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

Run macOS Software on Linux

darlinghq.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 102 posts

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#23

Post by AdieuToLogic »

dylan604 wrote: post #7
rvz wrote: post #6

This is the Darling project which aims to run macOS software on Linux for both Intel and ARM64. But you are probably looking for this: > Does it support GUI apps? > Almost! This took us a lot of time and effort, but we finally have basic experimental support for running simple graphical applications. It is still far away from running your favorite mac GUI apps like Logic Pro or Xcode, but it is a work in progress but…

What allows Wine to run so many Windows apps that there's not an equivalent for MacOS? Is it lack of interest? Is it a technical thing? I'd even be willing to limit to x86 apps. Or maybe there is and I'm just really out of touch??

> What allows Wine to run so many Windows apps that there's not an equivalent for MacOS? Is it lack of interest? Is it a technical thing?

It is a technical thing.

The XNU[0] kernel, which underpins macOS and is detailed by the exceptional book "Mac OS X internals"[1], can theoretically run on many x86 and/or ARM machines. However, the issue with running macOS apps via other operating systems is not the OS, but instead are the GUI frameworks expected (i.e., Carbon[2], Quartz[3], etc.). These frameworks are intentionally written for Apple hardware/macOS distros. Which makes sense when viewing macOS as a selling point for selling Mac's.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU

1 - https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17205558M/Mac_OS_X_internals

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#25

Post by belowavgiq »

porphyra wrote: post #3

In theory, running Apple Silicon apps on ARM64 linux machines would be really nice. But we are still far from having a performant and feature-complete implementation of doing so. Darling only targets x86_64 stuff. Still, it's a cool project. Kinda sad that there are very few updates though [1] [1] https://blog.darlinghq.org/

their AppKit implementation receives about 20-30 commits every 5 years. Cool project, but you are better off waiting for proprietary software manufacturers to release ARM64 builds (a lot of them do now) and patch the holes with FEX.

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#26

Post by ncr100 »

> Do you know about opensource.apple.com, GNUstep, The Cocotron and other projects?

> We do, and in fact, Darling is largely based on the original Darwin source code published by Apple. We use The Cocotron as a basis for our Cocoa implementation, along with the Apportable Foundation and various bits of GNUstep.

Apportable (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/apportable from 2011 - the Foundation repo last update was Dec 2014.

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#27

Post by inatreecrown2 »

999900000999 wrote: post #16

Very neat. All I want for Christmas is Logic on Linux. But then you’d still need a Mac to legally download it from the App Store and DRM checks would probably only work on Macs

Give Reaper a try, it works very well on linux and you can even use VSTs.

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#29

Post by duskwuff »

GeekyBear wrote: post #13
dylan604 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What allows Wine to run so many Windows apps that there's not an equivalent for MacOS? Is it lack of interest? Is it a technical thing? I'd even be willing to limit to x86 apps. Or maybe there is and I'm just really out of touch??

GNUstep ran early MacOS apps on Linux after Apple bought Next and adopted their APIs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUstep I don't think the project kept up with changes to the APIs over the decades compared to how well the Wine project kept up with changes in Windows.

> GNUstep ran early MacOS apps on Linux after Apple bought Next and adopted their APIs.

No, it did not. There was no point at which GNUstep provided binary compatibility with Mac OS applications - while the two ecosystems shared some common history, it was much too far back to provide any form of compatibility. Additionally, Mac OS X used a different executable format than Linux or other UNIX-like operating systems, and GNUstep never attempted to provide that sort of low-level compatibility.

(For perspective: the GNUstep project started in the early 1990s. Mac OS X was first released to users in 2001.)

It may have been possible for some developers to port applications between Mac OS X and GNUstep while sharing some code, but that's a long way from running an unmodified application.

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#30

Post by bri3d »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #23
dylan604 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What allows Wine to run so many Windows apps that there's not an equivalent for MacOS? Is it lack of interest? Is it a technical thing? I'd even be willing to limit to x86 apps. Or maybe there is and I'm just really out of touch??

> What allows Wine to run so many Windows apps that there's not an equivalent for MacOS? Is it lack of interest? Is it a technical thing? It is a technical thing. The XNU[0] kernel, which underpins macOS and is detailed by the exceptional book "Mac OS X internals"[1], can theoretically run on many x86 and/or ARM machines. However, the issue with running macOS apps via other operating systems is not the OS, but instea…

No? Windows also has its own graphics subsystem, compositor, and an even bigger set of user land UI/forms/controls libraries than Mac OS. It really is just a critical velocity / adoption / time thing, there’s nothing strongly technical separating Mac OS API/ABI translation from Windows ala wine.
Post reply on HN