ZacOS 9 and Mavernix: Two classic Apple desktops find their Wayland to Linux

You wait decades for a Mac-like desktop for Linux, and then two of them come along at once. AI might be involved, but even so, it's still shiny.

ZacOS 9 and Mavernix are two very new, independent, and separate projects, but there is a common thread linking them: they are both brand new efforts to bring vintage Macintosh-like desktop environments to Linux. One is explicitly built using LLMs, and we suspect it was probably involved with the other as well.

"ZacOS" is just a couple of weeks old, and both to forestall what is becoming a very frequently asked question, and also to credit to its inventor Adam Lawson, the project's GitHub page acknowledges two of the more visible LLM coding assistances: both Claude and Copilot are there. In the Hacker News discussion, he acknowledged that he used LLM assistance to make the software, and even his online comments.

It aims to recreate the “Platinum” appearance of MacOS 8 and 9 – as we described last month, one of the few things that Apple successfully salvaged from the Copland project to build a true multitasking successor to MacOS 7.

ZacOS includes a window manager, a filer, a global menu bar, a Control Panel app, a Control Strip, desk accessories and other additional apps, and more. It can network with Macs, and integrate with the existing SheepShaver emulator to run classic Mac apps. We previously mentioned SheepShaver when looking at the remarkable MacOS9.app web-based emulator, and if you don’t remember what it looked like, that’s the easiest way to find out.

The Sourceforge downloads contain a complete pre-installed Debian Linux image. On Github, there are much smaller Debian packages if you want to try installing it yourself. It's an all-new environment, based on Wayland. (Its own icons are based on Lawson's dog, Zac.) As far as we can see, ZacOS doesn't draw on any older MacOS-like code.

That's slightly surprising, because this is not the first project of its kind that we have ever seen. Although ZacOS does look to be one of the more complete ones, there's quite a bit of prior art.

"Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday," (as A. A. Milne put it, a century ago this month) – or at least, a few months before OpenAI launched ChatGPT – we mourned the lack of Linux desktop diversity. In that article, we linked to some projects that tried to bring a Mac-like UI to Linux.

That included Ryu Kojiro’s classic-wm, which is a Mac System 6-styled window manager, and also Morgan Aldridge’s mlvwm, which aims at the later grayscale MacOS 7 and MacOS 8 look. Although it targets the modern Unix-based macOS, we also mentioned Classic Mac Finder, which aims to recreate the older Finder on the modern OS.

A more modest but easier approach would start with one of the more versatile desktops out there. As we covered in our two-part workshop last month, that would be Xfce, which can already emulate the macOS desktop layout and with a few extra tweaks make a very usable alternative. We intentionally didn’t look at themes and skins, but they do exist, and one of the most thorough is what “Grassmunk” did with the Platinum9 theme for Xubuntu. Although Windows 95 itself is long obsolete, the Chicago95 theme makes Xfce look remarkably like the classic OS, and Chicago's developers still actively maintain it.

Fancy something a little more recent?

There is a lot of nostalgia for the Classic MacOS look and feel out there, as websites such as MacOS 9 Lives! shows. However, there’s also nostalgia for how Mac OS X used to look, as well. When we looked at how to Bring back your old Mac a year ago, we mentioned Mavericks Forever – a fan site for the last OS X version to have the “lickable” Aqua look.

Mavericks is notable because it was the first release of OS X that was available completely for free, as The Register reported in 2013. It’s not easy to find today, but you can still download it.

We mention this because you will need a copy if you want to try the second new vintage Apple OS remake. It’s called Mavernix, and for now, it’s only available for Arch Linux.

Unlike ZacOS 9, Mavernix is built on top of existing software: its windows are drawn by the Wayfire compositor, and its panels by Quickshell. So, yes, this too is entirely Wayland-based.

The main novelty in Mavernix is that it contains a tool to extract and use the images, icons, textures, wallpapers and so on from a real copy of Apple OS X, so that it can draw a Mac-like desktop using real Mac resources. To use it, you need to have a copy of OS X to hand – which is why we point out where you can get one. The license agreement prohibits running it on non-Apple hardware, but since this does not require running it at all, we don’t see any IP violations here.

Mavernix is by “Pruefsumme”, who is also a YouTuber, and on their channel, they’ve uploaded a demo video of the desktop in use. We can’t deny that it does look pretty.

How well it works, we can’t say, but the Gershwin desktop that we reported on last year is still in active development and may provide a deeper, richer Mac-like UI in time. Its development is also LLM-assisted, but the majority of the tools are human-written code, much of it from the GNUstep project – which started in 1991, making it older than Xfce, KDE, GNOME, and around the same age as the Linux kernel itself. ®