Day one: bones first, name later

I wanted Snow Leopard back. Not in a VM, not as a Linux theme on top of GNOME or KDE, not as nostalgia — actually back, as a working desktop on hardware I own, with modern features bolted in cleanly. I started a repo and called it AuraOS for the first day, picked C as the language for the shell, and BSD-3 for the license. The first push was a wm + dock + finder skeleton with hardcoded gradients where the chrome should be.

The compositor is its own subproject. I named it Crystal at first and started a phased buildout — reparenting, shadows, blur, animations, GLX. Most of the dock came up in a day. The menu bar followed. The early "AuraFinder" got list view and dropdowns. None of it looked right yet — too much of the chrome was Cairo-drawn from my own eyeballed gradients — but the bones were on screen.

The single rule from day one: pixel-perfect to Snow Leopard 10.6. Real assets, real measurements, real screenshots. No hand-approximated values that were close enough.

Day one moved fast because the first 80% of a desktop shell is mechanical: reparent windows, draw shadows, paint a shelf. The shape of a Snow Leopard clone is well-known. I think the hand-drawn gradients in this period were a mistake we paid for the next day — once you ship "close enough" colors into a renderer they become someone's mental reference, and ripping them back out cost real time. If I were redoing this, I'd refuse to commit any chrome color that wasn't sampled from a real screenshot on day one.

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