# Darling

> Darling — macOS translation layer for Linux

- **Website:** https://darlinghq.org
- **Pricing:** open source
- **Categories:** Design, Developer Tools
- **Tags:** design, developer-tools
- **Platforms:** macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical page:** https://linkrena.com/tools/darling

## About

Darling runs macOS software directly without using a hardware emulator.

It is developed openly on GitHub and distributed under the GNU GPL license version 3.

Darling implements a complete Darwin environment. Mach, dyld, launchd — everything you'd expect.

Darling does most of the setup for you. Sit back and enjoy using your favorite software.

We aim to fully integrate apps running under Darling into the Linux desktop experience by making them look, feel and behave just like native Linux apps.

And it is! Wine lets you run Windows software on Linux, and Darling does the same for macOS software.

Almost! This took us a lot of time and effort, but we finally have basic experimental support for running simple graphical applications.

No! We only directly use those parts of Darwin that are released as fully free software.

The name Darling is a combination of “Darwin” and “Linux”. Darwin is the core operating system macOS and iOS are based on.

Do you know about opensource.apple.com , GNUstep, The Cocotron and other projects?

We do, and in fact, Darling is largely based on the original Darwin source code published by Apple. We use The Cocotron as a basis for our Cocoa implementation, along with the Apportable Foundation and various bits of GNUstep.

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