Came here to say this. Lack of memory protection and preemption was atrocious. But the UI was dead simple and a joy. I also used to like to pick apart things in ResEdit.
I recently picked up my dream computer from 19 years ago - the PowerBook G3 (Bronze Keyboard) https://imgur.com/a/zhmi6cP
It's been great fun noodling around with, customizing the OS with Kaleidoscope schemes etc. Really love the classic MacOS. But it does bomb/hard freeze a lot. Especially with network activity (one AppleTalk glitch and the whole thing just freezes up)
One of the main issues in actually using it is that the adoption of HTTPS and deprecation of old encryption methods has made all the browsers available (including Classzilla) completely useless. My solution has been to install Firefox in a VM on my NAS and connect to that through VNC or an X11 client (former is zippier, but the latter makes it feel more native)
Both Windows 3.11 and the classic MacOS would be great interface to clone in a Unix window manager or Wayland compositor. Sure they're old but so many of the concepts still hold up and honestly most of us don't need much more than that.
It's not just the interface, though. Note how "installing" stuff is just dragging files to the right locations.
You could make fully bootable backups of your main drive just by copying everything from the root to a new drive. None of this re-installation rubbish or ownership getting messed up or what have you. It even worked across architectures, a Mac System 7.5 installation will boot on both 68k machines and supported PowerPC systems, just swap the drive over and you're going.
I concur. Not only is it not just about the interface, but it's about the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines and the ecosystem of applications that conform to it.
It would be nice to use a desktop environment that's inspired by the classic Mac interface (I particularly have a soft spot for the Platinum theme), but without an ecosystem of applications that conform to the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines, then all we have is yet another window manager.
It's the ecosystem of applications, like Microsoft Word 5.1, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe PageMaker, ClarisWorks, and others, combined with the Mac interface, that made the Mac so special.
Fun fact: You can copy/paste a whole linux system as long as `-a` is passed to copy.
Also, if you like copy/pasted Linux apps, there is the `AppImage` project that provides such a format and its tooling is rapidly improving. It is a self-contained alternative to Snap and Flatpak which only handle the file container and leaves security/sandboxing and distribution to other projects.
But yes, the classic Mac was the first computer I ever used and I also have a sweet spot for it. I still own some recent Mac, but don't really like the increasing lack of flexibility and non-iOS development environment macOS has and do all my development on Linux. Classic macOS was the ultimate flexible OS, you could monkey-patch everything (which is also called a virus, but... POWER!).
Disclaimer: I am one of the authors of AwesomeWM, a Lua window manager framework for Linux.
Even better: you could create a RAM disk, copy system file and reboot from it at lighting speed.
What I miss the most is the true spacial Finder. Copy a file to a floppy disk, add a custom icon and place it at a precise location on a window. Go to a different Mac and insert the drive. All those attributes are honored. Every single time no matter what. Such a simple and powerful model.
Not reliably and consistently. And it's not a bug, it's a design decision.
There used to be a one to one mapping of folders to windows.
The moment you decide 2 windows can show the content of the same folder simultaneously (which has its advantages), you run in these issues. Which is the canonical view that should be preserved?
And yes, we had all that without . DS_Store files.
> There used to be a one to one mapping of folders to windows. The moment you decide 2 windows can show the content of the same folder simultaneously (which has its advantages), you run in these issues. Which is the canonical view that should be preserved?
I'd posit most of us rarely open the same folder in two different windows, which means the icons should behave as expected in all but an uncommon edge case. It has worked in my experience, at least.
But separately, just as a though experiment: when an icon is moved in one window, the placement ought to update in both windows, in real time. Probably wouldn't have been feasible when macOS X was new, but perfectly doable today given modern computing power.
Installing modern macOS X apps usually work this way as well. Unfortunately, Apple has obscured their own simplicity somewhat with Launchpad. (Also partly why Snow Leopard is the GOAT)
