Is it possible to use Apple's Aqua as desktop environment on Linux?
I have found Aqua (the desktop environment in macOS) to be more polished, stable and better looking than any other desktop environment I have tried (Gnome, Unity, etc). Therefore, I would love to use it on my Ubuntu laptop, and wonder if anyone has successfully ported it to Linux.
I know that this is probably incredibly hard since Aqua is closed source (and it would probably be illegal as well), but still, has anyone done it?
1 Answer
It's not practical to port Aqua to another operating system because it's deeply integrated with the services provided by Mac OS X. For example, it relies on Mach ports (an inter-process communication mechanism) to exchange data with the Quartz display server, neither of which are available under any other OS.
It might be possible to develop an entire OS emulation layer akin to WINE so you could run native Mac OS X programs on Linux, but my guess is it would lack the performance and stability you're looking for.
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