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Darling: Run Apple OS X Binaries On Linux

Posted by Soulskill on from the sure-thing-sweetheart dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After having Wine to run Windows binaries on Linux, there is now the Darling Project that allows users to run unmodified Apple OS X binaries on Linux. The project builds upon GNUstep and has built the various frameworks/libraries to be binary compatible with OSX/Darwin. The project is still being worked on as part of an academic thesis but is already running basic OS X programs."

4 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. How long before... by rbprbp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... Apple finds a loophole and sues this developer into oblivion?

    --
    They're there in their room. You're on your own.
    1. Re:How long before... by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Companies don't just sue people for no reason. For Apple to sue Darling, there'd have to be some kind of motivation for them to do so. Otherwise it would:

      1. Waste a lot of money.
      2. Cause a lot of ill-feeling
      3. Possibly set precedents that bind it in future in a way damaging to Apple in the long term.

      It's hard to see what kind of threat this product would be to Apple, and in theory it might even be a benefit.

      Apple's market is based upon people liking the way Apple's devices work. With a small number of famous exceptions, few people buy Apple because of the exclusive availability of a particular piece of software. By and large, the vast majority of people interested in Apple's products aren't going to be interested in Ubuntu with a software compatibility layer. Of the few left who need a Mac for a particular piece of professional software, few are going to risk running that software on an unsupported compatibility layer.

      I find it very improbable Apple will sue. I think they'll ignore it.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  2. Re:But by eyegor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because as good as OS X is, it's not a particularly good server platform and requires Mac hardware, while Linux has been around for ages, runs on commodity hardware, has a very well supported number of open source packages and is considered mainstream by most Unix admins.

    As a server platform, OS X suffers from the same problem as Solaris. You need the vendor supplied hardware to get it to run well. Solaris is a dying OS because Sun and Oracle supplied hardware is too expensive and just isn't worth it when you can get three times the computing power for less money, and X86 Solaris is frankly crap, since it has such a small hardware compatibility list.

    I don't mention BSD since it's not really mainstream any longer. It's a good OS, but lacks overall vendor support.

    All that being said, I prefer OS X systems for my workstation and CentOS or Scientific Linux for servers. Redhat's nice, but overpriced when you need to deploy a lot of systems.

    --

    Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
  3. Re:What about the rest of the APIs? by cr_nucleus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You mean a project that just started with a single guy isn't complete or near completion ?

    Yeah it's gonna be tough but it doesn't mean it can't be useful or grow much bigger than it is now (rember this thing called Linux ?).