Running Mac Software on Linux: Good Luck

Out of curiosity I went looking to see if there are any macOS compatibility layers for Linux these days, similar to Wine for running Windows applications.

Good: I found Darling, which handles the low-level translation and can run command-line programs compiled for Darwin, but doesn’t have much in the way of GUI support. (If I ever need to run the XCode CLI tools on a Linux box, though, this will be the way to do it.)

Bad: A tech article that looked like someone copy-pasted an article about Wine and replaced every instance of “Windows” with “MacOS.”

Ugly: Running macOS in a virtual machine. Good luck with that! (Apple does support macOS virtual machines…on a physical Mac. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to run a macOS VM on Windows or Linux.)

That’s about it, which is, frankly, more than I expected!

Apple really wants you to buy their hardware, even when what you want is to build software for someone else who’s bought their hardware.

Of course, most FOSS programs that run on macOS can be compiled for Linux anyway. When there’s no Linux version of a proprietary macOS app, there’s often a Windows version that can run under Wine. And even when it’s macOS-specific, there’s usually something that will do the same job.