Submitted by Fancy running iWork on Linux? It may one day be possible courtesy of a project to get Apple OS X programs running on Linux-based operating systems.Similar to how Wine allows Windows applications to run in Linux OS, the Darling project is trying to build a software compatibility layer to run OS X apps.
I obviously doubt the attainability of the project’s goals, but this will be a fantastic coding experience for the programmers involved.
How long will it take before cease and desist letters are sent out from Apple? Trolls.
Honestly, given the fact that Apple seems much worse than Microsoft with “ownership” issues, I figure Darling will be hammered sooner than Wine.
If you listen hard enough you can already hear the scratching of pens on paper. Lol.
How so? Darwin is open source software. If they are doing what they claim, there’s a long way they can go before they hit the need for the closed parts of OSX’s API. Cocoa is heavily rooted in the OpenStep API, which was an open specification. There are already projects doing this kind of thing at an API level, Cocotron being the obvious one. If Apple were going to throw its weight around, surely Cocotron and the various iOS UI kit compatibility layers for OS X would have been closed by now?
Darwin is the Unix layer of OSX. I really doubt Darling needs to invest any effort and copy API from Darwin to achieve their goals.
Edit: beside dynamic linking of dylib (or converting dylib to so)
Edited 2013-08-03 07:43 UTC
OS X uses a completely different executable format, library format and also, external to Darwin, the Objective C runtime. All of this needs to be analysed and implemented. That’s what I was implying. If you are implementing an executable loader, surely using an open source implementation as a starting point will get you a head start.
If Microsoft could get rid of Wine, they’d probably have done so a long a time ago. Given the problem of trying to quash something where there’s no single company to attack and the wide availability of the source code.
Technically, this seems more feasible than WINE, because of the common Unix underpinnings, and OSX’s heavy reliance on open source software in various places. From my understanding (which is limited to be honest) OSX doesn’t pack in a million backwards compatiblity hacks either, which could just make things even easier compared with WINE.
If Wine is possible, I can’t see why this isn’t. It’d be great for some games too, since OSX games are all targeting OpenGL, which is easier to wrap to Linux drivers than D3D.
Plus there’s GNUstep which already provides some source compatibility.
Implement cocoa on GNUstep and write a Darwin layer similar to BSD’s Linux layer
Edited 2013-08-02 20:08 UTC
Doesn’t seem that hard… except GNUstep have been trying to reimplement Cocoa for about a decade now, and there’s still no apps for that environment. Outside of GNUstep’s 20-odd part-time coders there’s not enough manpower to cover both projects.
Frankly I’d be happy to just see multitabbed terminal, and a webbrowser implemented in gnustep. With stretch goals being a music player/database ala itunes implemented, and an extreme stretch goal of System Preferences tapping into X11/Pulseaudio to setup system settings.
Hell, even a wrapped web browser would be better than my Apple style menu bar disappearing everytime I go online, like it currently does. Mantella from Etoile project used to exist, but since firefox killed the old way to embed gecko there’s nothing.
GNUstep is my favourite Desktop project and sadly the one seeing the least attention/developers
Most GNUstep developers have given up on the apps and are focused on the API which is a real shame. The apps could really fix what’s broken on the Linux desktop. All GNUstep apps work the same way, can be configured to work like OSX/Windows/NextStep applications, which let’s the user decide which paradigm they prefer. just Defaults write menustyle NSMacintoshStyle to make your apps work like OSX, menu bar at the top of the screen for all and Defaults write menustyle NSWindowsStyle to get Windows style menus in each application window. It’s a real shame.
Edited 2013-08-03 21:51 UTC
Darwin + Linux=Darling. Good lord. Find a better name for the project.
How about Darlin’? =P
It sounds “southern”, hence sexier if said by the right kind of female.
What if by the wrong kind of female?
So you’ve been to Georgia.
(Kidding, of course; I met my lovely wife on the other side of Atlanta.)
I’m not so concerned with the name as I am with the feasibility of the project, but it’s nice to think about. And the ultimate irony would be to run GNU/Linux or Darwin on Mac hardware, which then would use Darling to run OS X apps, without the Aqua GUI.
If I could get Panic’s wonderful binary newreader Unison to run on Linux, I’d probably have to offer up my first born son in recompense*.
*I only have my daughter at the moment and I plan on keeping her as long as possible. If I do have a son, all terms are subject to change without prior notification.
I fully agree, Unison is the best news reader I have ever used. I love Unison and I love Transmit which I purchased as well. Panic is an awesome company!
Adrian
Since it doesn’t have the dominance of Microsoft Office, does iWork have any particular advantage over just running Open Office or Libre Office on Linux?
Edited 2013-08-02 22:33 UTC
Imho,
I’ve seen a few complaints about Pages from various word processing people. Gets the job done for me, but I’m no secretary. Never used Numbers heavily, so can’t really comment on how it compares to Excel. Keynote is totally worth it, though.
Edited 2013-08-02 22:53 UTC
there’s also office for mac.
And what about Photoshop and other adobe apps. Would be great to have Photoshop running on Linux.
Wine already does that. Is there someting in the Mac version that makes it better and worth the effort?
It isn’t really a competitor for Microsoft Office. Pages and Keynote genuinely make much heavier use of templates. Documents look good but are more constrained in their look and feel. Keynote is more or less on par with Powerpoint features wise, but Pages isn’t close to the depth of features of Word.
Numbers is even more different. From a spreadsheet perspective it follows the philosophy of Lotus Improv (today Quantrix) not Lotus 1-2-3. Again layout and aesthetics are but functions are definable and not all cells are equal. The paradigm encourages modeling while Number’s limitation encourage manipulation of small amounts of data.
Everyone who thinks the whole project is unfeasible should just watch this talk from FOSDEM 2011. OSX applications running on Linux is way more realistic than most people would think and it *does* actually work:
http://lanyrd.com/2011/fosdem/spdyd/
Remember people, MacOS X’ native API is Cocoa which *is* a fork of OpenStep while GNUStep is another derivative of it.
Cocoa has just plenty of additional extensions which currently make many OSX applications unable to run on GNUStep, but it principle it does work besides some applications which use core services like IOKit for which no translators currently exist on Linux. However, it will come at some point.
And, no, Apple won’t be able to sue anyone because GNUStep/OpenStep is an *OPEN* standard.
Adrian
Why wouldn’t they sue the jailbreakers, but do sue some run-OS X-apps-on-Linux guys?
It’s not like Wine caused millions of people to dump Windows and install Linux. Nor is it like people who run an OS X app on Linux would have bought a Mac if they couldn’t.
As for iWorks, the web based version may run on Linux. Although I’d rather run something native and there are plenty of capable alternatives on Linux.
The problem is not whether this is feasible or not, but the motivation around the project.
So far this is a single developer effort and he’s been around working on it for a while, yet it didn’t seem to have gathered enough of a developer community.
Maybe the guy it not good at promoting his effort, but at this point i would have expected more people to be interested in contributing to something like this.
On the whiny side of things, the developer has made the strategic mistake of removing code under Apple’s open source license, which is needless extra effort IMO.
PS: Also no donate button or kickstarter (ala openshot). If one developer can get so far, inagine what would happen if there were more developers hired by a kickstarter campaign, or if the author was encouraged by donations.
Edited 2013-08-03 18:25 UTC