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Run macOS Software on Linux

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Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#71

Post by Bluestein »

Melonai wrote: post #39
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

Agh that's one of my biggest Linux regrets! Logic Pro is probably my favorite DAW, it feels so smooth to use, and that's likely connected to me using GarageBand extensively when I was a child. (I still remember "composing" multiple memorial songs in honor of Steve Jobs, as weird as that sounds!) The strategy Apple has figured out with GarageBand pre-installed (or at least very low friction to install) seems really re…

> "composing" multiple memorial songs in honor of Steve Jobs, as weird as that sounds!

Very strangely fitting: using Jobs "bicycle for the mind" to compose this in his honor :)

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#72

Post by BillStrong »

throwaway19567 wrote: post #56

Mac OS X binaries are the most susceptible to bit rot of any major OS. There's constant platform churn, all of it closed source, and there's nowhere near the community that exists around emulating older Windows. You can reliably run DOS, Win, Linux applications of almost any vintage with the right translation layer / emulator, but there's a black hole of MacOS apps circa 2002-2012 that just no longer runs on anything…

VMs with GPU passed through. You can get Mac compatible GPUs that will work, look for the Dortania OpenCore guide GPU lists to find one that works for the version of Mac OS X it runs on. Looking on Macintosh Repository, that game will run on Intel CPUs and Snow Leopard, 10.6+. (IDK for sure.) You can emulate Intel Mac OS X using QEMU on linux machines, there are some scripts that make it easy from Proxmox that I use.

You can also emulate PPC Mac OS X and pass through devices, but I have not tried to do this, so your mileage may vary.

It is easier to emulate 10.7+ versions than 10.6, but you can get it to work from 10.4 with work.

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#73

Post by BillStrong »

ghm2199 wrote: post #50

Why can't we just be satisfied with wayy old mac versions in VMs on linux, ones where you played prince or persia or oregon trail, the fun looking black and white versions and some later ones their steel windows UIs, the theming, the file explorer, the note taker app. Isn't that level of fun one gets from looking at that enough?

Hardware acceleration for OS X era OSes, for one.

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#74

Post by BillStrong »

stuaxo wrote: post #35
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??

Wine has been going for a very long time - since 1993. When it started Windows was a lot smaller, so getting Windows 3.1 programs working was probably enough. There's too much history to cover in a quick comment. Wine has a lots of things that help - the compatibility database https://appdb.winehq.org/ is a good place for people to submit info on apps for instance, there's also a big test suite that runs against Wind…

Also, Mac is a moving target. Each year, there is a new version that is basically its own little snowflake, with older things deprecated and newer things added.

Windows 11 will still run Windows apps from Windows 3.1, because they have a backwards compatibility effort that Apple eschewed.

Now that makes it more complex to emulate all the features, but the core features used by most programs get emulated, and then just add features for specific programs to get them to work. And games tend to use core features and DirectX or OpenGL, mostly, whereas productivity apps and other things can do lots of weird things that are non-standard.

For Mac OS X, you really need to handle each versioon of Mac OS X. There are some core features that may work across versions, and some features that are available only on certain versions, then some features that are unique.

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#75

Post by BillStrong »

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…

There is a project to use the Snow Leopard kernel and open source components and some bits from the prerelease Snow Leopard on PPC to create a working PPC Snow Leopard.

I wonder if something like that might be a short term viable path to get working apps. Something like the non-opensource libraries as a download pack for certain each release of Mac OS X, for at least versions Apple no longer supports, to get working programs, then you could slowly work toward open implementations.

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#76

Post by MrAlex94 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #64
nonestdeus wrote: post #18

Cool that it exists, but I honestly don't even know which mac exclusive program I would want to install.

If its possible to compile & and sign iOS or MacOS apps that would be VERY useful in CI environments, but yeah hard to think of other killer command-line apps that only run on MacOS. If they had good GUI support then some more things open up but nothing really essential. Garage Band has no equal in terms of ease of use, if you are into that sort of thing.

Just in case anyone is wondering - this is already possible with Clang/LLVM and the work from Gregory Szorc: https://github.com/indygreg/apple-platform-rs/tree/main

The Firefox source tree has every tool available for cross-compilation from Linux → macOS, which is how Firefox is built for macOS.

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#77

Post by negura »

Melonai wrote: post #39
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

Agh that's one of my biggest Linux regrets! Logic Pro is probably my favorite DAW, it feels so smooth to use, and that's likely connected to me using GarageBand extensively when I was a child. (I still remember "composing" multiple memorial songs in honor of Steve Jobs, as weird as that sounds!) The strategy Apple has figured out with GarageBand pre-installed (or at least very low friction to install) seems really re…

https://www.bespokesynth.com/

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#79

Post by mike_hearn »

jeremyjh wrote: post #64
nonestdeus wrote: post #18

Cool that it exists, but I honestly don't even know which mac exclusive program I would want to install.

If its possible to compile & and sign iOS or MacOS apps that would be VERY useful in CI environments, but yeah hard to think of other killer command-line apps that only run on MacOS. If they had good GUI support then some more things open up but nothing really essential. Garage Band has no equal in terms of ease of use, if you are into that sort of thing.

You can ship a fully signed and self-updating macOS app from Linux (or Windows) using my product Conveyor:

https://hydraulic.dev/

It has built in support for Electron, JVM, Flutter and even native apps (although of course then you still have to compile the native binaries on macOS yourself).

That also works the other way around. You can ship to Windows from Linux or macOS.

Re: Run macOS Software on Linux

#80

Post by tgv »

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

I don't think anyone has an implementation of macOS' audio and midi frameworks (and whatever else Logic links to; probably a lot). I would like to have Hauptwerk under Linux, but it uses ilok, and that's not going to happen any time soon. But we can dream.
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