> A BSD-based OS project that aims to provide source and binary compatibility with macOS® and a similar user experience.
I am curious - what is the motivation for this project?
Is it to replicate macOS? - If yes, why?
Is it to provide application compatibility on a non-macOS? If yes, why a full OS? Why not take the route like Wine or other such layers that make compatibility possible? Also, is there such a need for running macOS apps on a non-macOS? Who is the target audience?
Would the energy be better spent in making Linux more stable or usable for the general public?
The goal for ravynOS is to be analogous to ReactOS. Much like ReactOS and WINE, ravynOS and Darling share a lot of Cocoa code.
For the problem of OpenStep implementations specifically, a bespoke software stack has the benefit of being able to put Mach messaging into the kernel, where it is much more performant.
They chose the FreeBSD kernel over Darwin for the sake of hardware compatibility (though of course NeXT Mach is one of the most widely-ported kernels of all time...)
There is also overlap with GNUstep, helloSystem, and other projects in the broader "open-source Mac/NeXT" space, though ravynOS (obviously) prefers BSD/MIT/Apache-style licensing over GNU-style licensing. Nevertheless, ravynOS currently uses the GNUstep libobjc2 runtime, a bit like how most of the Unix world used to depend on gcc.
They had chosen a FreeBSD base. The most recent forum posts suggest throwing away most of the FreeBSD base and going with Mach-o. That actually makes their goals of getting to macOS compatibility a bit simpler but it’s less interesting to me.
Indeed—I meant specifically the NeXT branch of the family tree because of this exhaustingly long list.
I would very much like to see that quad-fat OS4.2 CD; most NeXT releases around that era drop PA-RISC and are only tri-fat. I only have a 3.3 RISC (HPPA+SPARC) ISO for HPPA coverage.
The big ones you're missing are the Intel i860 (used as a graphics accelerator on NeXTdimension video processing boards—also the original target platform for the Win NT kernel) and the Motorola 88k family, which was briefly explored for the "NeXT RISC machine" in the mid-90s; only one prototype is known to exist. There were non-NeXT ports of Mach to m88k, which may have influenced the decision.
Of course, if we add in the other branches of the Mach family the number of ports gets absurd! It originated on the VAX; OSF/1 adds MIPS and AXP to the list... ultimately RISC-V and Itanium are the only significant ≥32-bit CPUs of the last forty years to not see some kind of Mach port.
But—the ultimate point is that the lion's share of actual work porting the kernel to new hardware is thanks to NeXT and/or NeXT cosplaying as Apple.
"We love macOS, but we’re not a fan of the ever-closing hardware and ecosystem. So, we are creating ravynOS — an OS aimed to provide the finesse of macOS with the freedom of FreeBSD."
rayvnOS seems to be designed for people who love macOS, particularly its interface, its UI guidelines, and its ecosystem of applications, but who do not like the direction that Apple has moved toward under Tim Cook (soldered RAM, limited and inflexible hardware choices, notarization, iOS-influenced interface changes, increased pushiness with advertising Apple's subscription services, etc.) and who would be unhappy with either Windows or the Linux desktop.
Speaking for myself, I used to daily-drive Macs from 2006 through 2021, but I now daily-drive PCs running Windows due primarily to the lack of upgradable RAM in ARM Macs. I'm not a big fan of Windows, but I need some proprietary software packages such as Microsoft Office. This makes switching to desktop Linux difficult.
It would be awesome using what is essentially a community-driven clone of macOS, where I could continue using a Mac-like operating system without needing to worry about Apple's future directions.
On the Unix side of things, I believe the decision to base ravynOS on FreeBSD rather than on Linux may make migrating from macOS to ravynOS easier, since macOS is based on a hybrid Mach/BSD kernel, and since many of the command-line tools that ship with macOS are from the BSDs. This is known as Darwin. It's not that a Mac clone can't be built on top of Linux, but FreeBSD is closer to Darwin than Linux is.
It's not "soldered". It's integrated with the SoC. The benefit is memory latency and bandwidth.
If you know Framework, their entire mission is to build upgradeable laptops, and they keep delivering. Now they also wanted to build an incredibly powerful, but small and quiet desktop. They went directly to AMD, asked their engineers to make the memory upgradeable. AMD worked really hard and said not possible, not unless you want all of these cores to sit idle.
The world has moved on. Just as you no longer have discrete cache chips or discrete FPUs, you can't do discrete memory anymore - unless you don't need that level of performance, in which case CAMM is still an excellent choice.
But that's not what Apple does. M1 redefined the low-end. It will remain a great choice in 5 years, even when macOS kills it off - Asahi remains very decent.
no, they are talking about high performance desktops, mostly. They link to the Framework desktop, which has 256 GB/s memory bandwith. For comparison, the Apple Mac Pro has 800 GB/s memory bandwidth. Neither manufacturer is able to achieve these speeds using socketed memory.
