macOS Apps on Linux: SwiftUI for Linux (and AppKit, NSFoundation, etc.)
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I made an open-source project that will take an existing macOS swift project and make it easily compile into a Linux (GTK/ or Qt). It's part of a new quality Swift-first OS I am making called QuillOS.I'm eager for help and for feedback.Also looking for people who have Swift code (there is very little open source swift code) who can give me example apps to compile against this to find any missing holes. The simpler/smaller the better but any size good.It's also easy to convert any working iOS app and adapt it to macOS with Claude, and then also cross-compile to Linux with this.https://github.com/Lore-Hex/QuillUI
HN · launched Jun 8, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 69%) · 2 views
Niche: software development frameworks · 154 launches, 4 in the last 7 days ▼ -76% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 154 launches in software development frameworks →
Could you build this?
No Cross-compiling macOS UI frameworks like SwiftUI, AppKit, and Foundation to Linux GTK/Qt requires reimplementing massive proprietary Apple runtime APIs and graphics subsystems.
What it would actually take: This demands deep systems knowledge of Swift runtime internals, ABI stability, and reverse-engineering Apple's declarative layout engine. The system requires writing a custom Swift framework that maps SwiftUI views and layout primitives to GTK/Qt widgets, managing event loops, rendering pipelines via Cairo/Skia, and reimplementing core parts of the Objective-C/Swift bridged Foundation library.
Discussion
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Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 303 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #239 of 304 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 203 days after the earliest competitor.
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- omarchy-apple-dev · github · 2026-09-09 · 102 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Taphouse · hn · 2026-02-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- rootbeer · ph · 2026-10-21 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- TopTab · github · 2026-09-10 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- kuu · github · 2026-09-18 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.49
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