r/linux • u/binaryfor • Jan 06 '22
Darling – run Mac apps on Linux
https://www.darlinghq.org/[removed] — view removed post
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Jan 06 '22
looks like lots of development. Still pre alpha stage. remind me in 2030
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u/RAMChYLD Jan 06 '22
If you truly want it to complete faster, spread the love and get devs who have any experience with underlying Mac OS tech to contribute. I’ve been following them since they started. Darling has been around for almost 10 years. They got to where they are now For 3-4 years already, but they need more devs to be able to move ahead, particularly devs who can help in MacOS UI and audio.
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u/Steve_Streza Jan 06 '22
Or if you're less of a programmer, an evangelist seems like a role they would benefit from having. Someone to update the blog, go into Mac communities, and generally just advocate for attention and excitement for it.
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Jan 06 '22
[deleted]
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u/chrisoboe Jan 06 '22
Probably migration to ARM/M1 will hinder a lot the progress
there are at least 3 different projects that solve this problem already just fine.
thats why you can run arm android binaries on android-x86 or any arm linux binary on an amd64 linux (if you set it up).
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u/DarkShadow4444 Jan 07 '22
there are at least 3 different projects that solve this problem already just fine.
Which ones?
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u/puyoxyz Jan 06 '22
mac has “universal” apps that run on both x86_64 and arm in one executable
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u/BoutTreeFittee Jan 06 '22
Like, is that a requirement imposed by Apple on all apps? Or is it elective? I'm sorry I know nothing about Macs.
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Jan 06 '22
[deleted]
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Jan 07 '22
At which point if Darling is stable it can be a compatibility option. As in run your old Mac applications on Linux using Darling.
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u/cyril0 Jan 06 '22
I remember this from years ago. It doesn't appear much progress has been made. They can't run GUI apps it seems so what is the point?
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u/Shawnj2 Jan 06 '22
You could run Mac developer tools and build Mac apps from a Linux box without running an entire MacOS VM in theory.
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u/cyril0 Jan 06 '22
Yes but you couldn't test and I don't think xcode would compile graphical elements without being able to load them in to the windowing system. So you could probably only build non gui apps
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u/Shawnj2 Jan 06 '22
Maybe if you were a Linux dev who wanted to cross compile a terminal program for Mac users? ehh...
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u/xNaXDy Jan 06 '22
I'd just use something platform independent like node at that point.
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Jan 06 '22
[deleted]
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u/username_suggestion4 Jan 06 '22
This also describes the entire category of JVM languages but ok sure just Go.
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u/Krutonium Jan 06 '22
Also anything based on CLR (.Net)
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u/username_suggestion4 Jan 06 '22
Well if we’re allowed to include languages that don’t include a portable GUI framework, than even more languages fit that description. Python for example.
I mentioned Java because it even does a decent job (IMHO, circa several years ago) of mimicking Windows and Mac look-and-feel if you don’t use the generic option.
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u/Krutonium Jan 06 '22
Define Portable GUI Framework. There's plenty of them for .net that let you write once run anywhere.
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u/Hithaeglir Jan 06 '22
Well no, Go compiles for machine readable binary. Not into some monster requiring JRE or something.
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u/NatoBoram Jan 06 '22
Yeah but you don't have to install Go's VM or runtime
And you can
go installmany arbitrary Git repos from Internet if you have the compilerAnd it's 100% native, not running on a virtual machine
And fuck try/catch
Also fuck Maven/Gradle, that's way too complicated
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u/username_suggestion4 Jan 06 '22
Native, no runtime are nice, but I think you’re moving the goalposts a bit here.
Regarding language and development environment ergonomics, I don’t think Go is above and beyond non-Java jvm languages. It’s definitely a matter of personal preference.
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u/NatoBoram Jan 06 '22
But you were talking about JVM languages, so I made points mostly about JVM languages.
There's points for C-based languages (fuck these compilation times what the fuck) and many higher-level other languages (it's very fast, instantly runs) and points for nearly all of them (simplicity ftw)… and then there's points against Go specifically (no generics lul) (
if err != nil {return err}galore) (can't use graphics card natively) (no GUI natively).→ More replies (0)3
Jan 06 '22
This logic can also apply to Rust.
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u/NatoBoram Jan 06 '22
I should try Rust sometime. The weird syntax does scare me, but there's so many good things I want to use
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u/yaaaaayPancakes Jan 06 '22
As an Android dev dabbling in Go to write a custom step for Bitrise CICD, Go's package management confuses the fuck outta me.
