blink VS owl

Compare blink vs owl and see what are their differences.

blink

tiniest x86-64-linux emulator (by jart)

owl

The portable Wayland compositor in Objective-C (by owl-compositor)
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blink owl
28 5
6,697 101
- 0.0%
7.9 2.7
3 months ago over 2 years ago
C Objective-C
ISC License GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

blink

Posts with mentions or reviews of blink. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-15.

owl

Posts with mentions or reviews of owl. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-02-03.
  • Blink virtual machine now supports running GUI programs
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Feb 2023
    Well, there is a Wayland Compositor for macOS:

    https://github.com/owl-compositor/owl

    It still lacks a lot of features though (I think, I never tried it out)

  • X Window System Basics
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jan 2023
    > X runs on so many more platforms than Wayland [...] Python3 is strictly an improvement on every platform, I don't think they're analogous because there really is no good reason to keep Python2 around

    X runs on more platforms than Wayland because...it was ported to them. Just like things use Python 3 because they were ported to it.

    This is also understating the reach of X I think: it's widely used in the embedded world, is seeing increasing support in BSDs, and has even been used on macOS (https://github.com/owl-compositor/owl). People have even used it to embed an entire compositor inside a GTK app (https://github.com/alexlarsson/wakefield).

    That isn't to say that libwayland has a lot of Linux-isms in it, but afaik they're not really structural as much as there is lack of interest to generalize things more. Heck, the protocol-oriented architecture would even make it easier for anything Linux-esque to be removed in favor of alternative protocols.

  • Valve is Paying 100+ Open-Source Developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and More
    2 projects | /r/linux | 17 Dec 2022
    Yup, the Owl compositor implements Wayland on Quartz (the macOS graphics system).
  • Release 1.2.0 · 89luca89/distrobox
    3 projects | /r/linux | 15 Dec 2021
    Thanks! FYI there is a wayland compositor for macos too, so it would be nice to be able to use that with linux apps in a VM...
  • Owl: A WIP portable Wayland compositor written in Objective-C
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2021

What are some alternatives?

When comparing blink and owl you can also consider the following projects:

chromium - The official GitHub mirror of the Chromium source

distrobox - Use any linux distribution inside your terminal. Enable both backward and forward compatibility with software and freedom to use whatever distribution you’re more comfortable with. Mirror available at: https://gitlab.com/89luca89/distrobox

blink - Blink Mobile Shell for iOS (Mosh based)

XQuartz - An X11 server and client libraries for macOS

cosmonim - A Nim template to compile your code with the Cosmopolitan libc

xdotool - fake keyboard/mouse input, window management, and more

strace - strace is a diagnostic, debugging and instructional userspace utility for Linux

wakefield - A proof of concept of a GTK+ Wayland compositor for various situations

xserver-SIXEL - A X server implementation for SIXEL-featured terminals, based on @pelya's Xsdl kdrive server(https://github.com/pelya/xserver-xsdl)

superconfigure - wrap autotools configure scripts to build with Cosmopolitan Libc