Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

darlinghq.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 210 posts

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#111

Post by roblabla »

torstenvl wrote: post #101
roblabla wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what drivers you've had to compile? The only ones I've ever had to compile were GPU drivers for very very recent cards. On my current laptop, the only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint reader (which doesn't even have a driver, makes me sad) - everything else is built into all the distros I've tried (Ubuntu, Fedora, NixOS). I am pretty curious in what places is the driver story behind?

Drivers for virtualized hardware is one big one. Parallels tools have to be recompiled for pretty much every new kernel version because Linux refuses to stabilize the kernel API. Often I have to edit the drivers by hand (example: replacing "sem" to "lock" for kernel 5.8 because apparently driver compatibility isn't as important as catering to kernel devs who don't know what a semaphore is?). In case you don't think v…

Thanks for the answer, that's really informative!

> In my opinion, investing in a proper driver architecture with a stable interface would be a massive step toward better Linux hardware support and broader adoption.

Eh, I have mixed feelings about this. Part of what makes Linux so great is that most of its drivers are open source - which allows the devices it supports to stay supported basically forever (though bitrot certainly is a thing). And they achieved this by making maintaining out-of-tree drivers so damn painful.

A stable interface would sort of undermine this. I honestly don't know if that'd be preferable to the status quo.

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#112

Post by kristofferR »

dvirsky wrote: post #93
stuaxo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GUI will come eventually. Some Dev commandline tools and compilers are starting to work, so these kind of environments will probably come first which will provide better performance than running under virtual machines.

What are some command line tools that aren't available natively on Linux? I'm not trying to dismiss or be negative, just really curious.

"xcrun safari-web-extension-converter" is one, for example.

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#113

Post by eptcyka »

code_biologist wrote: post #32
txdv wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been playing a lot of steam games with proton, it is mind bogling how valve expanded from support for linux for the source engine to support 70% of the games.

70% of games big asterisk The giant youtube channel Linus Tech Tips has done a recent series of videos on gaming on linux. On Jan 1 they published a 15 min summary video that covers that 70% claim in a much more nuanced way: https://youtu.be/Rlg4K16ujFw Punchline: it's kinda true, but there's plenty of struggle for new and multiplayer games still.

Whilst rarely a turn-key experience, there are plenty of games that run on release date on Linux.

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#114

Post by chipotle_coyote »

wlesieutre wrote: post #63
twblalock wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

If you ever got in a situation where your sound card wasn't supported on macOS, instead of "you can compile a driver" the answer you'll get is "throw away your sound card and buy supported hardware." You could apply the same fix to a Linux computer and purchase known working hardware, but because you have the option of fixing the software yourself that makes it a worse operating system?

Exactly how does one get into a situation where your sound card isn't supported on macOS, other than by putting together a Hackintosh? :) You're going to have to look for some pretty edgy edge cases where you will be left rending your shirt and wailing "if only I could compile an open source driver for [insert thing] but the cursed closed nature of Apple products prevents me from doing so!" (I mean, I'm pretty sure people can write open source drivers on Macs if they want.)

Granted, as someone who's been using Linux sporadically in various ways for the same two decades I've been a Mac-on-the-desktop user, I can't remember the last time I was left rending my shirt and wailing "if only I didn't have to compile an open source driver for [insert thing] to get basic functionality working." (Although I can remember more than one time I ran desktop Linux in a VM on a Mac, and spent several hours doing web searches for how to get [insert thing] working to find little more than other posts saying "I'm running desktop linux on a VM on a Mac and I can't get [thing] working".)

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#115

Post by hitpointdrew »

jldugger wrote: post #89
hitpointdrew wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see a password manager listed in the features, which is about 70% of what I think makes iTerm2 so useful.

TIL. Never used that!

option + command +f

Pop-up box comes up, here you can have as many credentials as you need, it saves them, just double click one and it will enter it in your terminal window. This an absolute life changing feature for me. I manage a ton of servers, and yeah we use SSO to ssh into them, but that is just ssh access. Once you are on a server they maybe several passwords and or accounts you need to login to or accesses (like postgres, mongodb, redis, etc.). Of course we have seperate passwords for each environment, so having this feature is pretty much a must for me now. Any terminal software that doesn't have a feature like this is a no-go for me (and so far iTerm2 is the only one I have found that has this feature, I have looked high and low for something similar native in Linux but have only come up with bupkis).

The other features I like about iTerm2 are pretty standard in at least a dozen or so other terminal emulators (tabs, split windows, etc.). Password management is THE feature that is painfully missing from Terminator, Tilix, etc.

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#116

Post by zrm »

microtonal wrote: post #10
tomrod wrote: post #8

Excited to see this. Hopefully this resolves the application portability issue for Linux (e.g. Microsoft Office native apps)

If you want to run apps like Microsoft Office, Wine is probably a far better bet. I'd be surprised if Darling runs complex Cocoa apps anytime soon.

> If you want to run apps like Microsoft Office, Wine is probably a far better bet. I'd be surprised if Darling runs complex Cocoa apps anytime soon.

The advantage of Wine is that it's more mature. The disadvantage is that Windows is possibly the least Unix-like operating system in popular use and the number of ugly hacks they have to use to make Linux do what Windows does will never cease to be a source of friction and heisenbugs.

Whereas macOS is a Unix, so Darling doesn't have to imitate all the eccentric behavior of the Windows kernel, it can just implement the API.

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#117

Post by lelanthran »

bww wrote: post #37
lelanthran wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure people used to say "it'll be years before it'll be a viable solution" when Wine was in its infancy. I don't think so. Wine was viable for me, playing Starcraft Brood Wars in 2000. Other than games, in 2000 it was running a significant number of minor applications for me.

Wine was originally released in 1993. You're talking about a period 7 years into it's development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

> Wine was originally released in 1993. You're talking about a period 7 years into it's development.

So? Darling is 9 years into its[1] development and hasn't really reached the maturity that Wine had after 7 years of development.

If memory serves me correctly[2], I'm quite sure that I played one or two Directx games on Linux using Wine in Dec-1998 - that's 5 years of development.

Fair enough, most of the games/apps did not run (Dune 2k was listed as "working" so I ran out and bought a copy only to find that it got no further than the game menu screen) but it ran more Windowed programs and full-screen games back then than Darling does now, so I don't think that I am performing an unfair comparison in that regard.

It might be that there is just not enough contributors to Darling to proceed at the pace that Wine did.

[1] I don't believe an apostrophe goes between the 't' and the 's'.

[2] At this stage of my life I treat my memory as a rough guide to past events, not as a record of what happened, so I could be wrong about the dates towards the end of the 90s.

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#118

Post by lelanthran »

lelanthran wrote: post #117
bww wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wine was originally released in 1993. You're talking about a period 7 years into it's development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

> Wine was originally released in 1993. You're talking about a period 7 years into it's development. So? Darling is 9 years into its[1] development and hasn't really reached the maturity that Wine had after 7 years of development. If memory serves me correctly[2], I'm quite sure that I played one or two Directx games on Linux using Wine in Dec-1998 - that's 5 years of development. Fair enough, most of the games/apps…

[EDIT: One more thing - In 1999 Wine ran my Watcom C/C++ IDE (with wasm inline and standalone too) perfectly. It just did not always run the programs I wrote in the IDE. I still have the CD somewhere.]

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#120

Post by saagarjha »

waynecochran wrote: post #74
max-ibel wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest actually reading the page since it has the answer to your question. TL;DR: GUI almost working. I assume screenshots will be added when it is.

Almost tells me they must have some screenshots of some GUI app working. Otherwise I almost have a million dollars to donate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29814478
Post reply on HN