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Comment by blauditore | Hacker News Reader

If I understand correctly, this should be able to run on any Intel platform, so it's not bound to Apple-labelled hardware, right?

I'm asking because publishing cross-platform mobile apps is currently a hassle, as the iOS one can only be done from MacOS, which itself only runs on Apple hardware. As a consequence, I have an old Macbook lying around and dust it off everytime I make a release. A VM running anywhere would come a long way.

Also, I'm aware of hackintosh VMs, but it's a hassle to set up (and yeah, borderline legal, but I'm on borderline patience with all that inconvenience by now).

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There are various companies online that give you remote access to a macOS VM running on Apple hardware, reasonably inexpensively. I use one for Mac & iOS builds. The one I use says in the contract that I am actually buying fractional ownership of the computer, along with hosting. I guess this gets around some Apple terms somehow.

Alternately, the VMWare ESXi bare-metal hypervisor is considered a legitimate "hardware" configuration that macOS will install under. If you have a spare server-grade PC laying about, or are willing to reformat a Linux server to put ESXi between it and the metal, it's a good option to get a local, "authorized" macOS VM.

This is not macOS. According to the screenshot of the latest build, it doesn't look like it even boots all the way to a shell. It is unlikely to ever help you with mobile app publishing.

From the FAQs:

"PureDarwin can run on VMware as well as real Intel-based hardware. We are successfully running a web server, have built hundreds of software packages with MacPorts running on PureDarwin, including ssh, apache2, tightvnc, Xfce, and others."

I personally haven't run it, but I think it's pretty usable if it can do the things mentioned above.

If I would need to run Apache, SSH, VNC - why would I go this difficult road? I can install Debian, Ubuntu or Centos, with desktop if I need it, and much more support online. What does PureDarwin offer that Linux doesn't?

That's sad. I hoped due to their similarity, it might be possible to run Xcode and Apploader (or whatever it's called) on PureDarwin.

The native macOS GUI has never been open-source. So pure open source Darwin (without any closed source Apple bits) has never been able to run native macOS GUI apps such as Xcode. Open source Darwin can only run non-GUI apps (text mode apps and daemons), and X11 GUI apps.

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