37 ms·
Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux
- wonks 10y agoHmm. I guess many developers use just the right amount of MacOS specific tools to justify this now. The git client Tower is something I've eyed before, but most tools I use are available on Linux, and I say that as someone who uses a Mac at work.
- ChristianGeek 10y agoNo GUI support at the moment.
- my123 10y agoBasic Cocoa apps work, as long as they don't crash and burn with GNUstep.
- jernfrost 10y agoSo many awesome GUI tools for developers on Mac, I can't find on Linux. E.g. OmniGraffle is fabulous for doing diagrams. I have not found anything as well designed and functional on Linux. You got so many nice git clients: Tower, Gitup, GitX etc. There are awesome diff tools like Kaleidoscope. There are a lot of good tools for keeping all sorts of notes, programming snippets etc. My life is pretty much centered on Ulysses, which has a very good way of organizing and searching for notes. Linux does of course have vim, emacs, etc but I'd say if you want a more modern feeling editor you got a lot more choices on Mac: TextMate, Sublime, SubEtaEdit, Smultron, Coda, Chocolate etc. Then there are all sorts of specialized tools, e.g. I use a Dash a lot of looking up developer documentation. Paw is pretty neat for working with REST APIs. Base is great for looking at and manipulating SQLite databases. Especially for any kind of graphical work, say you got to modify some application or toolbar icons, then you have a lot of great choices on Mac. Not only do you have the big powerful tools like e.g. Photoshop and Affinity Designer, but you to also small neat little tools like Pixen. It really depends on how long you worked on the platform. I didn't use nearly as many of these tools some years back. But the longer you stay on a platform there more tools you start using as particular needs arise. I've worked with plenty of colleagues who have used Macs for years, but who aren't really mentally into the whole Mac eco system, and so they often use various cross platform tools, websites etc before they actually explore the rich collection of desktop apps available on the Mac.
- sandebert 10y agoMinor note: Sublime also runs fine on Linux and Windows.
- wonks 10y agoExactly. That's what I use.
- chairmanwow 10y agoPeople still use Atom? I switched to Atom ~1 year ago, and my life has drastically improved. The in-app plug-in store is one of the greatest innovations. Anytime I encounter a situation where I wish my text editor did something a little better, I have been able to find a suitable plug-in, install it, and get back to work all without closing the app.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ISNIT 10y agoIt'll super useful when/if it supports XCode + Mac Developer Tools for iOS development. I think that's the main thing keeping app developers on their Macs.
- rimantas 10y agoBelieve me, it is not. All Android and WP developers I know also used Macs. :)
- m3rc 10y agoInteresting, the Android and WP developers I know use PCs running Linux... since the plural of "anecdote" is "statistics" I wonder how we proceed from here
- DigitalJack 10y agoThe plural of anecdote is data.
- m3rc 10y agoWell then I guess we have 2 data.
- zimpenfish 10y agoIncorrect: The plural of anecdote is Gladwell.
- pjmlp 10y agoI don't know anyone, and there are quite a few in this 4 floor building. Not to mention across all company sites. EDIT: And if you bother to listen to the Android Developers Backstage podcast, according to the Android team themselves the large majority is on Windows.
- st3v3r 10y agoThe entire Android developer team here is on Macs. And go to any Android developer conference, and I'd be willing to bet money that most laptops you'll see are Macs.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jhbadger 10y agoIs there anything the other way around? Running a Linux binary on MacOS? Sometimes the source isn't available so recompiling isn't an option.
- oxguy3 10y agoI don't think such a thing exists, probably because there are few/no applications that target Linux and not OS X that aren't also open source. Can you give an example of an app that is only released as a compiled binary for Linux and not OS X?
- cozzyd 10y agoFPGA development tools from xilinx or altera are one example.
- monocasa 10y agoPretty much all HDL tools. I've heard on the grapevine that Apple's own internal chip teams have to use Linux or Windows because the HDL vendors won't port to OSX, even with Apple willing to fund the effort.
- jhbadger 10y agoIt's not so much "applications" as such, but it isn't uncommon for programs in bioinformatics to only be released as a binary (often only a Linux one) because they want to reserve the right to license their code. Or they will only release the source code to academic researchers because they don't like the idea of industry benefiting from their work. This is changing with a lot of people hosting projects on Github and the like, but is still there.
