Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not affiliated with ravynOS, but I've been periodically following the project for a few years.

The main page (https://ravynos.com/) expresses the philosophy of ravynOS:

"We love macOS, but we’re not a fan of the ever-closing hardware and ecosystem. So, we are creating ravynOS — an OS aimed to provide the finesse of macOS with the freedom of FreeBSD."

rayvnOS seems to be designed for people who love macOS, particularly its interface, its UI guidelines, and its ecosystem of applications, but who do not like the direction that Apple has moved toward under Tim Cook (soldered RAM, limited and inflexible hardware choices, notarization, iOS-influenced interface changes, increased pushiness with advertising Apple's subscription services, etc.) and who would be unhappy with either Windows or the Linux desktop.

Speaking for myself, I used to daily-drive Macs from 2006 through 2021, but I now daily-drive PCs running Windows due primarily to the lack of upgradable RAM in ARM Macs. I'm not a big fan of Windows, but I need some proprietary software packages such as Microsoft Office. This makes switching to desktop Linux difficult.

It would be awesome using what is essentially a community-driven clone of macOS, where I could continue using a Mac-like operating system without needing to worry about Apple's future directions.

On the Unix side of things, I believe the decision to base ravynOS on FreeBSD rather than on Linux may make migrating from macOS to ravynOS easier, since macOS is based on a hybrid Mach/BSD kernel, and since many of the command-line tools that ship with macOS are from the BSDs. This is known as Darwin. It's not that a Mac clone can't be built on top of Linux, but FreeBSD is closer to Darwin than Linux is.

> soldered RAM

Hold on a minute.

It's not "soldered". It's integrated with the SoC. The benefit is memory latency and bandwidth.

If you know Framework, their entire mission is to build upgradeable laptops, and they keep delivering. Now they also wanted to build an incredibly powerful, but small and quiet desktop. They went directly to AMD, asked their engineers to make the memory upgradeable. AMD worked really hard and said not possible, not unless you want all of these cores to sit idle.

https://frame.work/blog/framework-desktop-deep-dive-ryzen-ai...

The world has moved on. Just as you no longer have discrete cache chips or discrete FPUs, you can't do discrete memory anymore - unless you don't need that level of performance, in which case CAMM is still an excellent choice.

But that's not what Apple does. M1 redefined the low-end. It will remain a great choice in 5 years, even when macOS kills it off - Asahi remains very decent.

> The world has moved on

we're talking about laptops, right?

no, they are talking about high performance desktops, mostly. They link to the Framework desktop, which has 256 GB/s memory bandwith. For comparison, the Apple Mac Pro has 800 GB/s memory bandwidth. Neither manufacturer is able to achieve these speeds using socketed memory.

> no, they are talking about high performance desktops

then i don't really get the "world has moved on"-claim. in my bubble socketed RAM is still the way to-go, be it for gaming or graphics work. of course Apple-user will use a Mac Pro, but saying that the world has moved on when it's about high-performance, deluxe edge-cases is a bit hyperbolic.

but maybe my POV is very outdated or whatever, not sure.

I think, but am not totally positive, this is primarily a concern for local LLM hardware. There are probably other niches, but I don't it's something most people need or would noticeably benefit from.

I agree and I do not agree. I still sometimes use a Thinkpad X230, and wait- a G4 PowerBook, and they are fine machines for many tasks. Yet even those have soldered CPUs, simply because of design constraints.

You don't need to have to train models. You want to play a game like Factorio, that, of all things, is bottlenecked on memory bandwidth - you must update each entity in a huge world on every tick, at 60 UPS, and yes, the game is insanely well optimized (check the dev blog). You don't have to play Factorio, but you also technically don't need DMA.

So somehow running MacOS in 2025 on hot, loud, horrible battery life x86 based computers is a good thing?

Not to mention x86 Mac apps are not long for this world. I can’t think of a single application I would miss moving from Macs to Windows. It’s more about the hardware and the integration with the rest of my Apple devices.

Notes and Reminders are extremely good at what they do, and the synchronization with their iOS equivalents is flawless from what I can tell… and fat chance you get to uproot such a thing to a non-Apple OS.

Third party apps other than for media editing seem to be rare, I think Apple has gobbled or rug pulled much of its independent software vendor ecosystem.

Apple Mail also is in my eyes the only generic mail client out there that really “gets it”.

Thunderbird has always felt clunky in comparison and the recent redesign just made it a different kind of clunky. Everything else is either too minimal (Geary), tries to clone old style Outlook (Evolution), or is tied to/favors a particular provider (Gmail, Outlook, etc).

This. I use Linux as my primary OS (with KDE) and my main complaint, by far, is the email/calendar situation. Mail.app simultaneously just works and gets out of my way, and I haven't seen a Linux email client come close to replicating that.

Every few years I convince myself I'll create a better email client for Linux, and I always start the project enthusiastically and stop soon after, when I get just far enough to be reminded of how complicated email is. Maybe someday I'll take a sabatical and actually do it...

> I always start the project enthusiastically and stop soon after, when I get just far enough to be reminded of how complicated email is.

What are some of the things you’re thinking of?

Is there a reason you cannot clone an existing client with technically solid mail handling and build a new UI on top of it?

Come to think of it, it just dawned on me that most of the proprietary Mac programs I’ve used on Mac OS X/macOS (as opposed to the classic Mac OS) are either from Apple (Preview.app, Dictionary.app, iPhoto/Photos, iTunes/Apple Music, Keynote, iMovie, GarageBand), Microsoft (Office, Teams), or are Electron apps like Zoom and Slack. The only non-Microsoft, non-Electron third-party proprietary applications I’ve used on my Macs in the past 19 years are from the Omni Group, particularly OmniOutliner (which came bundled with my 2006 MacBook) and OmniGraffle.

It seems that what I miss the most about using a Mac whenever I’m on Windows or Linux is Apple’s bundled apps, not necessarily third-party Mac apps since I never used them much to begin with. Makes me think harder.

That’s what I was implying when I said the integration.

As far as indie apps, BBEdit will survive the heat death of the universe and has made it through every Apple transition since at least System 7 in 1992.

Funny enough, I’ve only had one Apple computer during each era - an Apple //e (65C02), a Mac LC II (68K), A PowerMac 6100/60 (classic Mac PPC), Mac Mini G4 (OS X PPC), a Core Dúo Mac Mini (x86) and now a MacBook M2 Air.

I was never really that interested in x86 Macs and I just bought cheso Windows PCs that I really didn’t use that much outside of work except web browsing and back in the day iTunes.

> BBEdit will survive the heat death of the universe

With GraphicConverter by its side.

This description really resonates with me, so I guess I’m a potential user.

I’ve been running macOS most of my life. In college I ran Linux on my laptops, but I switched back to macOS as the user experience was better - I could spend far less time messing with things and instead rely on system defaults and first party apps.

Year by year though I feel more like I don’t own my computer. I’ve tried switching back to Linux, but I always give up because despite the freedom, it starts feeling like a chore. Even Asahi Linux on macOS hardware I couldn’t get into.

The rayvnOS vision is something I could get behind. A fully packaged, macOS-like user experience, where the default settings are good and things work out of the box. I’d LOVE to have that as on option.

Linux compatibility or even macOS binary compatibility matters less to me than, say, an out of the box Time Machine like backup tool based on ZFS snapshots. So FreeBSD makes sense from that perspective.

I guess drivers are important, which is a good reason for choosing FreeBSD :)

It's a shame that OpenDarwin didn't continue. PureDarwin seems to exist, but progress is understandably slow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system

https://www.puredarwin.org/#beta

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