<story><title>Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux</title><url>https://www.darlinghq.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>api</author><text>I wrote a blog post once about how the web is the new presentation layer for the desktop, that this is not necessarily a bad thing, and that a desktop OS (e.g. a Linux distro) should just fully embrace it by implementing a desktop that runs 100% via web technologies. Local and remote web apps could coexist as first class citizens, etc. I basically argued that HTML+JS+CSS renderers are the new X and that HTTP(S) is the new X11 protocol-- or at least that these parts occupy an analogous position in the stack to what X originally was. (They are technically quite different of course.)&lt;p&gt;The web is the OSS GUI stack with the largest, most diverse, and most active developer community, and with it you get to ride on the coattails of multi-billion dollar companies like Facebook and Google that have significant investments in the web.&lt;p&gt;I got DDOSed and threatened. I got some of the most insane all-caps slobbering and frothing at the mouth feedback I have &lt;i&gt;ever&lt;/i&gt; seen in all my years of interacting with any developer community. You&amp;#x27;d think I went into a conservative church and gave a talk about evidence for abortion in the Bible or something.&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of this came after the article got posted to Reddit &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;linux. Most comments there amounted to &amp;quot;web sucks and JS coders are weenies and next year will be the year of the Linux desktop as soon as we finish the next rewrite of (insert favorite project).&amp;quot; Intelligent criticism is good but the vast majority of the comments I read responded to none of the core points of my post and amounted to not much more than developer community religious bias.&lt;p&gt;I ended up taking the post down for two reasons:&lt;p&gt;(1) I got sick of getting DDOSed and it wasn&amp;#x27;t worth it to me to fight just to get an off the cuff opinion out there. I am not deeply invested in this and have better things to do.&lt;p&gt;(2) This convinced me that the &amp;quot;desktop Linux&amp;quot; community is toxic in the extreme and should be avoided. This includes avoiding providing any input whatsoever to that community. Also caused me to become a lot less loyal to Linux in general, since it&amp;#x27;s a community full of people who respond to any opinion differing from their own with absurd amounts of hate and vitriol.</text></item><item><author>peatmoss</author><text>I go back and forth on whether this would truly be useful. 10-15 years ago, having a fully baked, first class, slavishly source compatible implementation of GNUstep with broad adoption throughout Linux land would have likely been a game changer.&lt;p&gt;But now, it seems webified apps are king. The handful of native apps that people use are already satisfactorily implementable on Linux. In fact, a great number of native apps are being implemented on Linux in spite of the GUI bits not being source compatible with OS X or Windows. The major holdouts (MS Office, Adobe CS) likely have more to do with business reasons that factor much more than porting costs.&lt;p&gt;Now, if GNUstep were to become a compelling alternative to XCode for developing iOS apps, I could absolutely see that tide lifting the Linux fleet.</text></item><item><author>hapless</author><text>If you&amp;#x27;re interested in porting code, many of the OSX core libraries are available as part of the GNUstep project: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;software&amp;#x2F;gnustep&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;software&amp;#x2F;gnustep&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most of &amp;quot;cocoa&amp;quot; came from the OPENSTEP specification, and GNUstep offers quite a complete implementation.</text></item><item><author>jernfrost</author><text>I am hoping that with cross platform Swift we can start seeing more libraries to help us port Mac apps to Linux. I am a Mac developer but I&amp;#x27;d love to make stuff available on Linux.&lt;p&gt;I really like Linux as a backup plan, in case Apple totally drops the ball on professionals on the Mac.&lt;p&gt;The Linux desktop is getting pretty good, but it lacks well designed high quality GUI applications. If porting to Linux was done easier that could change.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peatmoss</author><text>I am truly sorry you caught the brunt of the toxic parts of the Linux community. It&amp;#x27;s a part of the community that has existed since I first started using Linux in the mid 90s. It sounds like you offered some thoughts about what you felt was the right thing to do, and people reacted violently to it.&lt;p&gt;I personally &lt;i&gt;wish&lt;/i&gt; we had a first class, broadly adopted Free *nix desktop option with native GUI and the like. I am not necessarily a fan of extending the web to all parts of my computing experience. However, what you described is very much what is happening with Chromebooks--so maybe your normative statements about the Linux desktop just required the implementation and backing by a Google.&lt;p&gt;That all said, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t write off desktop Linux along with the caustic communities you&amp;#x27;ve found. I did a career switch to urban planning some years ago now, and what I&amp;#x27;ve discovered is that every community has a majority group of mostly reasonable, mostly disengaged people along with a smaller group of really loud, difficult people. In that sense, Linux user communities feel normal to me.</text></comment>
