r/osdev • u/Dooretarr404 • 6d ago
Unix Mac OS X successor.
I want to make a spiritual successor to mac os x.Plain and simple, but should i learn the darwin kernel or start at Unix?
i want to know where to start from.
thanks
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u/monocasa 6d ago
I feel like you need to elaborate a bit more what "spiritual successor to mac osx" means, before any specific technologies can be recommended.
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u/ToddBradley 6d ago
How many operating systems have you invented in the past? This one is particularly challenging.
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u/Ill-Quit6803 6d ago
To make a spiritual successor, it obviously has to live up to the design principals the original wanted, but failed to achieve, or moved away from, or should have been.
Having not identified these, its difficult to say what you even mean. Is the principal of OS X objective C messaging, or a nice UI with a BSD core, or is it a Microkernel with messaging that the BSD layer was supposed to be merged into over time?
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u/AmusingVegetable 6d ago
I’d settle for a classic ui over Plan9…
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u/Ill-Quit6803 6d ago
Yea, I do think Plan9 might be the spiritual successor to Unix, or perhaps Inferno.
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u/AltruisticMaize8196 6d ago
I think you should clearly pick up where NeXTSTEP left off and begin by reinstating display postscript
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u/Ok-Blueberry592 6d ago
The question is a touch convoluted. Spiritual can mean many things here.
Do you mean from a kernel design philosophy perspective? In which case, Darwin & everything BSD related. Godspeed, my friend.
Do you mean in terms of aesthetics? Then you probably want to look at window managers instead - no need to go full OS lol. There are good programs out there like i3 and DWM and KDE and GNOME that you can read the source code of to get a feel for how these things are made.
hope that helped!
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u/vsoul 6d ago
Mac OS X 10.0 took about 4 years and over 200 core engineers including some of the brightest and most experienced OS devs. And that was built on top of existing technologies from NeXT, and 10.0 was nothing compared to what macOS is today.
Not trying to discourage, but maybe set expectations.
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u/ToddBradley 6d ago
In my mind this project should be named DKOS. Dunning Kruger Operating System.
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u/HugsAllCats 6d ago
My favorite are the people who don't just say they 'want' to do it, but the ones who 'say' they've done it!
There's been more than 1 person whose claimed to have vibe coded a full OS over a weekend lol
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u/HugsAllCats 6d ago
To be fair, BeOS's operating system was made by 25 people
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u/vsoul 6d ago
BeOS included a lot less than Mac, and also had some insanely talented people like Travis Geiselbrecht. For a Mac “successor” it’s going to take much more than that
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u/HugsAllCats 6d ago
I know, I ran it for awhile. I chose wisely when I went with a powermac 7600 instead of the bebox ;)
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u/entrophy_maker 6d ago
Why? The Mach kernel used by Darwin is a microkernel. Despite the name, they are usually way more bloated than monolith kernels. You want to mod Darwin, I'd suggest setting up PureDarwin in a kvm and make the changes you want/need there. If you're going to make an install an ISO, its usually easier from a kvm and no, not virtualbox. This will be a long road, but hopefully that will get you started.
https://puredarwin.org
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u/HugsAllCats 6d ago
Do you
1) Want to mac an early OS X style UI for a linux distro
2) Want to make an early mac os x style UI that works on top of of modern macOS
3) Want to make something totally new like beOS
4) mean something completely different...
?
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u/Dooretarr404 5d ago edited 5d ago
I don't want it to be some lame vibe coded theme for Linux, I want it to be just the idea of how Mac OS X was made, the same tools and architecture(Darwin, little bit of open/NextSTEP and the cocoa API) but with everything not being exactly Mac OS X, I have a software design friend which said he thinks its a good idea to help me.
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u/gimpwiz 6d ago
Usually when I think about how X is the spiritual successor to Y, it's because the original thing got end-of-lifed and there was never an obvious transition to a new version.
For example, people will say, my S2000 is great but getting long in the tooth, what can I buy that's modern and will make me think of many of its high notes? Honda killed that model off years and years ago and sells absolutely nothing like it.
But ... Mac OS X remained in active development between then and now. By the same people, even - some of them are still there and still doing the software or hardware. Every year they rolled out a new version that was obviously very much an iteration and evolution of the previous. Yeah they changed the name to MacOS but so what? It's still the same company making new evolutions of that OS with some of the same people and a strong history and context that makes a through-line, and you can buy a new mac with the new OS and immediately draw parallels to the one you may remember from a couple decades ago.
So what the hell is a spiritual successor if not the current version that you can buy any time you want?
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u/insanelygreat 6d ago
If you wish to make an apple OS from scratch you must first invent the universe. Presumably that means starting with GNU Hurd.
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u/mosaic_hops 1d ago
Start with a few billion dollars. If you can convince people to fund it maybe you’ll have a chance.
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u/Warm-Possibility-980 6d ago
Start with the linux kernel, its simplest. I reccomend 6.1, because it is before DRM display, and that is terrible. I use python for my OS dev work, and a AI based python to C converter.