macOS 13 Ventura is the brand-new version of Apple’s operating system for PCs and although it won’t be available until next fall, the company has already shown it to society and has advanced some of its new features, including support for running applications from Linux.
The presentation of macOS Ventura took place yesterday, within the framework of the WWDC 2022 , which the Cupertino firm took advantage of to show the next of its other leading products, including the new Macbook Pro and Macbook Air with the Apple M2 chips, iOS and iPadOS 16 or watchOS 9, in addition to the one at hand, macOS 13, codenamed macOS Ventura.
As well. Of the main novelties of macOS Ventura we reported yesterday at MC (also of the rest of the novelties that WWDC 2022 brought: click on the link above to see everything), although just that of compatibility with Linux applications, it was not among they. It should be remembered that macOS Ventura is in beta phase and many things remain to be known.
However, according to Phoronix macOS Ventura will be able to run Linux applications through Rosetta , the component that Apple developed to maintain the compatibility of classic macOS applications with the new Apple Silicon ARM processors. Much has been said about Rosetta at the beginning of the transition, but it seems that Apple has met some minimums and the invention has taken off.
With macOS Ventura they will go a step further, using the macOS Virtualization Framework to allow the execution of Linux binaries, using ARM-based Linux virtual machines . Rosetta integration in this sense will be reduced to that, binaries or applications within the user space, and not to entire Linux distributions, at least for now. What does this sound like to us?
Indeed, although we have seen cases like ChromeOS with Linux applications, this is different. It is not about expanding the ecosystem of desktop applications, which in macOS is quite flowery. Offering the ability to run Linux applications on macOS Ventura has the same goal as Windows Subsystem for Linux : to make life easier for developers… or to keep them from being tempted to switch to Linux for work?
Be that as it may, the change that Apple proposes for macOS Ventura can give something to talk about, although there are already those who are putting objections to the invention, not because of its form, but because of its substance. Hector Martin yesterday published one and two threads on Twitter talking about the subject and hoping that the evolution of Rosetta does not discourage work around the existing efforts to bring Linux to Apple Silicon.
According to Martin, one of those developers in charge of bringing Apple’s M1s to Linux , as well as one of those responsible for Asahi Linux, the first Linux distribution for Apple Silicon, there are questions about which technologies the new Rosetta functionality relies on. Doubts that may be cleared up today, because Apple has scheduled a talk in which this matter will be discussed. There is also the official Rosetta documentation .
There are also doubts, and these are of a different nature, in relation to the possible legal problems of using Rosetta outside of macOS Ventura and later versions, so continuing with the previous work of the community in open source key around Apple Silicon, it is essential, argues Martin.
What will everything be, we will see in the future. Meanwhile, who was going to tell us that we would bring macOS back to these parts? With macOS Big Sur the excuse was that the design change created a trend ; on this occasion, however, history points to other paths. Let’s see when it is invested in our -the one of the Linux users- please
Or what is the same, let’s see when we can talk about a substantial advance of Darling, because macOS has a number of high-level exclusive applications, many of which are not even available for Windows. Darling, by the way, is the equivalent of Wine, but for running Mac apps on Linux.
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