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Comment by danbmil99 | Hacker News Reader

And this is better than Debian, Ubuntu, Mint etc. because -- what?

It's usefulness is source level compatibility with Mac OS. It's a tool for understanding Mac OS, testing Mac components in a detached fashion, redistributing Mac software without proprietary baggage or running a pseudo Mac environment on commodity server hardware.

Even as a standalone OS, a comparison with other BSDs is far more appropriate.

That proprietary baggage is what makes Mac OS X worthwhile as an OS.

Without Objective-C and all the frameworks that make up the OS, it is no better than using a *BSD.

> Without Objective-C

GNUstep.

> it is no better than using a *BSD.

Actually it's quite likely to be worse. Is there any good reason Apple is using that Mach stuff other than momentum and having developers who know it well? IMO any given BSD project has a more coherent design than XNU.

GNUStep is almost dead project, it was being developed already before Apple bought NeXT, and it is still not there.

The way the web site gets updated, looks like a software project connected to a machine, without proper support for the latest Objective-C versions, who would bet on it for production code?

Every time I see them at FOSDEM I look forward to see better updates, but it always looks the same.

I used to use and develop with GNUstep (just small personal projects) for a good chunk of the 2000s decade, until I lost interest. A lot of the important stuff is there. AFAIK they have parity with 10.4 or so.

It's true that there isn't a lot of momentum behind the project. I suspect that's just a lack of people. I wonder if they'd be receptive if some folks just jumped in and implemented more of the missing stuff. I am guessing yes.

The spirit of my comment is: you can't say objc doesn't exist outside of Apple. It's there in some form. It might even more "there" if people start using and developing it. We as individuals have the power to do that. Dismissing it very early strikes me as defeatist.

> you can't say objc doesn't exist outside of Apple

Sure, it exists in a form as if we were in 2005, away from all Objective-C 2.x goodies, more recent frameworks and tooling.

... which is not nothing. These developments come from somewhere, I don't understand why one would bash GNUstep because it's not a unicorn.

I am not bashing it, just stating the hard reality that the project is stagnated.

A lot of people would disagree with you, obviously. That's a purely subjective statement disguised as objective analysis. I'm not saying I disagree with you, but it's a complex enough issue to merit a heck of a lot more thought and research than you have seemingly put into it.

Yes, I was wondering about using it for testing some (very low level) osx stuff for automated testing in a vm. But thats about the only use I can think of...

Hell if you could somehow pry out OS X components compatible with the build, it might run a basic OS X clone. There'd probably be a lot of hwid spoofing involved though.

It doesn't quite have to be, from a user perspective. This is the kind of hacking project where just making it work well (boot + drivers + services) is a fun challenge. Further, it's a sandbox where you can play with some of the neat ideas that are at the heart of Darwin, like XNU.

BSD-licensed, not GPL? For some people that's important.

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