liam_on_linux | Entries tagged with macos

I can’t speak for anyone else but I can tell you why I did it.

I was broke, I know PCs and Macs and Mac OS X – I ran OS X 10.0, 10.1 and 10.2 on a PowerMac 7600 using XPostFacto.

I got the carcase of a Core 2 Extreme PC on my local Freecycle group in 2012.

https://twitter.com/lproven/status/257060672825851904

RAM, no hard disks, no graphics, but case/mobo/CPU/PSU etc.

I took the nVidia card and hard disks from my old Athlon XP. I got the machine running, and thought it was worth a try since it was mostly Intel: Intel chipset, Intel CPU, etc.

I joined some fora, did some reading, used Clover and some tools from TonyMacX86 and so on.

After two days’ work it booted. I got no sound from my SoundBlaster card, so I pulled it, turned the motherboard sound back on, and reinstalled.

It was a learning experience but it worked very well. I ran Snow Leopard on it, as it was old enough to get no new updates that would break my Hack, but new enough that all the modern browsers and things worked fine. (2012 was the year Mountain Lion came out, so I was 2 versions behind, which suited me fine – and it ran PowerPC apps, and I preferred the UI of the PowerPC version of MS Word, my only non-freeware app.)

I had 4 CPU cores, it was maxed out with 8GB RAM, and it was nice and quick. As it was a desktop, I disabled all support for sleep and hibernation: I turn my desktops off at night to save power. It drove a matched pair of 21” CRT monitors perfectly smoothly. I had an Apple Extended keyboard on an ADB-to-USB convertor since my PS/2 ports weren’t supported.

It wasn’t totally reliable – occasionally it failed to boot, but a power cycle usually brought it back. It was fast and pretty stable, it ran all the OS X FOSS apps I usually used, it was much quicker than my various elderly PowerMacs and the hardware cost was essentially £0.

It was more pleasant to use than Linux – my other machines back then ran the still-somewhat-new Ubuntu, using GNOME 2 because Unity hadn’t gone mainstream yet.

Summary: why not? It worked, it gave me a very nice and perfectly usable desktop PC for next to no cost except some time, it was quite educational, and the machine served me well for years. I still have it in a basement. Sadly its main HDD is not readable any more.

It was fun, interesting, and the end result was very usable. At that time there was no way I could have afforded to buy an Intel Mac, but a few years, one emigration and 2 new jobs later, I did so: a 2011 i5 Mac mini which is now my TV-streaming box, but which I used as my main machine until 2017 when I bought a 27” Retina iMac from a friend.

Cost, curiosity, learning. All good reasons in my book.

This year I Hacked an old Dell Latitude E7270, a Core i7 machine maxed out with 16GB RAM – with Big Sur because its Intel GPU isn’t supported in the Monterey I tried at first. It works, but its wifi doesn’t, and I needed to buy a USB wifi dongle. But performance wasn’t great, it took an age to boot with a lot of scary text going past, and it didn’t feel like a smooth machine. So, I pulled its SSD and put a smaller one in, put ChromeOS Flex on it, and it’s now my wife’s main computer. Fast, simple, totally reliable, and now I have spare Wifi dongle. :-/ I may try on one of my old Thinkpads next.

It is much easier to Hackintosh a PC today than it was 10-12 years ago, but Apple is making the experience less rewarding, as is their right. They are a hardware company.

(Repurposed from a Lobsters comment.)

Current Location: Douglas
Current Music: Server fans

I just finished doing up an old white MacBook from 2008 (note: not MacBook Pro) for Jana's best friend, back in Brno.

I hit quite a few glitches along the way. Partly for my own memory, partly in case anyone else hits them, here are the work-arounds I needed...

BTW, I have left the links visible and in the text so you can see where you're going. This is intentional.

Picking a distribution and desktop

As the machine is maxed out with 4GB of RAM, and only has a fairly feeble Intel HD 3100 GPU, I went for Xfce as a lightweight desktop that's very configurable and doesn't need hardware OpenGL. (I just wish Xfce had the GNOME 2/Maté facility to lock controls and panels into place.)

Xubuntu (18.10, later upgraded to 19.04) had two peculiar and annoying errors.

On boot, NumLock is always on. This is a serious snag because a MacBook has no NumLock key, nor a NumLock indicator to tell you, and thus no easy way to turn it off. (Fn+F6 twice worked on Xubuntu 18/19, but not on 20.04.) I found a workaround: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AppleKeyboard#Numlock_on_Apple_Wireless_Keyboard

Secondly, Xubuntu sometimes could not bring the wifi connection up. Rebooting into Mac OS X and then warm-booting into Xubuntu fixed this.

For this and the webcam issue below, I really strongly recommend keeping a bootable Mac OS X partition available and dual-booting between both Mac OS X and Linux. OS X Lion (10.7) is the latest this machine can run. Some Macs – e.g. MacBook Pro and iMac models – from around this era can run El Cap (10.11) which is probably still somewhat useful. My girlfriend's MacBook Pro is a 2009 model, just one year younger, and it can run High Sierra (10.13) which still supports the latest Firefox, Chrome, Skype, LibreOffice etc without any problem.

