HelloSystem – OS with original Mac philosophy with a modern architecture
github.com
github.com
I'm not sure if all the ingredients necessary to brew up that magic could ever come together in quite the same way again. HelloSystem is dealing with a vastly harder problem with vastly fewer resources; it's no surprise that they're not there.
Attention to detail is still doable, it just isn’t something that is valued by MBA/PM types.
(Being an ambitious personal project made in limited free time is a better excuse, and I commend the project author’s efforts)
Or by folks who are not seasoned in user experience. Just because you use something doesn't make you an expert - UI is often thought of that way, but it is a real discipline.
Depends which day one goes back to.
Web projects I've been involved with since early 90s considered user modalities, affordances, predictability, and frictionlessness. To clients we used utility words like straightforward, coherent, clean, functional to describe the system, and experience words like delight, effectiveness, familiarity, ease, as sensations a user should have using the system.
Not sure when I first recall the abbreviation UX, probably mid-90s.
Mostly we just called it Design, a blend of things one might do making comfortable office furniture and effective graphic design and editorial layout for a magazine.
Perhaps things were interesting then because design was an emerging intersectional craft and interfaces were experimentally evolving. Digital UX wasn't yet the ubiquitous sameness of content marketing scaffolding.
Now that sounds way more gatekeeper-y than what you complained about before. Websites and web apps are by and large terrible in terms of UI and UX and would benefit a lot from people who know what they are doing in terms of design of the user-facing parts. Still, they are the software a lot of people interact with for a significant chunk of the time they spend on a computer.
Too bad the project is going through some drama from what I understand.
It has its own HIG, which you can see here: https://docs.elementary.io/hig
Personally, I never loved menubars, so I don't mind that difference.
By all means bow down before what they did at the time, but please do not treat macOS or the Apple HIG as "the be-all and end-all of UI/UX for all time". Because it is not.
But in practice it is. Or can you show something better (that exists now)?
Or can you explain why you think it is?
Because it is not.
Many of us don't want to use a Mac not because they are bad computers (they are extremely good) but because of MacOS
Two very popular examples: Finder and iTunes
The good bits in MacOS come from NeXTSTEP
Of course. Menu bars are still much better than catch-all hamburger menus. So it is still annoying that a project that supposedly took inspiration from older Mac OS regresses in that respect.
It doesn't work so well anymore for example with todays 34" ultrawide monitors, as the application window and it's menu are potentially far away from each other.
In NeXTSTEP (the predecessor of Mac OS X), the application menu was actually vertical and moveable freely on the screen. The menus were also detachable, so you could for example leave the "File" submenu open.
As for NeXT style menus, I don’t really have an opinion because with WindowMaker/NEXTSPACE on Linux the only applications that use the floating menu are GNUSTEP ones, so I don’t actually have much experience using that style of menus.
What drama?
I know you can install their stuff on other distros too, but it isn't well-supported
Since everyone gave up on native software in favour of web frameworks and the browser, there has been precious little innovation in native UI frameworks.
So my point is: couldn’t most of the attention to detail in Apple’s Classic Mac OS be replicated with a UI framework that understands design concepts such as proportionality, spacing, Schelling points, etc?
Why not? Nothing is stopping them - but statements like yours.
My own standards are high enough that I'd never even show such a screenshot to a friend, let alone put it into the readme to my project for all of the internet to see.
The technical hurdles they had to overcome - despite targeting lower resolutions, non-color screens - was considerably higher and more impressive because none of the scaffolding was there to support the work, and the system resources were also far, far less. You're significantly discounting that effort. It's also worth reminding you that — even among the engineers who left or felt too much pressure — nearly all of them say the emotional investment was both necessary and worthwhile in retrospect. There are very few ex-Macintosh-team detractors in the world.
Taking nothing away from this open source project, but let's not rewrite history.
A comparison I might make, then, is to video games then and now: despite extreme technical restrictions, in the 80s, a single person or at most a small team could make the equivalent of a AAA game in a matter of months in their basement. But precisely because those technical restrictions have now been lifted and so much more is now possible and expected, such a thing these days is absurd, and it instead takes teams of hundreds years of work and tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to put together a modern AAA game. But observing that fact in no way discredits the talent, hard work, and ingenuity of those basement coders of bygone days; nor does it mean that I think game devs these days are orders of magnitude less competent, either.
