> Don't you love how hackable everything is? Removing stock apps from the Applications folder is completely safe—nothing will break—and this is your computer, so you should make it your own. You can always restore apps later using Time Machine. Just don't delete System Preferences, or anything in the Utilities folder.
This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will break”, then in the same paragraph “but don’t do this specific thing”.
Yes, there is immense value in being able to do whatever we want with our computers without restrictions. But let’s not pretend there isn’t value in being able to set restrictions too. Everything in computers is a tradeoff. Having an immutable signed OS has plenty of advantages, including for hackers: I feel much safer telling people to “just try stuff” when I know there isn’t a risk of them breaking everything and being left with an unbootable machine, leaving them feeling stupid and scared of trying anything else. More advanced tasks can come later.
Kudos for the project in general, though, I’m not throwing shade. I too am discontent with Apple under Tim Cook, but staying on an older version of macOS isn’t an acceptable solution for my use cases, I’d sooner switch to a BSD.
This is a hallmark of having achieved comfortable familiarity within a system: You think you have total freedom because, mentally, you’ve excluded the off-limits things from consideration.
It reminds me of a couple jobs where management would tell us we had so much freedom that we could work on whatever we wanted. Choose your own destiny here! Except when you chose something that wasn’t among the short list of acceptable tasks, you were scolded for choosing something that was obviously not an option (to them). They knew the rules so deeply that the set of acceptable things seemed like the entire frontier of possibilities in their minds.
Like you said, it would be more helpful for everyone if the system actually clarified what was allowed and what was not so we didn’t have to guess. Drop the illusion of total freedom and replace it with clear rules that leave nothing to guessing.
> This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will break”, then in the same paragraph “but don’t do this specific thing”.
I think you're being a bit pedantic. There is no contradiction.
You can indeed delete System Preferences and nothing will break, ditto for utilities, it just makes life difficult if you do. For a locked down system for say a child though it might make sense. Also reversing the problem isn't hard, you can just copy in the apps from elsewhere.
macOS isn't perfect, but it does have a nice, clean, logical implementation in many ways.
One huge demonstration of that is the way it runs on commodity hardware so well (ie Hackintoshes). Apple could have easily baked in very hardware specific support in the OS, but instead they mostly implemented a general system that follows PC standards. Security lock downs are orthogonal to that.
Neither have I claimed there is one. I understood the point perfectly, I simply found it humorous. Things can be funny without being contradictions, my point was about the tradeoffs inherent to different types of OS lockdown.
> You can indeed delete System Preferences and nothing will break, ditto for utilities, it just makes life difficult if you do.
And—surprise!—most people don’t want to make their own lives difficult.
> Also reversing the problem isn't hard, you can just copy in the apps from elsewhere.
It is hard for most people. Most of us don’t just have something else at hand to copy from at all times, including the younger OP.
> For a locked down system for say a child though it might make sense.
I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing, but most of the time I see a variation on that comment it is attached to a fair bit of condescension. Like with calling something a “toy OS” when it’s used by millions of adults worldwide for productive work. Locked down systems don’t just make sense for children. On the contrary, children might benefit the most from operating systems which are not locked down, because they have the free time and willingness to experiment and won’t yet have a lot of important data. Or maybe you have kids who don’t really enjoy computers and just want to play an occasional game or need to write a school report. That’s OK too.
Both can also be true of your elderly relative, or your partner, or your cousin, or your friend who doesn’t want to fiddle with the damn machine, they just want to get their shit done without having to worry about screwing up anything. Your other friend will want the freedom to do everything and ask you for help.
There is no right approach for everyone, and there is no age at which one approach is definitely superior to another.
(I know I already replied in a different comment, but just thinking about this more.)
> Both can also be true of your elderly relative, or your partner, or your cousin, or your friend who doesn’t want to fiddle with the damn machine, they just want to get their shit done without having to worry about screwing up anything. Your other friend will want the freedom to do everything and ask you for help.
...you know, this is also why, as much as I love the hackability of Mavericks, I also kind of liked the way Apple initially implemented System Integrity Protection in El Capitan.
It was easy to turn off! Just boot into recovery mode, open the Terminal, type in a short command, and boom, SIP will never bother you again for the entire life of that computer! The process wasn't onerous, or even difficult as long as you knew how to open a Terminal in recovery mode, or were willing to learn. And if you couldn't do those things, well, you probably shouldn't turn off SIP!
Where I get annoyed is with the signed system volume stuff, because that consistently gets in your way! It is impossible for any type of user to "unlock" modern macOS.
Although then again, even going back to the original SIP without SSV... well, we did already have a system for this before SIP, didn't we? It was called UNIX permissions! If you didn't know what you're doing, or didn't want to learn, why were you using an administrator account? Why did your elderly relative ever have superuser privileges in the first place?
...the answer is kind of obvious, actually. Administrator accounts are the default, and even if you went out of your way to avoid one, you'd be unable to, for example, install Photoshop.
I wish that is the problem Apple had solved! Instead of introducing an entirely new layer on top of the UNIX security model, make non-admin accounts the default setting for new users, and then make those accounts a tad more capable (and lean on Adobe to stop being awful).
There is also another layer: when SIPS was introduced, there were tons of articles and videos teaching people to turn it off when they shouldn’t. This ranged from uninformed social media “developers” who confidently spewed dangerous bad advice, to outright bad actors trying to compromise your machine. Non-savvy users could still break their own systems by disabling these features easily.
But largely I agree with you. I wish Apple had taken longer to fully develop a robust solution from the ground up instead of the status quo of piling on year after year to a semi-broken system.
> There is also another layer: when SIPS was introduced, there were tons of articles and videos teaching people to turn it off when they shouldn’t.
...see, I actually had the opposite frustration with SIP. So many people were so hesitant to turn it off, even when they had a clear use case.
This is where the argument looses me. I agree that it's good to protect people from screwing up by accident. But if someone has taken the time to reboot their computer into recovery mode, find the Terminal app, and run a very specific command, that is not an accident! That is a user clearly requesting that the training wheels be removed. And sure, maybe the user was following bad advice, but it wasn't an accident!
People are allowed to do stupid things, that's how we learn. Again, it's great to have guardrails for people who want them, and it's great to have those guardrails on by default for people who don't want to think about them or even know they exist. But deciding which users are savvy enough to be worthy of disabling SIP feels Gatekeepy to me.
Because Google majorly screwed up, in a piece of software that runs with administrator privileges! Why the heck was it running with those privileges in the first place?!
It's kind of nuts that Google faced basically no blow-back for rendering people's systems unbootable.
The Chrome updater could also have had a bug that completely deletes your home directory, and SIP wouldn't protect you. I guess your computer would still boot in that case, but how much would you care? The actual damage would be worse.
Anyway, this entire incident was notable precisely because it was so unusual—in ~9 years of SIP I'm not aware of any other instances where turning it off caused problems.
Is this actually true? I thought Chess.app was, from OSX Lion (prior to Mavericks) yea unto the present, protected from deletion from the Applications folder as somehow intrinsically important to the system. It's apparently load-bearing, not just a holdover from NeXTSTEP but an integral element that the OS must defend at all costs to ensure System Integrity.
It's because its in the signed system volume. You cannot modify the system volume in any way. macOS will do all sorts of crazy things to portray that volume as just like the old filesystem, but ultimately there are hard limits. Deleting apps in that volume is one of them it seems.
It's absolutely not true on Lion or on Mavericks. You can just delete Chess. I know because I've done it. I've been using the system for five years.
On Lion—or, well, at least on Mavericks, but I'm assuming this is all Apple did starting in Lion—there is literally just a list of Appications in the Finder binary that, should you try to delete them, Finder will pop up a message stopping you. You can hex edit the Finder binary and the message will go away for the hex-edited app.
(Newer versions of macOS have signed system volume stuff, I'm not talking about that! This was introduced right around the time I nope'd out and built my current Mavericks computer.)
> I feel much safer telling people to “just try stuff” when I know there isn’t a risk of them breaking everything and being left with an unbootable machine
On which non-mobile OS is this true? It's certainly NOT safe on Mac/Windows/Linux to "just try stuff". I can trivially delete all of your data and/or upload all your .ssh files and Documents by "just try it"
If you are running an immutable system like Bazzite it is significantly harder to get yourself into an unbootable state by accident, since if your system-wide change does actually break the machine, you can just boot into an older one. NixOS is quite a bit different, but likewise it is really hard to make the system unbootable just by making changes, since I can just boot into an old generation. I haven't used rescue media for my own machines in probably 5 or 6 years now.
He is a fantastic COO, unfortunately, Apple needs a CEO with vision. They do everything safe. I like Tim Cook because clearly he runs the ship nicely, but we need a visionary at Apple. Apple was always a little different and more daring. Remember the Apple that told you, you were holding your phone wrong? I want that level of energy that pushes for more innovation, it was much more exciting.
running a funky chmod command recursively on my root dir and then learning how to fix it, probably taught me more about how linux works than any tutorial or article i've ever read.
I broke enough things in my early Linux days and learned a lot, but enjoying that, seeing it as a positive, or even having the willingness and time to spend on such fixes is far from universal. Most people have severe mental blocks to doing anything on the command-line for fear of breaking everything. Having an environment where they can’t break anything is a fantastic way to help them build confidence and learn how the computer works.
There is a time and place for each approach. Recognising which is appropriate for each situation and user is a good skill to cultivate.
> One time I somehow set the permissions of the sudo executable to lower than they needed to be (0600?). Fixing that was fun :)
I know very little, admittedly, but without telling us how, it’s just a funny anecdote.
I would try to switch user to root and su instead of sudo, but I’m not sure if that would actually work. Would it? Probably not on rootless installs, but I don’t know how many of those systems most folks are able to break in the manner described above.
> This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will break”, then in the same paragraph “but don’t do this specific thing”.
This is fair, but I will say, there's a reason I put this section after "Please enable Time Machine."
...you actually could get rid of System Preferences, if you really wanted to, and use the Terminal to set Preferences instead. The reason I called out System Preferences is because, growing up, my younger brother did delete System Preferences! He didn't have Time Machine, and this didn't come up until we were traveling and he couldn't connect to a new wifi network. So that was a little annoying.
But I'm probably further making your point, and I do largely agree with you! The thing is, my computer is my home--I spend so much time there--and I just can't deal with having my home littered with Apple cruft.
I have a soft spot for Mavericks too. It’s not 100% perfect (as post notes, scroll bars have been flattened and by then sidebar item icons had lost their color), but otherwise visually its probably the closest thing possible to “perfect” Aqua era OS X. It feels very refined in several ways that the earlier versions didn’t.
In my opinion the runner-up in terms of visuals is actually 10.4 Tiger, though — the dark grays ubiquitous throughout 10.5 and 10.6 have always felt kinda dingy and depressing in a similar manner to the dark gray Windows 95/98 (which, as an aside, is why I find the Windows 2000 variant of that look preferable, with its base gray being lighter and more cheery). That said I miss the 2D grid that 10.5 and 10.6 used for virtual desktops even today… the simplified 1D linear virtual desktops that’ve been in place since 10.7 feels needlessly watered down.
Funny enough that version of OS X can also run what to this day I’ve found to be the best implementation of a Quake terminal anywhere, in the form of the haxie Visor/TotalTerminal which added this functionality to the Apple terminal. The way it handled window focus and everything was so smooth and better than iTerm’s as well as any of the Linux dropdown terminals I’ve used.
On the note of Linux, I wish that there were Linux DEs that went the extra mile to produce a true OS X 10.4-10.9 analogue, but no such thing exists. The closest is elementary/Pantheon which is stylistically in the same ballpark but shares too much of its design roots with GNOME’s oversimplified iPadOS-like design. Everything else in the Linux world is Windows-type desktops or minimal WMs, both with flat UI themes.
On the BSD side there has been efforts such as helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) and rayvnOS (https://ravynos.com/) that aim to provide a FOSS recreation of the Jobs-era Mac OS X experience. Both can be considered BSDs as opposed to mere desktop environments. helloSystem uses X11 and Qt, while rayvnOS uses its own version of Cocoa.
However, it’s been a few years since I’ve seriously investigated these projects, and a cursory glance at them shows that they still have a while to go before they become replacements for existing desktop Linux environments. Both are rather ambitious passion projects from their creators, similar to Haiku, a re-creation of BeOS.
Both those projects can only go skin deep. The macOS experience is not only how it looks, but the depth of its interactivity and the thoughtful implementations within that depth.
I still shudder when I see the limitations of dragging files in Windows. The fact I can drag a folder to a save dialog to jump to that folder is so natural to me, and Windows and Linux never bothered with those details.
Yep. And you can drag from the title bar in a lot of applications to get the open file. And all the shortcut keys are consistent across applications.
I daily drive Linux mint. I can’t use ctrl+C in the terminal for Copy because that’s reserved for the interrupt signal. Fine - I’ll use meta+C. But I can’t use meta+C to copy in IntelliJ because the meta key isn’t a modifier key in Java. I’ve ended up needing to memorise different keys for copy+paste in every program I use. I mess it up on a daily basis. It’s madness!
Linux is like that everywhere. I like smooth scrolling. Some applications support it properly. Some half support it, or add scrolling lag for no reason (Firefox) and some break completely, assuming every scroll event should scroll a few lines down. I eventually solved my software problems by buying a worse mouse without smooth scrolling support.
