RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD
ravynos.com
ravynos.com
I've personally experimented with replicating UIs using just a "device" object to a graphical API, so I know very well that it is possible. What prevents this project from just... going out and actually doing what they're trying to achieve? Take high resolution screenshots, carefully understand what's going on, and re-implement it.
The hardest part would probably be compositing (if they do it from scratch), but even before getting there, there's so much wrong already. This really does not have the same finesse of MacOS, has anybody even looked at the screenshots picked by the developers??
* Awful typography (especially bold text)
* Ugly gray background in foreground window
* Windows 95-era buttons in the foreground window
* Weird left padding in the (ugly) dock
* Terminal window has window controls on the right for some reason, and they look like they're from Windows?
All that said, it's still in preview (v0.4pre4), and these things can all be corrected. But I think they'd do well to slap "early preview" all over the place so people don't write it off.
But before that, they clearly must be aware that... it's just bad (lightly put), yet it comes off very clearly that they're trying to copy[1] visual elements of Mac. So what does the author think finesse mean?
For my perspective, I'll quote the first definition I get on a Google search, "impressive delicacy and skill." We can argue that Mac does provide this (I believe it does, the experience is very opinionated (which also leads to stuff being intentional) and seamless across their devices, consistent (more than just the potential for consistency, which is what Windows provides), and so on, and so forth.
But, this is nothing like what we see in the current RavynOS. Nothing feels intentional. The advertising is misleading, and I don't think that it's something solvable in the future unless the person responsible for advertising and guaranteeing the presence of this "finesse" update their understanding of the word and clearly defines what that should mean in practice.
Update1: to add to my previous points, if my perception of the word "finesse" is correct, for something to have the "finesse of macOS," it wouldn't even have to look like it, but just achieve the same goal in it's own way (or Apple's way, that's "fine" but leaves a bad taste.)
[0] - https://ravynos.com/ "Finesse of macOS. [...]"
That’s what they appear to be doing, but they’re only about halfway there so far. It’s still just in beta, not even version 0.4 yet.
The level of polish that you are advocating seems completely premature to the current level of development.
This is not just a visual design shell. They are proposing a macOS mimic much more deeply at the OS level.
You can get insanely close with KDE, and KDE apps all follow a standard UI approach and the theming will transfer over. I'm pretty much convinced that the best DE is KDE for something full feature. If I had an OS with only the apps made for their respective Desktop Environments, KDE would be the winner for me, everything from games to code editors, browser(s?), and what have you.
I think this is an effort to create a skin, or graphics layer / window layer to FreeBSD that looks and feels like Apple.
But then it says the project uses the Mach kernel. Does that mean that they have a version of FreeBSD running on top of the Mach kernel? That sounds cool.
Are they creating a clone of Cocoa that will have the same interface as the original? Or is Cocoa a open sourced from Apple?
Near the top it reads:
""RavynOS aims to be compatible with macOS applications""
Ok well that sounds cool.
Then farther down:
""Trivial macOS and Darwin applications may run directly on ravynO""
I guess it can be a goal that is a long way off still. I dont know why they would bother with Linux compatibility. FreeBSD and Mac has to be the most important ones?
What I’d love to see would be a whole new desktop environment for macOS (homebrew has its warts but is a “good enough” package manager for my day to day needs)
The "Open" option should still be available for people who, for whatever reason, want to run an application directly from a DMG.
if you find yourself looking for faster routes to an end, MacOS almost always has several levels of shortcuts waiting for your muscle memory.
Not taking anything away from this project, it’s looks really interesting. But it’s definitely not a mom and pop friendly platform.
Besides, since when have app stores been difficult to use? Package management doesn’t have to be CLI based.
For people who are not "power users" then I suppose I can see the appeal. But the "it's our way or use something else" philosophy doesn't work for me. I will use something else (the problem is when you're forced into a system with that mindset). The computer is a tool, I am the master of the machine (especially as a programmer), and I can't stand feeling like there are barriers between me and how I want the system to behave. "Finesse" to me is the ability to install a completely different desktop environment if I so choose. To type "rm -rf /" as root and not have the machine question my command (very dangerous for the non power users I admit).