By the way: there are "hacks" to install newer versions of macOS onto older Macs which no longer support them. Colin "dosdude1" Mistr has a good list, here: http://dosdude1.com/software.html

However quite a few of these have serious drawbacks on a machine this old. For instance, my 2008 MB might be able to run Mountain Lion (10.8) but probably nothing newer, and if it did, I would have no graphics acceleration, making the machine slow and maybe unstable. Similarly, my 2011 Mac Mini maxes out at High Sierra. Mojave (10.14) and Catalina (10.15) apparently work well, but Big Sur (11) again has no graphics acceleration and is thus well-nigh unusable. But if you have a newer machine and the reports are that it works well as a hack, this may make it useful again.

I had to reinstall Lion. Due to this, I found that the MacBook will not boot Lion off USB; I had to burn a DVD-R. This worked perfectly first time. There are some instructions here:
https://www.lifewire.com/install-os-x-lion-using-bootable-dvd-2260333

Beware, retail Mac OS X DVDs are dual-layer. If the image is more than 5GB, it may not fit on an ordinary single-layer DVD-R.

If I remember correctly, Lion was the last version of Mac OS X that was not a free download. However, that was 10 years and 8 versions ago, so I hope Apple will forgive me helping you to pirate it. A Bittorrent can be found here.

Incidentally, a vaguely-current browser for Lion is ParrotGeeks Firefox Legacy. I found this made the machine much more useful with Lion, able to access Facebook, Gmail etc. absolutely fine, which the bundled version of Safari cannot do. If you disable all sharing options in OS X and only use Firefox, the machine should be reasonably secure even today. OS X is immune to all Windows malware. Download Firefox Legacy from here:
https://parrotgeek.com/fxlegacy.html

However, saying all that, Linux Mint does not suffer from either of these Xubuntu issues, so I recommend Linux Mint Xfce. I found Mint 20 worked well and the upgrade to Mint 20.1 was quick and seamless.

Installation

If you make a 2nd partition in Disk Utility while you're (re-)installing Mac OS X, you can just reformat that as ext4 in the Linux setup program. This saves messing around with Linux disk partitioning on a UEFI MacBook, which I am warning you is not like doing it on a PC. (I accidentally corrupted the MacBook's hard disk trying to copy a Linux partition onto it with gparted, then remove it using fdisk. That's why I had to reinstall. Again, I strongly recommend doing any partitioning with Mac OS X's Disk Utility, and not with Linux.) All Intel Macs have UEFI, not a BIOS, and so they all use only GPT partitioning, not MBR.

I set aside 48GB for Lion and all the rest for Mint. (Mint defaults to using a swapfile in the root partition, just like Ubuntu. This means that 2 partitions are enough. I was trying to keep things as simple as possible.)

If you use Linux fdisk, or Gparted, to look at the disk from Linux, remember to leave the original Apple EFI System Partition ("ESP") alone and intact. You need that even if you single-boot Linux and nothing else.

Wifi doesn't work out of the box on Mint. You need to connect to the Internet via Ethernet, then open the Software and Drivers settings program and install the Broadcom drivers. That was enough for me; more info is here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/55868/installing-broadcom-wireless-drivers

While connected with a cable, I also did a full update:

sudo -s apt update apt full-upgrade -y apt autoremove -y apt purge apt clean

Glitches and gotchas

Startup or shutdown can take ages, or freeze the machine entirely, hanging during shutdown. The fan may spin up during this. The fix is an simple edit to add an extra kernel parameter to GRUB, described here:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=284960

(Aside: hoping to work around this, I installed kexec-tools for faster reboots. It didn't work. I don't know why not. Perhaps it's something to do with the machine using UEFI, not a BIOS. I also installed the Ubuntu Hardware Enablement stack with its newer kernel, in case that helped, but it didn't. It didn't seem to cause any problems, though, so I left it.)

GRUB shows an error about not being able to find a Mok file, then continues because SecureBoot is disabled. This is non-fatal but there is a fix here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1279602/ubuntu-20-04-failed-to-set-moklistrt-invalid-parameter

While troubleshooting the Mok error above, I found that the previous owner of this machine had Fedora on it at some point, and even though I removed and completely reinstalled OS X Lion in a new partition, the UEFI boot entry for Fedora was still there and was still the default. I removed it using the instructions here:
https://www.linuxbabe.com/command-line/how-to-use-linux-efibootmgr-examples

NOTE: I suggest you don't set a boot sequence. Just set the ubuntu entry as the default and leave it at that. The Apple firmware very briefly displays a no-bootable-volume icon (a folder with a question mark on it) as it boots. I think this is why, when I used efibootmgr to set Mint as the default then OS X, it never loaded GRUB but went straight into OS X.

