Build an Open Mac Alternative! - a Guide for Switching from macOS to elementary OS

welcome back so today's video is one of the most ambitious projects that i've ever undertaken and it is in response to some of the recent announcements and and things that have been brought to light from wwdc 2020 where the newest version of mac os 11 has been unveiled now for those of you who regularly follow this channel you'll know that this channel is about showcasing alternatives with free and open source software predominantly linux and linux related software so the question that i am trying to solve today is can we build an open source mac alternative now what i'm not talking about here is grabbing a distribution of linux and skinning it to make it look like os mac os mac os 10 ish that's been done to death and you can google plenty of articles and videos on how to set that up if that is what you're into what i'm more interested in is how can we replicate some of the strong functionality that mac os has and replicate that functionality in the free and open source software world now this breaks down for two types of users first of all if you are have been a long time mac user and maybe you aren't really happy with the direction that mac os is going in mac os 11 and you want to start looking around at what else is out there that you could run on your hardware to do the things that you love to do on your mac so that's that's crowd number one crowd number two and the crowd that i most relate to are those who love the idea of the mac and a lot of the functionality that is present on the mac platform but do not want to either pay the asking price to get in the door or they don't want to get walled into the apple walled garden as it were and they don't get locked into the mac ecosystem so for either of those camps this video is going to be a long one but hopefully it's going to be really helpful these are some of the lessons that i've learned and are some suggestions that i can give to you in building an open mac alternative let's do it [Music] okay so we've got a few things going on today first of all we have coffee to get us through we have my notes off on the side here and then i've got the platform that i'm working on now i'm going to be working inside a virtual machine so that i can kind of set things up and not touch my main sort of production system but you should be able to kind of take some of this stuff leave the stuff that you don't want hang on to the stuff that you do and hopefully you'll be able to see just how close you can get to the same mac functionality now first of all what we need to talk about really quickly and i've got them listed on my notes here so i can blast through them as quick as possible here are what i believe are the strengths of the mac platform that we want to carry over when we're building the open alternative to mac os first of all a really strong system-wide search command space on the mac is so powerful and i want to have that replicated in our open alternative also i want quick toggles and a clean notification system so there any notifications that come through on my os can be neatly filed away and i can go back to them and refer to them later or just clear them all out i want unified system settings so that i don't have to go jumping around between different control panels and different uh windows um to find the settings that i want i want it all in the one system settings app i would also love integration with mobile because one strength i think of the mac platform is it's very tight integration with the iphone and the ipad if you have those uh spoiler alert we're probably not going to get there in this video there is a way to do it it's called kde connect it's a little bit fiddly with what i'm going to recommend but you can go google that on your own uh also i would appreciate unique design something that is simple something that gets out of the way and lets me focus on the apps that i want to run i also appreciate multi-touch gestures and so that's something that i want to replicate in our open mac os alternative i also want security built in i want a heavy focus on privacy because i think those are two things that mac os does quite well almost a little bit heavy-handed nowadays on the security side of things and i also want beautiful wallpapers because we all know mac os has got them wallpapers for days i also want some high quality consumer grade apps what do i mean by this i mean that i want to have in my system maps calendars that sync with online accounts i want a to-do list app i want a photo manager i want a decent file manager that can give me the different views that i want i want uh news and music and podcasts and note-taking and a web browser and basic office software maybe some voice memo stuff that kind of thing and cloud storage i need that as well okay so those are some of the things that i think the mac platform gives to new users out of the box and i think their strengths there are weaknesses but i'm not going to go into that in today's video because now what we're going to do is we're going to focus on how do we build this in an open source environment so we're going to try wherever we can to use free software that is both free to pay for as you don't have to pay for it you can if you want and also it's free as in free speech as in the code is open that people can go and use replicate and modify it without having to worry about end user license agreements so to that end we are choosing as our platform of choice uh elementary os now i'm sure a lot of you didn't really uh weren't really surprised to see this coming elementary os at the at the current time of this video we are up to elementary os 5.1.5 okay let's jump in here on the desktop and start playing around with some stuff okay so i want to give a few more details as to what elementary os brings to the table and why i've chosen it to build an open replacement for mac os there's a few key things now first of all i i think that the design of the overall operating system and the user interface is it's very simple and it's very thoughtful this operating system is also very privacy oriented it's open source it's very actively developed and it's got a very stable base underlying