5 ms·

Run macOS Software on Linux

296 points by Bluestein 2mo ago

HNDevsSuck 2mo ago
[dead]
- luqtas 2mo ago
  garageBand /j
porphyra 2mo ago
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/ https://blog.darlinghq.org/
- belowavgiq 2mo ago
  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.
jagged-chisel 2mo ago
Quibble: it'll run anything that runs on open source Darwin. You won't be running anything needing macOS frameworks.
wetpaws 2mo ago
[dead]
rvz 2mo ago
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 can still run command line tools.
- dylan604 2mo ago
  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??
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - tengwar2 2mo ago
    At a guess: the "killer apps" are things like MS Office and Photoshop, and since they are usually available on both Windows and Mac, there's not such a pressing demand to support similar functionality for Mac apps if the Windows version is easy to obtain.
    - dylan604 2mo ago
      That's such an obvious answer that I'm honestly embarrassed that it did not occur to me. <facepalm> Thanks for not rubbing it in!
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - GeekyBear 2mo ago
    GNUstep ran early MacOS apps on Linux after Apple bought Next and adopted their APIs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUstep 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.
    - asveikau 2mo ago
      Win32 has a little less churn than AppKit used to. If you support the API surface of winxp from 25 years ago you can run a lot of stuff. Most teams inside Windows at MSFT also try to leave older APIs alone and introduce stuff in an additive fashion. Apple, by contrast, historically has app compatibility as a non-goal. I said "used to" because anecdotally, I had a personal project I haven't released anywhere target AppKit, I haven't been maintaining it because life is busy, I recently rebuilt it for the first time in a long time and I was shocked that everything worked. ~8 years ago, you would need to do some porting to a new major release once per year. I skipped that maintenance for many releases and didn't need to change a single line. This tells me that desktop apps are not at all an area of major focus for them lately. Maybe swiftui is getting all the attention. They are doing something more resembling Microsoft, leaving the old shit alone.
BatchJob 2mo ago
Or better yet. Dont!
ay 2mo ago
I went down a deep but entertaining rabbit hole in the other direction for fun: https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/fakelinux 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..
- ishaderdevicemg 2mo ago
  Recently, Apple has made it so with a special entitlement, com.apple.private.custom-x18-abi iirc, you can actually use the x18 register, mainly so ARM64 versions of WINE/CrossOver can run outside of Rosetta, since they'll be partially killing Rosetta in macOS 28. I believe you can find slightly more info on how to use it in some XNU (macOS kernel) tests, namely this one: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/main/tests/x18_entitled.c https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/main/tes...
  - floam 2mo ago
    com.apple.private.uexc as well?
  - anyfoo 2mo ago
    In the current betas, there's actually more entitlements that allow this, not just private ones.
999900000999 2mo ago
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
- inatreecrown2 2mo ago
  Give Reaper a try, it works very well on linux and you can even use VSTs.
  - tensor 2mo ago
    Sadly a lot of VSTs are Windows and Mac only too due to shitty DRM. :-(
    - inatreecrown2 2mo ago
      True. On the other hand, there are top quality developers like u-he Urs Heckmann that provide native linux support.
      - SyneRyder 2mo ago
        AudioThing, TAL and Modartt have Linux versions as well. Korneff Audio is moving in that direction, but not everything is ported over yet.
- Melonai 2mo ago
  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 really smart in hindsight, give complete beginners a highly simplified but functional version of your professional utility, and provide an on-ramp to your professional programs. I imagine if Microsoft had some professional version of Windows Movie Maker it would've taken over a big chunk of the video editing market via the same method. Anyway, regarding Linux DAWs, I am trying to get used to Ableton in Wine, but it's just not the same, and making it work in Wine is troublesome enough that I end up giving up before finishing anything of interest. Is there any DAW that feels like it actually belongs on Linux and doesn't either feel like you're maintaining a package by yourself, or has an awfully bad UI/UX like all FOSS DAWs I tried so far? I think in 2026 there's really a good opportunity here, with user interest genuinely rising for Linux on desktop.
nonestdeus 2mo ago
Cool that it exists, but I honestly don't even know which mac exclusive program I would want to install.
- Gigachad 2mo ago
  Might be useful to run ARM mac apps on ARM Linux vs using Wine + an x86 emulation layer.
- jeremyjh 2mo ago
  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.
  - MrAlex94 2mo ago
    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 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.
    - henearkr 2mo ago
      The real deal-breaker is supporting the iOS app development. Which right now is only possible using XCode.
  - mike_hearn 2mo ago
