Cocoa-Way – Native macOS Wayland compositor for running Linux apps seamlessly | Hacker News Reader

Cocoa-Way – Native macOS Wayland compositor for running Linux apps seamlessly

github.com

331 pointsOJFord111 comments

Forgive the naivety, but what graphical Linux apps are people trying to run that don’t have native MacOS builds? In my experience, Linux GUIs are generally written in Qt or GTK, both of which are multi-platform.

I don’t doubt that they exist, I’m just struggling to think of a popular example.

I want to use KDE Plasma instead of Mac OS ugly (in my opinion) interface

This is possibly the first time in human history this opinion has been stated.

I mean Apple hasn't done itself any favours with Macos Tahoe.

“Liquid Ass” as some people say.

I don't want KDE but I would much prefer gnome to macos desktop, I think it's both prettier and more functional, and that's not a tahoe thing. I hate finder too, and don't see any way to properly use an alternative.

To be honest, I agree a little bit because I remember from my time at customizing KDE that everyone wanted it to make it look like Mac OS

but it feels a bit of peer-pressure/cool-factor, people used to like how Mac OS look but after Tahoe, I feel like most people don't.

To be honest, I am on mac right now but I really like Niri/Hyprland and to a degree KDE as well. I definitely feel like those were immensely more customizable and I miss that customizability, even if some people might use that customizability to make it look like MacOS default.

Similar opinions are voiced in about every recent macOS UI thread, and even occasionally in Windows threads.

It really isn’t. There are a great many people who use macs for work but who do not like Apples design choices. And that number has skyrocketed even further since Liquid Glass was pushed onto people.

In fact one of the front page articles today is literally calling macOS “ugly” in the title.

Yup ! And actually i used to like macOS when Apple still cared about it.

But now it’s KDE all the way.

not sure about the looks but I also find KDE much better in usability

I've been using Linux on the desktop for decades at this point. KDE Plasma is my current favorite and I've been using it for a few years now. It has everything you'd want in a desktop (maybe a bit more), looks great, and is very fast even on modest hardware.

My current job has me using MacOS on an M3 Pro Macbook and I find it barely tolerable compared to KDE. Usually when I want to do something new or change some configuration, either there is no way to do it, or it's hidden behind some key combination that I never would have guessed. I would describe the overall feel of MacOS as "syrupy." When using the mouse or typing, there is almost always some kind of barely-perceptible latency. Nothing is ever crisp and instant. (This isn't specific to this machine, it feels the same way on every Mac I've borrowed.) It's sort of like someone decided that the only way to make it smooth was to also make it slow.

Sir I’m here stuck on somewhat workable Sonoma, dread the day enterprise IT forces the push of Tahoe and would take a kde box in a heartbeat.

Go through my post history and you'll see I've been saying the same, or similar, for years :)

Plasma can be configured to rhyme with macOS' GUI. Not as in shitty macOS themes, but button placement, docks, global menus, widgets, Spotlight, Stage Manager, hot corners, keyboard shortcuts, Preview in Finder, etc.

I have Plasma configured to take advantage of my decade+ of macOS muscle memory without having to put up with Finder and the abysmal task-switching and window management experience on macOS.

Whenever I have to use macOS, I am reminded of how much better Plasma is. I'd might even buy a Mac again if I could use it instead of the default UI.

I was given the latest MacBook Pro at my new job not long ago, but I forced them to exchange it for Alan HP laptop just so I could use Linux on it. Unfortunately it's Ubuntu and not Plasma, but even so I'm happy I don't have to use Apple's software.

You can easily install Plasma on Ubuntu.

I’ll be the second then. I’ve love to use Fluxbox or xmonad on the Mac. I know that tiling mangers exist on macOS, but it’s never been the same experience.

No I moved over from Mac to KDE years ago and I love it. I love the way it's so customisable. I hated the years I spent on opinionated software.

The first years with macOS tiger it wasn't too bad but over the years it got worse.

Then you want to run KDE on Linux. This is not going to replace your native mac desktop environment.

Honest question: why use MacOS at all then? If you prefer KDE, why not run a system that KDE natively supports? Is it a particular MacOS application? Or is it that Linux support on Mac hardware is not good enough?

Linux has good support for m1 and m2, so for newer devices running a custom desktop would be neat.