<https://ravynos.com/images/ravyn_0.4.0_pre_desktop.png>
- What the actual heck is that window border around the terminal
- Horizontal spacing on the fonts is too dense, the text rendering is absolutely awful - maybe it's just the font but I wouldn't suffer through reading a full paragraph
- The buttons in the installer dialog look like a cheap knockoff of Windows 95
- Different colors for window background, title bar, dock, but somehow the window background and menu bar are the same
- The 3 visible dock icons mix 3 different art styles, the fourth icon is an empty space?...
- Where's the shadows to tell stacked windows apart? Windows did this in the late 90s
<https://ravynos.com/images/firefox_global_menu.jpg>
- The padding of the window controls is all messed up, with different offsets on all 3 sides; no unified window/tab bar in the browser (even though Firefox under both X11 and Wayland can do it just fine); again different window frame and background colors
- Bright white window borders (absolute worst aspect of the Big Sur redesign), although I'll give them credit for going a notch below #ffffff
- Very poor way to show off the transparent menu bar (the choice of wallpaper + no blur), visually distracts from the contents of the menu bar itself; note that all macOS default wallpapers have a pretty uniform sky color across the top, so the transparent menu bar can be a bit less of a mess
Again, this is all fixable, but the real problem is that half of these things are trivially improved by changing the font, the color, or the padding. But it's this lack of attention to detail (and the fact that despite these glaring issues they've still decided to use these screenshots) that speaks about the project's commitment to details.
It's pretty cool that you've got AppImages or an ObjC compiler, but you're not allowed to use the word "finesse" and make these mistakes!
There was also a time when the iPhone looked like this - https://i.imgur.com/wwH2UoF.jpg
As for Rhapsody, that looked decent, it had a similar vibe to A/UX where it looks like Mac OS Classic but runs Unix.
Perhaps you are referring to Kodiak or Cheetah, but those were pretty GUI-consistent at that time. Granted, up to Panther it was just Aqua and getting it to work consistently and performant, but I don't think it was ever in the state that this RavynOS is. That's mostly because NeXTStep as a foundation already had an existing GUI that was consistent.
RavynOS is having a bad presentation because it looks like some sort of odd partially-done theme based on CDE/Motif.
I thought Rhapsody looked good.
95% of it is the fonts. Apple always does well with the fonts.
Yes, but you are straw-manning the argument. This is skankphone UI - a UI used by the technical team building back-end services and features for the original iPhone. The actual UI was being built in parallel, and obviously it never looked like that.
> I don't code but this looks awesome! Can I still help?
> Absolutely! There will be art, documentation, testing, UX and UI work, [...].
I read this and immediately think the project sees UX as "I can't write code ell oh ell". You need to treat a UX role the same way you treat a kernel hacker role - it's a specialist whose input you must respect, or be left to deal with the consequences.
Also design is super hard to modularize and split into small pieces. With code random anybody can come and build/fix a feature. Not possible with design. Its mostly big picture work where you need to have deep context and follow it to get desired consistency. For projects like OS gui that requires huge commitment (most likely full time).
But i think copying existing well made software can make this a lot easier. Just need to be very diligent about it and not ashamed (and its a lot less creative work).
Unlike Windows, MacOS has no problem ignoring backward compatibility. So Wine works be rewriting older APIs and Microsoft always works on backward compatibility, MacOS does not do that. It just works or it doesn't.
If x86, then some feasible but difficult approaches exist, such as a translation layer or providing own reverse-engineered APIs. It would be tremendously difficult to achieve practical usability beyond very limited cases. However, by the time it could be done, won't the x86 macOS target be entirely obsolete?
If the target is Apple Silicon, it makes even less sense. The instruction set is ARM + Apple's mods which are proprietary. Moreover, they keep iterating on that instruction set and making new software alongside it. What's to stop Apple from using a Rosetta approach to run their M2 code on M1? If they have a translation layer, they don't need backwards compatibility in the instruction set.
So reverse-engineering would be extraordinarily hard - like, beyond human capability for a small team with no insider leaks out of Apple. Can this project keep reverse-engineering the instructions fast enough as Apple iterates on the arch? Not in reality. x86 is hard but this is that, and a moving target (pun intended).
So... how?
EDIT: Upon looking into it more, it looks like they want to use x86 translation layer Darling + open-source APIs. This seems more like running (maybe) basic GUI applications compiled for Apple's x86 targets that do not rely too heavily on the Apple ecosystem's APIs. So more for fun than for robust day-to-day compatibility akin to Rosetta. So I guess then it doesn't matter that it's a dying target, as it's more of a theoretical thing?