it not only that but they also have a pretty sustainable business model they've been around for a long time now they've been through multiple releases and they they have a really exciting road map for the future releases and and other features that they're going to be adding to this project so there was quite a few other contenders in this space for i guess for linux distributions to recommend but at the end of the day this was the one that i settled on now despite its appearances you do have a panel at the top and you have a dock at the bottom and usually this is enough to make people compare it instantly to mac os there are there are a lot of interface differences here when you're dealing with elementary versus mac os this is a very different beast and it is going to do things differently the the theming the user experience is all very thoughtful and it's very simple it's quite powerful underneath but we've got to be careful when we're comparing it to mac os what i'm trying to replicate here is building an alternative to mac os not trying to copy mac os or or replicate it pound for pound the other thing that i really appreciate about this project is the fact that they have very uh they have excellent communication that goes out with their releases and with their monthly updates each and every month so like i mentioned this project is very actively developed and just by going to their blog you can jump in and see what are some of the things that that they've been working on now the great communication doesn't just start and end with their blog for example because not everyone is going to read their blog but also when it comes to updates that get pushed out through the app center which is the software store for elementary os when updates for different applications get pushed out you get very detailed release notes as to what's changed and what they're working on so this this excellent communication that you get from the developers and their consistent commitment to improving this project gives me a lot of confidence to recommend it to people looking for a serious alternative to mac os okay now what are some other fundamentals that i mentioned before now what a lot of users love about mac os and what i mentioned at the top of the video you have very simple search and launch application launcher up here in the top left corner this search also applies for settings within different applications for example if i search nightline you'll see that it has brought up a search result for the settings panel inside system settings to go and turn on the night light control and this is all just from the windows and space key or if you're on a macbook it'd be the command space key now i do want to point out that here the system settings is another great example of something that we like about mac os that you can find here in elementary and that is unified system desktop preferences all in the same window so i highly recommend that you go and play around with some of these things especially the desktop settings and play around with the size of the text window animations and the the size of the icons on the dock and the hot corners and you'll be able to find yourself being quite productive in this desktop shell already now if you'd like a full video unpacking all the features that went into elementary os 5.1 which was the last sort of major service pack kind of release then there's a video linked up in the cards you can go and check that out what else does it bring to the table well i think the file manager is an important thing to talk about because again it carries over a lot of the things that users love about macos's file explorer or finder and such as different views so you have icon list and the three column view that just expands out as you need it and it's also worth mentioning that while you don't have the space bar to open and spacebar to close preview the apps that are built into elementary os that preview and view pdfs images videos etc etc are all incredibly lightweight so they launch almost instantly now bear in mind that in this video i'm using a virtual machine and i've only given it four gig of ram and yet it flies when it comes to opening previews of these different things the other touch that i do enjoy about the elementary files app is that when you close the window and then open the app again later on it'll it'll jump back to exactly where you were before of course you can turn that off if you don't like it but i think it's a usability tweak that elementary have done right finally i think the quick toggles and notification system up here in the top right is very minimal and very well done you can customize notifications that come through to the notification center you can turn on do not disturb and you can clear them all and customize whether you want pop-ups bubbles sounds etc etc on an app-by-app basis again one of the features that we like about mac os that we can find here in our open alternative elementary finally the thing that i think has me the most excited about this project is that it has an ever expanding ecosystem of quality of quality and coherent applications that are purpose made for this operating system so when you go into the app center which is effectively the app store for elementary os you'll notice that there are categories like you would see in any app store and when you search for a particular application let's say i search for notes you will get a list of curated applications at the top of the list and then non-curated apps now what you need to remember is that any of the curated apps that are up here are purpose built for the elementary os whereas the ones below are just general software that's available to any and all linux distributions we're going to get to more about how to add more software to elementary os in just a moment but first we need to talk about what do we tweak when we first finish setting up and installing elementary so there are a bunch of things that you can tweak at the end of the day elementary os is based on linux and you can very much tinker and tweak it to your heart's content but the things that i'm going to focus on doing are first of all adding a bunch of different software sources to elementary so that you have