> 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.
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Telemakhos 2 hours ago [-]
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.
philistine 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Wowfunhappy 1 hours ago [-]
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.)
Raed667 3 hours ago [-]
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!
latexr 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bobbylarrybobby 3 hours ago [-]
One time I somehow set the permissions of the sudo executable to lower than they needed to be (0600?). Fixing that was fun :)
bapak 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Wowfunhappy 3 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, you have to do a lot more than disable SIP nowadays because of the signed system volume stuff.
Wowfunhappy 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
nutjob2 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
latexr 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
> 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.
Wowfunhappy 48 minutes ago [-]
(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).
latexr 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
cosmic_cheese 4 hours ago [-]
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.
linguae 3 hours ago [-]
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.
philistine 2 hours ago [-]
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.
linguae 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cosmic_cheese 1 hours ago [-]
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).
robertoandred 2 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately that experience keeps getting degraded. The hiding of proxy icons is crazy to me.
cosmic_cheese 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Wowfunhappy 2 hours ago [-]
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!
xp84 10 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
sillywalk 8 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
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.
lproven 1 hours ago [-]
I agree.
It's not really what you're asking, but I know of two Linux desktops that are based around GNUSTEP.
>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.
delta_p_delta_x 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Wowfunhappy 5 hours ago [-]
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!
terhechte 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Wowfunhappy 6 hours ago [-]
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.)
xeviousr 6 hours ago [-]
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.
runjake 5 hours ago [-]
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.
oreilles 6 hours ago [-]
I would have went for Catalina.
boobsbr 6 hours ago [-]
I'm still running El Capitan on my 2015 Air.
Johnny555 2 hours ago [-]
>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.
Wowfunhappy 2 hours ago [-]
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...
brewmarche 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Wowfunhappy 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
brewmarche 5 hours ago [-]
I think it depends on what was the current version when your model came out. Should have said mid-2014 like OP, sorry
Wowfunhappy 5 hours ago [-]
> 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!
brewmarche 4 hours ago [-]
Good to know. Mine is from June 2014 (assembly, since it’s a custom configuration). Sorry for missing your point.
dingosity 2 hours ago [-]
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.
JKCalhoun 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Wowfunhappy 2 hours ago [-]
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!
Sure there are but running older browsers is a security risk. The older it is the more vulnerable it is.
JKCalhoun 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
Wowfunhappy 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
moondev 5 hours ago [-]
Was hoping this legendary gtk themer had a mavericks theme but Yosemite is the earliest it appears.
If you want a macOS theme with insane quality on Linux this guy's work is the pinnacle.
kccqzy 2 hours ago [-]
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.
NoSalt 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Ezhik 7 hours ago [-]
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.
SnuffBox 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
felixding 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Wowfunhappy 5 hours ago [-]
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.
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?
2 hours ago [-]
WillAdams 2 hours ago [-]
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_.
frumplestlatz 5 minutes ago [-]
10.6 was absolutely not 10.5 recompiled. It was entirely a reliability and bug fix release on top of 10.5.
52 minutes ago [-]
wsc981 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Wowfunhappy 5 hours ago [-]
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.
reactordev 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bazmattaz 4 hours ago [-]
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
WorldPeas 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
cosmic_cheese 3 hours ago [-]
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.
reactordev 1 hours ago [-]
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
stuaxo 7 hours ago [-]
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,
selimnairb 5 hours ago [-]
> 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).
Wowfunhappy 1 hours ago [-]
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.
bangonkeyboard 3 hours ago [-]
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?
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.
bangonkeyboard 3 hours ago [-]
Thanks.
stuaxo 7 hours ago [-]
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.
k_badcommand 7 hours ago [-]
You are a madlad! Also, I have an iMac 2013 that might benefit from this so thank you kindly!
mdaniel 3 hours ago [-]
> 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
Wowfunhappy 3 hours ago [-]
> 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!
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.
nutjob2 6 hours ago [-]
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.
fcpguru 4 hours ago [-]
why intel? i never want to use a intel mac again
Wowfunhappy 4 hours ago [-]
Well, if your goal is to get away from modern macOS, your options are Intel or PowerPC...
smm11 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Wowfunhappy 1 hours ago [-]
Your Macbook Pro is too new anyway. :( You need a Mac released between October 2008 and September 2014.
brudgers 1 days ago [-]
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 :
Wowfunhappy 21 hours ago [-]
...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!
brudgers 5 hours ago [-]
I was wrong and did not read the fine print on the downloads.
Sorry.
k_badcommand 7 hours ago [-]
I found this useful, appropriate section or not- thanks for sharing
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.
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.
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.)
have fun! break things!
There is a time and place for each approach. Recognising which is appropriate for each situation and user is a good skill to cultivate.
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 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 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Does anybody have an idea why Mavericks isn't available from Apple?
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102662#browser
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
>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.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
1: https://iterm2.com/downloads/beta/iTerm2-3_0_15.zip
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?
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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!
Sorry.