(Mint have not renamed their UEFI bootloader; it's still called "ubuntu" from the upstream distro. I believe this means that you cannot dual-boot a UEFI machine with both Ubuntu and Mint, or multiple versions of either. This reflects my general impression that UEFI is a pain in the neck.)

The Apple built-in iSight Webcam requires a firmware file to work under Linux, which you must extract from Mac OS X:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MactelSupportTeam/AppleiSight

Both Xubuntu and Mint automatically install entries in the GRUB boot menu for Mac OS X. For Lion, there are 2: one for the 32-bit kernel, one for the 64-bit kernel. These will not work. To boot into macOS, hold down the Opt key as the machine powers on; this will display the firmware's graphical boot-device selection screen. The Linux partition is described as "EFI Boot". Click on "macOS" or whatever you called your Mac HD partition. If you want to boot into Linux, just power-cycle it and then leave it alone – the screen goes grey, then black with a flashing cursor, then the GRUB menu appears and you can pick Linux. The Linux partition is not visible from macOS and you can't pick it in the Startup Disk system preference-pane.

Post-install fine-tuning

I also added the ubuntu-restricted-extras package to get some nicer web fonts, a few handy codecs, and so on. Remember when installing this that you must use the cursor keys and Enter/Return to say "yes" to the Microsoft free licence agreement. The mouse won't work – use your keyboard. I also added Apple HFS support, so that Linux can easily manipulate the Mac OS X partition.

I installed Google Chrome and Skype, direct from their vendors' download pages. Both of these add their own repositories to the system, so they will automatically update when the OS does. I also installed Zoom, which does not have a repo and so won't get updated. This is an annoyance; we'll have to look at that later if it becomes problematic. I also added VLC because the machine has a DVD drive and this is an easy way to play CDs and DVDs.

As this machine and the old Thinkpad I am sending along with it are intended for kids to use, I installed the educational packages from UbuntuEd. I added those that are recommended for pre-school, primary and secondary schoolchildren, as listed here:
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-education-ubuntued/17063

I enabled unattended-upgrades (and set the machine to install updates at shutdown) as described here:
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/set-up-automatic-unattended-updates-for-ubuntu-20-04/

While testing the webcam, I discovered that Mint doesn't include Cheese, so I installed that, too:
sudo apt install -y ubuntu-restricted-extras hfsprogs vlc cheese

[Repurposed from a reply in a Hackernews thread]

Apple looked at buying in an OS after Copland failed. But all the stuff about Carbon, Blue Box, Yellow Box, etc. -- all those were NeXT ideas after the merger. None of it was pre-planned.

So, they bought NeXTstep, a very weird UNIX with a proprietary, PostScript-based GUI and a rich programming environment with tons of rich foundation classes, all written in Objective C.

A totally different API, utterly unlike and unrelated to Classic MacOS.

Then they had to decide how to bring these things together.

NeXT already offered its OPENSTEP GUI on top of other Unixes. OPENSTEP ran on Sun Solaris and IBM AIX, and I think maybe others I've forgotten. Neither were commercial successes.

NeXT had a plan to create a compatibility environment for running NeXT apps on other OSes. The idea was to port the base ObjC classes to the native OS, and use native controls, windows, widgets etc. but to be able to develop your apps in ObjC on NeXTstep using Interface Builder.

In the end, only one such OS looked commercially viable: Windows NT. So the plan was to offer a NeXT environment on top of NT.

This is what was temporarily Yellow Box and later became Cocoa.

Blue Box was a VM running a whole copy of Classic MacOS under NeXTstep, or rather, Rhapsody. In Mac OS X 10.0, Blue Box was renamed the Classic environment and it gained the ability to mix windows with NeXT windows.

But there still needed to be a way to port apps from Classic MacOS to Mac OS X.

So what Apple did was go through the Classic MacOS API and cut it down, removing all the calls and functions that would not be safe in a pre-emptively multitasking, memory-managed environment.

The result was a safe subset of the Classic MacOS API called Carbon, which could be implemented both on Classic MacOS and on the new NeXTstep-based OS.

Now there was a transition plan:

• your old native apps will still work in a VM

• apps written to Carbon can be recompiled for OS X

• for the full experience, rewrite or write new apps using the NeXT native API, now renamed Cocoa.

• incidentally there was also a rich API for Java apps, too

Now there was a plan.

Here's how they executed it.

1. Copland was killed. A team looked at if anything could be salvaged.

2. They got to work porting NeXTstep to PowerPC

3. 2 main elements from Copland were extracted:

• The Appearance Manager, a theming engine allowing skins for Classic MacOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager

• A new improved Finder

The new PowerPC-native Finder had some very nice features, many never replicated in OS X... like dockable "drawers" -- drag a folder to a screen edge and it vanished, leaving just a tab, which opens a pop-out draw. Multithreading: start a copy or move and then carry on doing other things.