access to a wide array of software to be able to download and install the best that the open source world has to offer when it comes to software alternatives then we're going to add back our desktop functionality for those who enjoy putting stuff on the desktop and we're also going to talk about multi-touch gestures on laptops because this is a huge part of what makes mac os so such a pleasure to use and i want to be able to replicate that here and and have that functionality in elementary os we're also then going to touch on some cloud storage before getting into some app recommendations okay let's get into it so first things first we need to add some software sources now if you've been in the mac os world you probably would have heard of homebrew especially if you're more a developer homebrew is essentially a a way that you can install software through a package manager on mac os and and access a lot of a lot of free and open source software essentially what we want to do is we want to add some different software sources to the app center so that it's not just pulling in software from elementary os's software source but it's also pulling in from flat hub flat hub is a centralized universal linux packaging system so all you need to do to enable this is go to flathub.org and then just pick any random application that you would like to install pretty much everyone likes to install spotify these days so simply clicking on the install button will download a reference file now that small reference file is not the full application it's just a pointer that you will click on to enable the the flat hub software source to be added to app center essentially this little file will point the app center to link up with flat hub and once you hit ok you'll be given a you'll be given a warning just saying that hey this piece of software comes from outside the app center do you want to proceed you say yes and then it will then add the rest of flat hub to the app center so that you can search and install applications from flat hub as well as elementary's own software source so for example if i was looking for let's say vlc very popular media player if i search for vlc you will see now i have two different entries of vlc i will have one that is enabled from the elementary software sources and then i'll have a second one which is probably going to be more up to date that is available from the flat hub software source another great example of this would be caden live which is a video editor that i use to make and produce all the videos on this channel you'll see that i have one software search which which is called ubuntu and that is the the software source that's built into elementary and then i also have flat hub which is what we just added before but the beauty is is that now that this software source is added i can get the latest version of my favorite applications downloaded and installed and updated automatically through elementary so elementary os's app center so highly recommend wherever you can if you see that you have a drop down menu here on an application that you want to install i would recommend to go towards the flat hub version because it will be more up to date and it will be more readily updated than the version that lives on elementary os software sources i hope all that makes sense now the second thing that we're going to do is we're going to add the snap store now adding support for snap packages on elementary os is a little bit divisive amongst the linux community but i'm recommending it here simply so that you can have access to the most up-to-date and the most linux software that you can rather than being limited by the platform that you're on you may as well have access to all the stuff that's out there so in order to do this i'm going to recommend that you use the terminal now don't be too scared there's only two things that we're going to be doing here in the terminal and you can copy paste the link down in the description below the terminal on linux based systems works very similar to the way that it does on mac os if you've ever experimented in the terminal there then you'll likely be able to carry over a lot of that experience to the linux world as well now in this case all that we're going to be doing is saying sudo apt install snap d two ampersands and then snap install snap dash store now what this command does is twofold first of all it elevates our user to be able to access uh administrator level stuff then it asks apt to go out and install the snap package back end after that it will then ask snap to then install the snap store and snap store is basically just another app store that has different linux software available in it so once you've done those two commands i'd recommend that you log out of your session and log back in again and the reason for that is twofold first of all when you add software when you add new software sources it's always a good idea to log out and log back in again because of the fact you really only do this once at the start of using the os once you've got it out the way you'll be set up and ready to go now i've already installed the snap store on this particular system you'll notice that when we open it up we have a different looking app store but we have access to a lot more software now as well so if i could break it down for you this is how i'd prioritize it if you can find the latest version available in the app center for a particular app that you want to install i'd recommend you use flat hub as a software source first and foremost followed by the elementary os software sources that come built in followed by the snap store a case in point standard notes is a brilliant note tagging application very similar to something like bear in the mac world it has encrypted notes and you can sync them across platforms and across different apps but they don't have a straightforward up-to-date package for the particular system that we're on however they do have a snap package that'll automatically keep you at the latest version and update as you go so having this snapstore around for situations like that is very helpful so now that we've got our software sources all set up we have two app stores that we can pull apps from we can start