The performance overhead of the VM is minimal, the main tradeoffs is container startup time.

https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/11/apple-cloud-computing/

Which isn't such a bad idea really.

It’s doable but a lot more effort. Microsoft did it with WSL1 and abandoned it with WSL2.

FreeBSD has linuxulator and illumos comes with lx-zones that allow running some native linux binaries inside a "container". No idea why Apple didn't go for similar option.

Emulating Linux only makes sense on devices with constrained resources.

Just replace the XNU kernel with Linux already.

Some progress has been made to create a non-Docker implementation that integrates with all those random tools that expect to be able to yeet bytes into or out of the Docker socket, but I still hit blockers the last time I tried.

If it doesn't, then it's still a toss-up whether or not user chooses docker/podman/this...etc.

If it ends up shipping by default and is largely compatible with the same command line flags and socket API... Then docker has a problem.

For what it's worth, I prefer podman but even on Linux where the differentiators should be close to zero, I still find certain things that only docker does.

Even KDE eventually dropped KHTML in favor of KHTML’s own successor, WebKit-based engines (like QtWebKit and later Qt WebEngine based on Chromium).

A web engine isn’t just software — it needs to keep evolving.

Recognising the value of someone’s work is better than ignoring it and trying to build everything from scratch on your own, Microsoft's Internet Explorer did not last.

If my biases are already outdated, I'm happy to learn that. Either way, my hopes are the same. :)

They took over LLVM by hiring Chris Lattner. It was still a significant investment and they keep pouring resources into it for a long while before it got really widespread adoption. And yes, that project is still going.

It’s all very corporate, but also widely distributed and widely owned.

I can happily use my Mac as my primary machine without much hassle, just like I would often do with WSL.

I am also thinking the same, Docker desktop experience was not that great at least on Intel Macs

They don't have to do literally any of this.

Besides, I think OP wasn't talking about licenses; Apple has a lot of software under FOSS licenses. But usually, with their open-source projects, they reject most incoming contributions and don't really foster a community for them.

Laughs in Xcode

Everybody has been making fun of Blender forever but they consistently made things better step by step and suddenly few UX enhancements the wind started shift. It completely flipped and now everybody is using it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if desktop Linux days are still ahead. It’s not only Valve and gaming. Many things seems start to work in tandem. Wayland, Pipewire, Flatpack, atomic distros… hey even Gnome is starting to look pretty.

For Windows and MacOS you can throw a few quick bucks over the wall and tick a whole bunch of ISO checkboxes. For Linux, you need more bespoke software customized to your specific needs, and that requires more work. Sure, the mindless checkboxes add nothing to whatever compliance you're actually trying to achieve, but in the end the auditor is coming over with a list of checkboxes that determine whether you pass or not.

I haven't had a Linux system collapse on me for years now thanks to Flatpak and all the other tools that remove the need for scarcely maintained external repositories in my package manager. I find Windows to be an incredible drag to install compared to any other operating system, though. Setup takes forever, updates take even longer, there's a pretty much mandatory cloud login now, and the desktop looks like a KDE distro tweaked to hell (in a bad way).

Gnome's "who needs a start button when there's one on the keyboard" approach may take some getting used to, but Valve's SteamOS shows that if you prevent users from mucking about with the system internals because gary0x136 on Arch Forums said you need to remove all editors but vi, you end up with a pretty stable system.

Funnily enough that's how I feel every time I use Windows or Mac. Yet I'm not bold enough to call them "piss poor". I'm pretty sure I - mostly - feel like that because they are different from what I'm used to.

What exactly is wrong with it? I prefer KDE to either Windows or MacOS. Obviously a Linux desktop is not going to be identical to whatever you use so there is a learning curve, but the same is true, and to a much greater extent, for moving from Windows to MacOS.

> layman to sanely develop programs for Linux systems

> or the average person

The "layman" or "average person" does not develop software.

The average person has plenty of problems dealing with Windows. They are just used to putting up with being unable to get things to work. Ran into that (a multi-function printer/scanner not working fully) with someone just yesterday.

If you find it hard to adjust to a Linux desktop you should not be developing software (at any rate not developing software that matters to anyone).

I have switched a lot of people to Linux (my late dad, my ex-wife, my daughter's primary school principal) who preferred it to Windows and my kids grew up using it. No problems.

That said, counterpoint to my own, Android is Linux and has billions of installations, and SteamOS is Linux. I think the next logical step for SteamOS is desktop PCs, since (anecdotally) gaming PCs only really play games and use a browser or web-tech-based software like Discord. If that does happen, it'll be a huge boost to Linux on the consumer desktop.

I think we need to have a specific audience in mind when saying whether or not it's stable. My Arch desktop (user: me) is actually really stable, despite the reputation. I have something that goes sideways maybe once a year or so, and it's a fairly easy fix for me when that does happen. But despite that, I would never give my non-techy parents an Arch desktop. Different users can have different ideas of stable.

