Live data from Hacker News

Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

darlinghq.org

121–130 of 176 posts

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#121
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And you don't have to say this and sound arrogant. Our lives, especially with that high work-load we still have to cope with, don't allow us to choose many things to do when not working. If you have family with kids you loose every tiny bit of freedom to "waste your time" on tinkering and get easily annoyed when things just don't work out of the box. I like the possibility to customize everything on linux bu…

> How on earth is there still no terminal emulator like iTerm2 on linux????! Genuinely curious: What does iTerm2 do better than any other terminal emulator on Linux?

It's probably because it has a lot of features that are not unique, but you won't find all of them in a single terminal emulator on Linux.

Example, I don't know about a terminal on linux that both works as a drop down terminal (quake-like) & supports inline images.

Or split screen & password manager.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#122
This extra layer (and wine) are always going to be garbage.

If you need Mac or Windows, your best bet is not to move to Linux in the first place.

If you do mostly development or scientific computing, then you’ve probably dealt with more pain on those platforms, that melts away on Linux.

Best tool for job wins.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's really a marginal opinion. Maybe if you're an OpenGL developer. Apple provides an excellent framework (Metal) which works brilliantly. Yes it would be great if Apple delivered first-class support for Vulkan, but complaining about OpenGL is last decade's problem. The Metal drivers are more stable, but the shader compilers generate slow code, just like the old Apple OpenGL drivers (the ones they wrote for the…

> That's not a macOS feature though, that's an Apple PC firmware feature. That you see a distinction here is telling. The end user doesn't see the distinction. As for all of your complaints about the OpenGL drivers, that's an issue for developers, not end users. Yes, maybe there might be more 3D apps and faster 3D apps if the video driver situation was better, but also maybe not? Either way, this is all irrelevant be…

> As for all of your complaints about the OpenGL drivers, that's an issue for developers, not end users.

I shipped an application with WebGL under the impression that it would not need to be custom tested on a decade's worth of MacBooks Pro, but received a report later that a user had lost data because the graphics driver restarted the windowing system when he opened my webpage.

If an honest, non-malicious webpage can cause your windowing system to restart, that is an end-user problem. Even Apple themselves don't bother to test their official websites on more than one generation of Mac, why should everyone who uses this now half-decade-old web API have to buy $10,000+ worth of equipment, some of it with old versions of the OS, because they can't trust the vendor of the hardware to maintain the drivers?

And this is on top of the fact that, generally speaking, on a given piece of hardware, the application will run dramatically more slowly on macOS than on Windows or Linux.

> That you see a distinction here is telling. The end user doesn't see the distinction.

I tend to agree, but in this case there's an important distinction for us to make, even if the end users are generally unaware. In the case of recovering intentional backups on a fully-functioning computer, Apple has done a good job of making that straightforward on their laptops, if you attribute that to "macOS", then you miss the point that a) any vendor could offer the same thing, even if they don't, and it has nothing to do with macOS and b) improving "Linux" won't make a recovery partition suddenly appear on your computer. Furthermore, Apple's advantage here only applies to functioning computers. Apple makes it extremely difficult to recover data from damaged devices, and in the case of the iPhone, they literally censor any mention of it being possible from the forums, and lie straight to the faces of their customers. When something gets a little bit wet, Apple will tell you that you should have bought iCloud, and that your data are gone forever.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#124
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> — System-wide UI consistency, especially in the fine details > — Singular UI/UX vision eliminates points of confusion and everything-is-a-compromise choices for third party developers I mean, first-party GNOME applications are as consistent as first-party Apple macOS applications; and third-party macOS applications are as highly customized as third-party applications one might run on GNOME. Not sure what you base y…

>I'm pretty sure CoreAudio frames are not less than 44 samples. CoreAudio is actually pretty good. Without the linux-rt patchset, jack pipelines do overrun even when running jack at 10ms. Linux has quite the latency spikes. It's possible to demonstrate this fairly quickly by running cyclictest from rt-tests.