Alt+mouse drag moves windows around. I love that feature! I can’t believe windows and macOS are missing it! But - oops. Alt+click is a thing in davinci resolve for adding keyframes. Urgh. It’s this. Over and over again constantly.
> I can’t use ctrl+C in the terminal for Copy because that’s reserved for the interrupt signal.
It's not reserved - the terminal emulator is free to handle any key, in any way, however it wants. Some examples:
1. The XFCE terminal allows you to specify whether Alt+[X] means Meta-[X], or whether it should trigger a menu shortcut.
2. macOS's Terminal.app: use System Settings to rebind Copy to Ctrl-C - when some text is selected, it copies that text; when there is no selection, it passes the ^C along.
Unfortunately, few people question the status quo of terminal emulator design. Look at all the other emulators around you: quick save/load, customisable hotkeys (including gamepads), speed up/slow down, mute specific audio channels, enable/disable sprite/layer rendering, peek/poke memory, and so on. An average GBA or SNES emulator gives you better tools than most terminal emulators, and the latter are what is actually being used to get work done.
Wait, if meta isn’t a modifier in Java how do key shortcuts in Java apps (including IntelliJ) work under macOS? Is this maybe just an oversight on Jetbrains’ part for the Linux versions of their IDEs?
But yes, inconsistency being the only consistent thing in Linux is annoying to me too. It’s bad enough that I think a distro with a central feature of maintaining forks of everything to polish all of those little paper cuts would probably do well, particularly among switchers.
I agree. There have long been macOS-style skins for KDE, GNOME, and other desktop environments, and some of them do a good job at capturing the look of macOS. However, it’s the feel of macOS that makes macOS special. Additionally, it’s the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and the ecosystem of conformant apps on macOS that also contributes to the overall experience.
That’s the core challenge with efforts like ElementaryOS, helloSystem, and ravynOS; it’s not enough to provide a polished desktop if we still have to deal with non-compliant apps.
Of course, this is a challenge even for macOS in an era of Electron apps, and in the Windows ecosystem there’s much less of an emphasis on conformance to UI/UX guidelines.
At least Electron apps populate the menubar under macOS. They do no such thing under Linux even if you’ve got a setup that features a global menubar (as KDE is capable of).
That tracks. Elementary's file browser is one of the only GUI options on Linux if you want Miller Columns. Your options at this point are basically Elementary/Pantheon Files, or GWorkspace...
I’ve been keeping an eye on these projects too. My hunch is that helloSystem is going to find Qt limiting as it matures, and while ravynOS’ approach is more likely to produce a high fidelity analogue, it’s also much larger in scope and likely to get bogged down in achieving compatibility with existing Mac binaries. I wish the best for both though, because they’re filling an extremely empty niche in the FOSS desktop space.
There's XtraFinder which promises something similar, but now all modern macs require disabling security features, which seems a bit much for a convenient hotkey.
I have also requested TotalFinder-like feature for PathFinder(https://cocoatech.io/) which is the closest thing to what TotalVisor did.
Wild how tiny little utilities can change your expectations of using a computer. Simply cannot get by without quake terminal and bottom file explorer anymore, on any machine I daily drive.
Tiger is cool! The other neat thing about the visuals is, if you think about Apple's industrial design in that era, the UI feels a perfect extension of the hardware itself.
And as much as I love Mavericks, I agree, I would absolutely jump to a Linux distro that recreated the experience faithfully. There really isn't anything though, especially when you add in the larger app ecosystem—I like using Aperture a lot more than Digikam, for example.
Edit: Oh, and:
> and by then sidebar item icons had lost their color
But you can bring the color back with the ColorfulSidebar SIMBL plugin!
I have. Budgie is cool, but falls into a similar bucket as elementary/Pantheon in that it’s not mac-like even if it includes certain Mac features and qualities.
>I knew I wanted an operating system from before Apple abandoned the Aqua design language.
I suppose it depends on your definition, but that likely does mean Mavericks is the latest available. For my money though, El Capitan (10.11 to Mavericks' 10.9) was the local maxima (speed, stability, capability). I've no inkling what issues using that would entail—I had no idea that Mountain Lion had "a more capable version of QuickTime"—but my immediate response to this was wondering why not El Capitan.
Strictly speaking, Mavericks (and Mountain Lion and Lion before it) were already some way through abandoning Aqua. Lion dropped the beautiful blue scroll bars that previous OS Xs had, replaced the pill-shaped buttons with rounded rectangles, and somewhat flattened the overall UI as well, though not to the extent that Yosemite did.
But even as a fan of Aqua, I think it's nice that some of these elements got toned down just a bit. Really, you could view most of the design changes from OS X 10.0 onwards as Apple slowly toning down Aqua; the original Cheetah looks kind of gaudy IMO, the interface elements draw too much attention to themselves.
I do miss Snow Leopard's scroll bars though, as I explicitly call out on the website!
You're thinking of QuickTime 7, that can be optionally installed (as a separate app) even on macOS 10.14 Mojave! But the website is referring to versions of QuickTime X. QuickTime 10.2, which was included with Mountain Lion, was the last to support third-party components. (If you've ever used "Perian", that's what I'm referring to.)
We could benefit from a site that describes the best OS for any hardware and has scripts and instructions for how to mod them to be more efficient and up-to-date, with someone assigned to maintaining patches and tools for basic functionality you might need, but also having standalone, airgapped versions of each for longevity.
Right now, this info is dispersed everywhere and it’s not the primary intent of archival sites to provide this.
> Removing stock apps from the Applications folder is completely safe—nothing will break—and this is your computer, so you should make it your own
This is the part that hits home the most for me.
I get the benefits of the hardened pc-as-appliance that Apple has shoved down all our throats as "for our own good" but using a modern Mac compared to even Mavericks, or Windows XP, feels to me like if someone came into my house and confined me to a coat closet which they've padded and sealed off. This isn't my house anymore, someone else controls everything and only they can give me permission (revocable at any time) to do literally anything. They promise me that I'll never hit my head now, but I never had that problem in the first place.
Echoes of an article posted here [1] some time ago called I Don’t Like Computers which had the same nostalgic vibe about computing in the past. This is exactly how modern OS's and devices make me feel. The Personal Computer used to be PERSONAL. The User was in control. We used to be in the driver’s seat. We used to tell computers what to do. Now we feel like passengers, and the computer is telling us what it's going to do and hedging us into a few small scraps of functionality it deems safe for us.
The MacBook Air mentioned (2014) will install Mavericks when booted into recovery mode anyway (unless you use Option-Command-R which will give you the newest compatible version which is Big Sur).
I did that a few days ago and I agree, it’s quite snappy! Missing certificates can also be installed manually (e.g. from the curl CA bundle), but even then TLS 1.3 support is lacking in most apps which breaks a lot of stuff without the suggested proxy.
> The MacBook Air mentioned (2014) will install Mavericks when booted into recovery mode anyway (unless you use Option-Command-R which will give you the newest compatible version which is Big Sur).
Certain 2014 Macbook Airs, including my own, will install Yosemite instead in recovery mode for some reason, even though obviously I'm using Mavericks and it runs fine.
I don't want to belabor the point, but just to be clear—I am referring to a mid-2014 MBA, anything newer and Mavericks wouldn't work! (There is no "late 2014" MBA as far as I'm aware.) Mine offers to install Yosemite in recovery mode.
It may indeed be based on when that specific computer came off of the assembly line or something, I have no idea, but for that exact model of computer you can get different results in recovery mode!
There are multiple boot-time recovery options, but you might not have a required firmware update to use them. Per everymac, all 2014 MBA’s should be able to run up to Big Sur?
> Option-Command-R: Start up from macOS Recovery over the internet. Use this key combination to reinstall macOS and upgrade to the latest version of macOS that’s compatible with your Mac.
When updating to the new macOS, firmware updates that govern the pre-boot and recovery environment are changed/updated, and you can downgrade macOS again afterwards. You can usually install the firmware updates without updating macOS, but finding them is usually the harder part. You could probably swap hard drives to a scratch SSD if you wanted to update your firmware via updating macOS entirely without affecting your live install, or install macOS on a USB drive, which should not affect your internal SSD install, but like all upgrades, have a backup or pull the internal SSD.
I don’t know, I’ve performed numerous updates from the pre-installed Mavericks (Yosemite, El Capitan, High Sierra, Big Sur are the ones I remember, might be more), but the default recovery still goes into Mavericks for me
You might need to update the firmware for your Mac in order for the Internet Recovery to support updating to Big Sur. The firmware updates are installed at upgrade time usually, but you may be able to install them separately.
> About EFI and SMC firmware updates for Intel-based Mac computers
Big Sur Recovery mode works for me with Option+Cmd+R, so if needed I can install that. What I meant is that the other goes into Mavericks Recovery mode. And I’m happy about that actually :-)
Edit: if you were referring to Option+Cmd+R anyway, I guess I misread
Edit2: by other one I meant Shift+Option+Cmd+R, just Cmd+R actually goes into Big Sur, you are right!
> If you used Command-R to start up from the local Recovery system, you get the current version of the most recently installed macOS.
> If you used Option-Command-R to start up from Internet Recovery, you might get the latest macOS that is compatible with your Mac.
> If you used Shift-Option-Command-R to start up from Internet Recovery, you might get the macOS that came with your Mac, or the closest version still available.
There is another one, you can hold Option while booting and it will show disks to boot from. But there is also a SSID dropdown to do internet recovery like Shift+Option+Command+R.
You can even boot to Linux or Windows if you have the patience to set it up. I made a hackintosh for hard drive data recovery that would dual boot Windows 10 and macOS. It’s a fun ecosystem.
Yeah I remember using BootCamp back then. FreeBSD also works quite well on the MacBook Air mid-2014, but without WiFi.
Edit: I didn’t bother to look into wifibox which is a FreeBSD package that runs a Linux VM for the WiFi driver, that could work. Also didn’t bother to check the webcam. However both WiFi and webcam work under various Linux distributions, but it’s typically a third-party Broadcom driver that has to be added outside of regular package repos.
I guess I was also confused about the different recovery modes as pointed out by aspenmayer below.
I used Shift+Option+Command+R (or hold Option and choose WiFi instead of disk) which is internet recovery using the macOS version that came pre-installed (or closest)
Whereas Command+R is local recovery which might be any macOS version that last changed the local recovery environment.
Regarding SSL: just make sure you are using macOS 10.9.3, earlier versions (all of them, and I mean, all since the 80s) never had a working SSL implementation.
I stayed on Mavericks until late 2016, by which time I had to update to then-current system because I got a new job and needed latest Xcode to compile the iOS app. Surprisingly, I didn't hate the flatter design as much as I anticipated. But of course I still miss skeuomorphism.
The worst transition for me was Big Sur (or, more precisely, Mojave -> Monterey when I bought a new MacBook in 2021). The useless margins, the unification of title bars and toolbars that no one asked for, the borderless buttons (I enabled "show borders" in accessibility settings), SF Symbols (no pixel grid alignment whatsoever), and the redesigned alerts, are the worst. From what I've seen of Tahoe, it makes it even worse, both with the touchscreenification and with the wasted screen area.
I agree; I don’t like the iOSification of the UI/UX, and I also don’t like the increased locked-down nature of macOS, such as having to go through a nag screen whenever I use lldb. I still prefer Macs over Windows for work-issued hardware, but for my personal equipment, I never upgraded beyond Mojave. When combined with the lack of user-serviceability on the latest Macs, I switched back to PCs a few years ago after nearly 15 years on Macs. I have a Ryzen 9 desktop and a Framework 13 laptop. I begrudgingly use Windows 10/11; I would’ve moved to desktop Linux if it weren’t for some proprietary software I need that doesn’t run on Linux. I still have my “trash can” Mac Pro on the rare occasion I need a Mac-only app.
In my opinion both Windows and Linux are much worse than even modern macOS, so I'm going to keep using it for the foreseeable future, but being rather conservative with installing updates.
On hardware, my M1 Max MacBook Pro is the best laptop I've ever owned, period.
You call that insane quality? I took a five second look at the GitHub page and I already noticed that the spacing between the three traffic light buttons is wrong. It immediately felt off.
I'm not about to dedicate any minute of my time when my first impression of a project is bad. It's like meeting new people: I'm not going to try to meet up with you again to find more common ground if my first impression of a person is bad.
Reading "Why Mavericks" made me glad not to be alone in noticing the slow progression toward a general lack of usability in macOS.
For me, it started with 10.7 when a lot of things changed just to look different. From then forward, user habits were seemingly not considered and everything moved here and there on a yearly basis.
At least with Windows, the major overhauls to Explorer come so slowly that your productivity routines don't get sand in the cogs every year when you update and Apple's OS shifts extremely key parts of the window UI around and makes the hit points even smaller over time.
The killer for me is how difficult it is to fix things if you don't like them. Modern macOS has horrendous mouse speed handling, and changing this beyond Apple's very limited settings is a pain. And even then, Windows and Linux and older OS X handled the cursor movement better. I like(d) so much about Apple over the years, but it is clear they're an iPhone company that makes laptops and desktops... not the other way around.
I wish all of this angst could be bottled up and used to create a simply workable version of GNUstep --- ideally targeting something easy to configure hardware-wise like a Raspberry Pi 5.
My exit from the Macintosh OS was in 2011 with the release of OS X 10.7 Lion; meaning the end of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. It was at that point when I realized that Apple was going more towards an "appliance" company than a computing company. They started making it more and more difficult to access the power of the Unix core. So I packed up my virtual bags and moved to Linux once and for all. I started with Mint (for about a minute), then went to Ubuntu, now I am at Debian (with the Xfce DE); probably forever.