talking about what other tweaks do we need to make to the elementary os interface so here are some other tweaks that i would recommend first of all go into app center and install desktop folder the desktop folder app will give you some functionality back to your desktop allowing you to right click on the desktop create files links photos change the wallpaper show the desktop and open the terminal here as you can see in the screenshot on the app center you can add different things to the desktop whether it's icons or whether it's sticky notes and all that kind of stuff so if you're into being able to utilize the blank space that your user interface starts with then go and grab desktop folder and make sure that when you have a look at your application startup that desktop folder is enabled it should be enabled by default but that means that we can now add icons or anything of that nature now if you're noticing that none of your icons are showing up just double click on the desktop and you'll see them all pop up and you can rearrange them as you so desire now for me i'm okay with having a completely blank desktop but i just thought i'd point it out for those of you who might want it now the other thing that's super important to me is multi-touch gestures now the best way that i've found to make this work again involves just a little bit of tweaking through the terminal and it's through a tool using called fusuma now fuzuma has a bunch of different ways that it can take input from the trackpad and map it to different keyboard shortcuts now because elementary os as an operating system has a lot of different keyboard shortcuts built in it means that the system as a whole is very navigable via the keyboard therefore if we can use a tool to map gestures on the trackpad to the keyboard more power to you you have some very simple instructions here for how you need to manage it there are some keyboard commands that you need to give into the terminal and once you've finished doing that you can then add a custom gesture map all this is basically a configuration file that lives in your home directory and by editing that to the recommendations that are in the link in the description below you can basically have a gesture map that almost maps one for one with what you might be used to on mac os so whether it's pinching and zooming whether it's multi-touch swipes for going forward and back in the web browser whether it's swiping three or four fingers up to go to the multitasking view whatever it is you can map it out and have it work on a multi-touch trackpad on elementary os so it's well worth the effort to go and set that up i cannot recommend fuzuma enough also while we're talking about keyboard and mouse input i would recommend going and changing the keyboard shortcut for closing a window to command q or windows key q if you have muscle memory of quitting out of a certain application on mac os using command q then you might want to replicate that here because by default it is the windows default which is alt f4 alt f4 works if you're used to the windows way of doing things but if you're coming from a mac setting it to command q or the windows key queue is going to be a lot more helpful for you in the future okay finally we need to talk about cloud storage because something that mac os does very well is it integrates icloud drive very deeply into the system now when it comes to cloud storage there are a bunch of options that you can go and find but what i'm going to recommend is that if privacy and data security is important to you then i would recommend that you go and check out pcloud now they're not a sponsor or anything of this video although hit me up pcloud if you're curious but pcloud the reason i'm recommending it is because they have excellent linux desktop support and it's a very very simple process to get up and running in no time they give you 10 gigabyte of storage for free and then you can upgrade that to to different storage capacities and different encryption tools and all that kind of thing very very easily they even have a couple of deals at the moment for lifetime plans and they just their privacy model overall is very very attractive so when it comes to actually opening and running pcloud all you need to do is download the file from there from their website right click it go down to properties say permissions give it the permission to execute as a program and then click on it once and then it will open up and ask you to create account or log in once you have created an account or logged in you can very easily then set up a local folder sync very similar to dropbox or at the very least you will have a permanently mounted network share drive that you can add files to remove files from and and the performance is very very admirable as elementary os basically treats it like a local external hard drive and finally if you are interested in customizing your wallpaper there are plenty of great wallpapers built into elementary os but if you do want to grab some of the ones that have been made famous from mac os then check out the link in the description where there is a google photos library of pretty much every single mac os wallpaper that has ever been so if you're into macos wallpapers go check out that link and you can download them all but for right now i'm going to stick with the default wallpaper all right let's get into app recommendations so now that we have a pretty usable desktop shell and we have the ability to install software from wherever we like from two different app stores we can now go nuts and get this software that we need so i'm going to blast through some recommendations here as quickly as possible okay so let's start with web browser there's a web browser that comes baked into elementary os think of it very similar to safari it's very simple it's very bare bones and it's very performant however there are some great privacy and security features built into it such as the ability to try and block advertisers web trackers and pop-ups right in the web browser without having to use and install any extensions you can manage the search engines from within the web browser as well by default it does go to the very private and very secure duckduckgo search engine