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ravynos
A BSD-based OS project that aims to provide source and binary compatibility with macOS® and a similar user experience.
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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My feelings about Mac OS X are similar to the author's. I switched from a Windows XP/FreeBSD dual boot configuration to Mac OS X Tiger back in 2006 when I bought my first modern Mac, a Core Duo MacBook. I've remained a Mac OS X user from Tiger all the way to Mojave. Mac OS X in the 2000s to me was heads-and-shoulders better than the competition. It had a well-designed user interface, and most applications conformed to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. It also provided me a Unix shell whenever I needed it. In my opinion Mac OS X peaked at Snow Leopard; in fact, I'd be comfortable using Snow Leopard (or even Tiger) as my daily driver today if it supported current hardware and if there were a modern web browser for it. It was a nice marriage of NeXT technology and an updated version of the venerable Macintosh user interface. It felt much more pleasant than Windows of the era (though I admit I liked Windows 7), and the desktop environments for Linux and the BSDs simply didn't compare.
Then came the Tim Cook era, and with it came the gradual locking down of the Mac, both in terms of hardware (for example, the soldering of formerly upgradable components such as RAM and storage) and software (for example, notarization). The user interface also gradually started adopting more iOS influences, which I think take away from the desktop experience. Due to my disappointment with Apple's direction (especially since roughly 2016), I opted not to upgrade my aging 2013 MacBook Air and 2013 Mac Pro with new Macs, instead switching to a Microsoft Surface Pro (running Windows 10) and a custom Ryzen 3900X build (which runs both Windows 10 and FreeBSD). I miss macOS, but I enjoy the openness of PCs, and I enjoy the flexibility of Windows and FreeBSD.
I am keeping an eye on two very interesting projects that attempt to replicate the spirit of early Mac OS X: helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) and airyxOS (https://airyx.org/). Both projects are based on a FreeBSD foundation, but the major difference between the projects is airyxOS is a much more ambitious attempt to reimplement macOS's infrastructure (even going as far as to aim for supporting "trivial" Cocoa applications), while helloSystem has different (Qt) underpinnings, with an emphasis on replicating the Mac OS X look-and-feel and promoting adherence to the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. If these projects become successful, this will provide people who desire the early Mac OS X experience modern systems that will maintain that experience.
Thanks, note that it's all very much built on the shoulders of giants!
For example, the "Chromium Legacy Downloader" just adds automatic updates (and some tweaks) to to an existing project. Chromium Legacy itself—a branch of Chromium kept in sync with upstream which retains support for legacy OS X—is maintained by a Japanese developer I don't know much about. https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy.
Other downloads, like the Dolphin emulator, are basically just source recompiles, which use MacPorts tooling to support legacy OS X. MacPorts has incredible legacy support.
I'm the author, and I agree, it's not really possible for Cocoa developers to continue supporting old versions of macOS. The projects on my page have the advantage of only targeting old OS X releases, and not modern ones.
However, what really helps me is developers who document when support for an old OS was dropped, and continue to make older compatible versions of their software available for download and purchase. I have spent countless hours digging through the Internet Archive, doing a manual bisect to find the last compatible version of some app. Sometimes only to realize at the end that this version won't work with new license keys.
Worst of all are apps that have auto-update mechanisms I can't disable, which automatically replace my old working copy with a new version that crashes on launch. Please, don't do this!
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Apps designed to be cross-platform are a different story. I think it's more than a little annoying that Google Chrome doesn't support OS X 10.10 and older, when the set of changes needed to support back to 10.7 is really quite minuscule, relative to the size of the Chromium codebase: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/compare/main...blueboxd...
If a single developer working in his free time is able to maintain backwards compatibility, the full force of Google should be able to do it too. Not just for weird people like me who are strangely emotionally attached to old versions of OS X, but for people in Guatemala who literally can't afford to upgrade their hardware!
Modern Hackintoshes have moved to using OpenCore as the bootloader, which is open source: https://github.com/acidanthera/OpenCorePkg
The older standard was Clover, also open source: https://github.com/CloverHackyColor/CloverBootloader
Modern Hackintoshes have moved to using OpenCore as the bootloader, which is open source: https://github.com/acidanthera/OpenCorePkg
The older standard was Clover, also open source: https://github.com/CloverHackyColor/CloverBootloader
SIMBL lives on mostly thanks to w0lfschild, see: https://github.com/w0lfschild/MacForgeFramework. This repo hasn't been updated since 2018; I'm not entirely clear whether the most recent versions of MacForge is still based on SIMBL.
The SIMBL on my website uses an unmodified SIMBLAgent binary taken from an older version of w0lfchild's mySIMBL (https://github.com/w0lfschild/mySIMBL). However, I recompiled his SIMBL.osax with 32-bit support added back in, since I use a lot of 32-bit apps: https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/MacForgeFramework
Quick note that I don't really understand this code, I can just tell you that it works, at least on Mavericks.
SIMBL lives on mostly thanks to w0lfschild, see: https://github.com/w0lfschild/MacForgeFramework. This repo hasn't been updated since 2018; I'm not entirely clear whether the most recent versions of MacForge is still based on SIMBL.
The SIMBL on my website uses an unmodified SIMBLAgent binary taken from an older version of w0lfchild's mySIMBL (https://github.com/w0lfschild/mySIMBL). However, I recompiled his SIMBL.osax with 32-bit support added back in, since I use a lot of 32-bit apps: https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/MacForgeFramework
Quick note that I don't really understand this code, I can just tell you that it works, at least on Mavericks.
SIMBL lives on mostly thanks to w0lfschild, see: https://github.com/w0lfschild/MacForgeFramework. This repo hasn't been updated since 2018; I'm not entirely clear whether the most recent versions of MacForge is still based on SIMBL.
The SIMBL on my website uses an unmodified SIMBLAgent binary taken from an older version of w0lfchild's mySIMBL (https://github.com/w0lfschild/mySIMBL). However, I recompiled his SIMBL.osax with 32-bit support added back in, since I use a lot of 32-bit apps: https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/MacForgeFramework
Quick note that I don't really understand this code, I can just tell you that it works, at least on Mavericks.
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Is there any completely open source chromium based web browser that is NOT riddled with google, microsoft, nft/crypto badware but also regularly maintained and audited? Like Firefox but Chromium?