>Today, it an inherently vulnerable operating system, and you will need to be a bit careful. Regularly back up your data to cold storage, never use an outdated web browser, and always keep your router's firmware up-to-date.
If my computer is hacked, I'm not really worried about my data being destroyed, I have offline backups for that. The bigger danger is having my data exfiltrated, I don't want my tax return or password manager database to be exfiltrated from my computer.
How are they decrypting your password manager database? Sure they'll get your tax returns, but while I'm not saying that's great, didn't they get most of it from Equifax anyway?
My personal "thread model" is basically to make sure I can survive an automated attack. I'm convinced I can with my current Mavericks setup. If an experienced attacker was targeting me specifically, I'm sure Mavericks would make their life easier, but I also think they'd probably succeed no matter what OS I was running. https://xkcd.com/538/
But I do have my Bitwarden vault set to use 2,000,000 KDF iterations, literally the highest it will go...
> For some inexplicable reason, Apple's website does not offer a Mavericks download link. Their official list skips straight from Mountain Lion (10.8) to Yosemite (10.10).
Does anybody have an idea why Mavericks isn't available from Apple?
Mavericks wasn’t the end of the line for any Macs. Every device that is supported in Mavericks is supported in Yosemite. Apple only makes the latest version available for any given device.
But then why does Apple offer a download for Mountain Lion? Every device that was supported in Mountain Lion was supported in Mavericks (and Yosemite by extension).
I also like the aesthetics of OS X versions prior to 10.10. It is hard to find programs that still support older versions though. To make things easier I'm using the more modern macOS 10.14 but installed a few things to make it look more like 10.9.
macOSLucidaGrande (https://github.com/LumingYin/macOSLucidaGrande) can change the system font back to Lucida Grande like 10.9 used. One annoyance with this though is that the '*' character won't show up in password input fields.
Oh man, I actually used this guide when putting Mavericks on my old Mac! So damn nice. The UI is still so fresh. Neat that there's Firefox for it now. Last I tried it, I had to do Chromium-legacy, though I wouldn't exactly want to take an old unpatched machine online very often.
> There is no modern mainstream browser engine that works in Snow Leopard.
Sadly this too will be true in Mavericks soon enough. If you decide to web browse on a separate machine though, you can still have your Mavericks machine be your main one.
Ah, but note I said "mainstream browser engine", not "mainstream browser!" The mainstream browsers themselves dropped Mavericks some time ago, but other developers have been maintaining backports.
Firefox Dynasty is actually a relatively recent development. For a while I was using Chromium Legacy[1], which, yes, did stop getting updated a little over a year ago. But then just in time, i3roly came along with Firefox Dynasty[2]!
It's true that if i3roly drops Firefox Dynasty, and the Chromium Legacy developer doesn't return (there has been some movement on the repo), that will be the end of this project. But that could be many years from now!
Exactly, and just to add: browsers are where I draw the line in terms of security. If the OS is old, whatever, my router has a firewall and I trust the applications I install.
But my browser is running gobs of random Javascript from who knows where every day! I guess you could do the thing where you disable Javascript by default and re-enable it on select websites; I'm personally not willing to do that.
So a browser really needs a good, up-to-date sandbox. There has to be protection somewhere in the chain.
And some sites refuse to load if your browser is too old. I think Google was like that — requiring a newer browser to access, for example, your Google drive.
This is nice, I wish there was way to bring the old Rosetta over, though I guess it probably needs something like all/some parts of the OS to be compiled as fat binaries to work,
> 10.6 xnu does have special support for rosetta, namely in kern_exec where it seems to set some special ppc environment bits if the oah binary is invoked (and of course there's the handler to call the oah binary for a ppc mach-o, but the former is more important for minimal viable example since you can always invoke oah manually). I think this bit is actually needed because the kernel has other codepath here when allocating memory. (Not 100% confident though, bit it makes sense there are different conventions about base address, region sizes, etc.)
> Would be easiest to try getting a plain assembly hello world ppc binary working first. I see that someone on your linked thread tried copying translate binary but it crashed even without args; tracing in lldb would be the logical next step but seems he never followed up on that...
> Another thing which I'm not sure of is whether rosetta relies on existence of ppc-arch system frameworks; I'd assume not since they'd want to do high-level thunking here for performance, but maybe that only ends up being done in some cases? I couldn't find any docs on reverse engineering rosetta1m or if they exist they've disappeared.
A possible counterpoint to the last paragraph would be, if Rosetta doesn't need those system frameworks why are so many libraries in Snow Leopard compiled as intel-ppc universal binaries? If those actually get used, a port would be much more difficult.
(Relative) older time who got started with FreeBSD and Linux in the mid 90s here.
While I loved Mavericks (and I went through all the versions of OS X since Jaguar to macOS Sonoma), I have to say that in my opinion it just keeps getting better. Yes, a few restrictions came along but nothing that keeps me as a system developer from being productive.
The Apple SDK's, CLI tools, compilers and libraries available are world class, and I still got my Unix prompt, while having a snappy UI. Don't get me started on Apple Silicon; now I never have to wait for anything.
I'm still on Sonoma though, but it's because I take so long to upgrade. It's best practice to wait a few months with new releases of macOS. I've used that strategy for 20 years and it hasn't failed me once.
Big fan of your OS X stuff! I still have a 11" 2012 MacBook Air with Core i7 and 8 GB RAM, if only I could use it as my everyday machine I'd be very happy!
I didn't know about Firefox Dynasty, it's very cool.
(Wow, and Archive Plus and Preview Plus… you're killing it!)
What's your experience with those shady USB-C to Magsafe 2 cables/adapters? Old MacBook batteries are bound to deplete faster and faster every year, it'd be nice to be able to charge using what's most common nowadays.
I wouldn't trust the adapters. Maybe in theory it's possible to do it right, bridge PD negotiation to a 1-wire protocol negotiation but you've got to trust that they handled both the usb-c part correctly and the 1-wire part correctly.
There's not much rigorous testing I could find online, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg6pPDys-s0 tested a few and found that some spark when first connected, which implies they're not doing the 1-wire negotiation properly (real adapters will prevent arcing by sensing if it's connected first before increasing voltage)
> What's your experience with those shady USB-C to Magsafe 2 cables/adapters?
I don't have experience--I would probably try to get a real one. I'm also a big proponent of getting batteries replaced. I know this all costs money, but if you like and are using this computer, make it nice!
I've got this idea that third-party batteries are mostly crap and die very fast, but it's based on ≈10 year old experience (although the last official battery on my iPhone SE 2016 was the same)
So you know how there are different religious factions that broadly have very similar views but they practically go to war due to the variance of small details... screw mavericks, OSX 10.4 Tiger FOREVER!!!!
Hey, Tiger is cool, you won't get any shade from me! I would find it extremely difficult to use as a daily driver though, much moreso than Mavericks.
I do try to support other old versions of OS X where possible. Aqua Proxy supports Snow Leopard for example, which took some effort. (I wish it could support Tiger too but there's no way to build Go binaries for Tiger.)
...do you think that could actually work? I can't entirely tell if you're joking or not, it's true I never considered this... does WASM code have the network access that would be required for a proxy?
Yep, that's the one I was thinking of. Still, I wonder if the platform's networking could just be added in ex-post facto (disclaimer: never actually touched this, just looked at it)
There was a joke bumper-sticker in the valley back in the day that said "Windows 95 == Macintosh 89". But the critique of this was "Macintosh 95 == Macintosh 89". In the same way, "NeXTStep 89 == MacOS X 2001 == MacOS X 2015 == MacOS X 2025" except that they hadn't steved everyone from the user experience research group in 2001 and there were vestiges of #a11y features left in Yosemite.
Complaining your current version of MacOS X has a worse user experience than it did 10 years ago is like buying a Tesla and then complaining about its resale value.
> I came to a decision. It was time to leave modern macOS behind.
It was the opposite for me: I decided to leave Windows behind after a mounting cascade of frustration and disappointment with Microsoft and Their Way of Doing Things.
Fast forward to Now: I'm still happy on macOS Tahoe. Apple does some dumb annoying shit too but it hasn't yet gotten to the point where I give up computing altogether and retire to a Tibetan monastery. Or switch to Linux. Whenever I get to look at the current state of Windows it has nothing that makes me want to go back. Sure, like an ex it still has a few things that you wish you could still enjoy, like a few games, but then you remember why you left them in the first place.
Some of the things that irk me the most about macOS:
• The dumbness or complete lack of documentation about some specific things, specially on the developer side.
• Some features touted as hot and sexy during a new release's PR wave and then rotting in a half-baked state.
• Some minor bugs remaining unfixed for years.
• Most improvements being tied to a major version cycle, even if they could easily be shipped in a minor monthly/quarterly update.
I preferred Snow Leopard, 10.6 over all others. With Lion the downfall started. And it cracked with the doomed butterfly keyboards, that's when I gave up and switched back to ThinkPads with Fedora. Battery life was nice, but I am not wandering around that much anymore. Those days I did work in the pool with an air.
I'm afraid the newest compatible iTerm2 is 3.0.15 from 2017 [1].
It's open source so it might be possible to build a newer version to be compatible, or to cherry pick certain newer features. It's not an app I use though.
Running a popular OS with no security updates for the past 9 years sounds downright insane.
I really liked IRIX and will always have a soft spot for Sun's OpenWindows on Solaris, but there is no way in hell I'd use either as a daily driver these days, and I can almost bet either have fewer actively exploited vulnerabilities than Mavericks.
My favorite thing about MacOS is how it has never changed how it changes.
It's like the game Civilization.
Every new version is worse than the last. Every new version is more bloated. Every new version has changes that ruin it.
Every new version is "less snappy". Every new version ruins everything.
Not even with OS X, we're talking back to the System 6 days, almost 40 years ago, it has always been the same.
System 6 uses too much RAM I'm staying with System 5.
System 7 is bloated I'm staying with System 6.
System 8 is a disaster I'm staying with System 9.
System 9 is a buggy mess I'm staying with System 8.
System, err, OS X v10.0 has no apps I'm staying with System 9.
And then oh boy the OS X/macOS versions!
Every generation gets so much worse, buggier, and "less snappy" than the last that surely our computers must be traveling backwards through time by now!
Every Civ game past III, the one I spent the most time playing during college and am most used to and like the most for totally not arbitrary reasons, has just been the worst, amirite?
One notable standout here was 10.6 which was simply 10.5 recompiled for native Intel and dropping PowerPC support --- that said, for early 10.x each version consistently became more performant up through 10.5, it's just that 10.6 was the version where that was the _raison d'être_.
I know this isn't your point, but it actually seems like PPC got dropped from Snow Leopard at the last minute. Early developer preview disks worked on PowerPC Macs. The stability didn't come from dropping PPC.
This is way I feel, but my last stop is 10.15 (Catalina) having started with 3.2. Modern macOS is just trash.
My goal over the longer term is to fully migrate to Android, especially desktop mode. There are several reasons for this but maybe the fact that given the typical hardware for Android means it's less likely suffer the terminal bloat of desktop systems.
I stayed on Catalina for a long time as it was the last version my Macbook Pro 2012 supported natively. It is a pretty solid OS, though it is harder to get Apple services running on it now.
I personally just use Sonoma now on my Macbook Pro M3 Pro.
I'm actually the author of those fixed widgets! They are on the website in the app library. (Even though they aren't "apps"... I originally wanted to make a separate page for non-app Mavericks software but it felt weird.)
The idea is, remove the nonworking ones to start out since they're broken, and then you can install the working copies.
You know, there comes a journey in every developers life where all roads lead to hackintosh. It’s like a right of passage. I did it back during the Snow Leopard years with NForce motherboards (wrote some kernel extensions). Now, it’s just out of nostalgia.
I have fond memories of my Hackintosh years. Over time the frustration of updating to the latest OS and having to deal with breaking changes just sucked all the joy from it. Especially when I really needed to use the computer for something.
I might tinker again some time soon. I had thought of building a Mac mini for a home theatre setup but then again Apple TV just works so well
I hackintoshed a few times over the years too. It could be frustrating at times, but when you had a solid setup that updated cleanly and everything it felt like a cheat code. Just as stable as a real Mac, but more capable, quiet, and expandable.
One of the laptops I hacked for a while had a 15.4” 1920x1200 screen panel (much nicer than on contemporary 15” MacBooks), 4 USB-A ports, FireWire, Ethernet, an eSATA port, a full size DisplayPort, EC and PCMCIA slots, and an SD card reader and could dock to more than double the number of ports, plus two hot swap drive bays, and it all worked as expected under hackintoshed Mavericks which was incredible. It was like having a portable Mac Pro.
OpenBSD on the Desktop can be a thing if someone were just to make a good experience with it, from the ground up, like Steve Jobs did with NeXT. Just don't choose Objective-C.
The issue is money. Developers are expensive, AI isn't anywhere near ready for this task, and we have a lot of learnings from good UI design and developer patterns (both pro, and anti). ElementaryOS was supposed to be that thing but quickly devolved into yet another distro.
These older machines deserve some love too. Not everything needs to be <2 years old. Not everything needs to be shiny. This is why you're broke. Stop spending :D
hackintosh-in-docker has made my life so much easier. also w/r/t the apple tv, I've always wondered if anyone released an installer for the old x86 apple TVs, those would be fun to try and modernize.
