os platforms

New and revived desktops promise Cupertino polish, but our quick tests found a few seams showing

Linux can do many things, but good looks aren't always its strong point. Apple has rather more of a reputation in that department, and a crop of new projects is bringing Mac-style polish to the open source desktop.

Some are all-new, such as the Argentinian Lord OS , a whole new GUI desktop on top of Debian. Another, Cutefish , is a revival of a pre-ChatGPT project that never got as far as a complete release. Now it has version 1.0 for both x86-64 and Arm64, plus it's working on Mac binary compatibility via a work-in-progress layer called Reef . Ukrainian Desert OS is already at version 5.5 – practically a venerable elder in this company, despite appearing to be only about a year old.

Meanwhile, ClokeOS uses Xfce for its desktop, but underneath, the OS is based on Apple's FOSS XNU kernel.…