Show HN: OS X Mavericks Forever

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm still running El Capitan on my 2015 Air.

I would have went for Catalina.

Ah, but note I said "browser engine", not "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

Aren't there old versions of those browsers?

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

> 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 Go's built-in libraries.

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 really fun, you can replace any method 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 any that look promising. More recently I've begun using Hopper, a proper decompiler/disassembler, particularly because Claude is quite good at understanding assembly and can help 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.