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 …