The Appearance Manager was grafted onto NeXTstep, leading to Rhapsody, which became Mac OS X Server: basically NeXTstep on PowerPC with a Classic MacOS skin, so a single menu bar at the top, desktop icons, Apple fonts and things -- but still using the NeXT "Miller columns" Workspace file manager and so on.

Apple next released MacOS 8, with the new Appearance control panel and single skin, called Platinum: a marginally-updated classic look and feel. There were never any official others, but some leaked, and a 3rd party tool called Kaleidoscope offered many more.

http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2011/2/26_Copland.html

So some improvements, enough to make it a compelling upgrade...

And also to kill off the MacOS licensing programme, which only covered MacOS 7. (Because originally 7 had been planned to be replaced with Copland, the real MacOS 8.)

MacOS 8 was also the original OS of the first iMac.

Then came MacOS 8.1, which also got HFS+, a new, more efficient filesystem for larger multi-gigabyte hard disks. It couldn't boot off it, though (IIRC).

MacOS 8.1 was the last release for 680x0 hardware and needed a 68040 Mac.

Then came the first PowerPC-only version, MacOS 8.5, which brought in booting from HFS+. Then MacOS 8.6, a bugfix release, mainly.

Then MacOS 9, with better-integrated WWW access and some other quite nice features... but all really stalling for time while they worked on what would become Mac OS X.

The paid releases were 8.0, 8.5 and 9. 8.1, 8.6, 9.1 and 9.2 were all free updates.

In a way they were just trickling out new features, while working on adapting NeXTstep:

1. Rhapsody (Developer Release 1997, DR2 1998)

2. Mac OS X Server (1.0 1999, 1.2 2000)

3. Mac OS X Public Beta (2000)

But all of these releases supported Carbon and could run Carbon apps, and PowerPC-native Carbon apps would run natively under OS X without the need for the Classic environment.

Finally in 2001, Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah".

There have been multiple generations of Macs. Apple has not really divided them up.

1. Original 680x0 Macs with 24-bit ROMs (ending with the SE/30, Mac II, IIx & IIcx)
2. 32-bit-clean-ROM 680x0 Macs (starting with the Mac IIci)
3. NuBus-based PowerMacs (6100, 7100, 8100)
4. OldWorld-ROM PCI-based PowerMacs (all the Beige PowerMacs including the Beige G3 & black PowerBooks) ← note, many but not all of these can run Mac OS X
5. NewWorld-ROM PCI-based PowerMacs (iMac, iBook & later)
6. OS-X-only PowerMacs (starting with the Mirrored Drive Doors 1GHz G4 with Firewire 800)
7. 32-bit Intel Macs (iMac, Mac mini and MacBook Core Solo and Core Duo models)
8. 64-bit Intel Macs with 32-bit EFI (Core 2 Duo models from 2006)
9. 64-bit Intel Macs with 64-bit EFI (anything from 2008 onwards)

Classic MacOS was written for 68000 processors. Later it got some extensions for 68020 and 68030.

When the PowerMacs came out, Apple wrote a tiny, very fast emulator that translated 680x0 instructions on the fly into PowerPC instructions. However, unlike modern retrocomputer emulators, this one allowed apps to call PowerPC code, and the OS was adapted to run on the emulator. It was not like running an Amiga emulator on a PC or something, when the OS in the emulator doesn't "know" it's in an emulator. MacOS did and was tailored for it.

They ran Classic MacOS on this emulator, and profiled it.

They identified which parts were the most performance-critical and were running slowly through the emulator, and where they could, they rewrote the slowest of them in PowerPC code.

Bear in mind, this was something of an emergency, transitional project. Apple did not intend to rewrite the whole OS in PowerPC code. Why? Because:
1. It did not have the manpower or money
2. Classic MacOS was already rather old-fashioned and Apple intended to replace it
3. If it did, 68000 apps (i.e. all of them) wouldn't work any more

So it only did the most performance-critical sections. Most of MacOS remained 68K code and always did for the rest of MacOS' life.

However, all the projects to replace MacOS failed. Copland failed, Pink failed, Taligent failed, IBM Workplace OS failed.

So Apple was stuck with Classic MacOS. So, about the MacOS 7.5 timeframe, Apple got serious about Classic.
A lot of MacOS 7.6 was rewritten from assembly code and Pascal into C. This made it easier to rewrite chunks for PowerPC. However it also made 7.6 larger and slower. This upset a lot of users, but it meant new facilities: e.g. the previously-optional "MultiFinder" was now always on, & there was a new network stack, OpenTransport.

This is also the time that Apple licensed MacOS to other vendors.

Soon afterwards, Apple realised it could not build a new replacement OS itself, and would have to buy one. It considered former Apple exec Jean Louis Gassée's Be for BeOS, and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' NeXT Computer for the Unix-based NeXTstep.

