www.darlinghq.org project is doing MacOS app compat on Linux - i.e. building the userland libraries.
It's been a stable foundation for several of the most successful operating systems in history though
as far as i understand it, most companies don’t bother sending cease and desists to projects you’ve never heard of. the fact that the aforementioned projects have avoided the banhammer of Apple should not be an indication that a successful MacOS clone would receive the same treatment.
but on the other hand, maybe that’s a champagne problem. if you can make a macos clone good enough to get the attention of Apple, you’ve already done something incredible.
Looks great, so sad that it's yet another web framework. Kinda smacks of GNOME, though.
GitHub repo indicates they're working on basic, basic, bringup. Like, Objective-C works at all and CLI utilities work.
This is gutting, when combined with a prior post showing this dates back 3 years.
There's substantial demand for a spiritual successor to OS X 10.4/10.6/10.9 that isn't being filled.
I wonder how big the actual gap between close to Cocoa App compatibility and full app compatibility is? Being able to run MacOS apps natively would unlock a huge barrier to adoption here.
What has changed about Apple's ecosystem vis a vis openness, hardware, or the 'ecosystem'?
The macOS ecosystem is pretty much the same as it has been since 1997
Prior to that, modern Macs were just PCs. Then Apple started to introduce, and then depend upon, their unique hardware.
Then the ARM migration using proprietary CPUs and GPUs really kicked it up a level. The OS relies on the hardware, which is unique to Apple now.
Their goal was never to build a community around Darwin or get a bunch of people outside the company using Darwin sans Mac OS X's proprietary bits, or to get a bunch of people outside the company contributing to Darwin
> The problem was Darwin was a marketing ploy, and nothing more. Marketing thought that by throwing some source files over the wall, they could increase their market share and revenue. And they were right. You go to almost any technical conference these days, and there is an astonishing number of Mac laptops in the crowd. Prior to Mac OS X, people would have been laughed out of the building for having a Mac, but now, with Mac OS X and the magic of open source, it was suddenly OK or even cool. Managerially and culturally, Apple had no intention of becoming involved with any community outside its own walls. There were some well intentioned engineers and even a few low level managers that were duped by their own marketing department, and that was all. These people had given substantial amounts of their free time under the illusion they were doing something Right, something Good, but in the end were simply used by their own company's marketing department.
Open source software was used for the basis of macOS for Apple’s convenience, not because Apple intended to publish very much open source software.
BSD has a convenient license for these purposes and it’s why proprietary commercial products like the PlayStation 5 choose to use it.
I'm kinda on the opposite end of the spectrum. I love this world where 45 people try to race toward the same goal. Sometimes the best ideas win. Sometimes the fastest to the first goal wins. Sometimes everyone gives up. Sometimes we have competing standards we have to sift through. It's a mess, but it's a beautiful mess.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVDzuT0fXro
Variety and change is basically the definition of life itself. Uniformity and stasis are pretty good definitions of death.
Kooky offshoots and dead-ends are not waste, they are the very definition of life.
Imagine a world without life? Sure, absoulutely do imagine that, so that you can understand how and why you would never want that and should never suggest it, and know exactly how to respond to anyone who comes along and tries to float this genius idea of efficiency.
The Mac GUI is closed source. You're not cloning it without being sued by Apple's turbo lawyers or at the very least receive a C&D. This is for console applications?
macOS will now be ARM-only. If you buy Apple hardware you already have a license for the real thing.
Why run a TBD meme OS when you could run Darwin, FreeBSD, Linux, etc. or real macOS to accomplish whatever unclear goals are presented here?
*sigh* This is for no one, there is no viable use case. The ReactOS team will be sending a fruit basket.
The question might then, "why not make this a DE instead?" to which the answer is that Mac users also like how the underpinnings of the OS work (or have worked in older releases) and would like to continue to use their favorite Mac apps, which isn't going to happen as long as any traditional Linux distribution is involved. Mac apps also have a design ethos that's rare among current native Linux apps, which drives demand for alternatives.