<story><title>Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux</title><url>https://www.darlinghq.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>api</author><text>I wrote a blog post once about how the web is the new presentation layer for the desktop, that this is not necessarily a bad thing, and that a desktop OS (e.g. a Linux distro) should just fully embrace it by implementing a desktop that runs 100% via web technologies. Local and remote web apps could coexist as first class citizens, etc. I basically argued that HTML+JS+CSS renderers are the new X and that HTTP(S) is the new X11 protocol-- or at least that these parts occupy an analogous position in the stack to what X originally was. (They are technically quite different of course.)&lt;p&gt;The web is the OSS GUI stack with the largest, most diverse, and most active developer community, and with it you get to ride on the coattails of multi-billion dollar companies like Facebook and Google that have significant investments in the web.&lt;p&gt;I got DDOSed and threatened. I got some of the most insane all-caps slobbering and frothing at the mouth feedback I have &lt;i&gt;ever&lt;/i&gt; seen in all my years of interacting with any developer community. You&amp;#x27;d think I went into a conservative church and gave a talk about evidence for abortion in the Bible or something.&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of this came after the article got posted to Reddit &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;linux. Most comments there amounted to &amp;quot;web sucks and JS coders are weenies and next year will be the year of the Linux desktop as soon as we finish the next rewrite of (insert favorite project).&amp;quot; Intelligent criticism is good but the vast majority of the comments I read responded to none of the core points of my post and amounted to not much more than developer community religious bias.&lt;p&gt;I ended up taking the post down for two reasons:&lt;p&gt;(1) I got sick of getting DDOSed and it wasn&amp;#x27;t worth it to me to fight just to get an off the cuff opinion out there. I am not deeply invested in this and have better things to do.&lt;p&gt;(2) This convinced me that the &amp;quot;desktop Linux&amp;quot; community is toxic in the extreme and should be avoided. This includes avoiding providing any input whatsoever to that community. Also caused me to become a lot less loyal to Linux in general, since it&amp;#x27;s a community full of people who respond to any opinion differing from their own with absurd amounts of hate and vitriol.</text></item><item><author>peatmoss</author><text>I go back and forth on whether this would truly be useful. 10-15 years ago, having a fully baked, first class, slavishly source compatible implementation of GNUstep with broad adoption throughout Linux land would have likely been a game changer.&lt;p&gt;But now, it seems webified apps are king. The handful of native apps that people use are already satisfactorily implementable on Linux. In fact, a great number of native apps are being implemented on Linux in spite of the GUI bits not being source compatible with OS X or Windows. The major holdouts (MS Office, Adobe CS) likely have more to do with business reasons that factor much more than porting costs.&lt;p&gt;Now, if GNUstep were to become a compelling alternative to XCode for developing iOS apps, I could absolutely see that tide lifting the Linux fleet.</text></item><item><author>hapless</author><text>If you&amp;#x27;re interested in porting code, many of the OSX core libraries are available as part of the GNUstep project: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;software&amp;#x2F;gnustep&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;software&amp;#x2F;gnustep&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most of &amp;quot;cocoa&amp;quot; came from the OPENSTEP specification, and GNUstep offers quite a complete implementation.</text></item><item><author>jernfrost</author><text>I am hoping that with cross platform Swift we can start seeing more libraries to help us port Mac apps to Linux. I am a Mac developer but I&amp;#x27;d love to make stuff available on Linux.&lt;p&gt;I really like Linux as a backup plan, in case Apple totally drops the ball on professionals on the Mac.&lt;p&gt;The Linux desktop is getting pretty good, but it lacks well designed high quality GUI applications. If porting to Linux was done easier that could change.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>woodrowbarlow</author><text>While I agree with your view of HTML+CSS+JS in relation to X and would even go as far as to say the shift towards &amp;quot;webified&amp;quot; apps is (mostly) a good thing, it still saddens me as a developer to see it happening. It&amp;#x27;s an ecosystem that doesn&amp;#x27;t discourage lazy practices and it makes me feel unimportant because modern computers can more or less keep up with even the most poorly-written webified apps. I think it&amp;#x27;s that sentiment that caused the lash-out you describe.&lt;p&gt;But hey, that&amp;#x27;s why I&amp;#x27;m in embedded development. That field is still safe for now.</text></comment>