Ask HN: Is there any WINE like software for running OS X software on Linux?

by xstartup on 2/17/2018, 6:11 AM with 12 comments

Why or why not? Is it simply impossible to build?

  • by stuaxo on 2/17/2018, 3:46 PM

    Yes - The Darling project is exactly this:

    http://www.darlinghq.org/

    https://github.com/darlinghq/

    There's a lot of info on the website about the challenges. There aren't many people working on it, so any help would be appreciated.

  • by miles on 2/17/2018, 7:12 AM

    There's the old PearPC project:

    https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/pearpc

    "PearPC emulates a PPC Macintosh inside of Windows and Linux. It emulates a machine capable of running OS X versions up 10.1 to 10.4 (Tiger). PearPC does not emulate a Machine capable of running OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or greater. The emulated machine can also run Darwin and Linux."

    See also https://github.com/sebastianbiallas/pearpc and http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2005/01/18/Pea... .

  • by sgillen on 2/17/2018, 8:45 AM

    I’m sure it’s technically feasible, but it’s very labor intensive, there is very little demand (as far as I can tell), and there is a very high risk of a lawsuit.

  • by guitarbill on 2/17/2018, 10:12 AM

    Last time I checked, it was possible to boot macOS in VirtualBox.

    What macOS-exclusive apps would be worth running in your opinion? The only one that I use is Photos, and maybe Pixelmator. So it'd probably be quicker just to write completely new software, which is what seems to happen.

    Also, Apple has a nasty habit of breaking things between macOS versions and messing with APIs. Maintaining a compat layer would be horrible.

  • by tinus_hn on 2/17/2018, 2:34 PM

    Wine is an absolutely amazing piece of software that’s easy to take for granted. There is a large library of software exclusive to Windows so there are enough people motivated to build it. There isn’t a whole lot of software exclusive to Mac OS X so it’s much more difficult to get enough people together to run such a project.

  • by orionblastar on 2/17/2018, 8:10 AM

    If there was, Apple might sue them for it.

    So far there are GNUStep and Darling but they are not ready for prime time.

    You can buy an old MacBook for $99 That can run an old MacOSX on it like 10.7 or under but it would only be a Core 2 Duo, but would use Boot camp to run Linux.

  • by Ice_cream_suit on 2/18/2018, 6:33 AM

    I ran OS X under vmware for some time. It worked well on my box.

    However, I failed to find any Mac applications that were sufficiently compelling.

    So I ended up deleting the OS X disk image.

  • by petecox on 2/17/2018, 6:43 AM

    You could try porting your code to GNUstep.

    http://gnustep.org/

  • by steanne on 2/17/2018, 6:29 AM