The idea is nice, I don't want to dismiss it. I think attempting it could be a lot of fun. They're kind of brave to call it a project aim though, I don't think it's wise to set such expectations.
No you dont, RavynOS and HelloSystem are mediocre wrapper projects.
Put your efforts towards GNUStep, don’t run with it and making something pretty.
If GNUStep worked, it could be ran on Unix like systems people actually use like Ubuntu.
This project is going to fail with “finesse”.
But nobody big put any money or devs on GNUStep. Even Sun invested in Gnome (!), what did not made sense at the time because they had invested in OpenStep & the whole thing was Java friendly (I believe Java was a first class citizen in early releases of Mac OS X).
I always wondered if it might have been because there were some legal risks...
What was in it for Sun to invest in GNUStep? Jobs was always resistant towards supporting other platforms. So it’s clear OpenStep was the last attempt at making use of the dying Next line.
I could maybe imagine a sales pitch scenario like “port your Mac apps to Solaris”. But when OSX came around, Cocoa was steered more towards the consumer market, not workstations.
I'm saying that Sun needed an update to the old CDE and invested quite heavily in the development of Gnome to create their Java Desktop System [1] I believe it was a mistake for many reasons, nobody like JDS, the name itself was a lie and ultimately they just helped their competitor RedHat by turning GNOME into a serious project.
I believe Sun still had all the Lighthouse Design softwares that were made for NeXTSTEP [2] Jonathan Schwartz founded Lighthouse and actually joined Sun through the acquisition (!)
Anyway at that time the relationship between Sun & Apple had turned very bad & Steve Jobs threatened them when he saw the Looking Glass demo [2]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Desktop_System
[2] https://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/good-arti...
macOS is more than shiny traffic lights buttons on your windows, global menus, and dock.
It's also a clipboard that works everywhere and not like "oh you cannot do this because X11 this or wayland that", it's also human interface guidelines (the old ones, the new ones are unparseable shit) that make bloody sure that the OK/Cancel buttons appear where you expect them to appear.
It's also some bloody keyboard shortcuts that work everywhere the same and not every bloody app bringing in their own and their own little ways to configure them or none at all. Yeah chrome, I'm looking at you.
It's also that the most used system stuff can be configured pointy-clicky and that stuff that the system can figure out on its own is what it bloody figures out on its own, without me having to drop down to command line (although it is an avenue too, and command line and GUI must be in sync).
It's also that it's accessible out of the box. Try blindfolding yourself, inserting your installer usb stick, and installing your thing and using it successfully. Come on. OS X could do it since Leopard, I think, which was in... 2007?
In other words, macOS could abandon their Aqua looks and go for industrial NeXTStep looks, and still be ahead of almost everything else in terms of consistency, accessibility, and general lack of fuckness.
The ribbon had all the settings for the OS, and was always a click away. Finder worked out of the box. These days, copy-paste is hit or miss, and the window manager can’t be reliably controlled via the keyboard.
Also, even in first party apps, keyboard shortcuts are completely inconsistent. Command-0 no longer reliably restores the main window. In maps, Command-L doesn’t focus the location bar like it does in safari; it repositions the map to your GPS location.
Even the keyboard is a shitshow. Notes aggressively autocorrects technical terms to random words on the latest MacOS, but nothing else does, and I can’t find the second “turn off autocorrect” setting that it must be using instead of the OS-wide one (which is definitely disabled).
Current OS X’s UI and filesystem layout are a cruel parodies of OS 9. It’s like a bunch of Shoggoths or an army of slightly better LLMs tried to recreate OS 9, borg-style.
Apple mostly adds software features by acquiring stuff, storyboarding UIs, demoing a prototype to an exec, and then shipping it, so I guess that’s how it got so weird.
Anyway, I wouldn’t say the result has finesse.
But I will relent and acknowledge that your arguments ring very true. How do I get my Messages window back if I accentally close it? Very good point.
The ribbon though? I think your memory is optimistic. It was in my memory ugly, clunky, slow and had some, but few system settings. But I must admit that in my heart OS 7.1 was the high water mark of usability and I resented all subsequent innovations... which it sounds like you might be able to empathize with.
Just checked it: Cmd+N (New) will pop it right back. If you don't want the stupid new message, Cmd+0 will do the trick.