I like the spirit of this, but I just think Mavericks is a bizarre break point for this type of approach. At least hit Yosemite so you can benefit from NVMe. For me, Mojave feels like the neatest break point, but if you’re rocking Nvidia, there’s also a case for High Sierra.
Having switched from an x86 laptop to a macbook recently, macos is serviceable but overall terrible. I just want to install Linux at this point so bad. I wish Apple would officially support Asahi Linux. It would cost them nothing in the grand scheme of things.
In process of ditching everything Apple by the end of the year. Going all in on Linux. There's trade offs, nothings perfect, but I don't need a big desperate corporation trying to upsell me on cloud storage and AI.
One of the best parts, IMO, is the feeling that comes from contributing something to the community that will last--possibly for decades or centuries. To me, using Linux is an experience of gratitude.
> Web Browsers. There is no modern mainstream browser engine that works in Snow Leopard.
You don't need one. You can either use RDP to a Windows Server running on a lightweight Mini PC (like I do) or use VMWare Fusion in unified mode to have a modern Chrome version seamlessly integrated into your desktop experience.
VMWare Fusion in unified mode is an option I may explore if Firefox Dynasty stops being maintained, but I know the integration wouldn't be seamless enough to satisfy me. Especially given that my web browser is the most used app on my machine, it kind of defeats the purpose of using Mavericks in the first place.
Are you daily driving Snow Leopard? I'd be interested to hear about the experience, if you have anything in particular to share.
The newer version of MacOS on it, has become basically useless.
Windows 10 on it, has been handy for when I want to watch Apple TV, or use Channel 4 (who still don't generically support their app on Android which my TV runs).
But now Windows won't update to 11.
So maybe time to move from Windows to Linux and downgrade the MacOS.
I have a Mac Pro 1,1 and trying this might actually be kind of cool and give it more life. It is pretty limited otherwise and the 3,1 it sits next to is way more practical.
Recently I've been looking for some VPN solution and found that many are quite expensive, though often you get a decent enough discount if you subscribe for like a year or longer. Also, I believe many services are probably not trustworthy (regardless of their claims).
A very affordable alternative is a DigitalOcean droplet with PiHole. You can connect with this VPN with Wireguard, which will probably work just fine on Mavericks. Been using this now for a couple of months and no issues. My costs are probably around 3-4 USD per month, but I don't use VPN all the time.
I haven't used WireGuard, but it looks like the main macOS implementation uses Go. Binaries built with Go 1.19 or below will work on Mavericks if you inject some compatibility libraries. (This is one of many things I haven't had time to fully document on the website yet, but I can help anyone who asks.)
But the big problem with non-native VPNs on Mavericks (by which I mean, any VPN which requires installing additional software beyond what is built-in to the OS) is that they tend to bypass any HTTPS proxies you have set up. Without an HTTPS proxy, Mavericks will have trouble connecting to most servers because SecureTransport doesn't support modern cipher suites. In e.g. Firefox Dynasty this won't matter since it ships its own (modern) SSL implementation, but Apple Mail (for example) will be unable to load most remote images.
This is why I have the note about privatevpn on the website—it took me a bit of searching to find a service that was low cost and supported a Mavericks native VPN protocol. I don't really "trust" any VPN service, but they're useful in certain specific situations.
One thing I really like is that it won't MITM any requests that use TLS 1.3 or HTTP2. Since Mavericks doesn't support these protocols natively, the proxy knows this traffic must be coming from a relatively-modern app that ships its own TLS implementation and doesn't need any help.
> Can you touch on how some of these patches were made/backported from and to closed-source binaries?
The Mail plugin just disables a feature via Objective-C swizzling. Swizzling is fun, you can replace any method in any app with your own version. I usually use class-dump to get a list of methods in the original app, read the method names to guess at what each one does, and try the ones that look promising. More recently I've begun using Hopper (a proper decompiler/disassembler) more heavily, particularly because Claude is very good at reading both assembly and decompiler babble and can direct me.
The font patch is just a hex edit. To quote the readme:
>> The patch removes the `fnt_adjust` TrueType instruction from Apple's font rendering code. This instruction has not been used by legitimate fonts since the 90s. After CVE-2023-41990 was published, Apple responded by removing this instruction from modern macOS. This patch merely does the same on Mavericks.
The patched library replaces the vulnerable instruction with a no-op.
My favorite Mac, by far. I upgraded the RAM in it. Can you even imagine a Mac that has upgradeable RAM? Pearl clutching. I also tried plugging 4 different 4K monitors into it just for the novelty. I miss my trashcan
Also, if you were to serve your get.sh (et al) as text/plain it would enable browing them versus them downloading and having to open it locally. Or, as your footer implied, linking to GitHub would also be super handy
> Can you even imagine a Mac that has upgradeable RAM?
Well now I feel old. Not only can I imagine it, I used to routinely buy RAM upgrades for my Macs because it was more affordable than getting a Mac with more RAM in the first place. As I recall one of the early aluminum PowerBooks even had a really thoughtful design that made it easy to access and replace the RAM, battery, and hard drive.
Yeah, back in the day they used actual Philips head screws, I presume for that purpose. The user hostility is just outrageous, IMHO
I've been thinking harder and harder about https://getupgraded.com/macbook/ to really get it in my mind that I don't own any Apple product, I just lease it from them for a while
They also used Torx screws for a long time. Honestly the process for upgrading RAM was always variable. Power Macs had a door with a hinge, but the original iMac needed a lot of disassembly to get to the RAM slots.
> Also, if you were to serve your get.sh (et al) as text/plain it would enable browing them versus them downloading and having to open it locally.
Thanks, I'll look into this! I'm not immediately sure how to do it. The site is hosted via a very minimal Cloudflare worker, because it's free for static assets but unlike e.g. Github pages supports unencrypted http (which is useful when bootstrapping a new Mavericks system). I haven't changed the content type of anything.
My Github is https://github.com/wowfunhappy but you actually won't find either script there, the website is the canonical version! This type of thing is why my github isn't linked!
But what are you going to do when someone else uses an emoji in a way that changes the meaning of what they wrote?
You don't have to like them, but to me, using a computer that can't display emojis would be kind of like using a computer that can't display the simicolon character.
I use Macs for my day job, but personally I switched to Ubuntu (and Windows 11 when I have no choice). I have two older Mac's but they are fit for recycling now.
I made the leap due to Mac hardware cost and after seeing the Liquid Metal debacle. I also left iCloud Photos after Apple botched the UI.
I also got tired of jumping through hoops that didn’t really work most of the time to play games on Mac (e.g., Crossover).
But really, my Mac was an M1 system so I figured that even if I hated my Linux laptop I could just bail on it and get myself an M4 system as a nice upgrade. I was having issues with storage space and of course Macs aren’t upgradable so I have to sell my system and buy a new one to resolve that.
I’m very happy with my decision.
I run Bazzite with KDE and I’m very happy with the distro.
Love this and might downgrade (upgrade?)from Mojave which is when I stopped upgrading the Mac OS. Apple was still a computer company before Mojave instead of a bank wrapped in an ad network. Or is it an ad network wrapped in a bank? I can’t tell but their new Operating Systems are hot garbage since the old BSD guy left for truenas.
PowerPC you have Leopard or Tiger, the latter being "faster" but more limited. You can also install the version of Leopard someone added Snow Leopard beta parts to, which I do have on my PPC MacMini, but it still gives you limited returns.
With PowerPC you might be better looking at a third party. I hear good things about MorphOS, though never tried it. You could do Linux too.
I mean, yeah, sure, you can run this. I wouldn't trust my personal data to such an old OS if it ever got connected to the internet and the system will slowly disintegrate while you're using it so I'd rather adapt to something like Omarchy on a modern Linux system instead but if this is bringing joy to some people, more power to them.
It is an interesting article, but not really a Show HN because there is nothing I can play with or try out...unless you ship me an old compatible Mac... my email is in my profile :
...I'll admit I wasn't entirely sure if this could be a Show HN or not, I might have chosen wrong!
However, the guide includes a ton of software I made, which can absolutely be tried out—Aqua Proxy, updated QuickTime components, SIMBL plugins, etc—by anyone with compatible hardware.
I'm sorry you don't have the right hardware. :( You could use a virtual machine but there's really no point. But I don't think this in itself should disqualify a Show HN submission, right? Otherwise, the only thing people could submit would be webapps!
> Don't you love how hackable everything is? Removing stock apps from the Applications folder is completely safe—nothing will break—and this is your computer, so you should make it your own. You can always restore apps later using Time Machine. Just don't delete System Preferences, or anything in the Utilities folder.
This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will break”, then in the same paragraph “but don’t do this specific thing”.
Yes, there is immense value in being able to do whatever we want with our computers without restrictions. But let’s not pretend there isn’t value in being able to set restrictions too. Everything in computers is a tradeoff. Having an immutable signed OS has plenty of advantages, including for hackers: I feel much safer telling people to “just try stuff” when I know there isn’t a risk of them breaking everything and being left with an unbootable machine, leaving them feeling stupid and scared of trying anything else. More advanced tasks can come later.
Kudos for the project in general, though, I’m not throwing shade. I too am discontent with Apple under Tim Cook, but staying on an older version of macOS isn’t an acceptable solution for my use cases, I’d sooner switch to a BSD.
This is a hallmark of having achieved comfortable familiarity within a system: You think you have total freedom because, mentally, you’ve excluded the off-limits things from consideration.
It reminds me of a couple jobs where management would tell us we had so much freedom that we could work on whatever we wanted. Choose your own destiny here! Except when you chose something that wasn’t among the short list of acceptable tasks, you were scolded for choosing something that was obviously not an option (to them). They knew the rules so deeply that the set of acceptable things seemed like the entire frontier of possibilities in their minds.
Like you said, it would be more helpful for everyone if the system actually clarified what was allowed and what was not so we didn’t have to guess. Drop the illusion of total freedom and replace it with clear rules that leave nothing to guessing.
> This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will break”, then in the same paragraph “but don’t do this specific thing”.
I think you're being a bit pedantic. There is no contradiction.
You can indeed delete System Preferences and nothing will break, ditto for utilities, it just makes life difficult if you do. For a locked down system for say a child though it might make sense. Also reversing the problem isn't hard, you can just copy in the apps from elsewhere.
macOS isn't perfect, but it does have a nice, clean, logical implementation in many ways.
One huge demonstration of that is the way it runs on commodity hardware so well (ie Hackintoshes). Apple could have easily baked in very hardware specific support in the OS, but instead they mostly implemented a general system that follows PC standards. Security lock downs are orthogonal to that.
> There is no contradiction.
Neither have I claimed there is one. I understood the point perfectly, I simply found it humorous. Things can be funny without being contradictions, my point was about the tradeoffs inherent to different types of OS lockdown.
> You can indeed delete System Preferences and nothing will break, ditto for utilities, it just makes life difficult if you do.
And—surprise!—most people don’t want to make their own lives difficult.
> Also reversing the problem isn't hard, you can just copy in the apps from elsewhere.
It is hard for most people. Most of us don’t just have something else at hand to copy from at all times, including the younger OP.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44973333
> For a locked down system for say a child though it might make sense.
I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing, but most of the time I see a variation on that comment it is attached to a fair bit of condescension. Like with calling something a “toy OS” when it’s used by millions of adults worldwide for productive work. Locked down systems don’t just make sense for children. On the contrary, children might benefit the most from operating systems which are not locked down, because they have the free time and willingness to experiment and won’t yet have a lot of important data. Or maybe you have kids who don’t really enjoy computers and just want to play an occasional game or need to write a school report. That’s OK too.
Both can also be true of your elderly relative, or your partner, or your cousin, or your friend who doesn’t want to fiddle with the damn machine, they just want to get their shit done without having to worry about screwing up anything. Your other friend will want the freedom to do everything and ask you for help.
There is no right approach for everyone, and there is no age at which one approach is definitely superior to another.
(I know I already replied in a different comment, but just thinking about this more.)
> Both can also be true of your elderly relative, or your partner, or your cousin, or your friend who doesn’t want to fiddle with the damn machine, they just want to get their shit done without having to worry about screwing up anything. Your other friend will want the freedom to do everything and ask you for help.
...you know, this is also why, as much as I love the hackability of Mavericks, I also kind of liked the way Apple initially implemented System Integrity Protection in El Capitan.
It was easy to turn off! Just boot into recovery mode, open the Terminal, type in a short command, and boom, SIP will never bother you again for the entire life of that computer! The process wasn't onerous, or even difficult as long as you knew how to open a Terminal in recovery mode, or were willing to learn. And if you couldn't do those things, well, you probably shouldn't turn off SIP!
Where I get annoyed is with the signed system volume stuff, because that consistently gets in your way! It is impossible for any type of user to "unlock" modern macOS.
Although then again, even going back to the original SIP without SSV... well, we did already have a system for this before SIP, didn't we? It was called UNIX permissions! If you didn't know what you're doing, or didn't want to learn, why were you using an administrator account? Why did your elderly relative ever have superuser privileges in the first place?
...the answer is kind of obvious, actually. Administrator accounts are the default, and even if you went out of your way to avoid one, you'd be unable to, for example, install Photoshop.
I wish that is the problem Apple had solved! Instead of introducing an entirely new layer on top of the UNIX security model, make non-admin accounts the default setting for new users, and then make those accounts a tad more capable (and lean on Adobe to stop being awful).
