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I’ve been helping teams automating their routine work using https://aquablue.app , an AI employees app I built.

For example, syncing orders from e-commerce sites to their internal spreadsheets, generating invoices with custom workflow etc


Slightly off-topic: the old Aqua UI looks so much better. Not only it was much easier to see what's a control and what's text, but it also looked visually nicer (subjective, I know).

To be fair, so are many other UIs. Windows 95-style boxy buttons and bevels make the content look organized. Every possible action gets its button that looks like a button. You often see the total set of available actions by looking at a toolbar. You don't need to second-guess whether some piece of content itself is clickable / editable or not.

Also, everything has excessive padding now. Modern Windows control panel UIs often feel like a multicolumn wall of text with lots of empty space and a few switches dropped in, and to fit the same amount if options as the older UI they had to either hide some toggles because "known needs them anymore" or introduce extra intermediary navigation steps. As a result the new Control Panel feels bloated and less useful.


Funnily enough when Aqua was new i remember thinking Platinum looked so much better.

That is correct. Platinum still looks fantastic, carefully hewn out of the HIG. Early Aqua is a bit ostentatious and at the very least indulgent. Still better than the fucking flat-slop plus glarse vomit we have to put up with now.

We dont have to put up with it. At some point the collective “we” could consider using some other machines with other, more free, operating systems.

Exactly. I don't know why some people'd change the branding.


Apple keeps changing the name of their desktop operating system, so Hacker News has some sort of filter to automatically change "Mac OS" to whatever the newest name is in order to fit Apple's brand guidelines. This has the consequence of making some submission titles read as anachronistic when the sumission is about an old OS version.


The project didn't, only the HN submission title.


Not the submission title, just the automatically revised submission title. Pretty sure I submitted it with the proper casing/spacing


HN has this thing where it would automatically "fix" submission titles.


Exactly. Very clever name!


In case you don't know yet, there is a project that tries to bring the NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux:

https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace


I wish that all of these sort of efforts would be folded into GNUstep:

gnustep.org

and that we would arrive at something useful and easily installed and widely accepted.


They don't even support Objective-C latest, as GCC only supports what NeXT was obliged to upstream.


I'm pretty sure that's just the runtime.

Trivial to support. There is probably some AI slop for it. The main issue is providing an object platform people want to use.


Objective-C 2.0+ also has syntax and semantic updates, besides the whole weak references, and ARC improvements.


Interesting, this seems to have been around for quite a while, though not as long as AfterStep and Window Maker. I wonder why the author decided to write their own version instead of helping out with one of those projects.


There was WindowMaker for a while too, just a window manager.


Wow, this is very close to an app I’m building. My take is that the key part is not just generating the workflow, but making it reviewable and deterministic enough that businesses can actually trust it.


I'm sure there are innumerable Adderall infused "startups" vibe coding this exact thing right now.


Absolutely!

I wish projects like nextspace could get more love.


https://aquablue.app - Business software without developers

https://kintoun.ai - Document translator that preserves formatting and layouts

https://ricatutor.com - AI language tutor for YouTube


Maybe I’m nitpicking but there is no such thing as “macOS Tiger”. It’s called Mac OS X at the time so it’s Mac OS X Tiger.


"Amaze, amaze, amaze!"

I wonder if there would be interest in an Asahi Remix spin focused on a more Mac-like out-of-the-box experience: cmd as the main modifier key, Mac-like keyboard shortcuts, theming, gestures, etc.

Of course, you can tweak any distro however you want, but I think a curated default experience is a different thing.


Cmd as a “main” modifier?

Ok typical X/Wayland setups, Cmd is already the main modifier for DE features, while Ctrl is the modifier used at an application level.

There would be a lot of weird overlap with changing that.


> while Ctrl is the modifier used at an application level.

DE features don't matter at all outside of cmd-tab and whatever the equivalent of spotlight is. The application level is the main modifier, and changing them all to cmd is essentially impossible at this point. A detail Haiku got just about perfect, I think.

Either way, ctrl as a gui modifier is a dealbreaker for me. It also breaks the use of readline keybindings for text entry.


I've managed to get close enough w/ kde. I just asked claude code to implement it for me, and it web searched and built config files.


I’ve had the same thought and would love this. MacOS shortcuts are too deeply ingrained in my fingers.

But every attempt of mine to make Linux shortcuts Mac-like has had too many sharp edges to be useable. Toshy didn’t seem to work well with Wayland and felt heavy. Probably the best so far I’ve found has been keyd and custom configs for your most used apps.

A community effort might get us there. Distribute the hours of tinkering across many passionate users instead of everyone doing it in a vacuum.


Cmd as main modifier is lost battle. I've tried it multiple times. In the end just accepted ctrl life and sold my last macbook.


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