That's what I did yes. Advantage is also getting much more hardware for the money.

Popular apps? Probably not many.

But in the field of integrated circuit design there’s lots of apps that are Linux-only. I’ve tried to run some of them in containers on Mac. But XQuartz is awful.

If they ever transitioned to Wayland perhaps this would let us run these apps on Mac in a nice way.

On the other hand some of them have started getting ARM builds (for running simulations on certain cloud environments) so maybe native Mac GUI builds could happen someday soon.

What about this plus XWayland? Would that do it?

> But XQuartz is awful.

What issues are you seeing with it? I use it pretty heavily and have no complaints…

The biggest issue I found is that X apps look like ass against the elegant Mac environment. Maybe that's mitigated somewhat by macOS 26's Android-ass looking UI, but the appearance/functionality clash between Mac and generic Unix was a major issue before.

I agree, I think the problem is the seamless integration, where it renders only the application against the macOS environment. I'd much prefer something more like the cocoa-way example where there's a window that has its own background, and the applications run inside that. Not sure if Xquartz supports running a compositor or windowing manager.

XQuartz used to support rooted mode. I played with an early version back in the PowerPC era, and ran a regular desktop with WindowMaker and everything, using software from MacPorts. It was kind of a "parallel universe", as XQuartz would take over the whole screen in rooted mode and you had to switch between it and the Mac desktop, but it looked and functioned like a typical Linux or Unix desktop of the early 2000s.

It's not necessarily something only available for Linux, but something that you want to containerise. (And then it's inherently running on Linux.)

I think there are many use cases for this software.

For example, you may not want to run some graphical applications directly on your Mac for security, isolation or testing purposes.

If this software turns out to be lower latency than RDP and CRD, I could also see it being very useful for accessing a remote graphical workstation (e.g.: running heavy software on an beefy machine in a data center instead of taking up resources on my skinny laptop).

This is very interesting to me for two reasons:

1. I'd really like to run my development environment for things under Siri for its tiling window management but for better or worse I'm deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem for everything else, this looks like it could be a really nice way of doing it (possibly once multi monitor support is in).

2. There are still a few applications which have supported Linux builds but no support for macOS (Iridium's Niagara Workbench application for configuration of building management systems springs to mind here). Since Apple ended support for Quartz this has been a bit of a pain to deal with.

Apart from just running Linux apps, you can use this to run graphical applications remotely on a Linux server, like X11 forwarding.

I thought Wayland was different from X11, and didn't allow this. But I'm far from an expert on this topic so I'd like to learn more.

https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe proxies Wayland over a network. It’s straightforward enough in theory: Wayland core is just a communications protocol plus shared memory; so you just need to forward the messages, and detect and send changes in the shared memory. Not the cheapest thing, but perfectly tractable. Of course, there are also more difficult extensions, like GPU integration, but that sort of thing was a problem for X as well.

This is how modern x11 worked too since nobody uses software rendering with x primitives anyway.

here is Wayland vs X11 visualised.. it might help - https://vectree.io/c/compositing-window-management-architect...

According to that page Wayland's architecture is simpler than X11.

If you put everything into a monolith, it looks simpler than if you have components that have to speak protocols to each other.

Rio and its predecesor in Unix v8/v10 did it better than X. In some cases we got the worst:

- POSIX bloat vs Plan9's simple C and even simpler API

- ioctl's vs everything it's a file

- Complex socket spawning vs open() and dial() under Plan9/Go

- ALSA vs tuned up OSSv4, or plaing audio/mixerfs under 9front

- find -which syntax is huge- vs walk -f (or -d for dirs) | grep

- RDP/VNC/SSH/NFS/SMB vs just rcpu+auth (9p) and run rio(4) and for files... 9fs which does a simple bind()

- Symlinks and hard links vs bind and namespaces.

- GDB and SSH vs importing a remote /proc in a rio window and remote-debugging your damn remote machine as if it were your own. How cool is that? Ditto with devices. Import sound cards, network cards with the whole IP stack. NAT you say? No more.

- FFSv2 (hello OpenBSD) vs current GeFS under 9front which is like a miracle over what OBSD it's trying, the bad ZFS license or BTRFS not being ready on GNU yet. Probably the Hurd people will port GeFS to Hurd/Mach first, before BTRFS gets even ready...