All those projects, hellosystem, this one, I guess I've seen one or two more before — all of them are just kind of missing the whole point.
I would say the current KDE Plasma is somewhat starting to approach any amount of finesse at all. Hope they continue, at least they've learned from the whole KDE4 kerfuffle.
I don't understand this.
Are you saying its hard to install Linux? Has this ever been true? Usually you smash the Next button. There is a partioning screen, but that is some serious changes you are going to make.
I don't care what OS religion you follow, I'm taking the blindfold off during partioning.
This is not about religion, man. This is about accessibility.
If you mean 99% of US computer users, maybe.
To be fair, if something is on Mac, it is usually on Linux. Windows is a bit different.
That's true only for CLI apps. My most frequently used GUI apps on Mac:
- MailMate
- Affinity Photo
- ACDSee Photo Studio
- NetNewsWire
- ApolloOne
- Textual
- Transmit
- iA Writer
None of them are available on Linux. Most of them are Mac-only (i.e. no Windows version either).
On the interface side the global menu is not only a mediocre UI when universally implemented its unlikely to be properly implemented in countless apps making impossible to make consistent.
The marketing page is a little more generous to this project than the actual screenshots though, lol.
We don't need a new OS, much less one trying to compete with Mac (lol, no chance).
What we need is for the popular ones to continuously improve.
Windows 11 is better than 10 and 7 and vista and xp... (yes I skipped 8)
Most people that work in tech use Mac or windows, some use linux but they are small yet mighty.
The project creator is actually very capable - what they’ve done so far is very impressive on a technical level. The project has an effective bus factor of 1, though: I’ve lurked in the Discord for the past year (since it was called Airyx) or so and plenty of people come in but don’t contribute much.
Unless that changes I’m not sure it’ll work out long term.
While a nice idea wouldn’t it would be more efficient to improve virtualization and have something akin to Parallel’s “seamless” mode?
CUDA is a big advantage for NVIDIA, but I don’t use it. Similarly, NVIDIA hardware tends to be a half a generation ahead. Whatever. The AMD drivers are open source, in kernel tree, and reliable over time.
Might as well try this, since is currently running linux mint.
You can just hear: can I run 'popular macOS application' on it? No.
The average user, for starters, doesn't use a computer (most consumer tasks are done on a phone), and won't know how to install a different OS even if they do.
Run FreeBSD on the server and use the macOS Terminal to connect to it over ssh.
And that is where the magic happens.
GNUstep has been trying to provide a useful open source alternative implementation of OPENSTEP for more than 20 years now I believe. I don’t see that happen to be honest.
So apparently it can run macOS apps? More or less. Cool. It'll be hard to find those compiled for intel though going forward. But we'll see.
I'm actually quite happy with KDE on FreeBSD but perhaps their compatibility work can also be applied to vanilla FreeBSD. The only thing I really miss from macOS is Pixelmator.
I think much less than less for most practical purposes.
Subjectively, I find both names terrible. There’s zero chance I’ll vocalise either to someone and they’ll know how to spell it. The current one in particular is bound to have people typing “ravenous”.
But the idea is interesting, and even though the screenshots don’t yet inspire confidence (the typeface is too thin, folder icons are too square, …) I wish the team the best of luck in making their vision come to light.
12 year old me would have given the name two thumbs up.
I'd guess it was probably intended, and that makes things worse.
I know - as someone else was commenting - that naming things is hard, but for something like this, finding a name that is easy to pronounce, and easy to spell, should be a high priority.
Off the top of my head, playing with the fact that it is an OS, it runs on a Mac, and is based on FreeBSD (where BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution [0]), a couple of quick suggestions:
- BerkeleyOS (let's honor Berkeley)
- FinOS (a play on finess - easy to spell?)
- SteveOS (obvious reference - might be disliked by many - but is it Jobs or Woz? Perhaps WozOS would be better?)
- BillOS or JoyOS (Bill Joy founded BSD in 1976)
- JordanOS (Jordan Hubbard coined the term FreeBSD)
etc.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
Maybe, but I genuinely would not be surprised if Woz held and enforced trademark rights on his name. It’s his brand - see Woz U.
I prefer to read it as an homage to Steve-O.
