Comment by tailspin2019

I’m going to do some good old Hacker News bike-shedding here…

Whenever I see something that looks like a poor copy of something else, it has an immediate (negative) effect on me from quite deep down.

It’s a variation of the uncanny valley I think.

The UI screenshots on the landing page all look like “best effort” copies of macOS UI elements but are just slightly off and that “slightly off” feeling really sits badly with me. This is not a intellectual judgement but an instinctive gut reaction.

I totally get what they’re trying to do, but I think it would be worth creating just a tiny bit more distance from the macOS design language because if you try to be a direct carbon copy of macOS, it’s just going to fail at at that.

It’s a bit like when you see cheap knock-off products replicating those of mainstream brands. The knock-offs could actually be quite well made but because they’re imitating other products they just don’t ever look right, and the failed imitation aspect overshadows everything else.

I wonder what others think (especially the macOS users amongst us).

Aside from that, I think the idea of the project is cool. It just needs more of its own identity I think.