My intention was never to say that what the Macintosh team did was easy; but it was possible (clearly) with the enormous effort they put in, and I don't think what HelloSystem is trying to do really is, especially not with the resources they have. After all, Apple can't even do it these days, and they have virtually all the resources in the world.
Tell that to Microsoft. Resizing windows in Win 10 is a masochistic act.
I assume MPW Pascal was used once the OS could be booted.
The problem today is that everything is possible yet the quality of SW has gone down. We have UIs (GUIs are deprecated) using GB of RAM without help (how could they have a help menu with so little memory), where you have to guess what an UI element does, when you have to click on the only one text field on the screen to write something. It is like Will Smith came and erased the memory of everything that was done before. Using Win 95 was an exercise in pain because programs crashed. Using win 10 is an exercise in pain because it is user hostile. Yes i need to resize a window and yes i need a titlebar and a big enough scrollbar.
I really don't think so. The original Mac had 128K.
I’d argue that Palm was also a similar success at the time.
You are right that it’s not easy and probably impossible for a too small independent team or an open source project, it needs as you say a very focused goal, a small cohesive team.
And for example Meta totally failed to ship a great UI/UX for Quest (it’s ok, but with incredibly bad parts like inviting other users, typing text, inconsistent controls between apps and games, no standard UI library, etc. they really need to just start from scratch now, IMHO). So pure ressources are not enough.
If only browsers had used the past two decades to provide a comprehensive set of well-behaved, uniform, native-feeling UI controls for 95% of the use cases. Instead web devs still spent a lot of time reskinning and re-implementing basic controls.
https://css-tricks.com/dropdown-menus-with-more-forgiving-mo...
which are mostly from NextSTEP as described in the "NextSTEP user interface guidelines" first published in 1992 and later by Sun as "OpenStep User Interface Guidelines" in 1996
(pdf) https://gnustep.github.io/resources/documentation/OpenStepUs...
video from 1982
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q
that notoriously Steve Jobs saw and copied for the Lisa?
> which were also heavily inspired by the work of the Mac team for obvious reasons
[citation needed]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34531184
Apple has always been good at copying and (sometimes) improve things.
But mostly they have been good at selling stuff to the richest segment of the population.
Similarly to what Prada did with bags (before becoming a luxury brand focused on women, Prada made bags for the Italian Royal Household).
There's no shame in it, but I don't get why people try to credit Apple for things that have not been invented by Apple.
In this particular case, Xerox and NextSTEP did a lot of research on the matter, that Apple benefited from, because their core business was that: research.
Replacing Apple with a more privacy-preserving alternative is not really about UI minutia. UI/UX is mostly solved, for 2D displays at least. Gnome, KDE, Elementary OS's Pantheon, and others all offer usable and customizable variations on this tech that get you 90% of the way to Apple's standard. Incremental improvements in 2D UI/UX are reaching a point of diminishing returns, where it's more annoying for users to have to learn new interaction mechanics than to simply stick with the ones they know, even if the new mechanics are slightly better in some way.
Rather, I think the area that really needs focused developer attention, and with bigger and more meaningful payoffs, is in bringing the most secure and hardened base systems up to full compatibility with the broadest possible application ecosystem/s. The best option for that right now appears to be Linux + Wine/Proton, ideally using a hardened Linux base like Qubes or SEL4 or similar and Nix/Guix-like reproducible builds, while integrating the extensive work already put into existing UI/UX/DE's. I think if hackers want to achieve this objective, then that's where they need to start and build a community around.
Do you have thoughts on the idea of HelloSystem re-implementing the Cocoa APIs so that it can run Mac apps "natively"?
[1]:https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/search.html?q=cocoa&check...
But for mnacOS-like experience, much of this also needs integration with the GUI.
And that's assuming that Apple's standard is the 'gold standard'. Which I don't think it is, at all.
MacOS has many inconsistencies, which are remedied or fixed by other desktop systems, and it is not a benchmark to measure by.
This project doesn't tackle the reason macOS was so great: Cocoa.
Edit: To be clear, GNUstep is something like 6 years _older_ than Mac OS X, so it's had plenty of time to catch up. The problem is really that these APIs are constantly changing and being extended. The goalpost is moving far too fast to ever meet it.
