Airyx is a new open-source desktop operating system that aims to provide a similar experience and compatibility with macOS on x86-64 systems. It builds on the solid foundations of FreeBSD, existing open source packages in the same space, and new code to fill the gaps. Airyx aims to feel sleek, stable, familiar and intuitive, handle your daily tasks, and provide as much compatibility as possible with the commercial OS that inspired it.
An ambitious but interesting effort, that seems to align quite well with helloSystem.
Myself I feel the designers of Windows and MacOS X got a lot right in terms of concepts and technical thinking behind what ultimately shipped. I tend not to see this in Linux and the BSD’s and their derivatives. If there is anything which bothers me about Windows and OS X replacements like Linux Mint and helloSystem is the basic shape of a fairly decent idea copied then retrofitted to something which even Linux officiandos have problems with. Linux hasn’t had its VMS or NextStep moment like Microsoft and Apple did. Still, the idea of making an OS accessible and a well rounded design is a good thing and can lead places.
I’d like to see something that wasn’t a half-arsed re-implementation of a mainframe OS. BSD, Linux, Windows and MacOS are all 1960s Big Iron OSes under the hood.
IMO BeOS was about the only really interesting OS to get anywhere in the last 30 years. It’s successor Haiku has largely failed due to wanting backward compatibility and a lack of modern applications.
Please explain to me how BeOS isn’t a “Big Iron OS under the hood”? Oh why they are bad? BeOS may be a more modern OS, but I don’t see how the OS design isn’t also suitable for big iron.
Short answer: BeOS was not designed to be a server OS, it was designed to be a workstation OS.
Long answer: VMS and BSD were both designed to be Server OS that the users shelled in to from a terminal.
The Windows connection is a stretch, because the VMS userland bears little resemblance to the Windows Win32 API, and I believe this always comes from the fact that a VMS guy worked on NT.
(But by that token, Haiku is BeOS and so if PalmOS Cobalt, much of Android and much of Fuchsia. The designer of the NewOS kernel and one of the Fuchsia kernel developers is Travis Geiselbrecht, who was a Be engineer, Cobalt was written by a lot of ex Be engineers and used the Binder which originated in post R5.03 BeOS and BeIA, and there is sooo much BeOS style Api in Android, it isn;t even funny (Loopers, Lockers, Messengers, the Intent system is also straight up the BeOS BMessage in design.)
MacOS is a straight up BSD with a lot of userland and kernel changes and such like. BSD, as you remember, is a Server OS.
Linux was originally a simple little OS, but it is now used where ever it can be shoehorned in to, and Server is a BIG part of that, and always was from the very start (because it was based on Unix, and Unix was a Server oriented OS standard.)
BeOS was designed to run on a BeBox, It was never a server OS, and is actually pretty bad an being a server OS. People tried to use it to run servers, and it fails quite spectacularly on all released versions. The BONE network stack somewhat improved this, but it was still never designed for big iron servers.
Also bear in mind – I am sitting next to two working BeOS machines as I type this. So, it’s not like I am talking about long distant memories, I use BeOS quite a bit still for tinkering around.
I also just wrote out a big list of reasons BeOS wasn’t a server OS, but I think my edit timed out… so in summary:
1) No good networking stack
2) The OS was single user.
3) No suitable first party networking servers (FTP and TELNET were single user, the built in Webserver was extremely basic and the third party alternatives had to deal with the terrible net stack and single user OS)
4) No viable file sharing/serving (WON is not “decent” and all of the third party options were somewhat basic and only half worked because of the net stack.)
BeOS probably could have scaled up, but it would have needed a much better net stack (maybe BONE.. who knows) and a lot more services before it was viable as a Server OS. Oh, and multi user support.
Quote: “An ambitious but interesting effort, that seems to align quite well with helloSystem.”
Wel… if you read the info in their release page it reads “0.2.2 is the first build of Airyx based on the helloSystem components and FuryBSD LiveCD installer.” So, not that it “seems to align” but it “is based on” helloSystem.
Airyx seems so want more MacOs compatibility with Cocoa support
HelloSystem is more trying to have the same look an feel
If it has SOME compatibility, that’s nice. But, they should focus on making a good OS, not compatibility with an established OS…that’s a total moving target…
This sort of reminds me of Cocotron. That was a project to bring the Mac UI and Cocoa apps compilation to be cross platform. As you probably haven’t heard of it, you know how that went.
The thing with any OS trying to be macOS source compatible…. the ground is changing. Swift is the new hotness. Fairly soon, a lot of the available open source apps will start using Swift (they already do) and at that point, you would also need to support all the Swift APIs, which are different from the Cocoa ones. That sounds hard. That sounds like this is, maybe 5 years too late to get an easy ride.