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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Why don't we ever get the opposite? I want this but a MacOS emulator (really a library implementing the MacOS apis), so Mine, not Wine. Allowing me to e.g. run Safari on Linux.

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https://www.darlinghq.org/

Needs people to contribute to get to the point of running Safari, but the foundation is there.

The work is impressive, but I don't see a future where anyone manages to stay ahead of Apple and emulates macOS. Wine has decades of work, tons of support from companies with a vested interest in its success, and a clear need (running Windows games on Linux and Mac, running Office et al. on Linux). I am an inveterate macOS user and I don't see any benefit to a project like this for Linux. Who wants the very high quality third-party software made for the Mac, but not the OS? There's way too few people with this werid mindset to make a project of this scope viable.

Replace "Apple" with "Microsoft" and "macOS" with "Windows" in your post, and it is the exact statement I would have written ~2003 when I first played around with wine. Around 2004 I ran CS 1.5 online using wine on a linux box, and changed my mind. Today, in 2023, it seems like Windows games are better run with wine on Linux or macOS (the wine-bottles are basically sandboxed windows editions that I can create or scrub anytime I want). It is incredible how usefully sometimes software becomes 20 years later.

It's great we can run big games on Linux in 2023 but my laptop with a RTX3050 turns into a jet engine with ProtonGE and often drops frames, has to compile shaders, etc. I've used all tricks I could find to make this better. Some of it is lack of support, but it's mostly not as efficient to emulate things (shocking revelation, I know).

If you boot the same machine in Win11, it's silent playing most games, zero stutter, just smooth.

macOS going through the same means in 2043 they might be enjoying the extra heat dissipation.

Proton isn't an emulator, though shaders do need to be compiled which can be problematic when it's happening constantly. For many games there is next to no overhead -- some games even run better in my experience.

I've had the opposite experience but I'm glad people are having a positive experience in general.

To be clear, I'm really thankful this exists. It's has been super helpful not having to reboot into Windows so often but, in my experience, even with a lot of tweaking things aren't better than on Windows.

Maybe I'm a fan of games that hit all the issues in this page https://wiki.winehq.org/Performance

Even back in 2003, Windows had the two things I mentioned: games and Office. Wine might have been woefully inadequate back then, but people already wanted to run those two things on Linux. You lacked imagination in 2003.

>> wants the very high quality third-party software made for the Mac, but not the OS?

Everyone who wants to do video editing on a Linux box. Or, in other words, everyone who doesn't want to buy and maintain a $$$$ apple machine just for occasional video editing. The same people who don't want to keep windows boxes running just because one random client needs them to use some random Windows only software

Most of those folks, in my experience, just have a Windows computer, or dual-boot.

I use the Photoshop part of my Adobe subscription mostly on a Mac, but I boot my desktop over to Windows if I need to use Premiere and After Effects because applying to those problems a GPU that weighs as much as my Mac does counts for something.

Or has a virtual machine running Windows. The performance hit is there, but for occasional use, it's quite sufficient.

Video editing falls into the category of running Office and the rest.

What’s wrong with running Adobe Premiere through Wine?

Oh and there’s way too few people who would want to video edit with Linux but Mac software. I mean there’s probably a hundred people on the planet, no joke.

Davinci Resolve runs on Linux.

Someday!

“…we finally have basic experimental support for running simple graphical applications.”

But not yet.

Yeah, I know I shouldn't complain but I've lost faith in this project.

There was a project aiming to do this called Etoilé OS[1]. Just went to the website and realized last update was in 2014 :/

[1]: http://etoileos.com/

I tough it was/is aim of GnuStep, while Etoilé was supposed to be `distrivution` of GnuStep with additional features.

Honest question, but why would you want this? Wine is obvious, there was a lot of software exclusively on Windows with no match on Linux when the project started, and that still is very true today for games.

While there certainly is a handful of exclusive software for the Mac, I don't see anything that would generate broader interest in this.

Hackintoshing. I don't want to buy a separate machine just to make iOS apps, but sadly I have had to do so. A few years ago I was able to run Windows, macOS, and Linux in Proxmox, it worked pretty well, but I'm not sure how long that will still be available as macOS moves fully to ARM.

Unrelated but is there any way to use Safari on windows?

You can either 1) run macOS in a VM, though I'm only familiar with running macOS VMs on Linux, 2) VNC into a real Mac, or 3) run Safari for Windows from 2012 [1]

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20231006225735/https://www.oldver...

Mac is a system of tightly integrated processes, so emulation requires the whole OS.

Windows games tend to be isolated all in one executables.

That’s generally not true.

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