- Project Astoria[0], for porting Android apps
- Project Centennial[1], for porting Win32 apps
- Windows Bridge for iOS[2], for porting iOS apps
Project Astoria was later rebooted into WSL, and now with Windows Subsystem for Android we are back at Astoria's original goal.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_Mobile#Project_Asto...
[1] - https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/tag/project-cente...
[2] - https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2015/08/06/open-s...
And of course it wasn't so much "giving up" (which sorta implies it was the difficulty of the task), but more "losing interest", because they discontinued Windows Phone, where they were behind Apple's iOS in terms of market share. In that context, getting iOS apps on their system is economically interesting.
On desktop, Windows is way ahead of macOS in terms of market share, so there isn't much of a point.
I do Windows since version 3.0, and very seldom have touched raw Win32 other than for some university projects where I had no choice to do otherwise.
Having said that, NeXT and Apple frameworks are great.
I have a rule that if a platform fails the very first thing I try, I'm gonna assume it can't really be awesome for all other things, statistically :P
Sort of reading it as "Original MacOS Philosophy".
In the early days, there actually was a "better" MacOS. It was the Apple IIGS. The GS system software was second stab at what was MacOS, but with a bit of "clean slate" ethos to it to fix some of the early issues.
Its hard to appreciate the marvel and hoops the system and the developers had to jump through on early machines that lacked memory protection. The IIGS was a nice little sojourn further on in trying to make that kind of system a little bit better. The IIGS memory/process manager (which is kind of the heart of all of this) on top of the 65816 is a pretty neat piece of kit.
MacOS took much of the concepts, but was deliberately made "worse", so it could fit in the Mac's tiny ROMs, and not use an MMU. It was built as if it was a one-off with no serious consideration for the future (not an uncommon theme in the time, many companies hadn't really caught onto the "platform" concept yet).
(Re: the IIgs, building an elegant OS on the 65816 is annoying as hell with its banked memory architecture, tiny stack that can only be in the bottom 64k of RAM, poverty of registers, and lack of e.g. memory protection mechanisms. But the IIgs stuff was really a valiant effort, pretty cool.)
I miss proper spatial navigation sometimes. As a Windows owner I was often envious of MacOS up 9's spatial navigation. I briefly had my own spatial navigation on devices I owned in OS/2 WARP and that one time I was running Gnome-based distributions when Nautilus still had a somewhat buggy spatial navigation mode (which I admittedly compromised some of the design reasons behind spatial navigation by eventually switching to a tiling window manager). When I was old enough to finally own a Macintosh and a PC I was disappointed that Mac OS X had dropped some of the things I liked when working on a Macintosh such as spatial navigation.
There are definite trade-offs to it: manually arranged files and folders without strict grids can create a lot of cluttered "mess". (Add to that ideas of custom per-folder wallpapers and the "mess" gets even more chaotic.) It can be confusing if you aren't expecting it, and teaching it is sometimes hard (even though some of it is more "intuitive"). The mess can sometimes hide/"lose" important files.
But the interesting benefits to it involve sometimes superior muscle memory for frequently accessed folders, a better recall of "where" you left things, and somewhat better uses of some of our human visual data processing systems for visual wayfinding via distinct "landmarks".
Still, though, getting back somewhat on topic, I sometimes wonder what an OS with modern underpinnings committing to older GUI principles like spatial navigation might look like.
Xcode projects still keep files in the order you leave them in, unless you tell it to sort them. I'd guess 99% of people, like me, sort a group every time they add a file though.
I definitely do, as I find makes it quicker to find stuff as project grows in size.
The behaviour of Finder in MacOS (7.1 was my first version) of remembering the position of folders & files I never found that helpful, and in particular it made working on other peoples' machines really hard since you constantly wanted to clean-up or reorder to what made sense to you but didn't want to mess with their preferences (or their particular personal chaos, as it sometimes was).
I really liked it; I miss just... knowing where everything on my system lived, by feel. It was like the concept of a "memory palace", built into the system.
...until you consider attaching a large display to your laptop. And then detaching it after you have placed some stuff there.
Some of the impression I was given too was how much more important things like spatial navigation were for Mixed Reality usability according to research and usability studies. In three dimensions our brains much more crave that things we put into a place stay put in that place exactly where we put them.
