I believe that “my favorite OS, frozen in time” has substantial demand (which will only increase as the big commercial OSes continue to enshittify) and it’s surprising that there aren’t more attempts to capitalize on that.
I believe that “my favorite OS, frozen in time” has substantial demand (which will only increase as the big commercial OSes continue to enshittify) and it’s surprising that there aren’t more attempts to capitalize on that.
A high-quality replica takes tremendous effort and time, but it’s not really financially viable.
I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
Oh, and I’d be super happy to pay for such a replica too! For example, $99 a year for a Mac OS X Jaguar to Tiger era skin/theme/desktop environment.
KDE, GNOME, etc spend a lot of resources on new features and overhauls to enable new features. A fixed-feature replica project by comparison would eventually achieve a “finished” state, with resources instead going towards optimizations, bug fixes, code correctness, etc which are overall less demanding and make unavoidable tech migrations (e.g. X11 → Wayland) less of a pain since the project won’t be mired in tech debt.