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Comment by mekster | Hacker News Reader

It's still impressive that powerful command line environment and the best GUI are offered in a same OS.

Usually it's one or the other.

Powerful command-line environments are offered everywhere (wsl, Linux container on Chrome, Linux on Linux). MacOS is actually quite lacking in comparison (being limited wrt licenses and lacking a package manager). So it’s just a GUI question, and I’m not sure there is a definite lead these days.

Integration with their other hardware devices is the more important moat right now, as is hardware.

If you want to throw in WSL then include Docker on any OS

Any OSes where Docker runs that I have not covered?

The joke went over your head

There are plenty of third-party package managers for macOS that work fine. I would prefer it if Apple picked one to officially support, but installing Homebrew takes me ten minutes and then I never have to think about it again.

I had unpleasant issues with homebrew upgrades back when I used it. It’s not exactly state of the art. (Nix works the same everywhere, though — but there are some hoops you need to jump through on macs)

It’s definitely not the best. I have my issues with it. But I’ve been using it since I got a Mac in 2014 and it has improved a lot since then, it rarely blows up on me anymore. In fact I can’t remember when last it did.

I’ve always wanted to use Nix and have tried to get started a few times. It has always ended up seeming more trouble than it’s worth.

I've used it as my primary package manager on macOS for six months, but ended up dropping it. My main reasons -

* Nix doesn't have support for GUI apps like homebrew cask does - which meant I couldn't drop homebrew anyway. * The nix ecosystem forums suggest using nix-shell for managing packages for other languages, eg. python, java - but it's been really difficult to convince team members to use nix instead of pyenv, conda, gradle etc

Neither Macport or Homebrew work "fine", but please continue.

WSL includes a package manager now?

The distro you run in wsl certainly does.

It used to be, but Apple seems to have lost interest in the Unix/Open Source side of macOS a decade ago. They've abandoned GNU tools after GPLv3 (2007), haven't added anything new, and just let the old stuff limp along until it's obsolete.

Nowadays macOS needs something like Homebrew to fill the gaps. It's still slightly better than Windows + WSL, but Microsoft is catching up, while Apple seems to think that iPadOS is the future.

> It used to be, but Apple seems to have lost interest in the Unix/Open Source side of macOS a decade ago. They've abandoned GNU tools after GPLv3 (2007), haven't added anything new, and just let the old stuff limp along until it's obsolete.

There's a whole lot more to Unix and open source than GNU. macOS has current versions of many open source tools, such as zsh, awk, sqlite, tar, git, and xz.

If one is being pedantic, GNU is not even "open source" but rather is "free software," and macOS certainly is not free software.

None of that really matters when GNU is the predominant standard, though. You could tell your boss all about how great the MacOS coreutils are, but if your program doesn't compile, you're gonna be in trouble.

> GNU is the predominant standard

On Linux, sure, but not on other Unix OSes (like *BSD)

`awk` is part of GNU. And Unix™ is a proprietary product of AT&T.

This new world is way better. Before we were dependent on Apple's release cadence to keep our OSS up to date. Apple officials dropping support doesn't mean they don't want these tools to be on their platform, it just means the community does a better job of managing Unix/OSS tools separate from Apple's release schedule.

That's still pretty appawling though. If Linux distros can have big release candidates and still push out package updates between releases then why can't one of the most profitable companies in the world manage it?

I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve. Just that Apple aren't dropping support out of respect to their customers. They're doing it because it's cheaper.

Linux distros have massively different expectations of their users. And users have very different requirements from how they get and update their OSS, hence he variety of distros and package managers. Its less that Apple is unable to do this and more that Apple is in the one size fits all business, and that model simply doesn't work for solving the OSS distribution problem.

We're not talking about forking macOS for every theme change or offering alternative init daemons. We're just talking about providing a package manager for common user land tools. In fact Apple already do this: it's called "App Store". But you have to pay to have your app on there so most OSS don't bother. And here lies the problem: why would Apple run another package manager for free? For them, this is 100% a financial decision.

I'm thinking that the less value that Apple delivers to the customers, the better it is for their bottom line, don't forget, adding value costs money, plus its not like Apple fans are going to suddenly quit buying their products right?

Apple seems to be really good at maintaining their profit margin.

Apple is fantastic at creating artificial scarcity out of zero-marginal-utility.

In a nutshell, this is the correct answer. Going all the way back to when Apple's Java was deprecated and eventually removed from the shipping OS. In the moment, it's annoying, but I would rather not have to fight with preinstalled software when trying to get a newer version of (say) zsh installed.

Here, they not only realized it had become popular, but GNU licensing gave them an excuse to switch the default without much thrashing about.

The fact that I can `chsh -s /usr/local/bin/zsh` and macOS doesn't freak out is quite nice.

There's still an even better solution: Apple could start treating their operating system like a first-class programming platform, and everyone would win. But it looks like they're still dragging their feet on that one.

They're rolling in billions with nowhere to spend it. They could just hire some more unix devs to update their tooling. Nobody wants to champion that because it'll never be a keynote bullet point.

Their tools are up to date with UNIX, hence why they keep being certified.

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3668.htm

That's a hugely subjective comment and there are plenty of instances throughout history of a powerful CLI and sophisticated GUI being included as part of the same OS (Xerox Alto, BeOS, NeXT, Plan 9). Linux and *BSD's have plenty of popular WM / DEs too: personally I'd rate KDE above anything commercial I've used but that's my subjective preference. Heck these days even Windows can be argued as having a "powerful CLI" with both WSL and Powershell existing, and the Windows UI has it's fair share of fans (regardless of what our own personal preferences might be).

> and the best GUI

This is very subjective. I, for one, much prefer kde plasma. And there's a substantial breed of developers who would prefer a tiling window manager with good keyboard navigation, such as i3.

It was impressive back when OSX debuted, but now it feels like Apple is lacking in both regards. Their shell utilities are all horribly outdated/mismatched, and their UI design took a nosedive with Big Sur. Modern MacOS reminds me of what Ubuntu felt like 10 years ago: it's a confused and scared operating system that doesn't quite know where to go from here. I mean, look at what Monterrey introduced; basically better Facetime and some new wallpapers. I'm getting the feeling that Apple has painted themselves into a corner here. They spent the past 2 decades focusing on vertical growth, only to discover that the next 50 years are going to be ruled by better interop and protocols.

Their tools are up to date with UNIX standard,

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3668.htm

Best GUI? Finder is atrocious, and overall experience is far worse than even cancelled Unity. YMMV, of course, but I hate every second spent with this 'best GUI'. The only reason I ever use macOS is because I occasionally run Sketch.

In fact, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_500

Indeed.

Windows Subsystem for Linus sure has been a game changer!

and in this case it's neither

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