(But yes, doing it in 2D even on a single monitor was harder than it sounds. Another real world example of complications is things like removable read only drives: where do you store its customization and position info and is that something that you can accidentally burn to the disc and then never override?)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
And an HN thread about it:
And if it's about openness, why link to the branding pages rather than the source repo? I couldn't even find a link searching for 'source' on the page.
https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/jvnzkb/prismwm_in...
Something like it would be a revival of the OS9 theme and philosophy.
Unfortunately the thread was started 2 years ago with no reference to a public repo and no updates from the author since. Maybe it was always vapourware :(
Most of them that manage to get to the point of a UI that doesn't look like Fischer-price fail on the ecosystem (i.e. they have no ecosystem at all, or they try to shoehorn an existing one on top like a standard ports/apt/yum repo from another distro).
Besides that, the FUD in the README doesn't really help anyone since the masses care very little, and even if they did care, they almost never have what it takes to look at the sources, and even the small subset that does is practically not even checking a single package's sources.
If they just stuck to a "we want something that feels like 2005 apple" tagline it would have been a fine project to fiddle with for fun, but as soon as grand statements are made ("reinvent the Mac") we're back into generic "things few people care for"-territory.
I'll just take KDE plasma.
Was in an era when full colour bitmap graphics were becoming effortless to draw on screen, so let’s make EVERYTHING a high res texture! That will prove how modern and powerful this machine is! But now, it’s less impressive so the sheen doesn’t sparkle as much.
Where as maybe the older 1bit display of an old Mac isn’t trying to sell you anything thru UI fancyness. The fact that it’s not impressive technically is maybe less of an issue when it was obviously not the thing they wanted you to focus on.
• 10.0 - 10.4
• 10.5 - 10.9
• 10.10 - 10.15
• 11+
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsappearanc...
11+ to my eyes has more of a "timeless" potential. It's a bit more utilitarian, less showy and particular.
You could easily manipulate the scroll bars in Aqua, which is a useful feature that has been lost in recent updates.
And it was just plain fun and relatable, while flat UIs are more corporate and functional.
Flat reminds me of 1950s/mid century corporate design - inoffensive, but claustrophobic.
Another example was the "LCD" display at the top of iTunes, depicted as having a transparent cover over it with a sheen and highlights. Unbeknownst to most users (I suspect), some of the labels in that display were actually clickable controls. WTF? I've owned numerous audio components with displays behind clear plastic windows, and I've never tried to poke at one with my finger.
I think mid-'90s GUIs hit the right combination of graphical (not photographical) with universal visual cues. Buttons had only three or four monochrome shades, but had beveled edges whose shadows inverted when the button was "depressed."
I'm glad to see some backlash against the lazy obscurity of "flat UI," and a return to some proper demarcation of controls.
They really didn't need to change it. It's now just 4 coloured bubbles, which symbolises...what? I always thought it was just so...random. It's the most irreverent icon of the iOS home screen since iOS7.
Oddly, Game Center is missing from my phone, so I'll take your word that the new icon sucks. I like to scorn the Photos icon: a multicolored Spirograph. Why?
As the 'cell phone' folks get older and eyesight gets worse, I think we'll see things shifting back. I basically don't use a cell phone for anything except 2fa cuz the silly lil screens are too hard to read.
TBH - I work from home, so I'm never more then 20 feet from real monitors. So I just use the phone for 2FA stuff...
And by the way, may I suggest you try to search on the Internet what GNOME desktop environment developers did to theming with their libadwaita and flat Adwaita design. For a start: https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming...
Also, am I the only one sketched out by the javascript ads with the internal 'x' close buttons? Its obviously part of the ad, and not the program chrome/controls. For all I know, it's just a redirect to pwnme.com :-P
Or while trying to copy a link or text on page - you gotta grab it perfectly otherwise everything else gets selected. So you're maneuvering like under microscope at the very beginning or end of the text.
Similar thing I'm experiencing on Xfce: some themes use this very slim window borders which are almost impossible to grab to resize. And since there's no grab to resize widget in the bottom right corner (it used to be once a standard, I'm pretty sure), upper right corner near the close button is the way.
Cf. shaker furniture and Amish furniture vs. mid-twentieth-century furniture.
I imagine it would have looked like a very, very well-designed iPhone app: soft and welcoming, yet with delightful new features that became apparent with use, and serious functionality that would stay out of the way until it was needed.