    You can ship a fully signed and self-updating macOS app from Linux (or Windows) using my product Conveyor: https://hydraulic.dev/ 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.
SilentM68 2mo ago
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 :(
LollipopYakuza 2mo ago
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.
- testing22321 2mo ago
  You don’t have to run the latest photoshop. (Or Lightroom..) I run the last version I could fully buy before it went subscription based. It’s great.
Select2 2mo ago
[dead]
tootie 2mo ago
Will it run xcode build tools?
- stuaxo 2mo ago
  From the FAQ on the Discord: *Does Xcode work?* Yes and no. The Xcode GUI definitely doesn't work yet; see *Will <<Insert_Random_GUI_Application>> Work?* above. However, the Xcode CLI tools like Clang, LLDB, Git, the Metal compiler, the Swift compiler, and more do work. *What about `xcodebuild`?* Some versions of `xcodebuild` (e.g. 11.7) are known to work for extremely basic XIB-based macOS apps. However, the vast majority of projects do not qualify as extremely basic and aren't supported yet.
  - cromka 2mo ago
    So technically you can use it to build macOS software on Linux?
ncr100 2mo ago
> 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 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/apportable from 2011 - the Foundation repo last update was Dec 2014.
xyst 2mo ago
The real/final test is running applications like Final Cut Pro using `darling`
adamgoodapp 2mo ago
For me its a shame to make the Mac apps look like linux.
Alien1Being 2mo ago
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.
- tensor 2mo ago
  There are lots of amazing Mac only apps, but I'm not sure simply running them on Linux would be worth it. Without the cohesiveness of the UI as a whole you'd be losing a lot.
- wwweston 2mo ago
  For me it’s mostly media apps - Fireworks CS 6, Reason 10, maybe some version of Garage Band. There’s alternatives but these apps hit a sweet spot that I could camp out on for decades if the tech treadmill didn’t like to make software an exercise in seeing shifting shapes in the clouds.
- ashton314 2mo ago
  Glyphs is like the only game in town for font editing. I’m an Omnigraffle enjoyer too.
  - bel8 2mo ago
    it's really not, I see my colleague using https://www.fontlab.com https://www.fontlab.com for professional font authoring. I'll ask them about glyphs, got me curious.
- roosterIllusi0n 2mo ago
  Most of the apps on macos are for fixing os behaviors that make no sense.
- Archit3ch 2mo ago
  > Is there some really amazing Mac only software that would justify the effort ? As others said, the killer app is XCode. Even if you can technically get it to run, you'll still need the full support and test flows of a native solution, so you might as well follow the proper path and use a Mac. I can get Visual Studio to run in Parallels today. I still test with a real Windows machine.
yjuzz9 2mo ago
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.
- hstaab 2mo ago
  Unfortunately you may never see the beach ball
- dosisking 2mo ago
  > Next up: emulating the spinning beach ball of death for authentic nostalgic immersion. It looks more like a Magneto-Optical Drive, not a beach ball
- asimovDev 2mo ago
  Sadly cheese grater hasn’t cost that little since the first Obama administration
ghm2199 2mo ago
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?
- BillStrong 2mo ago
  Hardware acceleration for OS X era OSes, for one.
throwaway19567 2mo ago
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.)
- joombaga 2mo ago
  It runs on Rosetta w/ a few fixes. https://gist.github.com/JoshCooley/095b80f9639a4dc7e762208ae4ba01ec#file-fix-pac-the-man-x-sh https://gist.github.com/JoshCooley/095b80f9639a4dc7e762208ae...
  - throwaway45436 2mo ago
    [dead]
- BillStrong 2mo ago
  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.
Marchant_hq 2mo ago
Curious if this finally makes Sketch or Affinity Photo usable on my Linux box. Apple Silicon VM performance is usually the bottleneck.
dylanger 2mo ago
[dead]
cromka 2mo ago
Having experienced how much LLMs can help with reverse-engineering stuff, I wonder why such projects don't actually see unusual development speed-up. The things that are possible now with a fraction of time were previously reserved to the elite few. EDIT: although it looks like some try, e.g. https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1776 https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1776 https://github.com/darlinghq/darling-xnu/pull/16 https://github.com/darlinghq/darling-xnu/pull/16 Sadly, the fact that there's no response to some serious, months-old PRs implementing major frameworks (https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1725 https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1725, https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1724 https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1724) is not exactly a sign of an actively-managed project. Hopefully someone steps in or forks it.
cromka 2mo ago
This project will get notably much more difficult once Apple fully migrates to arm64 and x86 software no longer gets published. The arm64->x86 ISA translation is costly, there's been little precedent for it so far since everyone goes the other way round and so it will likely render the whole effort futile.
Archit3ch 2mo ago
I assume this wouldn't work for software that requires e.g. the Secure Enclave.

