How to run Linux gui apps on macOS (e.g. via XQuartz)

Question

I'm trying to run some Linux applications on macOS. I have installed XQuartz but if I attempt for instance to run firefox it does something - i.e. the firefox process can be seen by ps:

$ps -ef | grep firefox
  502 29337 29230   0 11:59AM ttys032    0:00.01 X /Users/steve/Downloads/firefox/firefox

.. But it does not show up as an X app:

So which additional steps are required to get Linux binaries to run?

Answer 1

You can't launch the Linux version of Firefox on macOS, because it is a binary for Linux calling libraries from Linux and calling system calls of Linux.

You have to build a macOS version of Firefox on macOS from the source tree you download from here:

https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

through the traditionnal steps:

./configure
make
/usr/bin/sudo make install

And during the configure step, you will have to take care to use the standard sets of X11 libraries (disclaimer: I didn't test this).

Answer 2

macOS can‘t run binaries compiled for Linux for the same reason it can't run Windows binaries: the underlying architecture and the required libraries are different. For Windows binaries there are wine and CrossOver, I‘m not aware of something similar for Linux binaries. If you have access to the source code, you can try to port/compile it yourself. Or you can try to install it through Homebrew.