I bet MacPaint would have looked a lot like Paper or Procreate.
It's a very interesting question, and honestly, I don't know how good it would have looked. I know what a lot of websites (including Apple's) looked like when designers had access to full color, bevels, drop shadows, etc. They looked terrible. I think those technological limitations—no color, almost no RAM, no hard disk—are one reason the original Mac GUI looked as good as it did. There just wasn't room for anything else.
That said, the primary reason why the first Mac OS was so tasteful was because Susan Kare is an excellent designer, and would probably not have made the mistakes I described above. (The Lisa had all those limitations too, and an extremely similar feature set, but if you compare the Lisa GUI to the Mac's, it looks a lot rougher and more inelegant. Kare was not involved with the Lisa, and it shows.)
So who knows. I'd love to see someone reimagine the original Mac OS using a more contemporary design language; would be an interesting experiment.
(Also, if you meant Bruce Horne, he was a software engineer; he wasn't involved with the visual design as far as I know.)
I'm not sure that the Spatial Finder needed to die; the standard excuses (we have too many files! our displays are too large!) feel knee-jerk and not well thought out at all.
And the Bruce I was referring to was Bruce Tognazzini.
On the other hand, MacOS9's UI style has aged remarkably well:
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90
(minus the media player, ugh)
It's really easy to forget how far we've come. Going back to an old OS and trying to get some real work done can be eye-opening.
Remember that Apple had just made a killing selling jelly-bean aesthetic iMacs (running classic Mac OS 9, even). The Aqua stuff matched the physical case design of those machines.
It all goes along with the late 90s / Y2K times, intense colours. "Run Lola Run" and Fifth Element and late 90s club culture and whatnot. Nothing restrained about that era in terms of style. It was boom times end-of-millennium and that aesthetic continued even for a bit after the .com crash and 9/11 deflated the tires.
Also as others have pointed out, it had to do with "we can do this now'; the graphics hardware and the software stack (showing off "Quartz" etc)
I realised very quickly that I'd forgotten how good the OS9 interface is, and how well it stands up against today's offerings. Trying out a lookalike theme on Linux [1] is definitely on my todo list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#/media/File:L...
I do wish windows rolled up into a bar like MacOS Classic did it.
Surely hardly any users even knew what a hard drive looked like outside of the computer case, but there it is on the desktop, seemed like a very un-Apple thing to do.
[1] What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels?
I took fvwm and a very simple blue bar, trim and simple window buttons. And weirdly now it looks pretty modern and fresh.
Anyway there's always the bizarre windows fisherprice theme, and over used chrome gradients there to help you bring up some bile.
In the 90s, most large software companies (especially OS vendors) would run usability studies with real-world users at a variety of skill levels to try to make their software as easy to use as possible. Everyone used medium-gray as the main UI background color because it makes colored elements easily stand out, and doesn't affect an element's perceived color. Everything had faux-3D bevels because they make it obvious which elements are clickable, and which aren't.
AmigaOS 1.x had a blue background color, but this was mostly because home computers were used on cheap TVs at the time, where white-on-blue seems to have been the color combination that gave the least video artefacts and flickering.
As for the medium-grey: I guess that had mostly to do with the properties of CRT displays.
To some extent GNOME seems to be doing this. I haven’t used Windows in too many years to count. But as I recall it, the GNOME of today bears little resemblance to it. Keyboard focused, minimalistic, yet has a modern aesthetic and it is multi-monitor ready.
It would be good if there were more DEs that were courageous or experimentative enough to follow suit and break with Windows and MacOS UIs. Do something that’s different. Something that’s neither GNOME nor those things. That would be the original Mac philosophy.
I guess nowadays KDE is the only one that comes close, GNOME doesn't really know what they want to be and everyone else never cared about full stack experience.
The way pixels are rendered is a tiny part of the OS experience.
HelloSystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897 - Oct 2021 (39 comments)
Hello system, a FreeBSD-based OS designed to resemble Mac - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040 - Feb 2021 (267 comments)
Hello: Let’s make a FreeBSD for “mere mortals” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25112820 - Nov 2020 (1 comment)
"Because we want to run apps from unidentified developers that need no blessing by the operating system vendor"
but I also don't want that cool calculator application I just downloaded have access to the network, my webcam or microphone, my photos, email, or really any files outside of the ones in its directory.