To do this properly it really needs to be a whole-OS endeavor.
I would absolutely agree that a logical reason is to run macOS apps on other platforms, but other than that, the macOS operating system and its design is nothing incredibly exciting, unique, or unattainable elsewhere.
You’ve established that a Linux desktop environment in macOS style alone is not sufficient, and that makes me wonder what details of the underpinnings is Linux getting wrong compared to Mac? Is launchd superior to systemd? Is Metal superior to Vulkan? Is container superior to docker/podman in Linux? I think in a lot of cases the macOS underpinnings are quite inferior to those on offer by the FOSS world. Not in every case, of course, but a whole lot of Apple’s low level tools are half-baked and weird.
I think we need to articulate what is actually wrong with Linux or other FOSS alternatives as far as their underpinnings because I am really coming up short.
Heck, macOS and FOSS alternatives share a whole lot of identical low level tools underpinnings, like how you can run your favorite shell in either OS or even install Homebrew on Linux. (Another hot take: Linux package management is vastly superior to macOS or any other operating system on the market).
This idea of the design ethos being superior on Mac…was that true with Liquid Glass too? Are we going to exclude from our analysis every time Apple rushes out the next big Ui redesign to meet marketing deadlines and fixes it in subsequent updates like they’ve done multiple times in the past?
I look at befuddling aspects of the macOS design ethos like the fact that the menu bar will just silently truncate items when you run out of space or the fact that there’s a giant notch on the screen as evidence that maybe the macOS design ethos is nothing to envy.
Maybe macOS design is merely “pretty good” and not actually something that significantly far above and beyond its competitors.
Again, I applaud the idea of making software to run macOS apps outside of the propriety ecosystem just like the tools we use to run Windows apps in FOSS operating systems. However, I don’t think users looking for macOS design ethos or platform quality are starved of options.
As a whole however, it works really well for some people. Better than Windows and Windows-like desktops (of which most DEs are closest to) and better than the desktoppified-mobile-OS shape of GNOME/Pantheon or tiling WM sort of thing.
The value lies more in the collection of frameworks referred to as Cocoa (primarily AppKit) and the desktop and third party apps built with it. The global menubar and perks it brings (such as a standardized menu API, which then enables things like System Settings allowing any menu item in any app to have its key shortcut remapped), the application-document process model, the windowing model that's built around windows overlapping with just the relevant bits remaining visible, first and third party GUI apps all being scriptable via AppleScript, high level of adherence to a central HIG, among many other things.
Many of these aren't unique but the particular combination is and doesn't really exist in the Linux desktop world… the best you can do is light mimicry and even that takes considerable manual configuration on the user's behalf, not to mention fighting against the grain and the awkwardness that brings.
I wonder if they have a GitHub...
That's what this is. Darwin isn't installable today. Apple just dumps a bunch of source code. Previous attempts at making Darwin bootable didn't go far and had no GUI.
There's also PureDarwin (?) which had been around forever but last I recall the lone developer was seriously ill and the project was not receiving help. I don't see how this would be any different.
To everyone here cheering this on: when will you be contributing? Or are you just waiting to download it, run it once for the lulz, and drag it to the Trash?
Who jammed a toe in your cheerios?
Besides accolades on HN of course.
I'm being real here and frankly blind, empty support of open-source projects does zero to support them.
Like seriously, what do you want here? Or are you just mad at everyone and lashing out?
With that mindset, everything is useless and nothing has a point. Have I made my point?
I regret to actually say this, and mean no controversy - but, I have been actually asking myself just that - and, not in the "workout or not" sense, alone. In the "does anything have a point", way. Apologies.-
PS. To indeed contribute something: I am a big fan of the "doing things because of the joy of doing things" itself theory of it all, which is, seemingly, an antidote.-