Very recently, Apple announced their new project OSX Yosemite. And it looks fantastic. It really does. But that hasn’t stopped myself and a vast majority of the Linux community left feeling rather cheated.

Let me take you into the world of Gnome. Specifically, Gnome Shell and its client-side decorations. The idea is to save screen space by putting a load of stuff within the titlebar.

As you can see, it’s a very clever and new idea for space-saving. There really aren’t any draw-backs – you still get the same functionality, and I honestly think it looks good! Elegantly done. And so they should be – the guys at Gnome have been sorting them out for a while now.

This is where Apple have forced their way in. Above is a screenshot of the Gnome web browser. Below is “brand new” design for Safari – Apple’s web browser.

See any similarities? I do. A lot. Ignore the close buttons and tweak the colour scheme a tiny bit. They are identical. And it’s like that throughout the whole system.

Apple are very keen to point out when another company copies one of their designs. Ask Samsung – they know all about it (see this article). I wonder how this would work the other way around though… Probably not too well – being such a large and well known company gives you certain privileges…like lawyers. A scarier thought would be if Apple now decide to place a patent on their “new” design. Then Linux really is in trouble.

Another (minor) concern is the view of the general public. There are way more Mac OS users than there are Linux desktop users. And the result of that will most likely be the majority of people taking a look at both systems and saying, “look at Linux trying to copy Apple”, which is simply not the case.

There isn’t really anything else to say about this – the screenshots tell most of the story, and there are plenty more out there showing the sheer number of similarities.

Apple make themselves out to be the company that really understand what the everyday user wants. The only people who are innovating and driving technology forward. But seeing this makes me wonder how many of their ideas are actually their own.