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

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

13 pointsxstartup12 comments

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

Yes - The Darling project is exactly this:

http://www.darlinghq.org/

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.

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."

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.

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.

The only piece of Apple software I can't live without is XCode, to make iOS builds of my Unity3D apps.

Right. VirtualBox + overnight compiles might work (perf is going to suck). There exist cloud macOS offerings which work well, I've used them for iOS continuous integration. Depending on how much money those apps are making, could also be an option?

Travis CI is free for OSS projects and offers a pretty cool iOS build option: https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/languages/objective-c/

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.

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.

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.

You could try porting your code to GNUstep.

http://gnustep.org/

darling? https://www.darlinghq.org/

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