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  • Hacker News
  • Would be nice to have a screenshot in the overview page
    by masijo
  • > Developers can port existing Cocoa applications with minimal changes.

    I wonder how big the actual gap between close to Cocoa App compatibility and full app compatibility is? Being able to run MacOS apps natively would unlock a huge barrier to adoption here.

    by tcdent
  • You're using open-source Apple code (Darwin) and aiming for Cocoa API compatibility. How are you handling the legal side? Apple's APIs and frameworks are proprietary. Are you reimplementing them from scratch, or using something like GNUstep?
    by jamesforestwest
  • Seems at least one of the same developers works on both PureDarwin and ravynOS: https://www.puredarwin.org/news/The-Road-to-20-5-0.html (This is the first time I've heard of the latter.)
    by jeandrek
  • from the faq: > Is this... legally sketchy? No. Consider projects like ReactOS, a from-scratch effort to create an OS compatible with Microsoft Windows, GNUstep, which provides an open implementation of Cocoa APIs and other things, or Darling, a compatibility layer for running Darwin (macOS) binaries on Linux. ravynOS is similar and stands on the shoulders of many such projects.

    as far as i understand it, most companies don’t bother sending cease and desists to projects you’ve never heard of. the fact that the aforementioned projects have avoided the banhammer of Apple should not be an indication that a successful MacOS clone would receive the same treatment.

    but on the other hand, maybe that’s a champagne problem. if you can make a macos clone good enough to get the attention of Apple, you’ve already done something incredible.

    by mcdow
  • I think any desktop operating systems has to present itself with at least a single screenshot. Why not one in the entire page?
    by pmkary
  • Related. Others?

    New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45997212 - Nov 2025 (165 comments)

    RavynOS Finesse of macOS. Freedom of FreeBSD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485596 - Dec 2023 (176 comments)

    RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32492514 - Aug 2022 (366 comments)

    by dang
  • Maybe someone more familiar with operating systems kernels can answer this: Is Darwin really all the exiting? It is different from both the BSD kernels and Linux, but less so than Windows. Other than the ability to run macOS applications (assuming you can clone the libraries and APIs from macOS) is there some benefit of Darwin that I'm not seeing?
    by mrweasel

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