There is also another layer: when SIPS was introduced, there were tons of articles and videos teaching people to turn it off when they shouldn’t. This ranged from uninformed social media “developers” who confidently spewed dangerous bad advice, to outright bad actors trying to compromise your machine. Non-savvy users could still break their own systems by disabling these features easily.
But largely I agree with you. I wish Apple had taken longer to fully develop a robust solution from the ground up instead of the status quo of piling on year after year to a semi-broken system.
> There is also another layer: when SIPS was introduced, there were tons of articles and videos teaching people to turn it off when they shouldn’t.
...see, I actually had the opposite frustration with SIP. So many people were so hesitant to turn it off, even when they had a clear use case.
This is where the argument looses me. I agree that it's good to protect people from screwing up by accident. But if someone has taken the time to reboot their computer into recovery mode, find the Terminal app, and run a very specific command, that is not an accident! That is a user clearly requesting that the training wheels be removed. And sure, maybe the user was following bad advice, but it wasn't an accident!
People are allowed to do stupid things, that's how we learn. Again, it's great to have guardrails for people who want them, and it's great to have those guardrails on by default for people who don't want to think about them or even know they exist. But deciding which users are savvy enough to be worthy of disabling SIP feels Gatekeepy to me.
Until you install a piece of niche software that corrupts your entire system when installing it with SIP turned off…
https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/15235262/chrome-upd...
Because Google majorly screwed up, in a piece of software that runs with administrator privileges! Why the heck was it running with those privileges in the first place?! It's kind of nuts that Google faced basically no blow-back for rendering people's systems unbootable.
The Chrome updater could also have had a bug that completely deletes your home directory, and SIP wouldn't protect you. I guess your computer would still boot in that case, but how much would you care? The actual damage would be worse.
Anyway, this entire incident was notable precisely because it was so unusual—in ~9 years of SIP I'm not aware of any other instances where turning it off caused problems.
It is trivial to escalate to root and then do precisely that when SIP is disabled.
That's because more recently Apple introduced an entitlement to make that trivial, right? I wish they hadn't done that.
Yes but it's natural considering that their security model is built on SIP being enabled
Correction: SIPS is the scriptable image processing system, SIP is system integrity protection.
Is this actually true? I thought Chess.app was, from OSX Lion (prior to Mavericks) yea unto the present, protected from deletion from the Applications folder as somehow intrinsically important to the system. It's apparently load-bearing, not just a holdover from NeXTSTEP but an integral element that the OS must defend at all costs to ensure System Integrity.
It's because its in the signed system volume. You cannot modify the system volume in any way. macOS will do all sorts of crazy things to portray that volume as just like the old filesystem, but ultimately there are hard limits. Deleting apps in that volume is one of them it seems.
It's absolutely not true on Lion or on Mavericks. You can just delete Chess. I know because I've done it. I've been using the system for five years.
On Lion—or, well, at least on Mavericks, but I'm assuming this is all Apple did starting in Lion—there is literally just a list of Appications in the Finder binary that, should you try to delete them, Finder will pop up a message stopping you. You can hex edit the Finder binary and the message will go away for the hex-edited app.
(Newer versions of macOS have signed system volume stuff, I'm not talking about that! This was introduced right around the time I nope'd out and built my current Mavericks computer.)
Absolutely not, that's an internet rumor.
> I feel much safer telling people to “just try stuff” when I know there isn’t a risk of them breaking everything and being left with an unbootable machine
On which non-mobile OS is this true? It's certainly NOT safe on Mac/Windows/Linux to "just try stuff". I can trivially delete all of your data and/or upload all your .ssh files and Documents by "just try it"
If you are running an immutable system like Bazzite it is significantly harder to get yourself into an unbootable state by accident, since if your system-wide change does actually break the machine, you can just boot into an older one. NixOS is quite a bit different, but likewise it is really hard to make the system unbootable just by making changes, since I can just boot into an old generation. I haven't used rescue media for my own machines in probably 5 or 6 years now.
By running libre software exclusively and an encrypted hard disk, just try.
I’ve found a big performance boost by running:
That comment really sounds like how pissed off I was when Windows Vista told me I wasn't allowed to do something.
Funny thing is that you're still allowed to change things in the latest macOS, just disable SIP. On Mavericks you can because there's no SIP at all.
Unfortunately, you have to do a lot more than disable SIP nowadays because of the signed system volume stuff.
> I too am discontent with Apple under Tim Cook
He is a fantastic COO, unfortunately, Apple needs a CEO with vision. They do everything safe. I like Tim Cook because clearly he runs the ship nicely, but we need a visionary at Apple. Apple was always a little different and more daring. Remember the Apple that told you, you were holding your phone wrong? I want that level of energy that pushes for more innovation, it was much more exciting.
> Remember the Apple that told you, you were holding your phone wrong?
When I think of the positive elements of Apple's culture/persona under Steve Jobs, that particular episode is not one of them.
running a funky chmod command recursively on my root dir and then learning how to fix it, probably taught me more about how linux works than any tutorial or article i've ever read.
have fun! break things!
I broke enough things in my early Linux days and learned a lot, but enjoying that, seeing it as a positive, or even having the willingness and time to spend on such fixes is far from universal. Most people have severe mental blocks to doing anything on the command-line for fear of breaking everything. Having an environment where they can’t break anything is a fantastic way to help them build confidence and learn how the computer works.
There is a time and place for each approach. Recognising which is appropriate for each situation and user is a good skill to cultivate.
One time I somehow set the permissions of the sudo executable to lower than they needed to be (0600?). Fixing that was fun :)
> One time I somehow set the permissions of the sudo executable to lower than they needed to be (0600?). Fixing that was fun :)
I know very little, admittedly, but without telling us how, it’s just a funny anecdote.
I would try to switch user to root and su instead of sudo, but I’m not sure if that would actually work. Would it? Probably not on rootless installs, but I don’t know how many of those systems most folks are able to break in the manner described above.
Disk Utility used to have a Repair Permissions tool, at least back in the 00s. Not sure when it was removed
> This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will break”, then in the same paragraph “but don’t do this specific thing”.
This is fair, but I will say, there's a reason I put this section after "Please enable Time Machine."
...you actually could get rid of System Preferences, if you really wanted to, and use the Terminal to set Preferences instead. The reason I called out System Preferences is because, growing up, my younger brother did delete System Preferences! He didn't have Time Machine, and this didn't come up until we were traveling and he couldn't connect to a new wifi network. So that was a little annoying.
But I'm probably further making your point, and I do largely agree with you! The thing is, my computer is my home--I spend so much time there--and I just can't deal with having my home littered with Apple cruft.
I have a soft spot for Mavericks too. It’s not 100% perfect (as post notes, scroll bars have been flattened and by then sidebar item icons had lost their color), but otherwise visually its probably the closest thing possible to “perfect” Aqua era OS X. It feels very refined in several ways that the earlier versions didn’t.
In my opinion the runner-up in terms of visuals is actually 10.4 Tiger, though — the dark grays ubiquitous throughout 10.5 and 10.6 have always felt kinda dingy and depressing in a similar manner to the dark gray Windows 95/98 (which, as an aside, is why I find the Windows 2000 variant of that look preferable, with its base gray being lighter and more cheery). That said I miss the 2D grid that 10.5 and 10.6 used for virtual desktops even today… the simplified 1D linear virtual desktops that’ve been in place since 10.7 feels needlessly watered down.
Funny enough that version of OS X can also run what to this day I’ve found to be the best implementation of a Quake terminal anywhere, in the form of the haxie Visor/TotalTerminal which added this functionality to the Apple terminal. The way it handled window focus and everything was so smooth and better than iTerm’s as well as any of the Linux dropdown terminals I’ve used.
On the note of Linux, I wish that there were Linux DEs that went the extra mile to produce a true OS X 10.4-10.9 analogue, but no such thing exists. The closest is elementary/Pantheon which is stylistically in the same ballpark but shares too much of its design roots with GNOME’s oversimplified iPadOS-like design. Everything else in the Linux world is Windows-type desktops or minimal WMs, both with flat UI themes.
On the BSD side there has been efforts such as helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) and rayvnOS (https://ravynos.com/) that aim to provide a FOSS recreation of the Jobs-era Mac OS X experience. Both can be considered BSDs as opposed to mere desktop environments. helloSystem uses X11 and Qt, while rayvnOS uses its own version of Cocoa.
However, it’s been a few years since I’ve seriously investigated these projects, and a cursory glance at them shows that they still have a while to go before they become replacements for existing desktop Linux environments. Both are rather ambitious passion projects from their creators, similar to Haiku, a re-creation of BeOS.
Both those projects can only go skin deep. The macOS experience is not only how it looks, but the depth of its interactivity and the thoughtful implementations within that depth.
I still shudder when I see the limitations of dragging files in Windows. The fact I can drag a folder to a save dialog to jump to that folder is so natural to me, and Windows and Linux never bothered with those details.
Yep. And you can drag from the title bar in a lot of applications to get the open file. And all the shortcut keys are consistent across applications.
I daily drive Linux mint. I can’t use ctrl+C in the terminal for Copy because that’s reserved for the interrupt signal. Fine - I’ll use meta+C. But I can’t use meta+C to copy in IntelliJ because the meta key isn’t a modifier key in Java. I’ve ended up needing to memorise different keys for copy+paste in every program I use. I mess it up on a daily basis. It’s madness!
Linux is like that everywhere. I like smooth scrolling. Some applications support it properly. Some half support it, or add scrolling lag for no reason (Firefox) and some break completely, assuming every scroll event should scroll a few lines down. I eventually solved my software problems by buying a worse mouse without smooth scrolling support.
Alt+mouse drag moves windows around. I love that feature! I can’t believe windows and macOS are missing it! But - oops. Alt+click is a thing in davinci resolve for adding keyframes. Urgh. It’s this. Over and over again constantly.
> I can’t use ctrl+C in the terminal for Copy because that’s reserved for the interrupt signal.
It's not reserved - the terminal emulator is free to handle any key, in any way, however it wants. Some examples:
1. The XFCE terminal allows you to specify whether Alt+[X] means Meta-[X], or whether it should trigger a menu shortcut.
2. macOS's Terminal.app: use System Settings to rebind Copy to Ctrl-C - when some text is selected, it copies that text; when there is no selection, it passes the ^C along.
Unfortunately, few people question the status quo of terminal emulator design. Look at all the other emulators around you: quick save/load, customisable hotkeys (including gamepads), speed up/slow down, mute specific audio channels, enable/disable sprite/layer rendering, peek/poke memory, and so on. An average GBA or SNES emulator gives you better tools than most terminal emulators, and the latter are what is actually being used to get work done.
Wait, if meta isn’t a modifier in Java how do key shortcuts in Java apps (including IntelliJ) work under macOS? Is this maybe just an oversight on Jetbrains’ part for the Linux versions of their IDEs?
But yes, inconsistency being the only consistent thing in Linux is annoying to me too. It’s bad enough that I think a distro with a central feature of maintaining forks of everything to polish all of those little paper cuts would probably do well, particularly among switchers.
I agree. There have long been macOS-style skins for KDE, GNOME, and other desktop environments, and some of them do a good job at capturing the look of macOS. However, it’s the feel of macOS that makes macOS special. Additionally, it’s the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and the ecosystem of conformant apps on macOS that also contributes to the overall experience.
That’s the core challenge with efforts like ElementaryOS, helloSystem, and ravynOS; it’s not enough to provide a polished desktop if we still have to deal with non-compliant apps.
Of course, this is a challenge even for macOS in an era of Electron apps, and in the Windows ecosystem there’s much less of an emphasis on conformance to UI/UX guidelines.
At least Electron apps populate the menubar under macOS. They do no such thing under Linux even if you’ve got a setup that features a global menubar (as KDE is capable of).
Unfortunately that experience keeps getting degraded. The hiding of proxy icons is crazy to me.
Read that, it's enlightening!
https://tidbits.com/2022/03/26/tipbits-always-show-window-pr...
Wow! They put it under "accessibility"? What?
This works in elementary OS
That tracks. Elementary's file browser is one of the only GUI options on Linux if you want Miller Columns. Your options at this point are basically Elementary/Pantheon Files, or GWorkspace...
I’ve been keeping an eye on these projects too. My hunch is that helloSystem is going to find Qt limiting as it matures, and while ravynOS’ approach is more likely to produce a high fidelity analogue, it’s also much larger in scope and likely to get bogged down in achieving compatibility with existing Mac binaries. I wish the best for both though, because they’re filling an extremely empty niche in the FOSS desktop space.
I relied on the TotalVisor - every system I have I will hack together something to get this functionality:
- Windows hotkey bottom file explorer: https://github.com/replete/productivity-ahk/blob/main/Bottom...
- MacOS hotkey bottom Finder: https://gist.github.com/replete/245986ddfb5a912f0bc71f5708be...
There's XtraFinder which promises something similar, but now all modern macs require disabling security features, which seems a bit much for a convenient hotkey.
I have also requested TotalFinder-like feature for PathFinder(https://cocoatech.io/) which is the closest thing to what TotalVisor did.
Wild how tiny little utilities can change your expectations of using a computer. Simply cannot get by without quake terminal and bottom file explorer anymore, on any machine I daily drive.
Tiger is cool! The other neat thing about the visuals is, if you think about Apple's industrial design in that era, the UI feels a perfect extension of the hardware itself.
