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  • Hacker News
  • Everyone gets to name their projects for their own reasons. If the pitch is basically an “alternate apple” macOS, I would have chosen one of the other other (alternate) apple varieties as the root of my OS. Missed opportunity I guess.
    by travisgriggs
  • Real apple-people would'nt consider this anyways. Open source geeks is were they can get traction. Seems like there is plenty of us that would like fbsd quality and vertical integration to the desktop level. There is effort but no breakthroughs.
    by laxd
  • Good luck! There are many attempts at doing something similar. We can't really see anything to judge it by, yet.
    by soupbowl
  • I'm sort of surprised that development is still on X86 instead of moving over to ARM, it looks like the only builds for ARM are for raspberry pi - I know about Asahi but I would have thought that these darwin-based projects would have a leg up on booting even the latest hardware, is Apple not updating darwin anymore?
    by itsrobreally
  • Here's macOS 26.5's XNU: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/tree/ac9718fb... Could just be what the devs have available, if they're really already going to the trouble to target RPi?
    by jeandrek
  • Kernel dev here (my own project):

    ARM is great. Love it. There are tons of chips that all do things differently, much more so than x86. Plus the booting mechanisms are a PITA to figure out, debugging is tricky, etc - and that's a single target. x86 isn't particularly elegant given its years of cruft and questionable design decisions but at least it's quasi-consistent (yes, lots of "well actually" possible; I'm speaking broadly).

    The ISA on ARM is better, IMO, than x86 but the surrounding ecosystem is hellishly fragmented. Just my $0.02. makes it difficult for OSdevers to find an 'in' to a wider ARM audience. rpi is a great entry point.

    by junon
  • Why using Discord for comms? Is there anyone who hasn't hit the max 100 "servers" years ago? I've been [lightly] using Discord since 2015 - I'm at the point where I just simply won't even consider trying to narrow down which "server" I can leave so as to join a new one, unless it's something pretty important to make it worth that time sink.
    by amatecha
  • 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
  • First, this will at best be source compatible.

    And if it ever reaches a usable state, I assume it will far behind Apple's current systems.

    by steve1977
  • 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
  • Looking (briefly) at the source code, it looks like they are at least partially using source code from Cocotron

    https://cocotron.org/

    by steve1977
  • 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
  • Good. Unfortunately Hackintosh people never put weight behind Pure Darwin. A missed opportunity.
    by fithisux
  • The text gives the impression that PureDarwin has been Clauded
    by steve1977
  • 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
  • Microsoft definitely know about ReactOS.
    by hnlmorg
  • It's safe, worked from previously apple owned darwin oss, opendarwin and mklinux, also apple provided mostly of base OS under OSS license/APSL.
    by liamgm
  • I think the better example is actually GNU, which endured several challenges as a clean room implementation of unix. I think this is legally sound, but IANAL.
    by jppittma
  • I think the core of this is google vs oracle case. I think they'll be in the clear unless they hit some specific (design?) patents.
    by IsTom
  • Wine and Proton are more popular than all of these examples combined and even have corporate sponsors, yet Microsoft hasn’t tried to stop them.
    by drdexebtjl
  • 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
  • And now that I have walked over the whole website: Why not a single screenshot anywhere?
    by pmkary
  • My bet is that is heavily vibe coded abandonware.

    I’m super excited about any open source OS there is, but in all honesty, I see very little value for a desktop system like that. Linux is plenty good and apps ecosystem is slowly coming into a really great state. I’d love to see FreeBSD being there too, and basically you need nothing different from that.

    by wltr
  • 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
  • I don't think it's all that exciting. The hybrid BSD/mach personalities is somewhat interesting, as are some of the available mach machineries.

    It's been a stable foundation for several of the most successful operating systems in history though

    by jabedude
  • Most kernels are kind of the same really. Some have slightly fancier inter-process communication. Leading to my all-time favorite YouTube video, an explainer on Android IPC cut like a spy thriller. I'm not even joking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb4UoqXPEtI
    by phendrenad2
  • IMO the Mach virtual memory API is much nicer than the Linux one.
    by panic
  • Just to clarify, did you mean ‘exciting’ by

    > Is Darwin really all the exiting?

    I’ve tried to reread your question, and couldn’t get the sense, before I thought maybe that’s an autocorrection / misprint.

    by wltr