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Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux

darlinghq.org

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Re: Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux

#251

Post by DonaldFoss »

zanny wrote: post #49
jernfrost wrote: post #33

I am hoping that with cross platform Swift we can start seeing more libraries to help us port Mac apps to Linux. I am a Mac developer but I'd love to make stuff available on Linux. I really like Linux as a backup plan, in case Apple totally drops the ball on professionals on the Mac. The Linux desktop is getting pretty good, but it lacks well designed high quality GUI applications. If porting to Linux was done easier…

> it lacks well designed high quality GUI applications. If porting to Linux was done easier that could change. Fundamental to most peoples complaints about desktop Linux applications is the lack of look and feel cohesion across all permutations of distro, desktop, and toolkit. Wine applications using the Windows APIs look like complete garbage and fit in nowhere. The same would be true of OSX Cocoa apps - they wouldn…

+1 here.

Ubuntu or a desktop that only uses Plasma apps may fit the bill. Plasma looks great but has a limited ecosystem. Ubuntu looks ok, but has a wider ecosystem.

What's most amusing to me is that I spend a considerable amount of time with Homebrew and others trying to make my MBP more Linux-like besides running Linux under Parallels. Getting Mac GUI binaries to run on [insert god-like desktop of your choice] would be very nice for the required closed course apps I must use. Developing for iOS (because I must) in Linux would be great. Otherwise, this feels like a step backwards.

-Mr. Fully Open Source Software

Re: Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux

#252

Post by DonaldFoss »

criddell wrote: post #166
StudyAnimal wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "professional" market doesn't care about visual cohesion. They either use just one app anyway or have them custom written to use their nvidia quadros with whatever UI they like, But the senior execs that need the absolute monster for outlook and facebook will always be well served by the top end macs.

> The "professional" market doesn't care about visual cohesion. That isn't true at all. I spend all day in a handful of applications and good aesthetics make my day much more enjoyable.

Visual cohesion makes my day more productive because I spend less time mentally context switching between app philosophies.

Mental context switching is just like high CPU system time, with the same results. I/O is slower, user time processing is slower and much less gets done.

Re: Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux

#253

Post by DonaldFoss »

rbanffy wrote: post #248
geowwy wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's even more important than that. People find it easier to use apps that have a familiar look and feel. That means less training, less troubleshooting, lower operating costs.

Knowing how to copy and paste or which button to click to close a window is negligible when compared to the training required to properly use an ERP or even the most unique features of, say, Excel. Anyone capable of navigating their way in Outlook can probably navigate their way in Apple's Mail or Thunderbird or Evolution. Anyone familiar with LibreOffice can do the basic stuff in Numbers in minutes. Now, if you want…

Vi (or gvim) is too easy by comparison. Making them use emacs would be a whole different story.

Re: Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux

#254

Post by DonaldFoss »

skratlo wrote: post #174
criddell wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "professional" market doesn't care about visual cohesion. That isn't true at all. I spend all day in a handful of applications and good aesthetics make my day much more enjoyable.

People will never stop complaining about look and feel. It's such a crap, it doesn't matter. How much clothes do you own? Computers are tools to do work and consume information, they don't exist for you to make a statement about your aesthetics opinions.

This alien concept (to many engineers) of beauty is a large part of makes new apps, especially web applications and SaaS startups, win or lose. Good design elements are the norm now, and expected. Gone are the days where someone would accept an ugly piece of solid software as a MVP. If it doesn't visually look as good as others in the ecosystem, your application is toast no matter how good it is otherwise.

Re: Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux

#255

Post by DonaldFoss »

criddell wrote: post #191
skratlo wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will never stop complaining about look and feel. It's such a crap, it doesn't matter. How much clothes do you own? Computers are tools to do work and consume information, they don't exist for you to make a statement about your aesthetics opinions.

