[vox-tech] Why Mac but not LInux?

[Ryan Northrup]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Jeff Newmiller
<jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us>wrote:
> As for why we use Wine more often than emulating OSX APIs, I don't know.
You want to write such a beast?

Apparently some folks had attempted nearly a decade ago:
http://softpear.sourceforge.net/faq.php.  A preview release is available on
the actual project page's Files section, and the old CVS repository is
still there, too.

I thought I read about another, more recent, SourceForge project to achieve
those means (though with a saner goal of just targeting x86 OS X binaries,
now that PowerPC Macs are unfortunately old - despite my own eMac running
happily with Debian and serving as a testbed for resurrecting Slackintosh).
 Unfortunately, I don't recall the name of that new project.

But yeah, the reason why Wine gets all the development is likely because
Windows-only software is much more abundant than OSX-only software, though
I'd love to be able to run XCode on Linux and not have to fork over the
money for a Mac or deal with the trouble of building a Hackintosh.

As for the original question...

On 06/27/2013 11:25 AM, Darth Borehd wrote:
> I see a lot of games that have Mac versions but not LInux versions.
> Why?  Wouldn't it be trivial to get the same program to run on Linux as
> they run on Mac because they are both POSIX based?

There are several reasons, not limited to the following:

* As Vincenzo mentioned, the differences between glibc and libc
* As Jeff mentioned, the lack of POSIX compliance in most Mac OS X
applications
* Reliance on Cocoa (which GNUStep partially addresses) and, in many cases
(including OS X apps made by Apple) Carbon

That said, I think Valve is shaking this up a bit, now that they're
developing Linux versions of their games (and their Source engine/SDK)
alongside the Windows and OS X versions.  I'm hoping other developers do
the same (my eyes are on you, Bethesda; Fallout 4/5/whatever had better
have a Linux version!).
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