296 points by Bluestein 2mo ago

HNDevsSuck 2mo ago

[dead]

luqtas 2mo ago
garageBand /j

porphyra 2mo ago

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/ https://blog.darlinghq.org/

belowavgiq 2mo ago
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.

jagged-chisel 2mo ago

Quibble: it'll run anything that runs on open source Darwin. You won't be running anything needing macOS frameworks.

wetpaws 2mo ago

[dead]

rvz 2mo ago

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 can still run command line tools.

dylan604 2mo ago
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??
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- tengwar2 2mo ago
  At a guess: the "killer apps" are things like MS Office and Photoshop, and since they are usually available on both Windows and Mac, there's not such a pressing demand to support similar functionality for Mac apps if the Windows version is easy to obtain.
  - dylan604 2mo ago
    That's such an obvious answer that I'm honestly embarrassed that it did not occur to me. <facepalm> Thanks for not rubbing it in!
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- GeekyBear 2mo ago
  GNUstep ran early MacOS apps on Linux after Apple bought Next and adopted their APIs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUstep 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.
  - asveikau 2mo ago
    Win32 has a little less churn than AppKit used to. If you support the API surface of winxp from 25 years ago you can run a lot of stuff. Most teams inside Windows at MSFT also try to leave older APIs alone and introduce stuff in an additive fashion. Apple, by contrast, historically has app compatibility as a non-goal. I said "used to" because anecdotally, I had a personal project I haven't released anywhere target AppKit, I haven't been maintaining it because life is busy, I recently rebuilt it for the first time in a long time and I was shocked that everything worked. ~8 years ago, you would need to do some porting to a new major release once per year. I skipped that maintenance for many releases and didn't need to change a single line. This tells me that desktop apps are not at all an area of major focus for them lately. Maybe swiftui is getting all the attention. They are doing something more resembling Microsoft, leaving the old shit alone.

BatchJob 2mo ago

Or better yet. Dont!

ay 2mo ago

I went down a deep but entertaining rabbit hole in the other direction for fun: https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/fakelinux 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..

ishaderdevicemg 2mo ago
Recently, Apple has made it so with a special entitlement, com.apple.private.custom-x18-abi iirc, you can actually use the x18 register, mainly so ARM64 versions of WINE/CrossOver can run outside of Rosetta, since they'll be partially killing Rosetta in macOS 28. I believe you can find slightly more info on how to use it in some XNU (macOS kernel) tests, namely this one: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/main/tests/x18_entitled.c https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/main/tes...
- floam 2mo ago
  com.apple.private.uexc as well?
- anyfoo 2mo ago
  In the current betas, there's actually more entitlements that allow this, not just private ones.

999900000999 2mo ago

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

inatreecrown2 2mo ago
Give Reaper a try, it works very well on linux and you can even use VSTs.
- tensor 2mo ago
  Sadly a lot of VSTs are Windows and Mac only too due to shitty DRM. :-(
  - inatreecrown2 2mo ago
    True. On the other hand, there are top quality developers like u-he Urs Heckmann that provide native linux support.
    - SyneRyder 2mo ago
      AudioThing, TAL and Modartt have Linux versions as well. Korneff Audio is moving in that direction, but not everything is ported over yet.
Melonai 2mo ago
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 really smart in hindsight, give complete beginners a highly simplified but functional version of your professional utility, and provide an on-ramp to your professional programs. I imagine if Microsoft had some professional version of Windows Movie Maker it would've taken over a big chunk of the video editing market via the same method. Anyway, regarding Linux DAWs, I am trying to get used to Ableton in Wine, but it's just not the same, and making it work in Wine is troublesome enough that I end up giving up before finishing anything of interest. Is there any DAW that feels like it actually belongs on Linux and doesn't either feel like you're maintaining a package by yourself, or has an awfully bad UI/UX like all FOSS DAWs I tried so far? I think in 2026 there's really a good opportunity here, with user interest genuinely rising for Linux on desktop.

nonestdeus 2mo ago

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

Gigachad 2mo ago
Might be useful to run ARM mac apps on ARM Linux vs using Wine + an x86 emulation layer.
jeremyjh 2mo ago
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.
- MrAlex94 2mo ago
  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 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.
  - henearkr 2mo ago
    The real deal-breaker is supporting the iOS app development. Which right now is only possible using XCode.
- mike_hearn 2mo ago
  You can ship a fully signed and self-updating macOS app from Linux (or Windows) using my product Conveyor: https://hydraulic.dev/ 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.

