🧑‍💻🐝 John's Blog 🍯

Almost a year went by since my last post. Autuum is coming slowly, so it's time to get back to hacking. Or, at least, prepare some stuff.

Over the last 5 years of mainly using Linux and having tryied many different distributions, I detected I got a little tired of that and longed back of the profound experience of mac OS. There's quite some nostalgia involved of course, but also I was just missing some conveniences and beauty.

Since I wanted to use a “good old” device and got a very good MacBook Air 11” from 2014, I first gave an implementation of the project “Mavericks Forever” a try.

=> https://mavericksforever.com/

And, omg, it looked and felt so great!

=> https://fosstodon.org/@lazarus/115150153203375007

It really fit the 2014 device just perfectly. But soon I recognized the troubles due to outdated SSL implementation (and not fully working MITM proxy) were quite serious (I couldn't connect to my uberspace anymore, even the generous help of Benny, the developer of MailMate, didn't help), also there were quite some Open Source apps I needed I would have to “backport” and the work just accumulated. (If I wanted that I could just got back to any Linux desktop, obvious amounts of necessary development work would appear on any of them.)

So I threw away the “Mavericks Forever” approach (at least it were some happy days) and went on to Mojave (Mac OS X 10.14). It runs more modern software, SSL works, modern ObjC features work and it still runs 32 bit apps in case I needed one of them. Very modern apps require macOS 12 or later these days, but there are quite some that work from 10.13 onwards (sadly not LibreOffice, but hey, maybe time to use a Mac app or just Markdown/pandoc/LaTeX for writing).

So it was project “Mavericks Forever” became “Mojave a little longer”.

=> https://fosstodon.org/@lazarus/115185699923864597

Update from 2025-10-30: Currently I'm not intrigued to develop for an Apple platform anymore. Maybe I left that retro cave behind. Let's see.