LeFantome

Absolutely.

A lot of it is just the organization and leadership within the projects themselves. The GNUstep guys struggled for a long time. Just agreeing to implement the Mac APIs instead of just the NeXTstep ones is a thing.

Regardless of how attractive projects are, they can be run well or badly. Without trying to disparage anybody, look at the progress of WINE vs ReactOS for example. And if you think it is just because kernels are hard, look at Linux or Haiku or SerenityOS vs ReactOS instead.

But the popularity of Windows made the Win32 APIs more commercially viable as well and so you get companies like CodeWeavers and Valve that really accelerate the WINE effort. That wind at your back really helps.

In what way?

The binary formats are not compatible, not even the format of the files themselves. Linux uses ELF. MacOS uses MachO.

True, macOS is more or less POSIX at the base but the API Mac applications are written to is not that at all ( Cocoa ). GNUstep exists for a reason. Sadly, it is not very mature. It is certainly not a trivial undertaking though as there have been a number of attempts over decades and nobody has really pulled it off.

The Win32 API on the other hand has largely been implanted on Linux. A few Win32 APIs are even being added to the kernel.

Going the other way is easier. You can port POSIX stuff to macOS fairly easily.

Ubuntu was the “original” easy-to-use Linux desktop. It expanded into that demand and still enjoys the market share it got when nobody else was really filling that niche.

Mint exists explicitly as a fork of Ubuntu and enjoys less success as a result. Many, including me, think Mint does a better job at being a solid desktop option than Ubuntu and is kind of the goto distro for that now ( not still not as popular as Ubuntu still is ).

Elementary is a curated desktop for people that really like coherence and design. That is, first of all, a more demanding target. It is perhaps too ambitious for their scale. And they have stumbled in execution. The task might be easier if they focussed on just being a DE ( desktop environment ) that other distros could use.

An “official” Ubuntu or Mint spin would have a real shot.

They are probably saying the shared POSIX underpinnings means greater commonality between macOS and Linux and therefore easier porting. That is likely true to some extent but real apps are written to Apple proprietary APIs and therefore that advantage is largely nullified.

In terms of effort to bring apps over, there has been far, far more effort put into porting Windows apps and so that task ( at this point ) is generally easier. It may have been less effort to port macOS at the start ( eg. GNUstep ) but that work has still largely never been done.

It is easy to move POSIX world apps to macOS. It is not as easy to go the other way.

I installed EndeavourOS on a 2013 MacBook Air a month ago for a backpack trip. It was light enough to carry around and it was cheap enough I did not worry about it being broken or stolen.

It works fantastically. LibreOffice, Outlook online, Teams, OBS Studio, Distrobox, Docker, IntellijIDEA. I have even played a little Steam on it. The only thing that was not out of the box was the iSight camera and even that was a one line command after install.

The only software that let me down was DaVinci Resolve. The integrated GPU is not supported.

All I did was hold down Option at boot so I could boot off the USB and then I let the installer do the work. Anybody could do it.

Did you install the facetimehd module?

When is this hardware from? 2010?

I have been using a 2013 MacBook Air recently that has Intel integrated graphics and have actually run a few Steam games in it. I also use a 2008 iMac but it actually has a dedicated GPU so that does not help with your hardware.

Even my old stuff has more than 4 MB of RAM though. That would be hassle these days.

I love running Linux on old kit. Way to go.

This thread is 3 MB

I assume it is because /var can be written to while the rest of the filesystem ( outside /home ) is expected to be read-only.

What is the name of the dinit system designed for containers?

As others have said, macOS does not “just work” anymore.

I am primary tech support for a few “normy” users including my mother and wife. My wife, the more technical and capable of the two, uses macOS. My mother uses Windows. My wife requires substantially more tech support. Worse, the issues are often complete mysteries to me like “why is everything so slow” and it turning out that some OS level process is consuming huge amounts of memory and / or CPU. Web searches reveal lots of people with similar issues but no real insight into what to do about it or why it is happening. I have moved OS versions just to solve this kind of crap on Mac. Another problem is software not working on older versions of the OS.

I am no Windows lover but, once I show my mother how to do something, I never hear from her. Every once in a while I stop by to marvel at how many updates need to be applied but that is about it. She is in the Windows 10 that I installed for her many years ago now. It just works.

While I understand the sentiment, we have to understand that Open Source developers work on projects that motivate them.

So, we can have a single example of each of these but they do necessarily get any more devs. In fact, if you take economic theory ( competition for example ), it is likely they attract less attention individually than they do competing as part of an ecosystem.

It would certainly help on the user acceptance and commercial software side where choice is an impediment. But, if we are just talking resources, limiting the number of projects only works if you pay people to work on them.

Why was each of these projects started ( eg. window managers )? The answer is simple. It is because the founding developer did not like any of the existing options.