- kps 10y agoPragmatically, run a Linux VM and point $DISPLAY to the host XQuartz.
- Longhanks 10y ago
- kevinherron 10y agoThis is neat, but I can't think of a single non-GUI tool on OS X that I need or doesn't have an equivalent in Linux...
- trashcan 10y agoHow about "packagebuild" and "productbuild"? They build OSX packages. You could use a linux server to build DEBs, RPMs, and OSX packages without using OSX.
- mzs 10y agoEver since the gpl bomutils project you can, here's a nice tutorial: http://bomutils.dyndns.org/tutorial.html http://bomutils.dyndns.org/tutorial.html http://hogliux.github.io/bomutils/tutorial.html http://hogliux.github.io/bomutils/tutorial.html
- Filligree 10y agoPhotoshop? And Scrivener. The OS X variant is a full major version ahead of Windows, and it isn't even supported on Linux.
- skykooler 10y agoPretty sure Photoshop does not count as a "non-GUI tool".
- redial 10y agoOp is talking about non-GUI apps, the kind that run only on the terminal.
- mrweasel 10y ago"non-GUI tool" - Photoshop is very much a GUI tool.
- pikachu_is_cool 10y agoNo it's not.
- cmrdporcupine 10y agoVery impressive. I wonder how useful the existing GNUstep libraries would be for supporting at least some subset of GUI apps. I wonder how far at this point OS X's CoreFoundation etc. differ from what's in GNUstep.
- baq 10y agowhat can apple's lawyers do to kill this project?
- mirekrusin 10y agoPivot their career as engineers and make better professional hardware at Apple so nobody will consider using this project?
- Rooster61 10y agoIt's a shame that you can't run a container with MacOS installed and just run the apps natively. Unlikely to ever happen though. You'd have to run the MacOS kernel and Mach concurrent with the Linux kernel without virtualization (something I am not sure is possible). At that point, you might as well just bite the bullet and run a VM.
- Filligree 10y agoI'd be happy enough if I could run the VM.
- sangnoir 10y agoYou can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556609
- conradev 10y agoand if you can install KVM on the host, you can even run the VM inside of a container: http://rancher.com/introducing-ranchervm-package-and-run-virtual-machines-as-docker-containers/ http://rancher.com/introducing-ranchervm-package-and-run-vir... I have a list of links on the subject: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VwLJqgc2VkD-EZnMzSFmZRq0YjZPCS18uPr94KsOByY/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VwLJqgc2VkD-EZnMzSFmZRq0...
- mdaniel 10y agoDo you mean legally, or at all? Because if it's "at all" I believe there is a very vibrant community who have a lot of tutorials for doing that
- ohstopitu 10y agoThere's a nice (pretty inclusive to beginners I might add) community for mac VMs on other OSes, but I've tried using such VMs for the past 4 years and each year I've had worse results. * Is it usable for dev work -> yes * Is it like using a mac -> no Usually When I'm on windows, I generally just run a Ubuntu VM and live inside it. That is not something you can generally do on an OSX VM. (just to add, my opinions based on my experience - your milage may wary)
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago> Why “Darling”? >The name Darling is a combination of “Darwin” and “Linux”. >Darwin is the core operating system OS X and iOS build on. If that's the case, why not Darlin? But then, I'm southern so that's why it makes more sense to me.
- labrador 10y agoI was looking at emacs documentation the other day and thought that RMS is probably right that Linux should be called GNU/Linux. In that case, newcomers to this project might ask "What's GNU Darlin?
- cptskippy 10y agoWell since you're abbreviating you can abbreviate GNU futher to G and then change the order to get DarlinG.
- felipelemos 10y agoI think nowadays we should start to use the name SystemD/Linux
- cyborgx7 10y agoHow about poetteringOS ?
- Keyframe 10y agoGnu/Linux/Darwin == Gnarlin? Seriously though, i used to think GNU/Linux was just envy of linux' success, but Gnu basically IS OS without a kernel (Herd, where art thou?).
- marcoperaza 10y agoIf you're using a distribution like Alpine Linux, which uses musl libc and busybox en lieu of much of the GNU userspace, it's not really a GNU/Linux by any definition.
