Desktop Classic System is an operating system based on Debian and a customized version of the MATE Desktop Environment that hearkens back to, but is not a direct copy of, the classic Mac OS. DCS seeks to provide and sometimes even improve upon the conceptual simplicity offered by the old Macintosh.
↫ Desktop Classic System website
I’m usually not particularly interested in reporting on random Linux distributions, but any one of them that defaults to a proper spatial file manager is one that I will highlight. I’m not entirely sure if this is just a supported feature of MATE’s file manager, or something more custom – there are some patches to Caja here, as mentioned – but spatial file managers are a dying breed and that’s a shame. They’re hard to implement and even harder to get right, which is probably why few people take on the challenge.
Other than that, DCS isn’t particularly revolutionary or special, but I’d love for more Linux distributions to look back at what we’ve lost, and see if we can bring those things back.
Looks like gnome 1 on top of nautilus (the best version imho).
Needs a global menu.
Doesn’t look too much like classic Mac OS. And besides that, I passionately hate spacial file managers (the first thing I do on a new Haiku install is switch Tracker to non-spacial mode). If I want the Mac OS classic feeling from time to time I start up my QEMU vm with 9.2 installed.
If this works, it might be the only way I’d use MATE.
Looks really great. I couldn’t get it to boot for now (might be EFI only)
For me, the file manager is a whole lot less interesting than the package management:
“Select AppManager from the Menu and enter a search term (such as “web browser” or “word processor”) to find what you need, then simply click “Install Application” to place it in the Menu. If you want to uninstall it, drag and drop the application from the Menu onto AppManager.”
This sounds a lot like what folks were trying with ROX desktop like 20 years ago.
I definitely lost efficiency when I moved away from MacOS Classic Finder spacial file manger. With that said, I am not sure if bringing it back would matter at this day and age. I have so much more screen space than I had back when I ran dual 1024 monitors on classic MacOS, and I have so many more files that I manage which also get added and removed by other people.
Secondly, anytime someone talks about recreating the ease of use of classic MacOS by making it ‘look like’ classic macOS or adding some of its feature, I realize they don’t fully understand why classic MacOS was so great. It was the excelent consistency that there was between every application GUI, near universal drag and drop, and interoperability between apps that made it efficient. There were only a few/rare irritating Mac apps like “Kais Photo Goo” that didn’t use standard MacOS frameworks. Windows had so many more various frameworks and compiler systems plus DOS stuff mixed in plus crapwhere, and was far behind in GUI consistency. On top of that, much of the ease of use was that it just worked. Windows supported so much more hardware (including lots of budget crap). I spent half of every computer game night, fixing my friends windows computers network, sound drivers and updates so they could join our Macs on the ethernet network to play Starcraft and quake 2.
When your extensions had a conflict, it was quite painful…
Wait, what?! a GTK2 build of modern tech. yeah how do i contribute and where is the fund page?
I can only imagine the beauty of “slickness” by “therob” that we lost when gtk3/4 came along.