And as much as I love Mavericks, I agree, I would absolutely jump to a Linux distro that recreated the experience faithfully. There really isn't anything though, especially when you add in the larger app ecosystem—I like using Aperture a lot more than Digikam, for example.
Edit: Oh, and:
> and by then sidebar item icons had lost their color
But you can bring the color back with the ColorfulSidebar SIMBL plugin!
Have you looked at https://ubuntubudgie.org/ ?
I have. Budgie is cool, but falls into a similar bucket as elementary/Pantheon in that it’s not mac-like even if it includes certain Mac features and qualities.
https://ravynos.com/ claims to support a lot of the mac niceties
In terms of the "Why Mavericks?" section,
>I knew I wanted an operating system from before Apple abandoned the Aqua design language.
I suppose it depends on your definition, but that likely does mean Mavericks is the latest available. For my money though, El Capitan (10.11 to Mavericks' 10.9) was the local maxima (speed, stability, capability). I've no inkling what issues using that would entail—I had no idea that Mountain Lion had "a more capable version of QuickTime"—but my immediate response to this was wondering why not El Capitan.
Strictly speaking, Mavericks (and Mountain Lion and Lion before it) were already some way through abandoning Aqua. Lion dropped the beautiful blue scroll bars that previous OS Xs had, replaced the pill-shaped buttons with rounded rectangles, and somewhat flattened the overall UI as well, though not to the extent that Yosemite did.
But even as a fan of Aqua, I think it's nice that some of these elements got toned down just a bit. Really, you could view most of the design changes from OS X 10.0 onwards as Apple slowly toning down Aqua; the original Cheetah looks kind of gaudy IMO, the interface elements draw too much attention to themselves.
I do miss Snow Leopard's scroll bars though, as I explicitly call out on the website!
You needed to own a "QuickTime Pro" license in order to enable these features. I used to do all my simple video editing with it until they shelved it.
You're thinking of QuickTime 7, that can be optionally installed (as a separate app) even on macOS 10.14 Mojave! But the website is referring to versions of QuickTime X. QuickTime 10.2, which was included with Mountain Lion, was the last to support third-party components. (If you've ever used "Perian", that's what I'm referring to.)
We could benefit from a site that describes the best OS for any hardware and has scripts and instructions for how to mod them to be more efficient and up-to-date, with someone assigned to maintaining patches and tools for basic functionality you might need, but also having standalone, airgapped versions of each for longevity.
Right now, this info is dispersed everywhere and it’s not the primary intent of archival sites to provide this.
Most of all that is subjective and is going to vary person to person, which is why it’s dispersed everywhere.
But something like a pcpartpicker.com but for OS setups would be cool.
I would have went for Catalina.
I'm still running El Capitan on my 2015 Air.
> Removing stock apps from the Applications folder is completely safe—nothing will break—and this is your computer, so you should make it your own
This is the part that hits home the most for me.
I get the benefits of the hardened pc-as-appliance that Apple has shoved down all our throats as "for our own good" but using a modern Mac compared to even Mavericks, or Windows XP, feels to me like if someone came into my house and confined me to a coat closet which they've padded and sealed off. This isn't my house anymore, someone else controls everything and only they can give me permission (revocable at any time) to do literally anything. They promise me that I'll never hit my head now, but I never had that problem in the first place.
Echoes of an article posted here [1] some time ago called I Don’t Like Computers which had the same nostalgic vibe about computing in the past. This is exactly how modern OS's and devices make me feel. The Personal Computer used to be PERSONAL. The User was in control. We used to be in the driver’s seat. We used to tell computers what to do. Now we feel like passengers, and the computer is telling us what it's going to do and hedging us into a few small scraps of functionality it deems safe for us.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30851371
The MacBook Air mentioned (2014) will install Mavericks when booted into recovery mode anyway (unless you use Option-Command-R which will give you the newest compatible version which is Big Sur).
I did that a few days ago and I agree, it’s quite snappy! Missing certificates can also be installed manually (e.g. from the curl CA bundle), but even then TLS 1.3 support is lacking in most apps which breaks a lot of stuff without the suggested proxy.
A lot of MacPorts ports also do not build sadly.
The look is so much better than current macOS.
> The MacBook Air mentioned (2014) will install Mavericks when booted into recovery mode anyway (unless you use Option-Command-R which will give you the newest compatible version which is Big Sur).
Certain 2014 Macbook Airs, including my own, will install Yosemite instead in recovery mode for some reason, even though obviously I'm using Mavericks and it runs fine.
I think it depends on what was the current version when your model came out. Should have said mid-2014 like OP, sorry
> Should have said mid-2014 like OP, sorry
I don't want to belabor the point, but just to be clear—I am referring to a mid-2014 MBA, anything newer and Mavericks wouldn't work! (There is no "late 2014" MBA as far as I'm aware.) Mine offers to install Yosemite in recovery mode.
It may indeed be based on when that specific computer came off of the assembly line or something, I have no idea, but for that exact model of computer you can get different results in recovery mode!
There are multiple boot-time recovery options, but you might not have a required firmware update to use them. Per everymac, all 2014 MBA’s should be able to run up to Big Sur?
What is offered to install when you do this?
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-macos-recovery-...
> Option-Command-R: Start up from macOS Recovery over the internet. Use this key combination to reinstall macOS and upgrade to the latest version of macOS that’s compatible with your Mac.
https://everymac.com/systems/by_capability/maximum-macos-sup...
> MacBook Air "Core i5" 1.4 11" (Early 2014)11 (Big Sur)
> MacBook Air "Core i7" 1.7 11" (Early 2014)11 (Big Sur)
> MacBook Air "Core i5" 1.4 13" (Early 2014)11 (Big Sur)
> MacBook Air "Core i7" 1.7 13" (Early 2014)11 (Big Sur)
When updating to the new macOS, firmware updates that govern the pre-boot and recovery environment are changed/updated, and you can downgrade macOS again afterwards. You can usually install the firmware updates without updating macOS, but finding them is usually the harder part. You could probably swap hard drives to a scratch SSD if you wanted to update your firmware via updating macOS entirely without affecting your live install, or install macOS on a USB drive, which should not affect your internal SSD install, but like all upgrades, have a backup or pull the internal SSD.
I don’t know, I’ve performed numerous updates from the pre-installed Mavericks (Yosemite, El Capitan, High Sierra, Big Sur are the ones I remember, might be more), but the default recovery still goes into Mavericks for me
You might need to update the firmware for your Mac in order for the Internet Recovery to support updating to Big Sur. The firmware updates are installed at upgrade time usually, but you may be able to install them separately.
> About EFI and SMC firmware updates for Intel-based Mac computers
https://support.apple.com/en-us/101198
I would see if you can access this:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/macos-big-sur/id1526878132
Download it, then you can make a bootable flash drive if you want, or just install it from under macOS.
> How to download and install macOS
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102662
> Create a bootable installer for macOS
https://support.apple.com/en-us/101578
Big Sur Recovery mode works for me with Option+Cmd+R, so if needed I can install that. What I meant is that the other goes into Mavericks Recovery mode. And I’m happy about that actually :-)
Edit: if you were referring to Option+Cmd+R anyway, I guess I misread
Edit2: by other one I meant Shift+Option+Cmd+R, just Cmd+R actually goes into Big Sur, you are right!
Yeah, there are a few keyboard combinations that do different things.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102655
> On an Intel-based Mac:
> If you used Command-R to start up from the local Recovery system, you get the current version of the most recently installed macOS.
> If you used Option-Command-R to start up from Internet Recovery, you might get the latest macOS that is compatible with your Mac.
> If you used Shift-Option-Command-R to start up from Internet Recovery, you might get the macOS that came with your Mac, or the closest version still available.
There is another one, you can hold Option while booting and it will show disks to boot from. But there is also a SSID dropdown to do internet recovery like Shift+Option+Command+R.
Yes, Option is boot menu iirc.
You can even boot to Linux or Windows if you have the patience to set it up. I made a hackintosh for hard drive data recovery that would dual boot Windows 10 and macOS. It’s a fun ecosystem.
Yeah I remember using BootCamp back then. FreeBSD also works quite well on the MacBook Air mid-2014, but without WiFi.
Edit: I didn’t bother to look into wifibox which is a FreeBSD package that runs a Linux VM for the WiFi driver, that could work. Also didn’t bother to check the webcam. However both WiFi and webcam work under various Linux distributions, but it’s typically a third-party Broadcom driver that has to be added outside of regular package repos.
I guess I was also confused about the different recovery modes as pointed out by aspenmayer below.
I used Shift+Option+Command+R (or hold Option and choose WiFi instead of disk) which is internet recovery using the macOS version that came pre-installed (or closest)
Whereas Command+R is local recovery which might be any macOS version that last changed the local recovery environment.
Good to know. Mine is from June 2014 (assembly, since it’s a custom configuration). Sorry for missing your point.
Regarding SSL: just make sure you are using macOS 10.9.3, earlier versions (all of them, and I mean, all since the 80s) never had a working SSL implementation.
For more, read about the GOTO FAIL bug: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2014-1266
It's pretty hard to install anything below 10.9.5, Apple updated all the installers to go straight to that version.
But if you're using Aqua Proxy, you're not really using the system's SSL implementation anyway, you're using Go 1.19's SSL.
I often bring this one up when I see missing braces in PRs.
I stayed on Mavericks until late 2016, by which time I had to update to then-current system because I got a new job and needed latest Xcode to compile the iOS app. Surprisingly, I didn't hate the flatter design as much as I anticipated. But of course I still miss skeuomorphism.
The worst transition for me was Big Sur (or, more precisely, Mojave -> Monterey when I bought a new MacBook in 2021). The useless margins, the unification of title bars and toolbars that no one asked for, the borderless buttons (I enabled "show borders" in accessibility settings), SF Symbols (no pixel grid alignment whatsoever), and the redesigned alerts, are the worst. From what I've seen of Tahoe, it makes it even worse, both with the touchscreenification and with the wasted screen area.
I agree; I don’t like the iOSification of the UI/UX, and I also don’t like the increased locked-down nature of macOS, such as having to go through a nag screen whenever I use lldb. I still prefer Macs over Windows for work-issued hardware, but for my personal equipment, I never upgraded beyond Mojave. When combined with the lack of user-serviceability on the latest Macs, I switched back to PCs a few years ago after nearly 15 years on Macs. I have a Ryzen 9 desktop and a Framework 13 laptop. I begrudgingly use Windows 10/11; I would’ve moved to desktop Linux if it weren’t for some proprietary software I need that doesn’t run on Linux. I still have my “trash can” Mac Pro on the rare occasion I need a Mac-only app.
In my opinion both Windows and Linux are much worse than even modern macOS, so I'm going to keep using it for the foreseeable future, but being rather conservative with installing updates.
On hardware, my M1 Max MacBook Pro is the best laptop I've ever owned, period.
Was hoping this legendary gtk themer had a mavericks theme but Yosemite is the earliest it appears.
https://github.com/vinceliuice/Yosemite-gtk-theme
If you want a macOS theme with insane quality on Linux this guy's work is the pinnacle.
You call that insane quality? I took a five second look at the GitHub page and I already noticed that the spacing between the three traffic light buttons is wrong. It immediately felt off.
The theme is actually correct, Apple is wrong
Great! Go make a pull request, that's the power of open source.
I'm not about to dedicate any minute of my time when my first impression of a project is bad. It's like meeting new people: I'm not going to try to meet up with you again to find more common ground if my first impression of a person is bad.
Reading "Why Mavericks" made me glad not to be alone in noticing the slow progression toward a general lack of usability in macOS.
For me, it started with 10.7 when a lot of things changed just to look different. From then forward, user habits were seemingly not considered and everything moved here and there on a yearly basis.
At least with Windows, the major overhauls to Explorer come so slowly that your productivity routines don't get sand in the cogs every year when you update and Apple's OS shifts extremely key parts of the window UI around and makes the hit points even smaller over time.
The killer for me is how difficult it is to fix things if you don't like them. Modern macOS has horrendous mouse speed handling, and changing this beyond Apple's very limited settings is a pain. And even then, Windows and Linux and older OS X handled the cursor movement better. I like(d) so much about Apple over the years, but it is clear they're an iPhone company that makes laptops and desktops... not the other way around.
I wish all of this angst could be bottled up and used to create a simply workable version of GNUstep --- ideally targeting something easy to configure hardware-wise like a Raspberry Pi 5.
I agree.
It's not really what you're asking, but I know of two Linux desktops that are based around GNUSTEP.
NEXTSPACE:
https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
-- primarily targets CentOS
GSDE:
https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html
-- primarily targets Debian
My exit from the Macintosh OS was in 2011 with the release of OS X 10.7 Lion; meaning the end of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. It was at that point when I realized that Apple was going more towards an "appliance" company than a computing company. They started making it more and more difficult to access the power of the Unix core. So I packed up my virtual bags and moved to Linux once and for all. I started with Mint (for about a minute), then went to Ubuntu, now I am at Debian (with the Xfce DE); probably forever.
>Today, it an inherently vulnerable operating system, and you will need to be a bit careful. Regularly back up your data to cold storage, never use an outdated web browser, and always keep your router's firmware up-to-date.
If my computer is hacked, I'm not really worried about my data being destroyed, I have offline backups for that. The bigger danger is having my data exfiltrated, I don't want my tax return or password manager database to be exfiltrated from my computer.
