I 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.<p>I really like Linux as a backup plan, in case Apple totally drops the ball on professionals on the Mac.<p>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.
> Since the most painful area is still the missing Cocoa implementation, hackers are welcome to explore the following possibility<p>I wonder why they suggest trying to rebuild Cocoa on top of Qt, rather than starting with the existing GNUstep?
It'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.
Back 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] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac-on-Linux" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac-on-Linux</a>
Is there anything the other way around? Running a Linux binary on MacOS? Sometimes the source isn't available so recompiling isn't an option.
Another similar project was Magenta OS: <a href="http://crna.cc/cat/open-source" rel="nofollow">http://crna.cc/cat/open-source</a><p>>Magenta was my attempt at implementing a mach compatibility layer on top of the Linux kernel.<p>The 2012 archive.org cache of this page has some details: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120619162157/http://crna.cc/magenta.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20120619162157/http://crna.cc/ma...</a>
> Why “Darling”?<p>>The name Darling is a combination of “Darwin” and “Linux”. >Darwin is the core operating system OS X and iOS build on.<p>If that's the case, why not Darlin? But then, I'm southern so that's why it makes more sense to me.
Wouldn'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.
Related: <a href="http://www.puredarwin.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.puredarwin.org/</a>, partial OS built from open-source Apple libraries / kernel.<p>The problem with both of these is re-implementing the Core Foundation (only partially open-source; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_Kit#Major_implementations" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_Kit#Major_implement...</a>) & 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.
If 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.<p>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.
Hmm. 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.
It's a shame that you can't run a container with MacOS installed and just run the apps natively.<p>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.
Very 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.
This 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.
Is there a licence issue preventing the use of <a href="http://www.cocotron.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cocotron.org/</a>, an existing Cocoa for Windows/Linux?
I 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.<p>I am going to miss a regular USB port and MagSafe.
Oh 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.
> "At this point, does not yet run macOS application with a GUI"<p>Great, so I can run OS X's shitty versions of Linux utilities... on Linux.