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 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.
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!
>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.
I do miss Snow Leopard's scroll bars though, as I explicitly call out on the website!
Right now, this info is dispersed everywhere and it’s not the primary intent of archival sites to provide this.
But something like a pcpartpicker.com but for OS setups would be cool.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The UI is soooo much better than the current Mac OS.
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.
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 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 and didn't have Time Machine set up. 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.
have fun! break things!
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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
brudgers•21h ago
Wowfunhappy•18h ago
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!
k_badcommand•4h ago
brudgers•2h ago
Sorry.