It bought NeXTstep and got Jobs back into the bargain. He regained control, fired Gil Amelio and killed off the licensing program. He also killed Copland, the experimental multitasking MacOS replacement, and got his coders to salvage as much as they could from it and bolt it onto Classic, calling the result MacOS 8.

MacOS 8 got a multithreaded Finder, desktop "drawers", new gaming and web APIs and more. This also killed the licensing programme, which only applied to MacOS 7.

MacOS 8.1 got a new filesystem, HFS+. This still works today and was the default up to High Sierra.

8.1 is the last release for 680x0 Macs and needs a 68040, although a few 68030 Macs work via Born Again.

The "monolithic" / "nanokernel" distinction applies to CPU protection rings.

These days this principally applies to OSes written entirely in compiled code, usually C code, where some core OS code runs in Ring 0, with no restrictions on its behaviour, and some in Ring 3 where it cannot directly access the hardware. IBM OS/2 2 and later uniquely used Ring 1. I've blogged about this before.

OS/2 2 using Ring 1 is why VirtualBox exists.

Decades ago, more complex OSes like Multics had many more rings and used all of them.

If a Unix-like OS is rewritten and split up sop that a minimal part of the OS runs in Ring 0 and manages the rest of the OS as little separate parts that run in Ring 3, that's called a "microkernel". Ignore the marketing, Mac OS X isn't one and neither is Windows NT. There are only 2 mass-market microkernel OSes and they are both obscure: QNX, now owned by Blackberry, and Minix 3, embedded in the control/management circuitry embedded into every modern Intel x86-64 CPU.

Classic MacOS is not a C-based OS, nor is it an Intel x86 OS. It does not have a distinction between kernel space and user space. It does not use CPU rings, at all. Everything is in Ring 0, all the time. Kernel, drivers, apps, INITs, CDEVs, screensavers, the lot.

MacOS 8.5 went PowerPC-only, and in the process of dropping support for 680x0 Macs, Apple made some provision for future improved PowerMacs.

The 68K emulator got a big upgrade to the emulator, now renamed a "nanokernel". It is not an OS in its own right: it boots and runs another OS on top of it.

It is not a HAL: this is native code, deep within an OS kernel, that allows the same OS to run with little modification on widely-different underlying hardware, with different memory maps, I/O spaces, APICs etc., without adapting the kernel to all the different platforms. MacOS 8.5+ only runs on Macs and the hardware could be adapted to the OS and the OS to the hardware. No need for a HAL.

It is not a hypervisor. A hypervisor partitions a machine up into multiple virtual machines -- it allows 1 PC to emulate multiple separate PCs and each virtual emulated PC runs a separate OS. Classic MacOS can't do that and only runs 1 OS at a time.

The MacOS nanokernel is a very small bit of code that boots first and then executes most of the rest of the code, and manages calls from apps from a 68K OS back to code written for the underlying PowerPC CPU.

It'sd a shame that this bit of code is secret and little-known, but some details have been leaked over the years.

Because I miss classic MacOS.

Unix is Unix. It's boring. It's everywhere. I run it on my desktop, my laptops, my phone, my tablet, my work PC. All different versions.

I dislike it less than the other options. I grew up on CP/M and VAX/VMS, then DOS, then Windows. At home, RISC OS.

I am not a programmer. Much of the stuff in Unix is irrelevant to me. I find its shell actively hostile, its filesystem an arcane mess that hasn't made sense since about 1973, its profusion of weird little config files, all in different formats, all to be carefully amended with various disgusting 1970s abominations of editors, to be a massive pain.

That's why my computer is a Mac. It needs less maintenance than almost anything else. My laptops run Ubuntu (and Haiku and A2/Bluebottle and IBM PC DOS 7.1). I rarely open a terminal if I can avoid it.

Classic MacOS is something else entirely. It's a thing of its time, yes, but it is a thing of great beauty. *The* single cleanest, most elegant GUI of any OS ever, from any time. No trace of a command line anywhere, not a single config file on the entire OS, and yet over 15 years it grew from something that ran in 128 kB of RAM on a 400 kB floppy to a multitasking Internet-capable OS on which I surfed the web, did my email, chatted to my friends on a half a dozen systems, did my invoicing, send data to & from multiple server OSes _and_ laid out magazines.

Its kernel wasn't elegant but there's more to life than kernels. It was the best-integrated general-purpose mass-market GUI OS the world has ever seen, and nothing ever even came close to its versatility. It was smoother and cleaner than ST GEM. It had a bigger better app selection than Amiga OS. It had a simpler yet more capable GUI than RISC OS. It made Windows or OS/2 look like sick jokes for a straight decade. And all this without any nasty dirty stinky mess of config files gluing it all together in the background.

I own a number of vintage Macs, and they're lovely, but there's no point in using PowerPC Mac OS X these days, because an Intel box does the same job better -- but it's not _really_ a Mac, although mine have gorgeous mechanical keyboards from the 1980s on them, naturally, because I'm a vintage computer fan and that's why I am here.

