alt Hacker NewsRun macOS Software on Linux
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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]
> 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 (<3) was a YC startup https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/apportable from 2011 - the Foundation repo last update was Dec 2014.
Cool that it exists, but I honestly don't even know which mac exclusive program I would want to install.
Quibble: it'll run anything that runs on open source Darwin. You won't be running anything needing macOS frameworks.
A few years back, I would have dreamt to run Photoshop on Linux. But this and the mandatory utilities that come with it became so bloated that even if it was officially offered on Linux I am not sure I would be using it.
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, even later Intel Macs.
I used to enjoy a cute little Pacman clone called Pac the Man X, for example, and I just don't know how I could run this today. Seems to reliably take down any emulator I've thrown at it - presumably it's using some kind of graphics acceleration that's not emulated. (Suggestions welcome.)
Is there some really amazing Mac only software that would justify the effort ?
I genuiniely can't see why I would want to run Mac software on my Arch box.
I have used Linux since the 1990's and used the Mac back in 1988.
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
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?
Finally, I can run Calculator.app and TextEdit on NixOS without buying a $3,000 aluminum cheese grater. Next up: emulating the spinning beach ball of death for authentic nostalgic immersion.
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.
Or better yet. Dont!
Would be nice to run Final Cut Pro on Linux without having to pay an arm and a leg for the actual machine. It's a really expensive toy :(
For me its a shame to make the Mac apps look like linux.
The real/final test is running applications like Final Cut Pro using `darling`
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I went down a deep but entertaining rabbit hole in the other direction for fun: https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/fakelinux - initially with the idea “just replace the syscalls in the executable with some sort of a trap and handle that”.
It almost worked, unfortunately MacOS reserves x18 for platform purposes and Linux doesn’t.
The result is some sort of pretty mad contraption which works sufficiently often to compile aarch64 Linux VPP and its dependencies on the Mac using Linux gcc :)
I suppose with some polish it might be useful for something..