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Comment by vinniepukh | Hacker News Reader

Seems like GUI application support is not there yet. In that case, what command-line software for MacOS is actually useful for?

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Last I tried Darling, my goal was to make a proprietary printer driver run on Linux. It was available for Windows and macOS (CUPS). So that’s one use case.

Did it work?

No, unfortunately I could not get Darling to compile back then and gave up. (I don't have that printer anymore either.)

Why this over Wine with the Windows executable?

The Windows driver wouldn't work with CUPS. Or is there something like ndiswrapper for printer drivers?

Depending on your printer

You may be able to print directly to port 9100 of the printer using netcat

Similarly I was hoping to run the Bonjour Conformance Test on Linux in CI for Avahi. Which is CLI as well.

Xcode build tools. Right now you practically need a macOS machine to compile applications for macOS or iOS.

For command line apps you can cross-compile from Linux. IIRC it does require building Clang from source, and obtaining a Mac SDK (which is probably against their T&C's) but there are pre-made scripts to do it (there's a good GitHub Actions one).

That said, I only do that for free projects. For commercial stuff I'd just buy a Mac Mini.

Any links?

Here you go: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

https://github.com/mbround18/setup-osxcross

> For command line apps you can cross-compile from Linux.

You technically can, but this has various issues. The lack of UI frameworks is one. I don't remember the others since I have a real Mac, but it's only an Intel Mac.

On a Linux host, use pts-osxcross (https://github.com/pts/pts-osxcross) to target macOS, it contains Clang and other build tools precompiled for Linux amd64.

Honestly my feelings exactly. Any cli software that’s available for Mac is also available for any other Unix. Seems entirely pointless to me.

Spot on ;)

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