- 10y ago
- jernfrost 10y agoI am hoping that with cross platform Swift we can start seeing more libraries to help us port Mac apps to Linux. I am a Mac developer but I'd love to make stuff available on Linux. I really like Linux as a backup plan, in case Apple totally drops the ball on professionals on the Mac. The Linux desktop is getting pretty good, but it lacks well designed high quality GUI applications. If porting to Linux was done easier that could change.
- hashkb 10y ago> I really like Linux as a backup plan, in case Apple totally drops the ball on professionals on the Mac. Is this a joke, referencing the new MBP releases? Personally, I've been saying we're there already. I haven't bought a Mac in years. (employers keep giving them to me and I install Ubuntu on them.)
- Calamitous 10y agoHow well does that work? I love the hardware, but I'd love to run ubuntu on my MBP even more.
- AsyncAwait 10y agoNot sure about Ubuntu, but https://antergos.com https://antergos.com works very well on my 15" MBP out of the box.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- zanny 10y ago> it lacks well designed high quality GUI applications. If porting to Linux was done easier that could change. Fundamental to most peoples complaints about desktop Linux applications is the lack of look and feel cohesion across all permutations of distro, desktop, and toolkit. Wine applications using the Windows APIs look like complete garbage and fit in nowhere. The same would be true of OSX Cocoa apps - they wouldn't mesh well at all, and it would be practically impossible to skin them with toolkit theming. That, and recent efforts by Gnome and KDE have been producing tons of good new applications with modern GUI. They just aren't all the applications yet.
- k33n 10y agoThis project has been around since 2012. I'm glad to see it's getting some momentum!
- jitendrac 10y agoI am following its status since it was created, i think it is pretty much dead.
- the_duke 10y agoRepo even starts in 2011. The commit log doesn't look like momentum at all though... https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/graphs/commit-activity https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/graphs/commit-activity
- LubosD 10y agoThat's because I (the author) still work on it alone and nobody wants to contribute. I receive tons of e-mails that go like "when will it run XYZ", but practically no pull requests.
- mikemoka 10y agoI hope more visibility can help, you can try to highlight more the need for contributions in the project homepage and in the github readme maybe
- ryao 10y agoYou might find the LGPL used by the Wine project to be more attractive to potential contributors. The first thing I thought a few years ago when I read that your project was GPLv3 was that any code that I develop using it would have to be GPLv3. Even if the GPLv3 itself might not force that for "system libraries", the harassment from armchair legal experts would. As much as I like OSS licensing, I do not like having my choice of OSS license forced on me. I am probably not the only one who feels that way. The LGPL is a far better choice for this kind of project. For what it is worth, that is from personal experience. I went through the trouble of re-licensing a script with consent from all contributors from GPL-2 to BSD-2 in a package in the past because of harassment from armchair legal experts. It had been mistakenly marked GPL-2 when it should have been BSD-2 to match OpenRC. It had been included with binaries under the CDDL. There was no incompatibility and the GPL FAQ even talked about the case under mere aggregation, but that did not stop the harassment from the stream of arm chair experts rushing to tell me that I had committed some egregious offense for having the package marked both GPL-2 and CDDL. Relicensing the script to the license it should have had in the first place put an end to it and created one less GPL licensed thing in the world. Anyway, switching to the LGPL now would be easier than switching later. It only gets harder as a project ages because you start to lose contact with past contributors.
- felipelemos 10y agoiTerm finally!
- owaislone 10y agoNope. That's a GUI app :)
- partycoder 10y agoIf there were build tools that could help deploying to the App Store/Google Play/Windows Store/Amazon Marketplace in a straightforward way, this would motivate people to write more portable software. Those marketplaces are not only places to buy applications. Many applications there are free. They are also distribution channels that help people finding and installing your app.
- dreamcompiler 10y agoBack in the PowerPC days, there was a thing called Mac-on-Linux [0] that allowed GUI Mac apps to run in Linux. It worked pretty well. I wonder if that code base would be helpful. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac-on-Linux https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac-on-Linux
- mjg59 10y agoMac-On-Linux ran a complete copy of Macos, so it's not really the same thing
- mrpippy 10y agoMoL ran the entire MacOS (9 or X) in an X window or VT, making it a full virtualization layer like VMware or VirtualBox. This is a binary loader/API translation layer/reimplementation, like Wine.
