RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source

travisgriggs

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.

mixdup

>but we're not a fan of the ever-closing hardware and ecosystem What has changed about Apple's ecosystem vis a vis openness, hardware, or the 'ecosystem'? The macOS ecosystem is pretty much the same as it has been since 1997

soupbowl

Good luck! There are many attempts at doing something similar. We can't really see anything to judge it by, yet.

masijo

Would be nice to have a screenshot in the overview page

dang

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)

pmkary

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

mcdow

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.

tcdent

> 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.

ivanjermakov

Imagine the world where open-source is collaborating instead of fragmenting. Single Linux distribution, single compartibility layer for other OSes, single graphics API, single package manager...

CodeCompost

Another one? What happened to the other one that was called ... (quick Google) ... Hello System?

jamesforestwest

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?

mrweasel

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?

j45

It will be interesting to see how much further (or not) some open source projects like this can get using meaningful AI driven development.

itsrobreally

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?

latexr

At the top of Project Goals is “Clean Design”. It would be nice to have screenshots. The wiki is impossible to read on mobile, due to the sidebar.

amatecha

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.

jeandrek

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.)

nign

So many people in these comments talking about this project like it's pitching itself as a ready to go replacement for MacOS... why are you expecting screenshots, this is a tiny project of ambitious scale that is only 5 years old. What they have achieved is brilliant.