When making a recommendation in a social setting, there’s a tiny window to get the other person interested in whatever you’re suggesting they watch/play/try. If the name is hard to understand, difficult to remember, or they have to take out a phone to write it down, it’s causing friction that makes them less likely to follow through.
¹ A sign of good design.
This name is the same way. If someone searches for RavenOS there's another project named that[1]. If they don't see that, they will probably be redirected to RaveOS[2], see "ah cryptocurrency mining" and then back out. Finally, if they miss both of those, there is an Android ROM called Raven OS[3] they might also find. No matter their intention, if people can't find it easily after it being mentioned in conversation it will be harder to grow.
1. https://github.com/raven-os 2. https://raveos.com/ 3. https://techkaran.co.in/2022/02/20/official-android-12-raven...
I am not. I speak from vast experience of trying multiple approaches.
Maybe English is the first language wherever you live. That’s not the case for the majority of the world. Even if my friends and I have a good grasp of the English language, switching mid-sentence causes a delay in understanding. It’s not just “raven with a y instead of an e”¹ but “raven, as in <raven in my language>², but with a y³ instead of an e”, which is several transformations to do. I guarantee that would need to be repeated multiple times, with the other person having to take out their phone and asking questions in the midst of typing, and I’d still have to check and they’d have it wrong first time.
¹ And you’re ignoring the part of “then the letters O and S, without spaces”.
² Which itself causes complications, because most people will recognise “crow” as a translation but we don’t make a distinction for “raven” so it’s a word even people with an understanding on English may not recognise.
³ Which is a letter we don‘t use in any native word.
The project is clearly being built by someone that speaks English and is targeting English speakers. Notice their website and documentation is all in English?
That’s a straw man. It’s not what I said at all.
Definitely not. I'd just tell the raven os and let them google it. Google would find it anyway.
Which I know you didn't even try before writing this italics laden diatribe because the bigger issue is that the name is already taken (albeit abandoned).
Definitely yes. Again, speaking from experience. Yours may be different, but don’t discount mine.
> I'd just tell the raven os and let them google it.
You missed the point entirely. With each step they have to do, you lose someone. The point is to reduce friction so there is a better chance the other person follows the recommendation. You don’t seem to care if the other person ends up searching for or finding the right thing, in which case you’re irrelevant to the point. The conversation is about people trying to maximise success of a recommendation being acted upon.
> Google would find it anyway.
You seem to be unaware, but Google shows different results to different people. All it shows me for several results is a movie called “ravenous”. To other people it shown multiple unrelated projects. At this point you’ve already lost several people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38487444
> Which I know you didn't even try
Yes, I did. And I didn’t get what I was looking for. I was expecting to get at least the web browser but even that did not show up. Please don’t assume you know what other people do or do not do.
> because the bigger issue is that the name is already taken
No, that is not an issue at all. No one made them choose “raven”, a name already in use by multiple projects. The solution to “this name already exists” isn’t “let’s replace a letter”.
> before writing this italics laden diatribe
You appear to be irrationally angry about this matter. It’s just an internet conversation about naming, it’s not worth raising your blood pressure for. I wish you a calm weekend.
Actually my impartial arbiter chatgpt says you're frustrated and annoyed. Always weird when people go straight into projection.
> Yes, I did. And I didn’t get what I was looking for. I was expecting to get at least the web browser but even that did not show up. Please don’t assume you know what other people do or do not do.
Please don't go on the internet and just tell lies.
> No, that is not an issue at all. No one made them choose “raven”, a name already in use by multiple projects. The solution to “this name already exists” isn’t “let’s replace a letter”.
This point was in agreement with you that their name was a poor choice. They should have chosen something else given this was already taken, for the exact same kind of thing no less. If you were less mad you might have realized that.
https://blog.ongig.com/diversity-and-inclusion/alleged-racis...
Meanwhile, OS X shares a little code with FreeBSD and was partially derived from it around 30 years ago. And the design philosophy of OS X is roughly the opposite of KDE. This situation has engendered at least half a dozen projects over the years, most of which are never really complete, to make a FreeBSD-first DE/UI that works like Mac. And if it can run Mac applications, so much the better!
Unfortunately, this is really hard. Cocoa is a moving target, and contra Wine, Apple is not as pertinaciously obsessed with backwards compatibility as Microsoft. Even much less ambitious (in my estimation) projects like enlightenment 17 and Wayland have struggled to replace major components of the desktop from the ground up.
