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Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

Now that I've switched mostly to OSX, and with many apps moved to "the cloud" and virtual machines, Wine is getting rapidly irrelevant (to me!).

However, I wonder if a project similar to Wine will be needed in a few years, to run OSX applications.

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There actually is at least one try for a project that (wants to) run OS X applications on Linux, but I have no idea how far it is.

http://darling.dolezel.info/en/Darling

There's Darling, to run OSX applications in Linux: http://darling.dolezel.info/ .

I've always thought this would be easier to make than Wine, since OSX is already Unix-like, Darwin is free software, GNUStep already has a lot of the Cocoa base classes and Mac apps use GL instead of D3D. You'd be able to get programs like Photoshop running on Linux with the added bonus of them being able to understand Unix paths.

There's a lot less demand for Mac OS specific applications on Linux than there is for Windows. A lot more people start with Windows and try to move to Linux (bringing their windows applications in wine with them) than start with Mac OS and try to switch. Not to mention the Wine project goes way way back, whereas Mac OS really only started to get popular (again) with Mac OS X.

This is becoming my sort of goto config.

I used to have Windows and xwin32 and I would run my stuff on FreeBSD or Linux, and use Windows as my "mainstream OS when I needed to print things and/or listen to things."

Eventually my gear could run the Linux server in a virtual machine. Then I started running Windows in a virtual machine to avoid browser vulnerabilities (create a clean instance, browse for a while, then burn it).

I am almost to the point where I can boot Linux natively and run Windows in a VM (except for the occasional game) but I do less of that so its not as big a deal. I did an Atmel seminar where the whole time my "windows" machine was just a VirtualBox instance running full screen on my Lenovo T430. That was a perfectly acceptable experience.

On this topic, I thought I could use a service like BrowserStack to do all of my Windows/IE testing in the cloud. However, I found that the latency was still too much. I agree that you have to run less and less on local Windows, but there are quite a few things that still require it, and for those, I'm really happy that Wine's around and I can use a VM on my own machine.

Isn't Mac these days a UNIX-like OS on x86? What happens if you just move a Mac binary to a Linux machine (with all its dependencies) and try to run it?

I'm assuming it'll break, but what difference between the two OS's makes it break?

> Isn't Mac these days a UNIX-like OS on x86?

Not exactly. Mac OS does include a BSD subsystem and behaves more like a Unix than it behaves like Windows. But it is still significantly it's own thing.

The Mac kernel is XNU. Nearly all Mac apps use Cocoa. The Mac filesystem is HFS+. Hardware is managed through IOKit. The list goes on but basically every major system service is written for Mac OS and does not have any direct compatibility with other OSes.

Well, first of all, OS X is based on BSD and not Linux, which would affect even simple command line utilities. (I'm not even sure the kernel ABI is compatible.)

More to the point, there's the lack of Mac-specific frameworks (e.g. Cocoa) on which most Mac applications rely.

They use different object file formats, different system calls, different library loading procedures, and on and on. Even if Mac OS X had the actual Linux kernel, the windowing interfaces are completely different.

To put it simply, it would take about the same effort to port a Linux application to Mac as it would to Windows. Everything talks differently, and you have to adapt for that.

I'm gonna stop you there—this isn't true. Yes, the interfaces are completely different, but if you can sidestep that (command line tools, games go directly to OpenGL), the systems are very compatible. I've written a LOT of hairy code that is perfectly compatible and would be straightforward to emulate.

I've often wondered how hard this would be, there's a lot of games released for OSX that aren't released at all for linux that you could play with a piece of software like that. Feels like it should be easier than implementing D3D, etc.

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