- itomato 10y agoMoL was PPC only, and didn't do any transformation of Toolbox calls to Linux native calls. It was essentially a hypervisor. https://sourceforge.net/p/mac-on-linux/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/ https://sourceforge.net/p/mac-on-linux/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/
- lambda 10y ago> Since the most painful area is still the missing Cocoa implementation, hackers are welcome to explore the following possibility I wonder why they suggest trying to rebuild Cocoa on top of Qt, rather than starting with the existing GNUstep?
- Polarity 10y ago80% of my apps i use run on electron :D
- ssalazar 10y agoSo thats why people need more than 16GB of memory on their MacBook Pro.
- hanief 10y agoA general rule I follow on my Mac to minimize memory and power consumption: - Use Safari - Avoid web based desktop app like Atom, Slack, etc. - Limit maximum of 3 app open, e.g. Xcode + iTerm + Safari. Bonus: I can focus my mind on the things that I need to do. - Limit maximum of 3 open tabs on my Safari.
- talideon 10y agoWouldn't be a terrible idea to do something similar for the BSDs, particularly FreeBSD. A lot of the syscalls would be passthroughs, which would make things a little easier at least.
- JdeBP 10y agoGo and whisper in these people's ears. (-: * http://www.nextbsd.org/ http://www.nextbsd.org/
- Mathnerd314 10y agoRelated: http://www.puredarwin.org/ http://www.puredarwin.org/, partial OS built from open-source Apple libraries / kernel. The problem with both of these is re-implementing the Core Foundation (only partially open-source; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_Kit#Major_implementations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_Kit#Major_implement...) & proprietary Cocoa API's that almost all GUI Mac apps use. Wine has done the equivalent for Windows, but so far nobody wants to do all the hard work of bug-for-bug compatibility. Probably because Apple is already becoming irrelevant, and almost every Mac product has a corresponding Windows equivalent.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- captn3m0 10y agoAnother similar project was Magenta OS: http://crna.cc/cat/open-source http://crna.cc/cat/open-source >Magenta was my attempt at implementing a mach compatibility layer on top of the Linux kernel. The 2012 archive.org cache of this page has some details: https://web.archive.org/web/20120619162157/http://crna.cc/magenta.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120619162157/http://crna.cc/ma...
- jcoffland 10y agoDarling has been around for sometime. In my experience it's buggy and not nearly as far along as Wine.
- odbol_ 10y ago> "At this point, does not yet run macOS application with a GUI" Great, so I can run OS X's shitty versions of Linux utilities... on Linux.
- int_handler 10y agoTechnically, they are't really OS X's shitty versions of Linux utilities but rather the BSD versions of GNU utilities.
- odbol_ 10y agoTechnically, those utilities were originally BSD, but Apple took them and modified them and did not release the sources back into BSD. So they're not really BSD anymore.
- nodesocket 10y agoI don't think the virtual esc key is going to be an issue. The placement actually seems more convenient than the current esc key location. I am going to miss a regular USB port and MagSafe.
- ronyeh 10y agoMaybe this might work as a replacement for MagSafe? https://www.amazon.com/Griffin-BreakSafe-Breakaway-Chromebook-replacement/dp/B01CQTK6GU https://www.amazon.com/Griffin-BreakSafe-Breakaway-Chromeboo... I haven't tried it myself, so it probably does not feel as fast and fluid as MagSafe.
- contingencies 10y agoJust an amusing thing to notice: 大零 ''da ling'' means "great zero" in Mandarin Chinese.
- stomato 10y agoThis is great. But I can't think of a single macOS-only app I'd like to have in Linux, other than Terminal.app, Control Panel, Activity Monitor, etc. Everything else I use already runs in Linux.
- cheiVia0 10y agoIt would be really great to be able to build macOS-only open source apps on Linux.
- lathiat 10y agoOh this looks excellent, I was thinking of trying to make something like this work for running the Bonjour Compatability Suite for automated testing against Avahi.
- microcolonel 10y agoMaybe this will some day mean Imgix can stop racking mac pros.
- samlittlewood 10y agoIs there a licence issue preventing the use of http://www.cocotron.org/ http://www.cocotron.org/, an existing Cocoa for Windows/Linux?