macOS Apps on Linux: SwiftUI for Linux (and AppKit, NSFoundation, etc.)
Details
- External ID
- 48451638
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- macOS Apps on Linux: SwiftUI for Linux (and AppKit, NSFoundation, etc.)
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- June 8, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.31420765027322406
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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
Enrichment
- Theme
- macOS and desktop customization tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- macos app framework for linux
- Manually corrected
- False
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
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 136 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #90 of 137 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 203 days after the earliest competitor.
- I Built SwiftUI but for macOS MDM · hn · 2026-04-20 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- 100% native Swift harness (NOT Electron) · hn · 2026-08-10 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- omarchy-apple-dev · github · 2026-09-09 · 102 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Taphouse · hn · 2026-02-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- TopTab · github · 2026-09-10 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- kuu · github · 2026-09-18 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- coolapk-for-mac · github · 2026-09-13 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- native-packages · github · 2026-09-12 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.45
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.