- Dynamic vs static linking. 9front, a suite of multiarch compilers. Set $objtype, compile, link, deploy a standalone binary. Ready, as if it were a Go binary under Unix, but without glibc oddities. ARM binaries from 386? Done. You need a crazy long i686-gnu-foo-bar and the rest of crazyness? Not anymore. These come in src form, compile and install them, no internet required. Literal two damn commands to do so, from any to any arch.

- SH/KSH/Bash. Complexity ridden shells. Here's rc. No aliases there, just functions. No complex escaping, just () for strings, ^ to concat, ' ' for quoting. Problem solved. Even the conditonal words' syntax it's like throwing down all the complexity giving you a weirdly simple shell.

- PCRE and ex commands under vi/nvi/vim (bloat) vs Sam and structural regexes. Sam it's like a graphical vi, period, there's nothing alien of it. Imagine a modeless vi with a small frame to input commands with an easier syntax:

     x/lookup/c/replace

These can be chained with ease.

Wayland natively isn’t built for forwarding the way X11 is. Waypipe fixes this, providing an X11 protocol equivalent for Wayland. This project is a waypipe client for macOS.

PuTTY

That's a Windows app.

PuTTY is absolutely available for Linux. On Debian-based distros it’s just a `sudo apt install putty` away. But why?

One possibility is to run its terminal emulation somewhere else. But of course terminal emulators are a dime a dozen on Linux.

Emacs runs much faster and better on Linux VMs. And I have a VM for each client I work with.

That's not the use case. The use case is running apps from a remote Linux host as a local window. A performant VNC for specific windows if you will.

For example, you could run VS Code on that machine as a window on your Mac. A more real world example is people accessing guis (e.g. matlab) on lab clusters.

The closest set up for x11 would be to use x11 forwarding with xpra.

Or running applications within fully sandboxed VMs on the local machine, but with native-ish forwarded GUI. Great for dev.

> The closest set up for x11 would be to use x11 forwarding with xpra.

Older versions of macOS even had an X server distributed by Apple that you could install on your machine, and if memory serves right you were then easily able to forward X11 from a remote Linux host (or other operating systems running X11 applications) using ssh and have it render to your macOS desktop.

From a quick google search there is apparently still an Apple supported third-party open source project called XQuartz one can use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuartz

X11 forwarding with ssh and XQuartz looks to work the same way that I remember using the Apple distributed X server in the past. Install the X server and then use the -X flag of ssh. Same way that you forward X11 between two Linux computers, or Sun workstations or whatever with an X11 desktop, over ssh.

https://docs.cse.lehigh.edu/xforwarding/xforwarding-mac/

This is Wayland. You could use xprs

wprs? Does not work for mac yet IIRC...

I tried that a few times back in the day, but I found it so jarring & ugly against the macOS GUI. The problem was that it was rendering the application alone, for a seamless integration. I don't remember if there was even an option to run a compositor or window manager such that you had a proper window with it's own background and the linux apps show up inside that (like the cocoa-way example).

Used to use XQuartz often years ago for (I think?) forwarding Firefox running in containers for browser-facing integration testing. It was pretty slow IIRC. Switched to VNC, which worked much better.

We run TurboVNC from macOS to beefy Linux servers on the daily. Just tunnel the connection over SSH. It's been solid for 5+ years.

Isn't better to run native VS Code and have remote SSH session? It very much works as if it was local (on fast low latency network). Only issue is moving files.

This is Wayland. You could use xprs (or Waypipe).

Sorry, I responded to the wrong comment.

Native GTK apps on macOS are often more broken than running it in a VM or Parallels, in my experience. I used to use Gitg on macOS and it was a terrible experience all around.

There’s a bunch of old Fortran stuff I use regularly (AVL, XFoil), but that’s all X, not Wayland, and XQuartz has worked great for decades.

The first thing I wondered about was running GUI apps in a Linux container.

I run emacs on linix in X11 mode and display on my mac with Starnet’s FastX. Been doing this since the product was released, and was a customer of their X server before that.

I use Linux VMs on macOS mostly headless via OrbStack. If it was convenient to run an individual window from the GUI in a way that felt native and performed well, I might run Emacs and Firefox from Linux instead of on the macOS side. Then I could manage them more via NixOS mechanisms instead of the janky options available on macOS. Plus in the case of Emacs, filesystem performance is still way, way better on Linux for some common tools. Git and Magit just perform massively better.