How are they decrypting your password manager database? Sure they'll get your tax returns, but while I'm not saying that's great, didn't they get most of it from Equifax anyway?
My personal "thread model" is basically to make sure I can survive an automated attack. I'm convinced I can with my current Mavericks setup. If an experienced attacker was targeting me specifically, I'm sure Mavericks would make their life easier, but I also think they'd probably succeed no matter what OS I was running. https://xkcd.com/538/
But I do have my Bitwarden vault set to use 2,000,000 KDF iterations, literally the highest it will go...
> For some inexplicable reason, Apple's website does not offer a Mavericks download link. Their official list skips straight from Mountain Lion (10.8) to Yosemite (10.10).
Does anybody have an idea why Mavericks isn't available from Apple?
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102662#browser
Mavericks wasn’t the end of the line for any Macs. Every device that is supported in Mavericks is supported in Yosemite. Apple only makes the latest version available for any given device.
But then why does Apple offer a download for Mountain Lion? Every device that was supported in Mountain Lion was supported in Mavericks (and Yosemite by extension).
Might have to do with it being the last OS available for purchase (i.e. not a free download)
It’s a shot in the dark though, I’ve also wondered this.
> Each update seemed to chip away at something I liked about the platform.
I have a MBP, 48GB RAM running today's stable version of macOS Sequoia 15.6.1
If I do cmd+space and type something it has 0 results for anything in my Documents folder. It's been that way for momnths despite all the OS updates.
macOS used to be good.
Have you inadvertently set the search privacy on your drive? https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchl1bb43b84/...
If that's not the issue try rebuilding your Spotlight search index: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/102321
No, Spotlight has just been broken for several years. Thankfully Tahoe seems to have improved it a bit for me.
Thanks, I wasn't looking for technical support. I did spend some time figuring this out (it was 'sudo mdutil -E /' that fixed it) but my point was:
The experience of using macOS, which I pay a large amount of money for, wasn't better than a Linux distribution.
I also like the aesthetics of OS X versions prior to 10.10. It is hard to find programs that still support older versions though. To make things easier I'm using the more modern macOS 10.14 but installed a few things to make it look more like 10.9.
The file and instructions in https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mavericks-window-contro... change many of the UI elements to look like those in 10.9.
Menu Bar Tint (https://manytricks.com/menubartint/) can make the menubar look like the one in 10.9.
macOSLucidaGrande (https://github.com/LumingYin/macOSLucidaGrande) can change the system font back to Lucida Grande like 10.9 used. One annoyance with this though is that the '*' character won't show up in password input fields.
Oh man, I actually used this guide when putting Mavericks on my old Mac! So damn nice. The UI is still so fresh. Neat that there's Firefox for it now. Last I tried it, I had to do Chromium-legacy, though I wouldn't exactly want to take an old unpatched machine online very often.
> There is no modern mainstream browser engine that works in Snow Leopard.
Sadly this too will be true in Mavericks soon enough. If you decide to web browse on a separate machine though, you can still have your Mavericks machine be your main one.
Ah, but note I said "mainstream browser engine", not "mainstream browser!" The mainstream browsers themselves dropped Mavericks some time ago, but other developers have been maintaining backports.
Firefox Dynasty is actually a relatively recent development. For a while I was using Chromium Legacy[1], which, yes, did stop getting updated a little over a year ago. But then just in time, i3roly came along with Firefox Dynasty[2]!
It's true that if i3roly drops Firefox Dynasty, and the Chromium Legacy developer doesn't return (there has been some movement on the repo), that will be the end of this project. But that could be many years from now!
1: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy 2: https://github.com/i3roly/firefox-dynasty
You can run a modern browser from a VM.
Aren't there old versions of those browsers?
Sure there are but running older browsers is a security risk. The older it is the more vulnerable it is.
Exactly, and just to add: browsers are where I draw the line in terms of security. If the OS is old, whatever, my router has a firewall and I trust the applications I install.
But my browser is running gobs of random Javascript from who knows where every day! I guess you could do the thing where you disable Javascript by default and re-enable it on select websites; I'm personally not willing to do that.
So a browser really needs a good, up-to-date sandbox. There has to be protection somewhere in the chain.
If you can't run a recent browser anymore then there's always the option to run the browser in a VM.
And some sites refuse to load if your browser is too old. I think Google was like that — requiring a newer browser to access, for example, your Google drive.
This is nice, I wish there was way to bring the old Rosetta over, though I guess it probably needs something like all/some parts of the OS to be compiled as fat binaries to work,
You'd need to compile a custom kernel, but it might it be possible.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/rosetta-on-10-7-and-abo...
> 10.6 xnu does have special support for rosetta, namely in kern_exec where it seems to set some special ppc environment bits if the oah binary is invoked (and of course there's the handler to call the oah binary for a ppc mach-o, but the former is more important for minimal viable example since you can always invoke oah manually). I think this bit is actually needed because the kernel has other codepath here when allocating memory. (Not 100% confident though, bit it makes sense there are different conventions about base address, region sizes, etc.)
> Likely might need changes to dyld also for obvious reasons, but that's open source as well https://opensource.apple.com/source/dyld/dyld-132.13/src/dyl...
> Would be easiest to try getting a plain assembly hello world ppc binary working first. I see that someone on your linked thread tried copying translate binary but it crashed even without args; tracing in lldb would be the logical next step but seems he never followed up on that...
> Another thing which I'm not sure of is whether rosetta relies on existence of ppc-arch system frameworks; I'd assume not since they'd want to do high-level thunking here for performance, but maybe that only ends up being done in some cases? I couldn't find any docs on reverse engineering rosetta1m or if they exist they've disappeared.
A possible counterpoint to the last paragraph would be, if Rosetta doesn't need those system frameworks why are so many libraries in Snow Leopard compiled as intel-ppc universal binaries? If those actually get used, a port would be much more difficult.
Trying to get this to work three OSes later seems kind of hard.
(Relative) older time who got started with FreeBSD and Linux in the mid 90s here.
While I loved Mavericks (and I went through all the versions of OS X since Jaguar to macOS Sonoma), I have to say that in my opinion it just keeps getting better. Yes, a few restrictions came along but nothing that keeps me as a system developer from being productive.
The Apple SDK's, CLI tools, compilers and libraries available are world class, and I still got my Unix prompt, while having a snappy UI. Don't get me started on Apple Silicon; now I never have to wait for anything.
I'm still on Sonoma though, but it's because I take so long to upgrade. It's best practice to wait a few months with new releases of macOS. I've used that strategy for 20 years and it hasn't failed me once.
Big fan of your OS X stuff! I still have a 11" 2012 MacBook Air with Core i7 and 8 GB RAM, if only I could use it as my everyday machine I'd be very happy!
I didn't know about Firefox Dynasty, it's very cool. (Wow, and Archive Plus and Preview Plus… you're killing it!)
What's your experience with those shady USB-C to Magsafe 2 cables/adapters? Old MacBook batteries are bound to deplete faster and faster every year, it'd be nice to be able to charge using what's most common nowadays.
I wouldn't trust the adapters. Maybe in theory it's possible to do it right, bridge PD negotiation to a 1-wire protocol negotiation but you've got to trust that they handled both the usb-c part correctly and the 1-wire part correctly.
There's not much rigorous testing I could find online, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg6pPDys-s0 tested a few and found that some spark when first connected, which implies they're not doing the 1-wire negotiation properly (real adapters will prevent arcing by sensing if it's connected first before increasing voltage)
Thank you!
> What's your experience with those shady USB-C to Magsafe 2 cables/adapters?
I don't have experience--I would probably try to get a real one. I'm also a big proponent of getting batteries replaced. I know this all costs money, but if you like and are using this computer, make it nice!
I've got this idea that third-party batteries are mostly crap and die very fast, but it's based on ≈10 year old experience (although the last official battery on my iPhone SE 2016 was the same)
I had the battery in my 2014 Macbook Air replaced by a ubreakifix in Chelsea (New York City) around two years ago, and it's still going strong.
So you know how there are different religious factions that broadly have very similar views but they practically go to war due to the variance of small details... screw mavericks, OSX 10.4 Tiger FOREVER!!!!
Hey, Tiger is cool, you won't get any shade from me! I would find it extremely difficult to use as a daily driver though, much moreso than Mavericks.
I do try to support other old versions of OS X where possible. Aqua Proxy supports Snow Leopard for example, which took some effort. (I wish it could support Tiger too but there's no way to build Go binaries for Tiger.)
Not even by compiling Go to WASM, then transpiling WASM to C++, then building the resulting C++ with Tiger's GCC?
...do you think that could actually work? I can't entirely tell if you're joking or not, it's true I never considered this... does WASM code have the network access that would be required for a proxy?
Looks like there is a project to transpile WASM w/ WASI APIs to portable C: https://github.com/turbolent/w2c2
Sadly it doesn't seem to support the networking parts of WASI, though. If it did, then it might even be possible to port all the way back to Cheetah
Yep, that's the one I was thinking of. Still, I wonder if the platform's networking could just be added in ex-post facto (disclaimer: never actually touched this, just looked at it)
There was a joke bumper-sticker in the valley back in the day that said "Windows 95 == Macintosh 89". But the critique of this was "Macintosh 95 == Macintosh 89". In the same way, "NeXTStep 89 == MacOS X 2001 == MacOS X 2015 == MacOS X 2025" except that they hadn't steved everyone from the user experience research group in 2001 and there were vestiges of #a11y features left in Yosemite.
Complaining your current version of MacOS X has a worse user experience than it did 10 years ago is like buying a Tesla and then complaining about its resale value.
> I came to a decision. It was time to leave modern macOS behind.
It was the opposite for me: I decided to leave Windows behind after a mounting cascade of frustration and disappointment with Microsoft and Their Way of Doing Things.
Fast forward to Now: I'm still happy on macOS Tahoe. Apple does some dumb annoying shit too but it hasn't yet gotten to the point where I give up computing altogether and retire to a Tibetan monastery. Or switch to Linux. Whenever I get to look at the current state of Windows it has nothing that makes me want to go back. Sure, like an ex it still has a few things that you wish you could still enjoy, like a few games, but then you remember why you left them in the first place.
Some of the things that irk me the most about macOS:
• The dumbness or complete lack of documentation about some specific things, specially on the developer side.
• Some features touted as hot and sexy during a new release's PR wave and then rotting in a half-baked state.
• Some minor bugs remaining unfixed for years.
• Most improvements being tied to a major version cycle, even if they could easily be shipped in a minor monthly/quarterly update.
I preferred Snow Leopard, 10.6 over all others. With Lion the downfall started. And it cracked with the doomed butterfly keyboards, that's when I gave up and switched back to ThinkPads with Fedora. Battery life was nice, but I am not wandering around that much anymore. Those days I did work in the pool with an air.
I can, and will, totally use this as my daily driver on my MBP 2013, if there is Tailscale and a up-to-date iTerm2.
The UI is soooo much better than the current Mac OS.
I'm afraid the newest compatible iTerm2 is 3.0.15 from 2017 [1].
It's open source so it might be possible to build a newer version to be compatible, or to cherry pick certain newer features. It's not an app I use though.
1: https://iterm2.com/downloads/beta/iTerm2-3_0_15.zip
Running a popular OS with no security updates for the past 9 years sounds downright insane.
I really liked IRIX and will always have a soft spot for Sun's OpenWindows on Solaris, but there is no way in hell I'd use either as a daily driver these days, and I can almost bet either have fewer actively exploited vulnerabilities than Mavericks.
My favorite thing about MacOS is how it has never changed how it changes.
It's like the game Civilization.
Every new version is worse than the last. Every new version is more bloated. Every new version has changes that ruin it.
Every new version is "less snappy". Every new version ruins everything.
Not even with OS X, we're talking back to the System 6 days, almost 40 years ago, it has always been the same.
System 6 uses too much RAM I'm staying with System 5.
System 7 is bloated I'm staying with System 6.
System 8 is a disaster I'm staying with System 9.
System 9 is a buggy mess I'm staying with System 8.
System, err, OS X v10.0 has no apps I'm staying with System 9.
And then oh boy the OS X/macOS versions!
Every generation gets so much worse, buggier, and "less snappy" than the last that surely our computers must be traveling backwards through time by now!
Every Civ game past III, the one I spent the most time playing during college and am most used to and like the most for totally not arbitrary reasons, has just been the worst, amirite?
One notable standout here was 10.6 which was simply 10.5 recompiled for native Intel and dropping PowerPC support --- that said, for early 10.x each version consistently became more performant up through 10.5, it's just that 10.6 was the version where that was the _raison d'être_.
10.6 was absolutely not 10.5 recompiled. It was entirely a reliability and bug fix release on top of 10.5.
Poor choice of word on my part/missing "re-written" and that it was reliability/bug fixes/removing PPC stuff was what I was trying to convey.
I know this isn't your point, but it actually seems like PPC got dropped from Snow Leopard at the last minute. Early developer preview disks worked on PowerPC Macs. The stability didn't come from dropping PPC.
This is way I feel, but my last stop is 10.15 (Catalina) having started with 3.2. Modern macOS is just trash.
My goal over the longer term is to fully migrate to Android, especially desktop mode. There are several reasons for this but maybe the fact that given the typical hardware for Android means it's less likely suffer the terminal bloat of desktop systems.
I stayed on Catalina for a long time as it was the last version my Macbook Pro 2012 supported natively. It is a pretty solid OS, though it is harder to get Apple services running on it now.
