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That's not the use case. The use case is running apps from a remote Linux host as a local window. A performant VNC for specific windows if you will.

For example, you could run VS Code on that machine as a window on your Mac. A more real world example is people accessing guis (e.g. matlab) on lab clusters.

The closest set up for x11 would be to use x11 forwarding with xpra.

This is very interesting to me for two reasons:

1. I'd really like to run my development environment for things under Siri for its tiling window management but for better or worse I'm deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem for everything else, this looks like it could be a really nice way of doing it (possibly once multi monitor support is in).

2. There are still a few applications which have supported Linux builds but no support for macOS (Iridium's Niagara Workbench application for configuration of building management systems springs to mind here). Since Apple ended support for Quartz this has been a bit of a pain to deal with.

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.

Apart from just running Linux apps, you can use this to run graphical applications remotely on a Linux server, like X11 forwarding.

I want to use KDE Plasma instead of Mac OS ugly (in my opinion) interface

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).

The first thing I wondered about was running GUI apps in a Linux container.

There’s a bunch of old Fortran stuff I use regularly (AVL, XFoil), but that’s all X, not Wayland, and XQuartz has worked great for decades.

It's not necessarily something only available for Linux, but something that you want to containerise. (And then it's inherently running on Linux.)

Emacs runs much faster and better on Linux VMs. And I have a VM for each client I work with.

Try building Inkscape or GIMP from source on macOS and see how "multi-platform" those GTK apps feel in practice. Even when a Mac build exists, it is often skinned oddly or lags because somebody has to carry Mac patches against an old fork.

This is for the long tail. The compositor path dodges a pile of volunteer-port churn and runs the Linux build directly, which is a lot more appealing for niche GUI tools and dev apps that barely get maintained on Linux, never mind macOS.

Native GTK apps on macOS are often more broken than running it in a VM or Parallels, in my experience. I used to use Gitg on macOS and it was a terrible experience all around.

PuTTY

In reply to then throwaway.

Anything I want sandboxed or “grouped”.

Work on a project -> open the relevant container.

Similar to parallels window integration mode.

It’s all from shortcomings to have a hierarchical view on your data and applications.

Goal: isolation. Security-wise, and focus-wise

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This is definitely not worth using. It doesn't even say what hypervisor its using. Is it using QEMU? Docker? Podman? Lima? Colima?

And also this chart is super weird:

    Solution  Latency  HiDPI    Native Integration  Setup Complexity
    Cocoa-Way Low      Yes      Native windows      Easy
    XQuartz   High     Partial  X11 quirks          Medium
    VNC       High     No       Full screen         Medium
    VM GUI    High     Partial  Separate window     Complex

I also looked at some of the code and it's using OpenGL 3.3 Core which is... super old. But it makes sense in the context of this being LLM-generated since most of its training data is probably OpenGL 3.3 Core code....

Overall this project is very strange. It makes me feel more confident in my skills, AI isn't all that great. It's all hype. You can get to the frontpage of HN. And if you're Peter Steinberger you can get acquired by OpenAI for a billion dollars. But that's about it. The code isn't getting any better.

This reminds me of that C-compiler-in-Rust publicity stunt by Anthropic. There's no substance. It's just a headline.

On intel macs there used to be single user mode, but even then I don't think you ever had control over the framebuffer.

But why MacOS then? If you take away the interface what differentiates Darwin from FreeBSD or GNU?

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

Incredibly L take. macOS keyboard commands are great for working in the terminal since system shortcuts use a different key and don't interfere with control codes

Sorry having to use ctrl+shift for in a terminal is absolutely awful. macOS keyboard shortcuts are king.

Super key for most keybinds is much nicer than windows in my opinion, where it is entirely wasted on opening the start menu. On Linux it gains a few functions based on the desktop environment but not much.

I mean, you can simply use Linux and save yourself all those hacks…

As someone that switches between MacOS (dayjob) and Linux (my own PCs) workstations daily - I wish I could do the opposite for Linux. MacOS keyboard shortcuts are just way more intuitive to me, and they are way more consistent across applications.