Perfect.. this will allow me to run GUI apps in a container.

I did a similar thing with X11, but I didn't like so much.

Bit by bit, Apple is loosing it's Desktop position. It all starts at the developers. At soon, every person will be a "developer".

In reply to then throwaway.

Anything I want sandboxed or “grouped”.

Work on a project -> open the relevant container.

Similar to parallels window integration mode.

It’s all from shortcomings to have a hierarchical view on your data and applications.

Goal: isolation. Security-wise, and focus-wise

> Bit by bit, Apple is loosing it's Desktop position.

Apple never really had much of a desktop position to start with.

And their desktop position has always been a higher share than Linux, so I don't really see how this changes much in that regard.

Take away the desktop.. then why stay integrated in the rest of the ecosystem? Why pay for iCloud when it's not gonna work on all your devices? etc.

This looks like slop? The README is full of emojis and kind of incoherent, there are no implementation details, there claims to be a Metal backend that doesn't seem to exist, etc.

The dependency list is also...something: https://github.com/J-x-Z/cocoa-way/tree/main/vendor

This is definitely not worth using. It doesn't even say what hypervisor its using. Is it using QEMU? Docker? Podman? Lima? Colima?

And also this chart is super weird:

    Solution  Latency  HiDPI    Native Integration  Setup Complexity
    Cocoa-Way Low      Yes      Native windows      Easy
    XQuartz   High     Partial  X11 quirks          Medium
    VNC       High     No       Full screen         Medium
    VM GUI    High     Partial  Separate window     Complex

A standard VM will always be the easiest to set up by far. And latency should be the same across all 4. I mean after all it's a VM running on your local machine. Honestly I don't even know what it means when it says "Latency".

I also looked at some of the code and it's using OpenGL 3.3 Core which is... super old. But it makes sense in the context of this being LLM-generated since most of its training data is probably OpenGL 3.3 Core code....

Overall this project is very strange. It makes me feel more confident in my skills, AI isn't all that great. It's all hype. You can get to the frontpage of HN. And if you're Peter Steinberger you can get acquired by OpenAI for a billion dollars. But that's about it. The code isn't getting any better.

This reminds me of that C-compiler-in-Rust publicity stunt by Anthropic. There's no substance. It's just a headline.

While I agree with the rest of your comment, they do mention they use OrbStack as their hypervisor in their demo video.

Gotcha thanks for that info. Yeah that's insane. You have to read the description of a YouTube video to understand what a project on Github is doing. There is no architecture here.

Right under the the link to the video the README states:

> True protocol portability: Cocoa-Way rendering Linux apps from OrbStack via Unix sockets.

And it's been there for at least two months.

Good eye.

I agree with most of your points, but why would a Wayland compositor need a hypervisor at all?

> It doesn't even say what hypervisor its using. Is it using QEMU? Docker? Podman? Lima? Colima?

I don't think it is, you use whatever you want and then run this to connect to Wayland on it? It could even be a separate machine, Linux host, aiui.

You are correct. I jumped the gun there, a little bit.

Very interesting, can this run something like android using waydroid within Orbstack too?

It would then essentially run android on macos as well, I do feel like it should be possible.

I need something like this for android, termux-x11 is a good start but if termux gets wayland support or there is a way to expose wayland sockets from the android native linux VM, the only thing missing is a native rendering compositor for a smoother experience

Now, if only macOS still had the ability to drop to a Darwin shell without a GUI at all… we could just have a nice UNIX with something like KDE or COSMIC, brew as our package manager… what a dream.

But why MacOS then? If you take away the interface what differentiates Darwin from FreeBSD or GNU?

Performance on apple chipsets!

That it will actually run on Apple Silicon.

TBH, I would love to install GNU or BSD on my M4 Max Mac Studio. What I really wanted is a modern UNIX workstation. My Studio’s price/performance was the best available, so that’s what I bought. Now, I am happy with that purchase except for the constant diminution in software quality from Apple.

If I could buy modern apple hardware and run the Linux of my choice, I probably would. I have 0 interest in the apple ecosystem.

I wish I could get an Apple SoC in a 2013 Thinkpad chassis.