so when it comes to searching for different items it will default to that search engine you can switch around the priorities of the search engine that you like now if you need a more fully featured web browser then definitely i would recommend firefox as again it respects users privacy and has a bunch of features built into it so firefox definitely gets my recommendation for a fully featured web browser but you can of course go out and install chrome or brave or any other number of web browsers out there okay let's talk about email there's a very simple mail client that is built into elementary that can handle pretty much all of the simple email needs that you might have now whether that is an email account from gmail or outlook.com or even icloud and there is a link in the description for how to set that up in using imap then the built-in mail program is going to suit your needs for the most part now if you have a more complicated email situation or you have corporate email like microsoft exchange or office 365 then my recommendation is going to go to evolution again you can download and install evolution from the app center and you will also need not just the evolution email client itself but you'll also need the exchange web services plugin what this will allow you to do is will allow you to connect to microsoft office or microsoft exchange servers and get all of the calendar and mail and tasks and all of those goodies syncing nicely incidentally when you enable synchronization to an exchange server on evolution you'll also get the calendar that is built in to elementary playing nice with your online calendars as well which is quite nice now again when it comes to calendar apps it's the app that i'm going to recommend just the built-in calendar app it should work fine for most people if you do find yourself needing to add a new calendar there is support for cal dev and google accounts again link in the description for how to set this up with multiple google calendars or other kaldav based calendars all right let's talk note taking now when it comes to notes on elementary os i'm going to give you two recommendations if cross platform syncing is very important to you and you want to be able to have your notes accessible on your phone be it iphone or android and other operating systems not just linux then my recommendation is to go to the snapstore and look up simplenote simplenote is a again privacy aware free and open source software that's developed by the same team that that runs wordpress and simplenote gives you the ability to take simple text based notes and organize them with tags again it's not as fully featured as apple notes but it's most of what people need with all of the cross-platform syncing that you could ever want or need and it's free for life now if you need something a bit more fully featured if you need something that is more akin to bear on the mac then i definitely recommend that you check out standard notes again standard notes is available in the snap store this is a lot more fully featured and also has encryption as an option that you can enable now if you're not interested in cross-platform syncing and you just want a quality note-taking app just to live here on your desktop then i can't recommend notes up enough notes up looks great it works really well and it gives you very similar functionality to something like evernote now my final recommendation is for an app called joplin if you find yourself needing the uh the functionality and export import function from something like evernote and you need web extensions you need clippers you need to deal with all different types of tables and formatting and images then definitely go and check out joplin because you can get the joplin app on multiple platforms it handles synchronization and it's just a far more powerful tool all around so think of joplin as a free privacy aware open source alternative to something like evernote or onenote and that i think about exhausts it for note-taking applications so let's talk about reminders now reminders on the mac are pretty uh let's say lackluster in features most mac users end up going towards something like things or in some cases apps like todoist so i'm going to recommend planner planner is an app that is developed for elementary os and it's available in the app center and planner has fantastic features built into it as well as synchronization support for todoist so if you need this if you need your to-do list and your project management software to synchronize to multiple platforms once again whether it's mac windows and android or ios then using planner and syncing synchronizing it with todoist is going to be the way to get that done highly highly recommend planner as an app just to organize yourself in general it has powerful integrations with calendar and other things in productivity software land now i do want to quickly mention that a lot of these applications in app center some of them have recommended donation amounts built into the the app recommendation you can kind of see here that we've got three dollars ten dollars four dollars et cetera again this is a pay what you want model so if you don't want to pay anything for that particular app you can very easily set it to zero or you can set a custom amount that you would wish to donate to the software developer to me this is key to elementary's long-term success not only as a platform but also as a platform where developers can publish applications and get a bit of a kickback for the hard work that they do there's no such thing as a free lunch moving on let's talk about maps very quickly if you need to look up a very quick address or look up a map that is not going to be tracking you or linked location data to your own account then definitely look up gnome apps make sure you install it from the flat hub repository no maps gives you very simple access to just mapping in general without tying it to an account so you don't have to be worried about privacy one of the most popular features of macos is the ability to use airdrop the alternative that i would offer to you is snapdrop snapdrap is simply a website that you go to snapdrop.net and all it does is it establishes a connection with other people