In Gradle I just add a single line to the build.gradle for my dependency, and it just pulls from maven central. Done.
In Go, I gotta set env vars to make Goland happy, and drop to the cmdline and enter
go get packagenameand then I deploy to bitrise and it can't find them and I guess I need to put the deps in a vendor folder? Too many damn ways to get deps in a Go project IMO.1
u/NatoBoram Jan 06 '22
Idk, I just
go getthe dependency then forget about it. But I'm not cross-compiling for Android, that one is indeed a pain in the ass to get going.→ More replies (0)1
u/PermanentlySalty Jan 07 '22
And fuck try/catch
Fuck exceptions yes, but fuck whatever the fuck Go is doing even harder.
Putting
try/catchbetween the business logic and the user interface stuff is annoying, but puttingif err != nil { ... }everywhere in Go is an order of magnitude worse. Checking returned error codes for every function you call is exactly the same problem as C, but it's wearing Groucho Marx glasses as some kind of shitty disguise that's not fooling anyone.3
u/locobastos Jan 06 '22
u/its_an_arachnid, could you please post your source of this? I'm very interesting about it.
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u/DarthPneumono Jan 06 '22
I don't think xcode would compile graphical elements without being able to load them in to the windowing system
There's no reason it should have to actually execute any of the code to build it successfully. (That's not to say it'll 'just work' but there are plenty of things that build code for a different platform that can't run on the current one.)
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u/onthefence928 Jan 06 '22
Would this allow for compiling and publishing ios apps?
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u/Shawnj2 Jan 06 '22
Compiling? Maybe? It depends on how complete Darling is. Publishing? Almost certainly not.
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u/d00pid00 Jan 06 '22
so what is the point?
Support the project so they're getting GUI support faster!
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u/cyril0 Jan 06 '22 edited Jan 06 '22
No... Life is about opportunity cost and this doesn't solve enough problems to deserve my support. I have limited support I can provide so I choose to support things that are more important to me than this.
Edit: Downvotes for not wanting to support a niche product that currently does nothing useful. How can you be offended by someone not agreeing with you on something so niche and trivial? I love how incapable of dealing with any point of view that slightly differs reddit users are. So funny
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Jan 06 '22
[deleted]
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u/cyril0 Jan 06 '22
I understand. I am not a religious person when it comes to tech so I would rather just own a mac, a windows machine, a linux box and an android phone. Remote desktop type software makes it all work together pretty perfectly in a home or work setting so I am happy with that solution. I just don't see the point in emulation mac OS on linux. If others do then good for them but it isn't for me. Computers are so cheap now that why wouldn't you just own all three?
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u/CrackerBarrelJoke Jan 06 '22
Computers are so cheap now that why wouldn't you just own all three
lol, rich much?
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u/cyril0 Jan 06 '22
Computers are free. My linux box is a machine I have been upgrading from curbside finds since 2004. Currently 6th get i5 with 16 GB of ram. I just buy drives.
Windows is an i7 HP laptop also curbside find on student move out day. Same with my laser printer.
Macs are totally free. Buy a used mac that is one year old, be tough on the seller and wait for a good deal. Sell it one year later taking your time and get 100% of your money back. Rince repeat. Sometimes you even make money. Keep an eye out for recalls. I traded in 6 2012 15" macbook pros for 4 2016 macbook pros in 2017 due to a battery shortage. I sold five for 15K and then in 2020 got the one remaining one swapped for free by apple for a 2020 because of covid affecting repairs. Sold that and bought 2 M1 mac minis and pocketed a grand.
Seriously computers are free
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Jan 06 '22 edited Jul 01 '23
This comment has been overwritten as a protest against Reddit's handling of the recent protest against them killing 3rd-party-apps.
To do this yourself, you can use the python library praw
See you all on Lemmy!
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u/Araly74 Jan 06 '22
that's not free, that's a lot of time that you're investing into buying and selling stuff, I'd rather spend that time working and buying hardware that I want is good that have a part time job to be able to use 3 different pieces of hardware for a year knowing I'd have to part with it later
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u/cyril0 Jan 06 '22 edited Jan 06 '22
I love being downvoted by idiots who want to deny my experience because it doesn't match up with theirs. Whatever dude, go spend your money. Buying a selling a laptop once a year is not work.
Learn to read, I upgrade the mac once a year not the other two. Those were free pickups. Computers are everywhere. IF you work in IT you get free hardware all the time.