To use your clothing analogy, consider this: what would you think if you bought a button up shirt and the buttons were not spaced equally, they were different sizes and colors, and some were on the right, some on the left. It works just as well as a shirt with standard construction, but it takes longer to put on and maybe it doesn't look very good. There's been a great deal written about how attractive things work be…

Mad props for extending the analogy to make our point. Nice job!

Now I need to find language to complement someone without it sounding like OO programming style.

HN, may I please have a simple +1 or upvote button? Needs to be usable on my smallish screen too.

Re: Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux

#256

Post by rbanffy »

DonaldFoss wrote: post #253
rbanffy wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing how to copy and paste or which button to click to close a window is negligible when compared to the training required to properly use an ERP or even the most unique features of, say, Excel. Anyone capable of navigating their way in Outlook can probably navigate their way in Apple's Mail or Thunderbird or Evolution. Anyone familiar with LibreOffice can do the basic stuff in Numbers in minutes. Now, if you want…

Vi (or gvim) is too easy by comparison. Making them use emacs would be a whole different story.

That's an apples to oranges comparison. Emacs is an operating system, not a text editor like Vi. ;-)

Re: Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux

#257

Post by rahoulb »

skratlo wrote: post #174
criddell wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "professional" market doesn't care about visual cohesion. That isn't true at all. I spend all day in a handful of applications and good aesthetics make my day much more enjoyable.

People will never stop complaining about look and feel. It's such a crap, it doesn't matter. How much clothes do you own? Computers are tools to do work and consume information, they don't exist for you to make a statement about your aesthetics opinions.

Who'd have thought it? People getting emotional about stuff.

When all software is designed to be consumed by other computers then we can ignore those emotional reactions, for as long as software is consumed by animals it is going to be a vitally important factor.

Re: Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux

#258

Post by ryao »

LubosD wrote: post #192
the_duke wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repo even starts in 2011. The commit log doesn't look like momentum at all though... https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/graphs/commit-activity

That's because I (the author) still work on it alone and nobody wants to contribute. I receive tons of e-mails that go like "when will it run XYZ", but practically no pull requests.

You might find the LGPL used by the Wine project to be more attractive to potential contributors. The first thing I thought a few years ago when I read that your project was GPLv3 was that any code that I develop using it would have to be GPLv3. Even if the GPLv3 itself might not force that for "system libraries", the harassment from armchair legal experts would. As much as I like OSS licensing, I do not like having my choice of OSS license forced on me. I am probably not the only one who feels that way. The LGPL is a far better choice for this kind of project.

For what it is worth, that is from personal experience. I went through the trouble of re-licensing a script with consent from all contributors from GPL-2 to BSD-2 in a package in the past because of harassment from armchair legal experts. It had been mistakenly marked GPL-2 when it should have been BSD-2 to match OpenRC. It had been included with binaries under the CDDL. There was no incompatibility and the GPL FAQ even talked about the case under mere aggregation, but that did not stop the harassment from the stream of arm chair experts rushing to tell me that I had committed some egregious offense for having the package marked both GPL-2 and CDDL. Relicensing the script to the license it should have had in the first place put an end to it and created one less GPL licensed thing in the world.

Anyway, switching to the LGPL now would be easier than switching later. It only gets harder as a project ages because you start to lose contact with past contributors.

Re: Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux

#259

Post by antfarm »

wahern wrote: post #151
Sanddancer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS X is posix-compliant. It doesn't implement certain GNUisms but depending on any vendor-specific problems is going to be a pain point.

OS X is UNIX 03 certified. That's a formalism. 1) That's a nearly 15-year-old standard (03 == 2003). Windows was certified to the predecessor POSIX standard. 2) While certified, it's compliance in actuality is poor. macOS's certified status says more about flaws in the certification test suite and administrative process, and the OpenGroup's need for income, than it does about macOS. The manual page for pselect, for e…

From PSELECT(2):

STANDARDS The pselect() function conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (``POSIX.1'').

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