that are on the local network the same wi-fi network as you and it allows you to upload and share those files with anybody who goes to snapdrop.net now this works whether you're on mobile or on different desktop operating systems and once you discover snapdrop it's one of those services that you just didn't imagine living without so think of it like the convenience of airdrop but available for everyone moving right along for photos we have you guessed it photos it's not nearly as fully featured as the one that comes built into mac os but it will get the job done for you it supports raw photos it supports simple edits and it helps you organize your photos and import them from camera sd cards etc now when it comes to playing back music my recommendation is going to go to lollipop lollipop is a fantastic music player for handling large local music libraries and again it's available to install from flat hub here on the app center now the things that i love about it is that it handles large music libraries with panache and it has automatic album artwork downloading built into it as well as well as just great recommendations for a random album of the day and great ways to organize and categorize your music now obviously spotify is available there from the app center as well once you have enabled flat hub and there are plenty of other ones to choose from but lollipop and spotify get mine out of approval when it comes to office documents my recommendation is going to go to only office now there is a very popular offer suite out there in the open source world called libreoffice and while libreoffice is very capable i find the compatibility with microsoft office documents to be a little bit shabby on libreoffice now my experience is that there is no such compatibility issues with only office and it is still free and open source so it has apps available for spreadsheets shows and word processing and that should be able to handle most of what you want the only bummer here is that the window controls are flipped because they're integrated into the window itself very similar design and layout to office 365 and has a lot of features that are important all right we're on the home stretch now when we're talking about messaging or uh or being able to communicate with people my recommendations to replace things like imessage would be signal as their uh privacy aware encrypted conversations that you can have with different people and some group chats as well supported on literally every platform out there and it's based on open source technology so signal is highly recommended also you've probably heard of telegram by this point but you can install the telegram desktop app from the app center and use that if you're involved in online community group chats and obviously things like discord are also available to install if you're into that when it comes to managing podcasts my recommendation is vocal there is a fantastic uh elementary os developed app which allows you to browse the podcasts that are in the itunes top 100 and then add them to a list that you follow you can then manage downloads and all of that fun stuff so vocal gets the knot of approval for managing podcasts in elementary os and when it comes to managing books there are two recommendations that i have for you first of all is foliate which is a very simple ebook viewer so you can just load up epubs or dot mobis or other ebook formats and get a very simple straightforward ebook reader that you can enjoy on your device and also when it comes to managing audio books there is another app called cozy which is a modern audiobook player that again allows you to just compilate all of your different audio books in the one area and and be able to save them locally to your device finally some two little utilities that i'd recommend to you is system monitor as surprisingly there isn't a system monitor built in to elementary so just looking up monitor will then give you a very simple process monitor that you can use to check out what is eating up your ram and killing processes etc and also for backing up like time machine i recommend tardis tardis is a very simple backup utility that encourages you to plug in an external device and once you have plugged in an external device it will then back up the folders that you ask it to in the home directory you can set it to automatically back up every single time that drive is plugged in very similar to how time machine operates on mac os and that ladies and gentlemen is about all there is to cover i think i missed out this one news yep news is exactly what it says on the tin it's like apple news just less paywally and less curated as you can see it's just pulling in the sources from hacker news and google news specific to your location by default which is all well and good i suppose and there you have it now we haven't covered anything like pro apps or gaming or anything like that but this video is designed to give you a guide to building an open alternative to mac os as it presents itself out of the box while feature parity isn't entirely comparable i think this is getting pretty close and this will suit what most people are looking for in an operating system so let me know what recommendations you have for helping mac users switch to linux in the comments below and if you've made it this far thank you for watching and i will see you all in the very next video hey blaine here thanks for checking out the infinitely galactic project look if you want to find more videos like this then definitely go check out the channel subscribe if you're new turn on notifications all that good stuff and you can chat with me on twitter at ingalactic see you in the next one you

Channel: InfinitelyGalactic

Views: 222,282

Keywords: infinitelygalactic, technology, linux, open-source, free software, ubuntu, alternatives to windows, alternatives to macos, distro reviews, app reviews, switching from macos to elementary os, elementary os 5.1 hera, switching to elementary os guide, elementary os best apps, macos 11, macos big sur, alternatives to mac, switch from mac to linux, how to switch to linux, tutorial, beginners

Id: RO0wOW6_u-A

Length: 37min 40sec (2260 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020