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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

This looks very promising! Thinking of putting it on something.

MacOS App support isn't there yet. It supports only a few apps. Test out a copy and give them feedback please, thank you.

It’s a really good idea since apple is abandoning its x86 software. It’s an opening for FOSS to pull in new GUI frameworks/features. Could really help gain userbase.

They use FreeBSD and Darwin open-source code. Darwin is the core of MacOS with the XNU/MACH Kernel. So they are doing nothing wrong that Apple can sue them over it. The trick is writing the code that does what the Non-Open-Source code of MacOS does to run the Mac Apps.

> The trick is writing the code that does what the Non-Open-Source code of MacOS does to run the Mac Apps

And that is where the magic happens.

GNUstep has been trying to provide a useful open source alternative implementation of OPENSTEP for more than 20 years now I believe. I don’t see that happen to be honest.

I think when brew works nativelu it will be much more functional and fun to use.

Why? Brew is a workaround for not having a proper package manager on macOS. Can't you use the native package manager instead?

I have used brew on Linux for dev tooling, because it’s so easy to switch versions.

I realized Brew was released for Linux a while back, and my jaw dropped because… why? Brew is simply awful compared to most Linux package managers. It has gotten better over the years but I still couldn’t ever imagine preferring it over the installed out of the box package manager in quite literally any Linux distro.

Sometimes you can’t use a distro’s package manager (e.g. shared hosting) but Homebrew will still work.

Homebrew is my preferred package manager on Linux. It just seems to work more simply than apt or Flatpak for me, and it’s less context switching when I need to use macOS.

For standard apps, I agree. But being able to change the default version of Python, NodeJS, etc. just by running brew install is a lot easier than using apt/apt-get. They just aren't made to support that kind of scenario.

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