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Jorge Pinho
Asked: 2011-06-23 10:20:23 +0800 CST

Why isn't it possible to run Mac software?

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I wonder why there isn't any equivalent of Wine for running Mac software on Ubuntu. Thoughts?

mac

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The best we got was an attempt in 2007-ish called mac on linux as a virtualization tool to run Mac OS.

    If there was ever a need to built a wine version for Mac (would that be called mine?) it probably would have been created by someone already. I doubt someone could not make it but I guess that

    • there is not enough software that is Mac-only to make it worth while.
    • too few Linux users care for Mac software.

    Basically there seems no need for it.

    1 more issue: you are not allowed to run Mac OS software legally on non Apple hardware. Someone who creates it will get sued in an instant and no one will be able to ship it with their OS.

    Edit: http://opensource.apple.com/ provides the iOS and Mac OS kernels, which are licensed under free software licenses (it is legal to run on your non-Apple, since otherwise it would be non-free). Basically it is illegal to run the Mac OS itself on non-Apple hardware, but legal to run software based on Mac OS on non-Apple hardware.

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  3. There is a translation layer of OS X in linux:

    https://www.darlinghq.org/

    Unfortunately it can only run terminal programs at the moment and maybe GUI will be in the future.

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