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…