SilentM68 2mo ago

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 :(

LollipopYakuza 2mo ago

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.

testing22321 2mo ago
You don’t have to run the latest photoshop. (Or Lightroom..) I run the last version I could fully buy before it went subscription based. It’s great.

Select2 2mo ago

[dead]

tootie 2mo ago

Will it run xcode build tools?

stuaxo 2mo ago
From the FAQ on the Discord: *Does Xcode work?* Yes and no. The Xcode GUI definitely doesn't work yet; see *Will <<Insert_Random_GUI_Application>> Work?* above. However, the Xcode CLI tools like Clang, LLDB, Git, the Metal compiler, the Swift compiler, and more do work. *What about `xcodebuild`?* Some versions of `xcodebuild` (e.g. 11.7) are known to work for extremely basic XIB-based macOS apps. However, the vast majority of projects do not qualify as extremely basic and aren't supported yet.
- cromka 2mo ago
  So technically you can use it to build macOS software on Linux?

ncr100 2mo ago

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

xyst 2mo ago

The real/final test is running applications like Final Cut Pro using `darling`

adamgoodapp 2mo ago

For me its a shame to make the Mac apps look like linux.

Alien1Being 2mo ago

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.

tensor 2mo ago
There are lots of amazing Mac only apps, but I'm not sure simply running them on Linux would be worth it. Without the cohesiveness of the UI as a whole you'd be losing a lot.
wwweston 2mo ago
For me it’s mostly media apps - Fireworks CS 6, Reason 10, maybe some version of Garage Band. There’s alternatives but these apps hit a sweet spot that I could camp out on for decades if the tech treadmill didn’t like to make software an exercise in seeing shifting shapes in the clouds.
ashton314 2mo ago
Glyphs is like the only game in town for font editing. I’m an Omnigraffle enjoyer too.
- bel8 2mo ago
  it's really not, I see my colleague using https://www.fontlab.com https://www.fontlab.com for professional font authoring. I'll ask them about glyphs, got me curious.
roosterIllusi0n 2mo ago
Most of the apps on macos are for fixing os behaviors that make no sense.
Archit3ch 2mo ago
> Is there some really amazing Mac only software that would justify the effort ? As others said, the killer app is XCode. Even if you can technically get it to run, you'll still need the full support and test flows of a native solution, so you might as well follow the proper path and use a Mac. I can get Visual Studio to run in Parallels today. I still test with a real Windows machine.

yjuzz9 2mo ago

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.

hstaab 2mo ago
Unfortunately you may never see the beach ball
dosisking 2mo ago
> Next up: emulating the spinning beach ball of death for authentic nostalgic immersion. It looks more like a Magneto-Optical Drive, not a beach ball
asimovDev 2mo ago
Sadly cheese grater hasn’t cost that little since the first Obama administration

ghm2199 2mo ago

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?

BillStrong 2mo ago
Hardware acceleration for OS X era OSes, for one.

throwaway19567 2mo ago

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.)

joombaga 2mo ago
It runs on Rosetta w/ a few fixes. https://gist.github.com/JoshCooley/095b80f9639a4dc7e762208ae4ba01ec#file-fix-pac-the-man-x-sh https://gist.github.com/JoshCooley/095b80f9639a4dc7e762208ae...
- throwaway45436 2mo ago
  [dead]
BillStrong 2mo ago
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.

Marchant_hq 2mo ago

Curious if this finally makes Sketch or Affinity Photo usable on my Linux box. Apple Silicon VM performance is usually the bottleneck.

dylanger 2mo ago

[dead]

cromka 2mo ago

Having experienced how much LLMs can help with reverse-engineering stuff, I wonder why such projects don't actually see unusual development speed-up. The things that are possible now with a fraction of time were previously reserved to the elite few. EDIT: although it looks like some try, e.g. https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1776 https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1776 https://github.com/darlinghq/darling-xnu/pull/16 https://github.com/darlinghq/darling-xnu/pull/16 Sadly, the fact that there's no response to some serious, months-old PRs implementing major frameworks (https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1725 https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1725, https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1724 https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1724) is not exactly a sign of an actively-managed project. Hopefully someone steps in or forks it.

cromka 2mo ago

This project will get notably much more difficult once Apple fully migrates to arm64 and x86 software no longer gets published. The arm64->x86 ISA translation is costly, there's been little precedent for it so far since everyone goes the other way round and so it will likely render the whole effort futile.

Archit3ch 2mo ago

I assume this wouldn't work for software that requires e.g. the Secure Enclave.