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submitted 4 months ago by jackalope@lemmy.ml to c/macos@lemmy.world

found a thing that said you could use Gnome Files on Mac using MacPorts. I don't know what MacPorts is but I was able to find some instructions on how to use it with Gnome Files, but it's a bit involved and I don't want to screw up my Mac (not as easy to recover a mac installation as a Linux in my inexperience). Anyone actually done this? Can't find any info about it on Youtube. Would like to see how it actually functions.

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[-] trey_a_12@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Sorry, I tried using MacPorts in a VM and installing Nautilus with sudo port install Nautilus as 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.

this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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