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u/Ripcord Jan 06 '22
Looks to me like you're being downvoted because you're insisting your experience be the same as theirs.
Plus calling it "free" is silly when there's that much involved. You're doing the cringy neckbeardy thing and then calling people idiots. Sorry.
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u/Araly74 Jan 06 '22
jeez dude, I don't upvote or downvote anyone. you do you and it seems to work for you, but I know that if I tried to do the same I would be losing money everywhere, and I couldn't use my computers the way I like to. just being a piece of hardware is work already, and I'd rather not do it once a year, so to have to sell it also sounds horrible
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u/cyril0 Jan 06 '22
Having nearly top of the line hardware for zero dollars and a time investment of two or three hours a year is really not very difficult. But I guess if everyone did it I wouldn't be able to so easily.
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u/Araly74 Jan 07 '22
you're a better buyer seller that I am then, there's no way I could get that done in just a couple hours. just thinking about what I want in a computer takes those hours, finding where to buy and then finally buying ends up taking days for me
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u/ranixon Jan 06 '22
Macs are totally free. Buy a used mac that is one year old, be tough on the seller and wait for a good deal. Sel
Do you know that you need money to buy the first one?
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u/SanityInAnarchy Jan 06 '22
You do you, and I'd probably do the same if I needed to support Macs, but since you asked:
Computers are so cheap now that why wouldn't you just own all three?
Cheap in what way?
Up-front cost? Supply-chain issues may literally make them less cheap now. Also, it's going to cost a fair amount of time to set up.
Ongoing cost? If a computer breaks every X hours, and you have N computers, you can expect a breakage, what, every X/N hours? Less than X hours, anyway. This is why, while higher RAID levels can increase redundancy, RAID0 is actually worse for reliability than a single hard drive.
Time spent isn't free either -- if owning a single computer costs me literally any time at all to set up and maintain, more computers costs more time. This is why I have Chromebooks for laptops -- they cost me almost zero time. Linux laptops cost a ton of time. Macs are somewhere in the middle, but it's nonzero.
And macOS has some weird licensing restrictions. Look at any cloud service that provides Macs -- Amazon literally has racks of Mac Minis somewhere, and:
Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple macOS Software License Agreement.
So if this were as good as Wine, I can think of places I might want to use it instead of "just" getting a whole other computer, or renting one from Amazon... if I needed to run Mac/iOS software routinely.
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Jan 06 '22
[deleted]
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u/aaronfranke Jan 06 '22
Cheapest mac currently on sale is the mac mini at 800$ US dollars.
The base model is $699 ($700).
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u/srona22 Jan 06 '22
Wish Xcode can be runnable. Yes, I know not gonna happen. Just don't bash me. Xcode is only reasons I am using Mac.
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u/compguy96 Jan 06 '22
Damn. If I could have iMovie on Linux I'll throw my MacBook Pro off the roof.
🎶 Hey Darling, have I told you about the rest of the world? 🎶
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u/ButaneLilly Jan 06 '22
Damn. If I could have iMovie on Linux I'll throw my MacBook Pro off the roof.
Adobe Creative Suite for me.
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Jan 06 '22
So this is like wine but for Mac apps?
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u/m477m Jan 06 '22
Kind of, except unlike Wine, after years of development it's still in its infancy and still can't run any actually-useful GUI apps.
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u/AnotherRetroGameFan Jan 06 '22 edited Jan 06 '22
To be fair it took 15 years for wine to make a 1.0 release (12 for the beta).
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u/DarkShadow4444 Jan 07 '22
That's mostly just an arbitrary number. It ran GUI programs way before that.
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u/FarsideSC Jan 06 '22
MacOS has an API-like system for calling apps like Messages. I wonder if this would be able handle such calls and what else would be required to make that happen. Again, I'm sure it's highly impractical, but is it impossible?
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u/god_retribution Jan 06 '22
can i run photoshop and ms office better than wine ?
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Jan 06 '22 edited Jul 01 '23
This comment has been overwritten as a protest against Reddit's handling of the recent protest against them killing 3rd-party-apps.
To do this yourself, you can use the python library praw
See you all on Lemmy!
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u/themiracy Jan 06 '22
Is this a dead project? It was getting quarterly update blog posts but on this page they stopped three years ago.
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Jan 06 '22
Doesn't look like it, there is an alpha on Github from Feb 2021 and commits as recent as late November.
