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this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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I’m not familiar with gnome files, however, instead of macports, consider homebrew. I was a long time Mac ports user until about 12 years ago- brew is great and is more widely used. It also supports installing GUI apps via brew casks- combined with brew files, you can install your complete kit on any computer with just a command. I’ve found homebrew does a LOT less compiling from source since it has precompiled “bottles” available for most things. Good luck!
I generally use brew, and never used MacPorts before, but brew doesn't appear to have Gnome Files.
I have always been curious about MacPorts’s applications. Usually I’d assume they’re either really old versions that were once available for the platform natively (such as Safari on Windows), but that’s worth checking out.
Follow-up: Did a bit of research and looked into MacPorts. Yes, most their applications appear to be older versions, as I don’t see any indication that Nautilus (the GNOME file manager) or Dolphin (KDE’s file manager) is still in the works for macOS. I’m attempting to install this older version of Nautilus via MacPorts now in a virtual machine, and will follow up again with results.
Sorry, I tried using MacPorts in a VM and installing Nautilus with
sudo port install Nautilusas suggested on the MacPorts website, but this was the final result after like 20 minutes of "installing" data and the like to no avail.(This was tested on a macOS Sequoia VM with an M4 MBA host running macOS Tahoe Beta 4. It is possible this may work better on an x86 Mac or older macOS version, but I wouldn't get too caught up in this.)
There is ONE other way to run Nautilus on macOS that I've used a bit, but it's kind of cheating and not that great: Containers. Specifically, Docker and similar programs should allow this (which I did test once), but more recently Apple introduced their own Containerization framework which I also tested and was able to get up and running. The issue is that Xquartz, which you'd have to use to get any GUI Linux applications on macOS, isn't very good in and of itself. No Retina support is the biggest dealbreaker for me, but this is also technically just running a micro Linux VM with access to your macOS files a bit like Windows Subsystem for Linux.