12.09.2026 –, Freiraum - C120 Language: English
Apple's M-Series chips are very fast and popular, but it can be pretty difficult to run any software not made for their platform on these machines. This is a deep-dive into writing and using various translation layers to integrate Linux applications seemlessly into Mac OS X.
If you happen to have access to a Mac powered by Apple Silicon, chances are you got frustrated with theses machines. On one side they are pretty fast, on the other running anything not sanctioned by Apple gets annoying just as quick. Even if you get all the security measures out of your way, you are still left with a platform, that has put up a bunch of barriers simply by doing things differently and refusing to adhere to common standards. OS X has it's own accelerated graphics api, spotty unix conformance, it's own UI toolkit and much more. Even though the ARM platform has gotten more common in recent years in desktop-grade machines, these chips also run on an unusual 16-bit page size. Which means not many previously existing binaries run without some kind of emulation or translation and Apple only provides those for older OS X software. You can deal with these by using virtual machines of course, but integration into the rest of the OS is usually severly lacking.
In this talk we explore ways to overcome each and every one of these barriers one by one to make unmodified linux applications feel right at home on Mac OS X through a combination of various translation layers and other technologies.
Hi! I'm Drakulix, your friendly Linux Desktop Witch. 🪄
You can talk to me in English or German. I use it/its or she/her pronouns / es/ihr in German.
I love talking about Rust, Wayland, anything Linux desktop, Linux mobile, VR, ARM devices, Gaming, Coffee, Metal Music, Karaoke and more! At my day job, I work at System76 on the COSMIC desktop environment.
Feel free to approach me at the event or find me on Fedi (https://social.dreampi.es/@drakulix)