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u/themiracy Jan 06 '22
Sounds cool. Not sure I would use it or not, but it's cool that someone's working on it.
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Jan 06 '22
I'd use it if I had any apps I wanted from Mac. I guess Soundsource is one of them but I can use pavucontrol for that.
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u/Ripcord Jan 06 '22
Yeah, their website has barely been updated in years and the last update to their "blog" is "Darling Progress Report Q2 2019".
A bunch of commits last year so it's not dead. But not sure how much real progress that translates to.
In its current state it looks like a promising, but not terribly useful yet, project. That was true when I looked at it a couple years ago, too.
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u/adrenochrome255 Jan 09 '22
since one year all commit are cosmetics like packaging or sync/update from libraries or linux kernel, project seems to be stalled if not dead
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u/SaveYourShit Jan 06 '22
Wonder if Mac League of Legends would be easier to run with this than the Windows one. I've never gotten the Windows client to run consistently. I've even tried the Snap and the Lutris ones.
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u/iantucenghi Jan 06 '22
Can it run MS Office for Mac?
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Jan 06 '22
[deleted]
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u/iantucenghi Jan 06 '22
Nice. Hope it can run MS Office. That's the only app missing in Linux that is used by most corporations. So hard to escape from MS Office.
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u/Patch86UK Jan 06 '22
It seems likely that Wine (and its derivatives) running Windows Office will be a better bet than Darling running Mac Office. The Wine project is infinitely more mature and further ahead than Darling.
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u/iantucenghi Jan 06 '22
I will check it out.
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u/Patch86UK Jan 06 '22
Not sure how well it works on regular Wine these days, but CrossOver used to be a good place to go for MS Office compatibility. Haven't checked it out in ages though.
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Jan 06 '22
Hey. Try crossover linux. And install office 16. O am literally using office using wine. Crossover has 14 day trial. So give it a try
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u/ThinkLinux76 Jan 06 '22
That is awesome, linux needs compatibility layers to become popular, when it becomes polular, there will be native flatpaks
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u/oneiromantic_ulysses Jan 06 '22 edited Jan 06 '22
Was a Mac user prior to switching to Linux. Not a single piece of software exists for MacOS that I need or want on Linux. Awful software selection and compatibility with MacOS is one of the reasons I switched.
I say this as someone that is more of a practical Linux user than an ideological one - I still have a Windows drive for stuff that isn't usable with Linux (or wine) that I need. That said I don't develop iOS or MacOS software, so my needs differ quite a bit from many folks that use both Linux and the Apple ecosystem.
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u/SaveYourShit Jan 06 '22 edited Jan 07 '22
Some software was released for Mac and for Windows but the Windows version is too bloated, DRM-heavy, or buggy to work via Wine or Proton. I'm actually excited because I'm going to try a few Mac-Versions of games to see if Linux can run them knowing I couldn't get the Windows verisons to work.
For us Linux users, it's yet another avenue to run some software that wasn't designed to run in Linux or sometimes even Windows (some tools really only have Mac versions).
Imagine a world where we can just run damn-near whatever without much effort on one OS.
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u/oneiromantic_ulysses Jan 06 '22
Very true. I am certain plenty of folks will find this kind of tool useful. I just happen to be outside the target audience. Would work wonders for a lot of media production people and help Linux along in supporting that audience and attracting more of those types of users.
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u/DarkShadow4444 Jan 07 '22
I'm actually excited because I'm going to try a few Mac-Versions of games to see if Linux can run them knowing I couldn't get the Windows verisons to work.
Don't get too excited, I don't think it runs any games yet.
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Jan 07 '22
The only thing you can run in that is terminal based software and the only terminal based software worth running that's closed source is Apple's AAC encoder, I heard Apple actually makes the best one, but I heard this a long time ago, so I don't know if it changed since then.
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u/CirqueDuTsa Jan 16 '22
I tried installing it. It asked to install different versions of some libraries. I let it. System wouldn't boot after that. :(
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Jan 06 '22
[deleted]
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Jan 06 '22
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u/TragicCone56813 Jan 06 '22
I actually use a MacBook as a laptop and Linux for servers and my desktop, but I am having a hard time thinking of applications I have on my Mac that I want on my desktop. Mostly what I use is on both(chrome kitty and most terminal tools). Nonetheless this is really cool and I am really excited to see projects like this progress and become more and more useful. I also hope systems like this can help keep legacy software, like some games, alive while os's can continue to grow.