But the last _real_ Mac was the Beige G3 for me. It looked like a Mac, it talked ADB and AAUI and SCSI to the outside world, and it was visibly the same family as a Mac Plus from 1985.

(I gave my Blue & Whites away, which I slightly regret.)

Even my G4s aren't that Mac-like any more. They use PC stuff like USB and Firewire and PCI, which makes them cheap to run, but somehow a bit soulless.

The Mac was not just a computer, it was a culture, and it's one I worked with at the time but could't afford to use myself.

And whereas the ST and Amiga were cultures too, which I respect, I wasn't part of them then. I was an Acorn user then, but Acorns were barely usable on the Internet or on LANs. That stuff came after their decline and fall, for all that I have a Raspberry Pi with RISC OS on it.

Classic MacOS came from that era, but it survived and prospered and thrived into the Internet era of the Web and USB and multimedia.

That deserves anyone's respect.

(Adapted from a Quora answer.)

OS/2 1.x was a clean-sweep, largely legacy-free OS with only limited backwards compatibility with DOS.

OS/2 2.x and later used VMs to do the hard stuff of DOS emulation, because they ran on a chip with hardware-assisted DOS VMs: the 80386’s Virtual86 mode.

NeXTstep was a Unix. It predated FreeBSD, but it was based off the same codebase: BSD 4 Unix. It “only” contained a new display layer, and that itself was based off existing code — Adobe PostScript — and the then-relatively-new technique of object-oriented development. Still substantial achievements, but again, built on existing code, and with no requirement for backwards compatibility.

BeOS was a ground-up new OS which wasn’t backwards or sideways compatible with anything else at all.

NT is based on OS/2 3.x, the planned CPU-independent portable version, with a lot of design concepts from DEC VMS incorporated, because it had the same lead architect, Dave Cutler. Again, the core NT OS isn’t compatible with anything else. This is rarely understood. NT is not a Win32-compatible kernel. NT isn’t compatible with anything else, including VMS. It’s something new. But NT supports personalities, which are like emulation layers running on top of the kernel. When NT shipped, it included 3: OS/2, POSIX and Win32. OS/2 is deprecated now, POSIX has developed into the Linux subsystem, and Win32 is still there, now in 64-bit form.

The point is, none of these OSes were enhanced versions of anything else, and none were constrained by compatibility with existing drivers, extensions, applications, or anything else.

Apple tried to do something much, much harder. It tried to create a successor OS to a single-user, single-tasking (later cooperatively-multitasking, and not very well), OS for the 68000 (not something with hardware memory protection, like the 68030 or 68040), which would introduce those new features: pre-emptive multitasking, virtual memory, memory protection, integrated standards-based networking, etc.

All while retaining the existing base of applications, which weren’t written or designed or planned for any of this. No apps == no market == no use.

Apple took on a far harder project than anyone else, and arguably, with less experience. And the base hardware wasn’t ready for the notion of virtual machines yet.

It’s a great shame it failed, and the company came relatively close — it did have a working prototype.

It’s often said that Apple didn’t take over NeXT, nor did it merge with NeXT — in many important ways, NeXT took over Apple. Most Apple OS developers and project managers left, and were replaced by the NeXT team.

The NeXT management discarded Copland, most Apple technologies — OpenDoc, OpenTransport, GameSprockets, basically everything except QuickTime. It took some very brave, sweeping moves. It took the existing MacOS classic APIs, which weren’t really planned or designed, they just evolved over nearly 1½ decades — and cut out everything that wouldn’t work on a clean, modern, memory-managed, multitasking OS. The resulting cut-down, cleaned-up API was called “Carbon”. This was presented to developers as what they had to target if they wanted their apps to run on the new OS.

Alternatively, they could target the existing, far cleaner and richer NeXT API, now called “Cocoa”.

The NeXT team made no real attempt to be compatible with classic MacOS. Instead, it just ran all of classic MacOS inside a VM — by the timeframe that the new OS was targeting, machines would be high-enough spec to support a complete classic MacOS environment in a window on top of the Unix-based NeXTstep, now rebadged as “Mac OS X”. If you wanted your app to run outside the VM, you had to rebuild for “Carbon”. Carbon apps could run on both late versions of classic MacOS and on OS X.

This is comparable to what NT did: it offered a safe subset of the Win32 APIs inside a “personality” on top of NT, and DOS VMs with most of Win16.

It was a brave move. It’s impressive that it worked so well. It was a fairly desperate, last-ditch attempt to save the company and the platform, and it’s easier to make big, brave decisions when your back is against the wall and there are no alternatives... especially if the mistakes that got you into that corner were made by somebody else.

A lot of old Apple developers left in disgust. People who had put years of work into entire subsystems and APIs that had been thrown in the trash. Some 3rd party developers weren’t very happy, either — but at least there was a good path forwards now.

