Mac lookalikes multiply as Linux raids Apple's wardrobe

Linux can do many things, but good looks aren't always its strong point. Apple has rather more of a reputation in that department, and a crop of new projects is bringing Mac-style polish to the open source desktop.

Some are all-new, such as the Argentinian Lord OS, a whole new GUI desktop on top of Debian. Another, Cutefish, is a revival of a pre-ChatGPT project that never got as far as a complete release. Now it has version 1.0 for both x86-64 and Arm64, plus it's working on Mac binary compatibility via a work-in-progress layer called Reef. Ukrainian Desert OS is already at version 5.5 – practically a venerable elder in this company, despite appearing to be only about a year old.

Meanwhile, ClokeOS uses Xfce for its desktop, but underneath, the OS is based on Apple's FOSS XNU kernel. The project lead plans to offer compatibility with multiple types of binaries: Linux apps, plus Mac apps via Darling, and Windows apps via Wine.

This isn't new. Much as Cutefish has been revived, last year we reported on PearOS Linux, a very Mac-like skin on KDE Plasma. It has hooks in place for ambitious future features, such as Siri-style speech recognition.

What's striking is the number of projects appearing and the pace of their development. Some offer both x86-64 and Arm64 builds, with Raspberry Pi editions in certain cases. For human coders, this would be months of hard work, but if it's just checking an additional box in an LLM development tool, then why wouldn't you? It's almost no extra work, but it widens the potential audience.

Coveting Mac-like good looks is a longstanding urge among Linux users, and with legitimate reason. There's nothing wrong with Macs, even if you are mainly a FOSS user. Modern macOS, or OS X as it was called a decade ago, is a Unix underneath its shiny proprietary desktop, and many of the flagship Linux FOSS apps also have Mac versions, from Firefox and Thunderbird, via LibreOffice, to VirtualBox, plus less well-known but very handy apps such as Ferdium and Panwriter. We've written about the usefulness of FOSS apps on macOS before, including for reviving elderly Macs.

Just a couple of months ago, we published a two-part guide on how to give Xfce a macOS-like layout and then how to tweak it so apps fit in better. We focused on the functionality, though, not the looks – we don't really care much for such things. If it does matter to you, though, you're not alone, and there are lots of themes and skins to make Xfce look prettier.

Some of these are all-in-one packages that you can install on an existing distro to give it a new look. One recent example is Cupertino, developed with assistance from Claude. From a few years ago, there are Small Sur and Ventura-Xfce. From nine years ago, long pre-LLM, there is osXFCE.

We can see the appeal. From 2006 to 2020, Macs used Intel x86 processors, and those machines are now all falling off the end of Apple support – only four Intel models supported last year's macOS 26 "Tahoe," support for which is just starting to reach OpenCore Legacy Patcher. Earlier this year, The Reg FOSS desk upgraded his 11-year-old iMac to macOS 15 "Sequoia" with OCLP 2.5.1. The first experimental OCLP 3.0 release appeared last month, and it's now up to 3.0-rc5. This adds support for macOS 26, Apple's final major macOS release for Intel Macs. That puts a ceiling on future macOS upgrades for both home-built Hackintoshes and older Macs kept going with unofficial patches.

We gave LordOS a brief spin using its OVA virtual machine image. It installed and booted without trouble, and looks impressive. Last month, we wrote about ZacOS-9 and Mavernix, and similarly, we gave ZacOS-9 a very quick spin in a VM. The resemblance to our recent experience with ZacOS-9 went beyond appearances. In both, we found that the keyboard UI is largely missing: standard keystrokes didn't work. In LordOS, we found some menu options duplicated in two places in an un-Mac-like way, such as "About" options in both the app menu and the Help menu. The LordOS GitHub repository does not credit any LLM assistants, but it's gone though nine test releases in three weeks.

The inevitable end of life of x86 Macs is driving fresh interest in FOSS OSes. They offer a life extension for genuine Macs as well as the enticing prospect of Mac-like polish for existing FOSS OSes. Combine that with the fast, easy code generation offered by LLM coding assistants, and we think there's going to be a lot more of this. In 2025, we saw one macOS-like Linux project rebooted. This October, we saw two new ones. In November, we've found four more. We have a feeling that these are just the first trickles of what may soon become a flood. ®