Cocoa-Way – Native macOS Wayland compositor for running Linux apps seamlessly
Native macOS Wayland Compositor written in Rust using Smithay. Experience seamless Linux app streaming on macOS without XQuartz. - J-x-Z/cocoa-way
Forgive the naivety, but what graphical Linux apps are people trying to run that don’t have native MacOS builds? In my experience, Linux GUIs are generally written in Qt or GTK, both of which are multi-platform.
I don’t doubt that they exist, I’m just struggling to think of a popular example.
To be honest, I agree a little bit because I remember from my time at customizing KDE that everyone wanted it to make it look like Mac OS
but it feels a bit of peer-pressure/cool-factor, people used to like how Mac OS look but after Tahoe, I feel like most people don't.
To be honest, I am on mac right now but I really like Niri/Hyprland and to a degree KDE as well. I definitely feel like those were immensely more customizable and I miss that customizability, even if some people might use that customizability to make it look like MacOS default.
Popular apps? Probably not many.
But in the field of integrated circuit design there’s lots of apps that are Linux-only. I’ve tried to run some of them in containers on Mac. But XQuartz is awful.
If they ever transitioned to Wayland perhaps this would let us run these apps on Mac in a nice way.
On the other hand some of them have started getting ARM builds (for running simulations on certain cloud environments) so maybe native Mac GUI builds could happen someday soon.
I think there are many use cases for this software.
For example, you may not want to run some graphical applications directly on your Mac for security, isolation or testing purposes.
If this software turns out to be lower latency than RDP and CRD, I could also see it being very useful for accessing a remote graphical workstation (e.g.: running heavy software on an beefy machine in a data center instead of taking up resources on my skinny laptop).
Many of the keyboard commands are configurable in settings, complete with switching cmd and ctrl keys around.
Or you can get used in a week or two when switching, this is what I did years ago and now for me Win/Linux is confusing and find the location of the command key more ergonomic on a Mac.
Here some history on how the command key came to be
https://www.folklore.org/Swedish_Campground.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_key
Perfect.. this will allow me to run GUI apps in a container.
I did a similar thing with X11, but I didn't like so much.
Bit by bit, Apple is loosing it's Desktop position. It all starts at the developers. At soon, every person will be a "developer".
OJFord