alt Hacker NewsWhat allows Wine to run so many Windows apps that there's not an equivalent for MacOS? Is it lack of interest? Is it a technical thing? I'd even be willing to limit to x86 apps. Or maybe there is and I'm just really out of touch??
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At a guess: the "killer apps" are things like MS Office and Photoshop, and since they are usually available on both Windows and Mac, there's not such a pressing demand to support similar functionality for Mac apps if the Windows version is easy to obtain.
GNUstep ran early MacOS apps on Linux after Apple bought Next and adopted their APIs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUstep
I don't think the project kept up with changes to the APIs over the decades compared to how well the Wine project kept up with changes in Windows.
> What allows Wine to run so many Windows apps that there's not an equivalent for MacOS? Is it lack of interest? Is it a technical thing?
It is a technical thing.
The XNU[0] kernel, which underpins macOS and is detailed by the exceptional book "Mac OS X internals"[1], can theoretically run on many x86 and/or ARM machines. However, the issue with running macOS apps via other operating systems is not the OS, but instead are the GUI frameworks expected (i.e., Carbon[2], Quartz[3], etc.). These frameworks are intentionally written for Apple hardware/macOS distros. Which makes sense when viewing macOS as a selling point for selling Mac's.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
1 - https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17205558M/Mac_OS_X_internals
While the productivity apps are mentioned in the other comments of this reply, games are another reason. There are far more games on Windows to port and handle than macOS games. And in that case, you got a financial desire in the form of Valve and its Steam store. macOS games tend to be ports from Windows and are usually less featureful.
> What allows Wine to run so many Windows apps that there's not an equivalent for MacOS?
Backwards compatibility. Apple changes their API every year or so, usually for no good reason.
> What allows Wine to run so many Windows apps that there's not an equivalent for MacOS?
A lot of work done over 3 decades. Wine also started when Win32 was something comprehensible by one person, so they could build it up slowly.
Wine has been going for a very long time - since 1993.
When it started Windows was a lot smaller, so getting Windows 3.1 programs working was probably enough.
There's too much history to cover in a quick comment.
Wine has a lots of things that help - the compatibility database https://appdb.winehq.org/ is a good place for people to submit info on apps for instance, there's also a big test suite that runs against Windows + Wine.
Both of these have been around since the 1990s - Darling is at an earlier stage, but once GUI apps run better both of those are good ideas to adopt.
I think Darling probably needs more people working on it.
The whole are of Metal on Vulkan looks interesting https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/issues/390#issuecomment...