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..
ay
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]
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.
yjuzz9
> 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.
Cool that it exists, but I honestly don't even know which mac exclusive program I would want to install.
nonestdeus
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.
Alien1Being
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
999900000999
Quibble: it'll run anything that runs on open source Darwin. You won't be running anything needing macOS frameworks.
jagged-chisel
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.
comments (10)
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..
ay
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/
porphyra
yjuzz9
> 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.
ncr100
BatchJob
nonestdeus
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.
Alien1Being
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
999900000999
jagged-chisel
LollipopYakuza