Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#181

Post by torstenvl » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 1:29 PM UTC

roblabla wrote: post #111

torstenvl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bitro…

I think I'd be happy with a stable API, it wouldn't have to be a stable binary interface. Wanna change the internals of a struct? Totally fine. Not make binary shims for 32-bit drivers? Totally fine.

That would encourage open-source or at least source-available drivers (to allow recompiling for ABI changes), but recompilation should be straightforward and possibly automatic if the API doesn't change every couple months.

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#182

Post by pms » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 1:39 PM UTC

gurkendoktor wrote: post #160

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #157

stupid question because I have not touched a Mac since 1999. What kind of apps are you using on Mac that if you were forced to switch to Linux you feel that you can't live without? the appeal back then (and from I hear people say until today) was always how everything is neatly integrated. a coherent system from the hardware all the way up the stack. not sure if that is overselling it but at least that's how I unders…

For me: Git Tower, MoneyMoney (German banking app, absolutely fantastic), Fantastical, to some degree also OmniFocus. Plus first-party apps like Safari with its fluid trackpad gestures, Photos with its iCloud integration, and of course Xcode, because being able to build/debug things for macOS/iOS is a bonus feature I can offer as a developer. The list is a lot shorter than 10 or 15 years ago. Most new apps that come…

Isn't Sublime Merge a great cross-platform replacement for Git Tower?

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#183

Post by gurkendoktor » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 1:50 PM UTC

pms wrote: post #182

gurkendoktor wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me: Git Tower, MoneyMoney (German banking app, absolutely fantastic), Fantastical, to some degree also OmniFocus. Plus first-party apps like Safari with its fluid trackpad gestures, Photos with its iCloud integration, and of course Xcode, because being able to build/debug things for macOS/iOS is a bonus feature I can offer as a developer. The list is a lot shorter than 10 or 15 years ago. Most new apps that come…

Isn't Sublime Merge a great cross-platform replacement for Git Tower?

Thanks. I've tried it when it came out and wasn't really convinced. The video on its homepage looks better now, I'll give it another try when I'm on Linux again.

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#184

Post by torstenvl » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #141

torstenvl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Parallels tools have to be recompiled for pretty much every new kernel version because Linux refuses to stabilize the kernel API. I don't think that's a fair comparison. Parallels comes with dkms module and while the process of installing involves compiling under the covers, it's just part of installation. It's not the late 90s "compile that driver yourself completely manually" situation. If Parallels doesn't work…

> I don't think that's a fair comparison.... the process of installing involves compiling under the covers, it's just part of installation. It's not the late 90s "compile that driver yourself completely manually" situation.

I don't understand. Do you think I'm lying or something? Because I'm not, and neither are these folks:

https://www.google.com/search?q=compile+new+kernel+site%3Afo...

It's a giant pain in the neck and it's caused by pretty deliberate decisions about Linux architecture.

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#185

Post by jesboat » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 2:13 PM UTC

als0 wrote: post #123

monocasa wrote: post #55

Does this still require a kernel driver to intercept syscalls? It'd be nice to have a gvisor/UML like option that would let it run entirely in user space.

Yep, it looks like they have a kernel module for handling the Mach subset of syscalls. > Emulating XNU system calls directly in Linux would have a few benefits, but isn't really workable. Unlike BSD kernels, Linux has no support for foreign system call emulation and having such an extensive and intrusive patchset merged into Linux would be too difficult. Requiring Darling's users to patch their kernels is out of ques…

The module is amazing and actually kinda terrifying: it grafts in a decent bit of xnu, rather than re-implementing all xnu's features from scratch. This is made a bit more sane because Mach was designed to be extremely portable and has a good abstraction layer for manipulating very low-level stuff like page tables and contexts. But it's still kinda incredible. Part of me wonders if it wouldn't have been easier to graft Linux into xnu instead.

https://github.com/darlinghq/darling-newlkm

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#186

Post by vhhn » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

u-rate wrote: post #159

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #157

stupid question because I have not touched a Mac since 1999. What kind of apps are you using on Mac that if you were forced to switch to Linux you feel that you can't live without? the appeal back then (and from I hear people say until today) was always how everything is neatly integrated. a coherent system from the hardware all the way up the stack. not sure if that is overselling it but at least that's how I unders…

Any creative tool (audio, video, picture), that doesn’t randomly crash after 30 minutes

> that doesn’t randomly crash after 30 minutes

that rules out any Adobe product :)

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#187

Post by wetpaws » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #157

stupid question because I have not touched a Mac since 1999. What kind of apps are you using on Mac that if you were forced to switch to Linux you feel that you can't live without? the appeal back then (and from I hear people say until today) was always how everything is neatly integrated. a coherent system from the hardware all the way up the stack. not sure if that is overselling it but at least that's how I unders…

Aside from probably iTerm there are none.

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#188

Post by coldtea » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 2:39 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #20

mkdirp wrote: post #14

Lots of questions around GUI apps. As someone pointed out, GUI apps have been "almost" working for years. Darling looks great but it hasn't gotten near as much love as Wine has gotten. I've been keeping an eye on it, and will continue to keep an eye it, and I've noticed the development is very slow. At the rate it's going, it'll be years before it'll be a viable solution like Wine is. I hope visibility for it will in…

> Having Linux run iOS, macOS, Android, and Windows applications running would be nothing less than mind-boggling, and would finally get people to stop yelling that nothing runs on Linux Nothing will stop those people from yelling that, because it hasn't been true in a very long time and that doesn't stop them. These are the same people who say they don't want to run Linux because they don't want to compile their sou…

>These are the same people who say they don't want to run Linux because they don't want to compile their sound card drivers. They are already way outside of rational territory

Not wanting to "compile their sound card drivers" sounds like a very rational argument to me...

>In their minds Linux hasn't changed a bit since 1999

It did, but other OSes are also a moving target.

Seen Linux (the vlogger) try to get a basic system running?

(And I'm an old UNIX+Linux hat with 25 years of experience).

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#189

Post by 999900000999 » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:17 PM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #152

999900000999 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually really like Android Studio, which is of course a Jet Brains product. Visual Studio is going to be the best supported IDE for C#. I'm fine with having a Windows PC for that. I still Dual boot on my old laptop

Ha, that's amusing, because at the same time i hate Android Studio with a passion - it seems like the worst JetBrains product by far, though maybe because Android isn't a particularly nice platform to develop for. Admittedly, most of my complaints there would be about the different Android SDK versions and how sluggish and slow everything feels at times, as well as about how Android seems to have a stripped down JDK…

You can still use Eclipse for Android dev, or just run your own builds with cli tools.

I'll agree Android dev is pretty frustrating, it's much better than it was just a few years ago, but it's still nowhere close to iOS. iOS users also tend to be much more willing to pay money, so there's that.

Re: Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux

#190

Post by gurkendoktor » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:19 PM UTC

wirrbel wrote: post #172

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #157

stupid question because I have not touched a Mac since 1999. What kind of apps are you using on Mac that if you were forced to switch to Linux you feel that you can't live without? the appeal back then (and from I hear people say until today) was always how everything is neatly integrated. a coherent system from the hardware all the way up the stack. not sure if that is overselling it but at least that's how I unders…

By now the appeal is a classical desktop user interface that has been micro-optimised for the past decades (instead of rewrites like Gnome).

This too. I sometimes boot a PowerPC iMac from 2004 to rip a CD, and it's amazing how little Apple has broken/removed since then, while adding gestures, cloud syncing, and all sorts of tiny quality-of-life improvements.