I personally just use Sonoma now on my Macbook Pro M3 Pro.
> Remove apps and features which don't work anymore, and would just make me sad if I saw them.
Some of these could be fixed if you find a replacement API. Try this modded Weather widget for example: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/weather-dashboard-widget-da...And check out Download #2 (`Working_Widgets.zip`) here: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/widget-collection-2005-macw...
I'm actually the author of those fixed widgets! They are on the website in the app library. (Even though they aren't "apps"... I originally wanted to make a separate page for non-app Mavericks software but it felt weird.)
The idea is, remove the nonworking ones to start out since they're broken, and then you can install the working copies.
wow that will teach me to read usernames lol
Thank you!
You know, there comes a journey in every developers life where all roads lead to hackintosh. It’s like a right of passage. I did it back during the Snow Leopard years with NForce motherboards (wrote some kernel extensions). Now, it’s just out of nostalgia.
I have fond memories of my Hackintosh years. Over time the frustration of updating to the latest OS and having to deal with breaking changes just sucked all the joy from it. Especially when I really needed to use the computer for something.
I might tinker again some time soon. I had thought of building a Mac mini for a home theatre setup but then again Apple TV just works so well
I hackintoshed a few times over the years too. It could be frustrating at times, but when you had a solid setup that updated cleanly and everything it felt like a cheat code. Just as stable as a real Mac, but more capable, quiet, and expandable.
One of the laptops I hacked for a while had a 15.4” 1920x1200 screen panel (much nicer than on contemporary 15” MacBooks), 4 USB-A ports, FireWire, Ethernet, an eSATA port, a full size DisplayPort, EC and PCMCIA slots, and an SD card reader and could dock to more than double the number of ports, plus two hot swap drive bays, and it all worked as expected under hackintoshed Mavericks which was incredible. It was like having a portable Mac Pro.
if I were a bitcoin whale...
OpenBSD on the Desktop can be a thing if someone were just to make a good experience with it, from the ground up, like Steve Jobs did with NeXT. Just don't choose Objective-C.
The issue is money. Developers are expensive, AI isn't anywhere near ready for this task, and we have a lot of learnings from good UI design and developer patterns (both pro, and anti). ElementaryOS was supposed to be that thing but quickly devolved into yet another distro.
These older machines deserve some love too. Not everything needs to be <2 years old. Not everything needs to be shiny. This is why you're broke. Stop spending :D
hackintosh-in-docker has made my life so much easier. also w/r/t the apple tv, I've always wondered if anyone released an installer for the old x86 apple TVs, those would be fun to try and modernize.
That was the golden era of Mac. The OS was fast, and Apple software didn’t suck (I still miss Aperture).
> never use an outdated web browser
That part is not going to age well, as browser vendor push updates they tend to drop support for older OS versions.
Upstream Firefox and Chromium dropped Mavericks ages ago. That's not what I'm using.
https://github.com/i3roly/firefox-dynasty/releases
Fully up to date port of Firefox to legacy OS X.
I like the spirit of this, but I just think Mavericks is a bizarre break point for this type of approach. At least hit Yosemite so you can benefit from NVMe. For me, Mojave feels like the neatest break point, but if you’re rocking Nvidia, there’s also a case for High Sierra.
I think Yosemite was out because of the flat design, the author wanted aqua specifically.
Having switched from an x86 laptop to a macbook recently, macos is serviceable but overall terrible. I just want to install Linux at this point so bad. I wish Apple would officially support Asahi Linux. It would cost them nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Oh my god, I am so jealous of this guy. Please just make it stop, I want off this crazy upgrade merry-go-round.
I was curious about how the OS looks like, here is a demo https://youtu.be/lccQ5WhcKko
In process of ditching everything Apple by the end of the year. Going all in on Linux. There's trade offs, nothings perfect, but I don't need a big desperate corporation trying to upsell me on cloud storage and AI.
One of the best parts, IMO, is the feeling that comes from contributing something to the community that will last--possibly for decades or centuries. To me, using Linux is an experience of gratitude.
> Web Browsers. There is no modern mainstream browser engine that works in Snow Leopard.
You don't need one. You can either use RDP to a Windows Server running on a lightweight Mini PC (like I do) or use VMWare Fusion in unified mode to have a modern Chrome version seamlessly integrated into your desktop experience.
VMWare Fusion in unified mode is an option I may explore if Firefox Dynasty stops being maintained, but I know the integration wouldn't be seamless enough to satisfy me. Especially given that my web browser is the most used app on my machine, it kind of defeats the purpose of using Mavericks in the first place.
Are you daily driving Snow Leopard? I'd be interested to hear about the experience, if you have anything in particular to share.
I've sent you an E-Mail.
This is tempting to stick on my 2012 Mac Mini.
The newer version of MacOS on it, has become basically useless.
Windows 10 on it, has been handy for when I want to watch Apple TV, or use Channel 4 (who still don't generically support their app on Android which my TV runs).
But now Windows won't update to 11.
So maybe time to move from Windows to Linux and downgrade the MacOS.
You are a madlad! Also, I have an iMac 2013 that might benefit from this so thank you kindly!
I have a Mac Pro 1,1 and trying this might actually be kind of cool and give it more life. It is pretty limited otherwise and the 3,1 it sits next to is way more practical.
I noticed the app section included VPN.
Recently I've been looking for some VPN solution and found that many are quite expensive, though often you get a decent enough discount if you subscribe for like a year or longer. Also, I believe many services are probably not trustworthy (regardless of their claims).
A very affordable alternative is a DigitalOcean droplet with PiHole. You can connect with this VPN with Wireguard, which will probably work just fine on Mavericks. Been using this now for a couple of months and no issues. My costs are probably around 3-4 USD per month, but I don't use VPN all the time.
I haven't used WireGuard, but it looks like the main macOS implementation uses Go. Binaries built with Go 1.19 or below will work on Mavericks if you inject some compatibility libraries. (This is one of many things I haven't had time to fully document on the website yet, but I can help anyone who asks.)
But the big problem with non-native VPNs on Mavericks (by which I mean, any VPN which requires installing additional software beyond what is built-in to the OS) is that they tend to bypass any HTTPS proxies you have set up. Without an HTTPS proxy, Mavericks will have trouble connecting to most servers because SecureTransport doesn't support modern cipher suites. In e.g. Firefox Dynasty this won't matter since it ships its own (modern) SSL implementation, but Apple Mail (for example) will be unable to load most remote images.
This is why I have the note about privatevpn on the website—it took me a bit of searching to find a service that was low cost and supported a Mavericks native VPN protocol. I don't really "trust" any VPN service, but they're useful in certain specific situations.
Thanks for the explanation regarding Mavericks issues with third-party VPN software.
Can you touch on how some of these patches were made/backported from and to closed-source binaries? Which underlying proxy is Aqua Proxy built on?
> Which underlying proxy is Aqua Proxy built on?
Aqua Proxy's source code is here: https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/AquaProxy/tree/master. It mostly leverages the Go standard library.
One thing I really like is that it won't MITM any requests that use TLS 1.3 or HTTP2. Since Mavericks doesn't support these protocols natively, the proxy knows this traffic must be coming from a relatively-modern app that ships its own TLS implementation and doesn't need any help.
> Can you touch on how some of these patches were made/backported from and to closed-source binaries?
The Mail plugin just disables a feature via Objective-C swizzling. Swizzling is fun, you can replace any method in any app with your own version. I usually use class-dump to get a list of methods in the original app, read the method names to guess at what each one does, and try the ones that look promising. More recently I've begun using Hopper (a proper decompiler/disassembler) more heavily, particularly because Claude is very good at reading both assembly and decompiler babble and can direct me.
The font patch is just a hex edit. To quote the readme:
>> The patch removes the `fnt_adjust` TrueType instruction from Apple's font rendering code. This instruction has not been used by legitimate fonts since the 90s. After CVE-2023-41990 was published, Apple responded by removing this instruction from modern macOS. This patch merely does the same on Mavericks.
The patched library replaces the vulnerable instruction with a no-op.
Thanks.
I do kinda wonder if we could use these sorts of outdated setups with no internet connection offline for more things
I so want to set this up on a 2016/17 Macbook Pro, but I have near zero drive space left just from the system itself.
Your Macbook Pro is too new anyway. :( You need a Mac released between October 2008 and September 2014.
> Cylindrical "Trash Can" Mac Pro
My favorite Mac, by far. I upgraded the RAM in it. Can you even imagine a Mac that has upgradeable RAM? Pearl clutching. I also tried plugging 4 different 4K monitors into it just for the novelty. I miss my trashcan
Also, if you were to serve your get.sh (et al) as text/plain it would enable browing them versus them downloading and having to open it locally. Or, as your footer implied, linking to GitHub would also be super handy
> Can you even imagine a Mac that has upgradeable RAM?
Well now I feel old. Not only can I imagine it, I used to routinely buy RAM upgrades for my Macs because it was more affordable than getting a Mac with more RAM in the first place. As I recall one of the early aluminum PowerBooks even had a really thoughtful design that made it easy to access and replace the RAM, battery, and hard drive.
Yeah, back in the day they used actual Philips head screws, I presume for that purpose. The user hostility is just outrageous, IMHO
I've been thinking harder and harder about https://getupgraded.com/macbook/ to really get it in my mind that I don't own any Apple product, I just lease it from them for a while
They also used Torx screws for a long time. Honestly the process for upgrading RAM was always variable. Power Macs had a door with a hinge, but the original iMac needed a lot of disassembly to get to the RAM slots.
> Also, if you were to serve your get.sh (et al) as text/plain it would enable browing them versus them downloading and having to open it locally.
Thanks, I'll look into this! I'm not immediately sure how to do it. The site is hosted via a very minimal Cloudflare worker, because it's free for static assets but unlike e.g. Github pages supports unencrypted http (which is useful when bootstrapping a new Mavericks system). I haven't changed the content type of anything.
My Github is https://github.com/wowfunhappy but you actually won't find either script there, the website is the canonical version! This type of thing is why my github isn't linked!
https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/static-assets/head... alleges it honors the c-type of the asset when it was uploaded, just like S3
Thanks--I think I fixed it!
> The Unicode Consortium has introduced a lot of new emojis since Mavericks was released. We need to add them to Mavericks!
No, we don’t. If I had infinite free time, I’d build a Linux distro that completely lacks support for emoji (and animated GIFs).
But what are you going to do when someone else uses an emoji in a way that changes the meaning of what they wrote?
You don't have to like them, but to me, using a computer that can't display emojis would be kind of like using a computer that can't display the simicolon character.
No important messages are conveyed to me that have emojis in them.
So much work to not switch to Linux.
And seriously, it is the year of the Linux desktop. I’m shocked at how much “just works” like a Mac.
I feel like I have a system that’s more compatible with commercial software than a Mac (thanks Steam/Proton).
I use Macs for my day job, but personally I switched to Ubuntu (and Windows 11 when I have no choice). I have two older Mac's but they are fit for recycling now.
I made the leap due to Mac hardware cost and after seeing the Liquid Metal debacle. I also left iCloud Photos after Apple botched the UI.
I also got tired of jumping through hoops that didn’t really work most of the time to play games on Mac (e.g., Crossover).
But really, my Mac was an M1 system so I figured that even if I hated my Linux laptop I could just bail on it and get myself an M4 system as a nice upgrade. I was having issues with storage space and of course Macs aren’t upgradable so I have to sell my system and buy a new one to resolve that.
I’m very happy with my decision.
I run Bazzite with KDE and I’m very happy with the distro.
Love this and might downgrade (upgrade?)from Mojave which is when I stopped upgrading the Mac OS. Apple was still a computer company before Mojave instead of a bank wrapped in an ad network. Or is it an ad network wrapped in a bank? I can’t tell but their new Operating Systems are hot garbage since the old BSD guy left for truenas.
Wow. Nice hacking.
why intel? i never want to use a intel mac again
Well, if your goal is to get away from modern macOS, your options are Intel or PowerPC...
PowerPC you have Leopard or Tiger, the latter being "faster" but more limited. You can also install the version of Leopard someone added Snow Leopard beta parts to, which I do have on my PPC MacMini, but it still gives you limited returns.
With PowerPC you might be better looking at a third party. I hear good things about MorphOS, though never tried it. You could do Linux too.
>> having the perfect computer,
For me, that is a browser and a terminal. Arch is pretty awesome these days for that use case.
I mean, yeah, sure, you can run this. I wouldn't trust my personal data to such an old OS if it ever got connected to the internet and the system will slowly disintegrate while you're using it so I'd rather adapt to something like Omarchy on a modern Linux system instead but if this is bringing joy to some people, more power to them.
It is an interesting article, but not really a Show HN because there is nothing I can play with or try out...unless you ship me an old compatible Mac... my email is in my profile :
...I'll admit I wasn't entirely sure if this could be a Show HN or not, I might have chosen wrong!
However, the guide includes a ton of software I made, which can absolutely be tried out—Aqua Proxy, updated QuickTime components, SIMBL plugins, etc—by anyone with compatible hardware.
I'm sorry you don't have the right hardware. :( You could use a virtual machine but there's really no point. But I don't think this in itself should disqualify a Show HN submission, right? Otherwise, the only thing people could submit would be webapps!
I found this useful, appropriate section or not- thanks for sharing
I was wrong and did not read the fine print on the downloads.
Sorry.