In hindsight, it’s clear that Apple did have an alternative. It had a rich, relatively modern OS, upon the basis of which it could have moved forwards: A/UX. This was Apple’s Unix for 680x0, basically done as a side project to satisfy a tick-box for US military procurement, which required Unix compatibility. A/UX was very impressive for its time — 1988, before Windows 3.0. It could run both Unix apps and classic MacOS ones, and put a friendly face on Unix, which was pretty ugly in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

But A/UX was never ported to the newer PowerPC Macs.

On the other hand, the NeXT deal got back Steve Jobs. NeXTstep also had world-beating developer tools, which A/UX did not. Nor did BeOS, the other external alternative that Gil Amelio-era Apple considered.

No Jobs, no NeXT dev tools, and no Apple today.

Current Location: 6music

Although the launch of GNOME 3 was a bumpy ride and it got a lot of criticism, it's coming back. It's the default desktop of multiple distros again now. Allegedly even Linus Torvalds himself uses it. People tell me that it gets out of the way.

I find this curious, because I find it a little clunky and obstructive. It looks great, but for me, it doesn’t work all that well. It’s OK — far better than it was 2-3 years ago. But while some say it gets out of the way and lets them work undistracted, it gets in my way, because I have to adapt to its weird little quirks. It will not adapt to mine. It is dogmatic: it says, you must work this way, because we are the experts and we have decided that this is the best way.

So, on OS X or Ubuntu, I have my dock/launcher thing on the left, because that keeps it out of the way of the scrollbars. On Windows or XFCE, I put the task bar there. For all 4 of these environments, on a big screen, it’s not too much space and gives useful info about minimised windows, handy access to disk drives, stuff like that. On a small screen, it autohides.

But not on GNOME, no. No, the gods of GNOME have decreed that I don’t need it, so it’s always hidden. I can’t reveal it by just putting my mouse over there. No, I have to click a strange word in the menu bar. “Activities”. What activities? These aren’t my activities. They’re my apps, folders, files, windows. Don’t tell me what to call them. Don’t direct me to click in a certain place to get them; I want them just there if there’s room, and if there isn’t, on a quick flick of the wrist to a whole screen edge, not a particular place followed by a click. It wastes a bit of precious menu-bar real-estate with a word that’s conceptually irrelevant to me. It’s something I have to remember to do.

That’s not saving me time or effort, it’s making me learn a new trick and do extra work.

The menu bar. Time-honoured UI structure. Shared by all post-Mac GUIs. Sometimes it contains a menu, efficiently spread out over a nice big easily-mousable spatial range. Sometimes that’s in the window; whatever. The whole width of the screen in Mac and Unity. A range of commands spread out.

On Windows, the centre of the title bar is important info — what program this window belongs to.

On the Mac, that’s the first word of the title bar. I read from left to right, because I use a Latinate alphabet. So that’s a good place too.

On GNOME 3, there’s some random word I don’t associate with anything in particular as the first word, then a deformed fragment of an icon that’s hard to recognise, then a word, then a big waste of space, then the blasted clock! Why the clock? Are they that obsessive, such clock-watchers? Mac and Windows and Unity all banish the clock to a corner. Not GNOME, no. No, it’s front and centre, one of the most important things in one of the most important places.

Why?

I don’t know, but I’m not allowed to move it.

Apple put its all-important logo there in early versions of Mac OS X. They quickly were told not to be so egomaniac. GNOME 3, though, enforces it.

On Mac, Unity, and Windows, in one corner, there’s a little bunch of notification icons. Different corners unless I put the task bar at the top, but whatever, I can adapt.

On GNOME 3, no, those are rationed. There are things hidden under sub options. In the pursuit of cleanliness and tidiness, things like my network status are hidden away.

That’s my choice, surely? I want them in view. I add extra ones. I like to see some status info. I find it handy.

GNOME says no, you don’t need this, so we’ve hidden it. You don’t need to see a whole menu. What are you gonna do, read it?

It reminds me of the classic Bill Hicks joke:

"You know I've noticed a certain anti-intellectualism going around this country ever since around 1980, coincidentally enough. I was in Nashville, Tennessee last weekend and after the show I went to a waffle house and I'm sitting there and I'm eating and reading a book. I don't know anybody, I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book. This waitress comes over to me (mocks chewing gum) 'what you readin' for?'...wow, I've never been asked that; not 'What am I reading', 'What am I reading for?’ Well, goddamnit, you stumped me... I guess I read for a lot of reasons — the main one is so I don't end up being a f**kin' waffle waitress. Yeah, that would be pretty high on the list. Then this trucker in the booth next to me gets up, stands over me and says [mocks Southern drawl] 'Well, looks like we got ourselves a readah'... aahh, what the fuck's goin' on? It's like I walked into a Klan rally in a Boy George costume or something. Am I stepping out of some intellectual closet here? I read, there I said it. I feel better."

