Which is not completely dead, but also not that active.
Turns out there is a big effort difference between “why don’t they just”ing on forums and actually doing it! :)
More generally, it doesn't offer much of practical value to use the Darwin kernel which is at this point pretty tied to Apple hardware that comes with OS X anyway. You can still Hackintosh but it just adds a lot of additional complexity that you won't have to deal with on Linux.
upd: googling "OpenDarwin" bings up two first results that are news of it closing, in 2006
Why? Where does this logic come from? And apparently it's common, because PureDarwin mentioned in another comment does just that for some reason.
IMO, the right thing to do would be to replicate Apple's proprietary stack as closely as possible. Like, literally take the real macOS and start replacing essential proprietary frameworks like Cocoa and Quartz and core apps like Finder and Dock with fully API-compatible open-source ones. You'll eventually end up with a fully open-source operating system capable of running macOS apps.
There's also some hairiness legally about working from within the official Mac OS system outwards AFAIK.
That's the point. ReactOS doesn't use any of the Linux parts, and it's reimplementing everything from scratch because there are no open-source components in Windows afaik.
That said at this point I don't see anything inherently easier or beneficial about this than creating some other project around an alternative paradigm than PC derived desktop systems on top of some existing better supported kernel.
That said contrary to what the previous poster implied I don't think either OpenDarwin or PureDarwin aimed at reproducing the proprietary bits—they were/are essentially quirky, buggy, poorly documented BSDs just as reliant on the floss ecosystem as much better supported stacks.
To some degree it is. On the other hand this is also why I prefer to use Ubuntu or Debian over any other distribution. They are highly integrated and opinionated in the sense that they keep the packages as unmodified as possible.
What compromises does Ubuntu have vs MacOS? It has orders of magnitude better gaming support thanks to Wine + Steam Proton.
Besides that, Linux desktop is this loosely stacked pile of different components that sometimes falls apart. No one wants to spend 50% of their time writing config files and setting up drivers instead of actually doing something useful.
I don't understand how you can make sweeping generalizations about every desktop environment that runs on Linux. Every DE is an afterthought? Just the fact you call them "Linux GUIs" makes me question how much you have even used any DE with Linux.
I spend no time writing system config files. Drivers are part of the kernel, so I also spend zero time on that. Brand-new laptop hardware sometimes takes a while to get support, but it is really easy to check before you buy.
It is perfectly OK to prefer a padded, walled garden. Just like it is OK to prefer a modular OSS Linux environment where everything is knowable. Nobody needs to be "right", and nobody needs to bash the other with unsubstantiated claims.
I don't like walled gardens — I despise Apple's service ecosystem and the app store. I just prefer things to work sensibly out of the box. The only reason I made an Apple ID is because it won't let me download Xcode without one.
- Why do you think are there so many different DEs, window managers and UI frameworks out there?
- How would you go about introducing one singular UI and UX across all of Linux?
- How would you foster competition and innovation in that space?
- Why do you think Apple is able to define and (somewhat) enforce their standards?
* https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS_FAQ
I found this disappointing at the time that ReactOS was announced, as I recall, because there were a few things that were architected better in Windows NT 6.