Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

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I moved on to Windows 10 and FreeBSD after many years on the Mac (I refused to upgrade my Macs beyond Mojave), but this is an interim solution for me since neither Windows 10 nor existing FOSS desktops match even Mac OS X Tiger when it comes to the user experience.

My long-term solution is building my own desktop environment that is inspired by the classic Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, but also takes ideas from OpenDoc, Smalltalk environments, the Symbolics Genera Lisp machine OS, and Plan 9 (itself influenced by Project Oberon when it comes to the GUI) to form an environment that encourages flexible, programmable tools built from smaller components but can be arranged to create complete software solutions, kind of like how a painter arranges colors and tools. Unfortunately I’m still early in the design phase and I have no code to share, and this is also a side project since I work full-time as a researcher and thus I can’t devote my full time to this, but I hope that by 2024 I’ll have an early version working and released.

I am inspired by the vision of personal computing pioneers like Alan Kay, and I hate to see personal computing being transformed from user empowerment to platforms for selling services and serving ads to a captive audience.

I only spent a few years in Mac-land when I was working on an iPhone game, but having grown up on the Amiga and being blown away by Symbolics Genera, I seek out and suppport such visions of personal computing.

It's like we're going from 'bicycles for the mind' to 'mass transit for the mind', where more people than ever are going places, but the bus doesn't go exactly where you want at the time you want to go there, the seats aren't adjustable, the other passengers are sometimes annoying or even dangerous, and nothing is under your control or at your convenience.

I'm also beginning to see that those of us who were lucky enough to experience the individual empowerment granted by the original vision of personal computing must work to keep it going, else we end up with the kind of world that personal computing was reacting against.

Good luck with your project.

That sounds amazing! Can you build it on top of Linux so I can run it on Asahi Linux on a MacBook? I refuse to use a laptop that isn’t running an Apple M-series chip now. Intel/AMD have a long, long way to go to catch up and they don’t seem to have any interest in doing so.

I've also moved on... But unless someone out there gets their hands on a CPU comparable with M2, what would be the point of not upgrading back to a Mac? It's not like Windows is a significantly better experience (gee, the menu item search is such an obvious and necessary thing, is that covered by a valid patent?!)

That sounds amazing, please do a show hn when you decide to release it, I’d love to use something that’s closer to classic Mac OS HIG.

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