Sort-of. You can compile it if you have the source. Commercial software (binaries) are often unable to be run outside of their target cpu and flavor of Unix tho

Sort-of. You can compile it if you have the source. Commercial software (binaries) are often unable to be run outside of their target cpu and flavor of Unix though. Apple is a little different in that FAT binaries can contain multiple architectures and even binaries that are not built for the current arch are automatically run in an emulated environment. Solaris had a mechanism where one could place binaries in arch-specific folders (eg: /bin/sparcv9) and even per-arch library paths but it was definitely opt-in with varying levels of adoption. I’ve also seen some pretty fun hacks to start qemu in Linux for certain non-native executables. Still not nearly as complete/smooth/user-friendly as the fat binary/library approach.