> no, they are talking about high performance desktops
then i don't really get the "world has moved on"-claim. in my bubble socketed RAM is still the way to-go, be it for gaming or graphics work. of course Apple-user will use a Mac Pro, but saying that the world has moved on when it's about high-performance, deluxe edge-cases is a bit hyperbolic.
but maybe my POV is very outdated or whatever, not sure.
I think, but am not totally positive, this is primarily a concern for local LLM hardware. There are probably other niches, but I don't it's something most people need or would noticeably benefit from.
So somehow running MacOS in 2025 on hot, loud, horrible battery life x86 based computers is a good thing?
Not to mention x86 Mac apps are not long for this world. I can’t think of a single application I would miss moving from Macs to Windows. It’s more about the hardware and the integration with the rest of my Apple devices.
Notes and Reminders are extremely good at what they do, and the synchronization with their iOS equivalents is flawless from what I can tell… and fat chance you get to uproot such a thing to a non-Apple OS.
Third party apps other than for media editing seem to be rare, I think Apple has gobbled or rug pulled much of its independent software vendor ecosystem.
Come to think of it, it just dawned on me that most of the proprietary Mac programs I’ve used on Mac OS X/macOS (as opposed to the classic Mac OS) are either from Apple (Preview.app, Dictionary.app, iPhoto/Photos, iTunes/Apple Music, Keynote, iMovie, GarageBand), Microsoft (Office, Teams), or are Electron apps like Zoom and Slack. The only non-Microsoft, non-Electron third-party proprietary applications I’ve used on my Macs in the past 19 years are from the Omni Group, particularly OmniOutliner (which came bundled with my 2006 MacBook) and OmniGraffle.
It seems that what I miss the most about using a Mac whenever I’m on Windows or Linux is Apple’s bundled apps, not necessarily third-party Mac apps since I never used them much to begin with. Makes me think harder.
Apple Mail also is in my eyes the only generic mail client out there that really “gets it”.
Thunderbird has always felt clunky in comparison and the recent redesign just made it a different kind of clunky. Everything else is either too minimal (Geary), tries to clone old style Outlook (Evolution), or is tied to/favors a particular provider (Gmail, Outlook, etc).
This. I use Linux as my primary OS (with KDE) and my main complaint, by far, is the email/calendar situation. Mail.app simultaneously just works and gets out of my way, and I haven't seen a Linux email client come close to replicating that.
Every few years I convince myself I'll create a better email client for Linux, and I always start the project enthusiastically and stop soon after, when I get just far enough to be reminded of how complicated email is. Maybe someday I'll take a sabatical and actually do it...
That’s what I was implying when I said the integration.
As far as indie apps, BBEdit will survive the heat death of the universe and has made it through every Apple transition since at least System 7 in 1992.
Funny enough, I’ve only had one Apple computer during each era - an Apple //e (65C02), a Mac LC II (68K), A PowerMac 6100/60 (classic Mac PPC), Mac Mini G4 (OS X PPC), a Core Dúo Mac Mini (x86) and now a MacBook M2 Air.
I was never really that interested in x86 Macs and I just bought cheso Windows PCs that I really didn’t use that much outside of work except web browsing and back in the day iTunes.
This description really resonates with me, so I guess I’m a potential user.
I’ve been running macOS most of my life. In college I ran Linux on my laptops, but I switched back to macOS as the user experience was better - I could spend far less time messing with things and instead rely on system defaults and first party apps.
Year by year though I feel more like I don’t own my computer. I’ve tried switching back to Linux, but I always give up because despite the freedom, it starts feeling like a chore. Even Asahi Linux on macOS hardware I couldn’t get into.
The rayvnOS vision is something I could get behind. A fully packaged, macOS-like user experience, where the default settings are good and things work out of the box. I’d LOVE to have that as on option.
Linux compatibility or even macOS binary compatibility matters less to me than, say, an out of the box Time Machine like backup tool based on ZFS snapshots. So FreeBSD makes sense from that perspective.
> Also, is there such a need for running macOS apps on a non-macOS?
Arguably there's a need for running macOS apps on macOS even. E.g. my parents are stuck having an old Intel Mac Pro around on an old OS for a few 32-bit programs (not sure if it changed, but IIRC you couldn't run an OS that supported them as a VM on Apple Silicon). Pretty soon Rosetta 2 will go away as well.
I have the same sentiment. I am forced to use a MacBook in my new job while waiting for them to procure a laptop that I can put Linux on. I can say that Linux with KDE Plasma desktop is in almost every way superior to Mac OS. Much better UX, configurability and core applications. And even little things are more polished and thought through compared to what a trillion dollar company was able to produce. It's really beyond me how people use Apple products, and it's the absolute majority of them in my field.
“Better” is largely subjective. For some (including myself), a Windows-like paradigm like KDE uses is not desirable, and UI papercuts like the many that KDE has are highly visible.
Tried it for a while, it was death by a thousand papercuts.
I wanted the Konsole theme to stay in sync with system light/dark theme. I ended up writing a pair of .desktop files and a helper program to talk to DBus.
