[audunw]

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.

[addaon]

> But XQuartz is awful.

What issues are you seeing with it? I use it pretty heavily and have no complaints…

[bitwize]

The biggest issue I found is that X apps look like ass against the elegant Mac environment. Maybe that's mitigated somewhat by macOS 26's Android-ass looking UI, but the appearance/functionality clash between Mac and generic Unix was a major issue before.

[fouc]

I agree, I think the problem is the seamless integration, where it renders only the application against the macOS environment. I'd much prefer something more like the cocoa-way example where there's a window that has its own background, and the applications run inside that. Not sure if Xquartz supports running a compositor or windowing manager.

[bitwize]

XQuartz used to support rooted mode. I played with an early version back in the PowerPC era, and ran a regular desktop with WindowMaker and everything, using software from MacPorts. It was kind of a "parallel universe", as XQuartz would take over the whole screen in rooted mode and you had to switch between it and the Mac desktop, but it looked and functioned like a typical Linux or Unix desktop of the early 2000s.

[MBCook]

What about this plus XWayland? Would that do it?