> CoreAudio is actually pretty good.

I wasn't arguing that, I was saying that "millisecond latency" involves frames smaller than (samplerate / 1000) samples, completely ignoring overhead.

> Without the linux-rt patchset, jack pipelines do overrun even when running jack at 10ms. Linux has quite the latency spikes.

Are we talking about sub-10ms latency? Sure, that's a different matter, and Linux's default schedulers could stand to improve support for mixed-realtime.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CoreAudio round trip latency can be under 5ms.

I bet somebody has a Gnu/Linux rig using ALSA with well below 5ms round-trip latency, too. The plus to CoreAudio is that any system it runs on has probably been designed so that a non-technical user can get something like the low-latency you're describing by default. The minus is that hardware probably costs at least $800, and CoreAudio doesn't support things like the RPI. The plus to ALSA is that it runs on things l…

Yeah, 5ms isn't that tough to achieve. You need decent hardware for sure, but hell, you can get PulseAudio of all things to under 10ms.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#126
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Ardour had some of the features Logic does (most significantly flex time), as well as a nicer UI. Literally Logic is the only thing keeping me on macOS.

Bitwig has a Linux version now.

It always has

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#127
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And you don't have to say this and sound arrogant. Our lives, especially with that high work-load we still have to cope with, don't allow us to choose many things to do when not working. If you have family with kids you loose every tiny bit of freedom to "waste your time" on tinkering and get easily annoyed when things just don't work out of the box. I like the possibility to customize everything on linux bu…

> How on earth is there still no terminal emulator like iTerm2 on linux????! Genuinely curious: What does iTerm2 do better than any other terminal emulator on Linux?

* The gap between Windows Manager and Terminal is not as wide as with most terminal emulators I know in the linux world (copy&paste, drag&drop, search-function, mouse support, easy (!) image rendering support out of the box...)

* User accessible features like the tmux integration (look at this: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-tmux-integration.html)

Just to mention a few advantages.

Of course most of the awesome apps like tmux just need you to learn a bunch of new commands but I can't imagine myself doing that a lot over my whole lifetime.

Some things I just want to use without a steep learning curve and apps like iTerm2 prove that this is possible.

I use the shell a lot since many years but I'm far from using it the way I could imagine it in the 21st century (the shell is still the superior interface for computers in my opinion but I'm afraid this topic didn't really get much attention & innovative approaches in the last decades).

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#128
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And you don't have to say this and sound arrogant. Our lives, especially with that high work-load we still have to cope with, don't allow us to choose many things to do when not working. If you have family with kids you loose every tiny bit of freedom to "waste your time" on tinkering and get easily annoyed when things just don't work out of the box. I like the possibility to customize everything on linux bu…

> How on earth is there still no terminal emulator like iTerm2 on linux????! Genuinely curious: What does iTerm2 do better than any other terminal emulator on Linux?

One thing I have not found (admittedly I have not searched much) is to be able to detect patterns printed on screen and launch triggers. E.g.: if something prints on screen "created a job XXX" I can color this text blue and make it an URL pointing to example.com/XXX

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#129
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is iOS and macOS the same thing? It's not even running on the same architecture.

He means running xcode to produce iOS binaries

Then that's different. This won't work, xcode is heavily integrated with macOS only libraries and as far as I'm aware, it requires GUI interaction at some point to produce the iOS binary.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#130
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get this, MacOS is super tinker-y. You can script multi-app work flows with Automator, set up folder actions to magically transmute files (I have one that insta-shrinks the images in PDFs for me and puts them in an output directory), cast magic spells on selected data using custom services, use the full range of Unix commands for text processing. You have Perl and Python right there. The things that ar…

> The things that are resistant to tinkering in MacOS are the UI But not completely resistant. For example, there are multiple tiling window managers for os x.

My friend uses one of those and it takes over a second for a new window to find its place. I can’t see what productivity benefits you would get from that. It look pretty hacky compared to any decent X11 WM with tiling functionality.
Post reply on HN