I think in the long term, such a project could be more sustainable than projects focused on an “original” experience.
KDE, GNOME, etc spend a lot of resources on new features and overhauls to enable new features. A fixed-feature replica project by comparison would eventually achieve a “finished” state, with resources instead going towards optimizations, bug fixes, code correctness, etc which are overall less demanding and make unavoidable tech migrations (e.g. X11 → Wayland) less of a pain since the project won’t be mired in tech debt.
The original Star Wars: TIE Fighter was one of the first computer games I played as a teenager. The funny thing is, I had absolutely no idea what Star Wars was, but somehow I still thought the game was really cool and played it for quite a while.
Star Wars went dormant in the late 80s through the mid-late 90s where there was no merch or toys in stores, no cartoons or shows on tv, and no comic books. Cable and home video wasn’t yet ubiquitous, for a cohort of kids born in the 80s and early 90s it’s quite possible to have missed out on it until you were older.
I was 7 or 8 in the early 90s in Texas before I heard about Star Wars. I was playing play sword fighting with my dad, when he mentioned my broom handle looked like a lightsaber, I was like “what’s that?” My dad then proceeded to delight me with the story. It would be about 6 months later when an aunt lent us a VHS player that I would get to see it.
Same, my first viewing was on a betamax copy my aunt had - coincidentally the same trip I ended up buying a cassette tape that had Weird Al's Yoda on it.
I grew up in China, where the first Star Wars movie wasn't released in theaters until 1999. It had probably been shown on TV in some cities before then, but Star Wars definitely wasn't a well-known pop culture phenomenon there.
If your parents thought cable TV was too expensive, even a North American kid could have no idea what Star Wars was until they became a teenager , had access to a BBS and saw jpegs of princess Lea.
> in the 80s the Star Wars were already a cult thing
I grew up in the 90s, and when the special editions came out in '97, it was the kind of thing that only those of us with nostalgic dads actually went to see.
I only saw Empire at the time, don't think I saw the rest of the trilogy until shortly before the prequels came out.
Exactly. Hard pass on a phone without a 3.5mm headphone jack.
People who say, “You can use a dongle” or “Just buy Bluetooth earphones” are missing the point. It’s never about what compromises we, as consumers, can make; it’s about users’ choices and preferences.
I’m fine with manufacturers wanting to make more money by selling dongles or Bluetooth earphones, but I’ll never accept them doing so by removing features to force us to buy them.
I used all of them in various projects: "traditional" Ajax-based SPAs, HTML over WebSockets/SSE, etc. Then I found Inertia.js and never looked back.
With Inertia.js, you get the real feel of an SPA without the complexity of maintaining APIs just for the frontend. You can even make some pages plain HTML (like the homepage, legal pages, etc.), while making pages that require reactivity SPAs.
Deterministic workflows still have plenty of use cases. AI agents can help build them, but can’t replace them when predictable and auditable execution matters, because agents are inherently nondeterministic.
That said, Relay.app announced its shutdown a few weeks ago, and now Flowise is winding down too. I wonder whether coding agents are really the cause, or whether these products simply struggled to find a sustainable market.
Disclosure: I’m building Aqua Blue (aquablue.app) around a related idea: AI builds the workflow, but fixed rules run it.
It's not safe or reliable, no matter how hard you try. Fundamentally, agents will try whatever they can to achieve the goal, as we've seen in many recent security incidents.
If determinism is important, as it is in many business use cases, use agents to build the tool, but don't let them run it.
I built a similar product around this exact idea: AI builds the workflow. Fixed rules run it.
Please don't let users "try" your product only to immediately hit a signup/signin wall. It instantly undermines whatever trust the demo may have established.
More on this, we're still experimenting between a hard vs. soft paywall. Regardless, if you sign up it should be easy enough to play around with it for a while on the free tier. We promise that we don't send spam/marketing emails.
It’s not about what you offer on the free tier. It’s about whether what you say matches what you do.
If your page asks people to try the product, let them try it. Asking them to enter something and click “Try,” only to immediately hit a signup wall, is frustrating and makes them feel tricked.
Maybe it’s because I’m old, but the classic Mac OS user interface looks so good. I’d trade the current Mac OS UI for it in a heartbeat. I’m already sticking with Sequoia because I don’t want Liquid Glass making my eyes sore.
I literally thought the same the other day when I was messing around with macos 9. The modern macos is so damn bright that I don't think it would need a dark mode if it just softened the colour choices.
That and just generally it feels so soulless nowadays. Mac OS pre-brushed metal felt like a breath of fresh air compared to os9, but it's taken it to its extreme now and it just looks bad
What exactly is bright? I don't disagree with you on pre-brushed metal and so on. I am running Tahoe in bright mode (not a fan of dark mode unless it's an IDE or a terminal emulator), and I can't really say it's screams bright. Even the new transparent menu bar matches my dark grey desktop background now.
A high-quality replica takes tremendous effort and time, but it’s not really financially viable.
I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
Oh, and I’d be super happy to pay for such a replica too! For example, $99 a year for a Mac OS X Jaguar to Tiger era skin/theme/desktop environment.
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