On intel macs there used to be single user mode, but even then I don't think you ever had control over the framebuffer.

Yeah, why stick to the inferior kernel used by macs with a worse package manager? Like something like nix is just superior in every sense.

Wow. Would this allow a macos-based wayland-client to create an EGL surface?

Neat, but wouldn't it be better to have the windows as "seamless"? I.e. not contained within another window.

A matter of taste: when I use wine on Linux I prefer to confine all window to a single "real" window. In truth: I suspect that your suggestions is more work to pull off properly.

Wonder if this will bring at least a tiny amount of interest to GNUstep.

Now if we could switch MacOS to use Win/Linux keyboard commands, MacOS wouldn't be so insufferable

I mean, you can simply use Linux and save yourself all those hacks…

Absolutely. I went through great lengths to install Asahi on my work M1, only to have most things not work (RTFM). So when one is forced to use MacOS, may it round corners in hell, for work…

Maybe try this: https://ke-complex-modifications.pqrs.org/#pc_shortcuts

Yeah I've used Karabiner to get windows-style shortcuts (home/end, etc.) and it works very well.

Aside: the new, large radius Liquid Ass corners that make some parts of the window basically unusable are really annoying me.

Super key for most keybinds is much nicer than windows in my opinion, where it is entirely wasted on opening the start menu. On Linux it gains a few functions based on the desktop environment but not much.

The use of the Windows key extends far beyond the start menu. Builtin functions include window management, invoking programs on the taskbar, locking the computer, invoking Explorer and Settings, invoking and controlling accessibility functions like Magnifier. The Microsoft Power Toys add a lot of functions using the Windows key by default as well, like screen snipping, screen OCR, color picking, enhanced clipboard, and many more.

That’s still like 10 uses vs unlimited uses on macOS

It may be ten uses, but it's ten uses I use constantly throughout the day.

Even just the window management category is more than ten uses. And it is unlimited uses, as you can assign additional shortcuts however you like.

You must not use MacOS. Command gets used all over the place, even during editing. And in Emacs it gets used as Super, which opens up some options.

Having a key reserved for OS level actions means you can create your own shortcuts and macros based on it without fear of it conflicting with each app shortcuts.

Since operating systems also don't change often nowadays there is also seldomly any conflicts when a new system shortcut is added.

I also love good old Meta + left click/right click drag for moving and resizing windows in linux.

My problem is that I don’t use the majority of these functions at all. Command I can use for almost everything no matter how frequent or infrequent. It also replaces most “ctrl+shift” binds which is a great plus for me.

Many of the keyboard commands are configurable in settings, complete with switching cmd and ctrl keys around. Or you can get used in a week or two when switching, this is what I did years ago and now for me Win/Linux is confusing and find the location of the command key more ergonomic on a Mac.

Here some history on how the command key came to be https://www.folklore.org/Swedish_Campground.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_key

Incredibly L take. macOS keyboard commands are great for working in the terminal since system shortcuts use a different key and don't interfere with control codes

Exactly. You don’t have the terminal itself fight with whatever is running on the other side of the term.

As someone that switches between MacOS (dayjob) and Linux (my own PCs) workstations daily - I wish I could do the opposite for Linux. MacOS keyboard shortcuts are just way more intuitive to me, and they are way more consistent across applications.

Sorry having to use ctrl+shift for in a terminal is absolutely awful. macOS keyboard shortcuts are king.

agree. I guess it's a force of habit, but I am so used to the cmd+<whatever> (specially copy & paste) shortcuts, that I configured them into my linux desktop to behave the same way

Being limited to just control and alt definitely cuts down on the options. Conversely, having MacOS command key act as “super” in Emacs opens up some possibilities.

You totally can, I used Karabiner-Elements to switch command (behaves like ctrl), option (behaves like alt) and control (behaves ~ like super and like control in terminal) to their usual positions. (You could do this even with bare system settings but iirc they could not switch around differently the left and right keys.)

Then I set up a few shortcuts that were different on macOS I actually used, plus a port of a Linux keyboard layout (I think the US layout mostly matches but I use a national one which differs in the AltGr layer). Surprisingly configurable for an Apple product.

Server-side decorations "with shadows and focus indicators" -- is it not using macOS's native window chrome? Pass... Add OpenGL instead of Metal, and hard pass.

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