I do have nostalgia for the way computers used to be, but there have been a lot of OS improvements since then that I don't want to give up.
The extent of moddability and control afforded by Mac OS 9 extensions with their ability to patch the OS itself in memory as they pleased was incredible, but it was ridiculously insecure and unstable which makes that model untenable today. Applications having full access to everything is no different.
I think that the way to do should be capability-based security with proxy capabilities, and that can be controlled directly by end users. (The existing ways (user accounts, existing sandboxing systems, etc) have many problems, in my opinion)
However, I think this HelloSystem is based on BSD so it would use POSIX. (EDIT: Now I found apparently FreeBSD has a capability mode too, so maybe it can use capabilities.)
Before then, I spent a considerable amount of my teenage days trying to make various Linux distributions look like OS X.
This doesn't really feel much more than what I did back then.
The reason we prefer a Mac is because the whole ecosystem works the same way, follows the same guidelines and, most importantly in recent years: because if you bought yourself into the Apple ecosystem, it just works together.
One example which HelloSystem will probably never be able to do: I open an authenticator app on my iPhone, tap the code and then just hit Cmd-V on the Mac. I do this several times a day. _This_ is the Mac experience's edge today, not the rounded corners and whatnot.
https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/developer/application-bun...
The docs page have a lot of interesting technical details that the linked page either gloss over or do not touch. It's worth a look to see why this is seemingly more than a skin on FreeBSD.
Interesting use of the plural form of _operating systems_ here.
I love many of the UX-focused priorities, but a much larger % of their priorities such as Linux vs FreeBSD aren't high for me and don't seem end-user focused.
An interesting idea I had never thought to question was considering "App Stores" as package managers.
"Package managers for end-user applications: Those are aimed at "managing the system", whereas everything that is to be managed on our system can be managed in the file manager and/or other GUI elements. --> Use package managers to produce a system image, which is considered immutable for the end user (like on almost every embedded system/software appliance)"
https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-unwelc...
Good food for thought. Elsewhere they criticize App Stores for their commercial and centralized aspects. But I don't really see an issue with Ubuntu's App Store. It is just a GUI instead of only offering CLI, right?
Whenever I see something from pre-flat era either on macOS or iPhone, I want to vomit.
There's even some precedent, but it never really took off: http://etoileos.com/etoile/
"Qt on FreeBSD" simply isn't the same, even though it may have copied the rounding and color of the buttons. I get that GNUStep simply isn't there, and will never be, but this looks like three raccoons in a trench coat.
"Original Mac" this is not. "Original OSX", maybe.
I wouldn't call FreeBSD (or any UNIX(1971)-like system) modern.
A modern architecture would be something like Genode[0], a multi-server system built around the concept of capabilities.
Processes can enter "capability mode" where only open (or rather: active) file descriptors can be used. There used to be an alternative runtime for FreeBSD called CloudABI [1], with which native programs could be started in capability mode, but it was discontinued in favour of WASI [2] (server-side Webassembly) — which adopted CloudABI's libc API.
0: <https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/>
FreeBSD is a clone of UNIX, and all it takes is a single kernel bug for the system to break down as a whole. Yet, considering the kernel's size, it's not hard to extrapolate that there is far more than one bug.
This is not a very good architecture. In 2023, it is very far from the state of the art, and absolutely cannot be called modern.
OSX is still very far from modern.
Something to be said about the right amount of chrome in your UI to remind you "where you're at" instead of getting lost in the content.
I still want GarageBand and perhaps Processing / Glyph, but I prefer embedding those Mac OS X/XI apps in my GNU workflows. Rebooting to another OS wastes time and virtualization has performance penalty; neither is fun.
I liked the the UI/UX of David Gelernter's "Scopeware" layer, that seemed like it would be a nice alternative to either of those.
a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897
2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040
All the other stuff can come later. IMO it's a bit overly ambitious (I'd be happy to be wrong!) and I fear it dying prematurely.
"Wayland: Under development since a long time, it offers no clear advantage over Xorg while it makes things more complicated (e.g, breaks screen recording) --> Use Xorg instead, or (maybe even better) no X server at all but pure framebuffer (like *ELEC does for media centers). Also see https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... "
https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-unwelc...
Yet it copied low usability UI elements such as global menu bar and that big ass wasteful dock. What is the innovation here?