Can’t comment on the others but I copy screenshots to the clipboard multiple times a day in macOS and have done for years. Very frequently I send them via Screen Sharing to another Mac and paste there, something I value hugely.
macOS has markup tools for screenshots (or any image) built right into Quicklook and Preview. It’s not as rich as something like SnagIt, but it’s good enough for adding some text, arrows, shapes, redactions, etc.
Dolphin is one of the things about KDE that bothers me, due to the way its windows are laid out and how they use margins/spacing. It just feels “wrong” in a way that even most other Linux file managers (including more full featured ones that still have a menubar) don’t.
> - screenshot tool is objectively inferior to that in Plasma, eg. not clear how to annotate a screenshot or copy it to clipboard
I'm not sure what to make of this. When you take a screenshot (i.e. via cmd-shift-3 or cmd-shift-4), right there in the window that pops up are the annotation tools and a button to copy to clipboard?
> needs an external app for fractional display scaling
Huh? I go to Settings -> Displays -> Advanced -> Show resolutions as list -> Show all resolutions -> you can literally pick *whatever* your screen will advertise?
*Maybe* that's one or two clicks too many? Arguably you don't want non-technical users to accidentally set up blurry text.
There are objective criteria that macOS definitely fails at. Various government agencies here in the states can't use macs even if they wanted to due to lack of #a11y support or the ability to load their own root cert stores.
I agree with you that for MOST people, MOST of the complaints boil down to "I just don't like the Mac UX," but there are organizations that cannot tolerate the risk of forcing employees to use equipment that doesn't follow even the basics of section 508 or DoD guidance.
That is a quite strange reason, as Mac and iOS have by far the most investment in accessibility of any system. The amount of accessibility features both systems have is bewildering.
Every company using Macs I’ve ever worked for has MDM and their own root certs, that’s basic device management. Are you thinking of something else?
I'm not sure I understand. What software do they expect to install via the App Store that can't be installed with the Apple's root certificates? Apple signs everything listed on the App Store, does it not?
Also, why would they need the App Store to distribute software signed by their own keys anyway?
Just curious... did your employer agree to getting you a Lennucks Bocks 'cause you asked nice or were they frightened of running afoul of one of the many #a11y or security evaluation frameworks?
#a11y in Mac used to be a gold standard. And FedPack in the 2000s made MacOS-X a good alternative to the confusing jumble tha was windows security. This is not the case in 2025.
Obviously the idea was about a Linux desktop - whether that means investment in toolkits like Gnome, KDE, core infra like X11 or Wayland, or distributions like Debian.
Yes, but Linux's desktop environment(s) is a feature of a product, not a product itself. You can see that Framework themselves markets Linux that way: https://frame.work/linux
If the goal is to make the Linux desktop more popular with the general public as the previous comment suggested, then you must create a product built exclusively around it that is marketed to the general public. There doesn't seem to be much interest in this
I would much rather emulate linux apps on a more stable and consistent OS than vice versa. The sheer number of toolkits and window managers leaves my head spinning, and unifying their behavior even before you can begin to improve it feels like a nightmare.
I personally don't care much about the dock or the look and feel or whatever; I just want access to the usability of macos without having to accept how closed it is.
I'm not referring to the kernel at all. It's the morass of the userland—three decades of catering to the expectations of IBM PC/windows users have led to... inconsistent and underwhelming results. If I wanted to use 1980s UX, I would have switched to windows or linux decades ago.
But what am I saying? Consistent emacs bindings across all text forms is actually from the 1970s. Maybe I'm the problem....
Maps, news, stocks are all installed by default and supported by ads. Opting out eliminates personalization. One needs to install an app like lulu to block background calls even with personalization turned off. This started with the twitter integration many years again and while social is no longer tightly integrated, the philosophy around user fingerprinting “while not being tied to your identity” is still very much alive and well in a default macOS install.
That’s all ad-supported shovelware. I use a Mac all day long for work. I never use Maps, News, or Stocks. I also don’t use Weather, Music, Mail, Pages, Numbers, FaceTime, Keynotes, Contacts, Reminders, Photo Booth, Books, Dictionary, Stickies, Voice Memos, AppleTV, GarageBand, or Image Playground.
I do use Preview quite a bit. I sometimes use TextEdit, Terminal, or Safari, but I more often use Vim, iTerm2, Firefox, DuckDuckGo Browser, or sometimes Chrome.
It helps not to judge a whole OS by three free apps included with it. Microsoft meanwhile puts ads in the main menu and in the task bar. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Windows desktop wallpaper on the Home editions become ads.
I am curious - what is the motivation for this project?
Is it to replicate macOS? - If yes, why?
Is it to provide application compatibility on a non-macOS? If yes, why a full OS? Why not take the route like Wine or other such layers that make compatibility possible? Also, is there such a need for running macOS apps on a non-macOS? Who is the target audience?
Would the energy be better spent in making Linux more stable or usable for the general public?
If its just a hobby, sure, that is well & good.