Yeah, I read. I like reading. It’s useful. A bar of words is something I can scan in a fraction of a second. Then I can click on one and get… more words! Like some member of the damned intellectual elite. Sue me. I read.

But Microsoft says no, thou shalt have ribbons instead. Thou shalt click through tabs of little pictures and try and guess what they mean, and we don’t care if you’ve spent 20 years learning where all the options were — because we’ve taken them away! Haw!

And GNOME Shell says, nope, you don’t need that, so I’m gonna collapse it all down to one menu with a few buried options. That leaves us more room for the all-holy clock. Then you can easily see how much time you’ve wasted looking for menu options we’ve removed.

You don’t need all those confusing toolbar buttons neither, nossir, we gonna take most of them away too. We’ll leave you the most important ones. It’s cleaner. It’s smarter. It’s more elegant.

Well, yes it is, it’s true, but you know what, I want my software to rank usefulness and usability above cleanliness and elegance. I ride a bike with gears, because gears help. Yes, I could have a fixie with none, it’s simpler, lighter, cleaner. I could even get rid of brakes in that case. Fewer of those annoying levers on the handlebars.

But those brake and gear levers are useful. They help me. So I want them, because they make it easier to go up hills and easier to go fast on the flat, and if it looks less elegant, well I don’t really give a damn, because utility is more important. Function over form. Ideally, a balance of both, but if offered the choice, favour utility over aesthetics.

Now, to be fair, yes, I know, I can install all kinds of GNOME Shell extensions — from Firefox, which freaks me out a bit. I don’t want my browser to be able to control my desktop, because that’s a possible vector for malware. A webpage that can add and remove elements to my desktop horrifies me at a deep level.

But at least I can do it, and that makes GNOME Shell a lot more usable for me. I can customise it a bit. I can add elements and I could make my favourites bar be permanent, but honestly, for me, this is core functionality and I don’t think it should be an add-on. The favourites bar still won’t easily let me see how many instances of an app are running like the Unity one. It doesn’t also hold minimised windows and easy shortcuts like the Mac one. It’s less flexible than either.

There are things I like. I love the virtual-desktop switcher. It’s the best on any OS. I wish GNOME Shell were more modular, because I want that virtual-desktop switcher on Unity and XFCE, please. It’s superb, a triumph.

But it’s not modular, so I can’t. And it’s only customisable to a narrow, limited degree. And that means not to the extent that I want.

I accept that some of this is because I’m old and somewhat stuck in my ways and I don’t want to change things that work for me. That’s why I use Linux, because it’s customisable, because I can bend it to my will.

I also use Mac OS X — I haven’t upgraded to Sierra yet, so I won’t call it macOS — and anyway, I still own computers that run MacOS, as in MacOS 6, 7, 8, 9 — so I continue to call it Mac OS X. What this tells you is that I’ve been using Macs for a long time — since the late 1980s — and whereas they’re not so customisable, I am deeply familiar and comfortable with how they work.

And Macs inspired the Windows desktop and Windows inspired the Linux desktops, so there is continuity. Unity works in ways I’ve been using for nearly 30 years.

GNOME 3 doesn’t. GNOME 3 changes things. Some in good ways, some in bad. But they’re not my ways, and they do not seem to offer me any improvement over the ways I’m used to. OS X and Unity and Windows Vista/7/8/10 all give me app searching as a primary launch mechanism; it’s not a selling point of GNOME 3. The favourites bar thing isn’t an improvement on the OS X Dock or Unity Launcher or Windows Taskbar — it only delivers a small fraction of the functionality of those. The menu bar is if anything less customisable than the Mac or Unity ones, and even then, I have to use extensions to do it. If I move to someone else’s computer, all that stuff will be gone.

So whereas I do appreciate what it does and how and why it does so, I don’t feel like it’s for me. It wants me to change to work its way. The other OSes I use — OS X daily, Ubuntu Unity daily, Windows occasionally when someone pays me — don’t.

So I don’t use it.

Does that make sense?

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Page Summary

I was a Hackintosher
Installing Linux on an old 2008 MacBook needs some workarounds & fixes
A brief history of Apple's transition from Classic MacOS to the NeXTstep-based OS X
Apple's long processor journey
I really fancy a classic PowerBook G3 Pismo, for classic MacOS fun. Why?
Why did Apple's Copland fail when so many early-90s OS projects succeeded & dominate the world today
Why I don't use GNOME Shell

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Liam on Linux

Liam Proven's thoughts on IT, especially FOSS

Entries tagged with macos

I was a Hackintosher

Installing Linux on an old 2008 MacBook needs some workarounds & fixes

A brief history of Apple's transition from Classic MacOS to the NeXTstep-based OS X

Apple's long processor journey

I really fancy a classic PowerBook G3 Pismo, for classic MacOS fun. Why?

Why did Apple's Copland fail when so many early-90s OS projects succeeded & dominate the world today

Why I don't use GNOME Shell