When you are a DE that’s embedded in FOSS no one has an appetite to fund user experience the same way as corporate OS can.

We do have examples where this can work, like with the steam deck/steamOS but it’s almost counter to market incentives because of how slow dev can become.

I see the same problem with chat and protocol adoption. IRC as a protocol is too slow for companies who want to move fast and provide excellent UX, so they ditch cross collaboration in order to move fast.

Plus, one could argue they've actually just established dominance through market lockin by ensuring the culture never had a chance and making operating system moves hard for the normal person.

But more importantly if we instead consider the context that this is largely a collection of small utilities made by volunteers vs huge companies with paid engineering teams, one should be amazed at how comparable they are at all.

If Gnome implemented that as well as macOS does I’d happily switch permanently.

And it’s in incredible numbers - hundreds of millions of units - of game consoles.

The BSD family isn’t taking a bow in public, that’s all.

I think what slows down market share of Linux on desktop is Linux on desktop itself.

I use Linux, and I understand that it's a very hard job to take it to the level of Windows or macOS, but it is what it is.

More software gets developed for that base Linux platform API, which makes releasing Linux-native software easier/practically free, which in turn makes desktop Linux an even more viable daily driver platform because you can run the same apps you use on macOS or Windows.

I don't think I'll make my 2030 date at this point but there might be some version of Windows like this at some point.

I also recognize that Windows' need to remain backwards compatible might prevent this, unless there's a Rosetta-style emulation layer to handle all the Win32 APIs etc..

Likewise with ChromeOS.

They are Pyrrhic victories.

As for Tizen, interesting that Samsung hasn't yet completely lost interest on it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT

I do pro audio on Linux, my commercial DAWs, VSTs, etc are all Linux-native these days. I don't have to think about anything sound-wise because Pipewire handles it all automatically. IMO, Linux has arrived when it comes to this niche recently, five years ago I'd have to fuck around with JACK, install/compile a realtime kernel and wouldn't have as many DAWs & VSTs available.

Similarly, I have a friend in video production and VFX whose studio uses Linux everywhere. Blender, DaVinci Resolve, etc make that easy.

There is a lack of options when it comes to pro illustration and raster graphics. The Adobe suite reigns supreme there.

Depending on what you mean with "the game", I'd say even more so.

MS/Apple used to villify or ridicule Linux, now they need to distribute it to make their own product whole, because it turns out having an Open Source general purpose OS is so convenient and useful it's been utilized in lots of interesting ways - containers, for example - that the proprietary OS implementations simply weren't available for. I'd say it's a remarkable development.

The reverse, i.e. running Linux binaries on Windows or macOS, is not easily possible without virtualization, since Linux uses direct syscalls instead of always going through a dynamically linked static library that can take care of compatibility in the way that Wine does. (At the very least, it requires kernel support, like WSL1; Wine is all userspace.)

> But after that, Rosetta will be pared back and will only be available to a limited subset of apps—specifically, older games that rely on Intel-specific libraries but are no longer being actively maintained by their developers. Devs who want their apps to continue running on macOS after that will need to transition to either Apple Silicon-native apps or universal apps that run on either architecture.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/apple-details-the-en...

It's all a question of using the right/performant hardware interfaces, e.g. IOMMU-based direct hardware access rather than going through software emulation for performance-critical devices.

Also the EULA limits you to just two VMs per computer and only for very specific purposes. Clearly because they want you to buy their damn computers

Heck even Microsoft managed to run Windows containers on Windows, even with the technical debt and bloat they had. Apple could, they just don't want to because it goes straight against their financial interests

Docker for Mac builds it in 4 minutes.

container tool... 17 minutes. Maybe even more. And I did set the cpu and memory for the builder as well to higher number than defaults (similar what Docker for Mac is set for). And in reality it is not the build stage, but "=> exporting to oci image format" that takes forever.

Running containers - have not seen any issues yet.

If you're a dev team that creates Mac/iOS/iPad/etc apps, you might want Mac hardware in your CI/CD stack. Cloud providers do offer virtual Macs for this purpose.

If you're a really big company (eg. a top-10 app, eg. Google) you might have many teams that push lots of apps or app updates. You might have a CI/CD workflow that needs to scale to a cluster of Macs.

Also, I'm pretty sure apple at least partially uses Apple hardware in the serving flow (eg. "Private Cloud Compute") and would have an interest in making this work.

Oh, and it'd be nice to be able to better sand-box untrusted software running on my personal dev machine.

In my experience, the only use case for cloud macs is CI/CD (and boy does it suck to use macOS in the cloud).

https://askubuntu.com/questions/55868/installing-broadcom-wi...

Not sure about the newer ones.

Gathering this information and putting together a distro to rescue old Macbooks from the e-waste bin would be a worthwhile project. As far as I can tell they're great hardware.

I imagine things get harder once you get into the USB-C era.