That’s extremely difficult to reimplement, even if you lock compatibility to a particular macOS release.
The first release of FreeBSD was 30 years ago, OS X a little over 20.
I think it’s better when a team actually has designers working for them and comes up with their own real UI standards, (see Pop!_OS). IMO Apple’s UI design isn’t particularly good so it’s not like some holy grail we should copy and paste to Linux.
It may not be perfect, but it’s pretty darn good - as especially visible when comparing to this effort presented here. There’s a lot of detail and polish in MacOS interface design and UX people don’t realise until it’s missing.
However, as someone who has used GUIs from SunView/Irix Desktop/DECwindows to iPadOS/MacOS, via Windows 2.0/3.0/95/NT/etc. I am of the opinion that Apple is still the most consistent and easy to learn GUI. Even my 80-year old mother manages quite well with her Mac and iPhone.
Fixed that for you…
In my experience with some Linux distros goals alone don't necessarily work out, but the approach with trying to be compatible with actual Mac OS apps is already more notable than an Ubuntu reskin.
We have decades-old projects like GNOME, KDE and GNUstep and none of them come close to macOS in terms of „finesse“. Despite some of them having corporate backing.
So I just don’t see that happening for a project with a small team working on it in their free time. Far too ambitious, I‘ve seen projects like this fail too often in the last two decades.
Its fascinating to watch their members behave.
I feel both desktop producing companies that actually matter (can run all the productivity apps I need to do my job) have put this space on the back burner for cloud (Microsoft) or consumer electronics (Apple).
No year has ever been the year of the Linux Desktop and all the Desktop stuff for Linux is too Linux specific to work well portably on FreeBSD.
All I can say is I hope Apple makes iPads able to run full development suites because the desktop appears to be dying a slow death in general.
Or, maybe I’m wrong (would love to be) and things start getting better again.
Desktop seems to be converging to tablets. Which is just another way of saying, dumbing down of the UI and restricting what can be done, and offloading to the cloud.
Development suites will all move to containers in clouds just like VSCode does today.
I wish someone would just clone the headline features and app UIs (not the UI toolkit) but apply more attention to details like regression testing.
It's nice from far, but far from nice.
It does get features to sustain people’s interest in Apple hardware and services, which I guess is a lifestyle. But it’s an “Apple lifestyle” not a MacOS one.
A lot of commentators don’t really seem to appreciate how Apple is a consumer electronics manufacturer now, and still evaluate it like people did ca. 2003. Apple could shut down their desktop/notebook computing division entirely and still make a bundle. (They probably would lose phone market share, though.)
There are some workflows where that would be OK, but to do my job I have to be in and out of multiple windows constantly. I gave up on Gnome when I was trying to find one of 5 different terminal windows in the exploded window view and it was clear that they'd rather I cycled through them all one at a time instead of what I do on XFCE which is scroll up on the terminal icon in my dock, which quickly cycles through them and brings them to focus.
Personal preference for finesse will always differ so I tend to focus more on the usability aspect of it and accept any finesse that comes along for the ride as a kind of luxury experience lol
It’s designed around letting windows that are sized to fit content overlap and be at least partially visible if they’re relevant in any way. If there gets to be too many windows to manage (which happens in other desktop environments too; the usability of Windows alt-tab for instance scales incredibly badly as the number of open windows increases), that’s when you start tossing windows into another virtual desktop (“space” in Mac nomenclature), perhaps organizing windows into desktops based on task.
To opt out of fullscreen on the green button, hold down Option/Alt before clicking it. The behavior of the button in that situation is defined by the developer of the program you’re using though so YMMV. Maximizing windows is possible by double-clicking their titlebars, except in Electron apps that have replaced the system titlebar with a fake one that’s missing functionality.
As for GNOME, I’d say it compares to iPadOS much more closely than macOS due to missing or oversimplified functionality. It feels like it’s more oriented towards tablets and small laptops than desktops or even midsize-to-large laptops.
My opinion that MacOS wasn't "designed" for multitasking is heavily biased by how I multitask (as you mentioned it's the Win9x style, stemming from using Windows for my formative computing years) so I am not trying to discount MacOS at all - I use it for my music production because Core Audio is rock solid. But then, that's a relatively singular task and as a result I treat it as though its only job is running Ableton at the time.
Multitasking is also different now, since so much of what we do is in the browser anyway.