Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

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> - uniform, comprehensive, robust package management, including for the system software

macOS uses Software Update to manage system packages, and AppStore to manage that world, and for everything else, MacPorts (if you care about your system homebrew is not an option).

> - GNU coreutils and related utilities (sed, grep, find, etc.)

macOS has a userland... you seriously can't find /usr/bin/sed in macOS? Seriously?

> - good filesystems

uh, if you actually think ext4 is any good, then I guess you just don't care about massive data loss. wtLf??!?

> - 'root is root'; no policy or other bullshit restricting what root can do by default

Always good to have unrestricted access to root for all those necessary privilege escalations. Security policy just gets in the way. Who has time to activate this and authenticate that?

> - lots of featureful, performant terminal emulators (to the point that the DE default is almost always fine)

You do realize that every single beloved terminal emulator you use on Linux most likely also runs on macOS, right?

> - some choice w/r/t desktop experience

omg. You are not required to run quartz. You can run X11 if you really want, and you can even run gnome or xfce, any window manager you want in macOS. Oh, but what you mean is because you don't know how then it can't be done.

> - popular apps don't just entirely stop working between OS releases

Because you're not aware of Linux breaking applications between releases, I guess it doesn't happen, and because upgrading system software the moment it is released is the new, state of the art sysadmin philosophy.

> - pretty much everything is discoverable and configurable if you're determined

kind of an empty observation, because this is true of all things

Stick with Linux, please. The less you know, the better off everyone else is.

I'm surprised and kind of impressed by the level of vitriol in this comment, especially given the relatively narrow focus of the comment of mine it's replying to, which didn't really consider the merits of macOS itself so much as the differences that give using it a very different vibe from using Linux for people who are used to desktop Linux.

I'm not going to reply to the ‘substance’ of your post but I will say that nothing you've written here is in fact news to me. A more curious person, or maybe just a person who is having a better day, might wonder what they're missing rather than lose their shit, when someone writes something that surprises them on the internet.

Just wanted to chime in that you're absolutely right. That comment was unnecessarily filled with hate and obsessive elitism. It's really weird that someone would take time out of their weekend to write that.

>> - 'root is root'; no policy or other bullshit restricting what root can do by default

> Always good to have unrestricted access to root for all those necessary privilege escalations. Security policy just gets in the way. Who has time to activate this and authenticate that?

On gnu/linux there’s SELinux for that, since 2001. Red Hat, that implements security very well, has had that enabled by default since forever basically.

Right, and SELinux, alternatives like AppArmor, and the various kernel hardening parameters available on Linux are things that get in your way relatively rarely. SIP is much more annoying.

And there are also configuration matters where rather than policy on what root is allowed to do per se, making things a pain in the ass is the security strategy. Like there's no way to non-interactively enable macOS' built-in SSH server without resorting to an enterprise endpoint management system.

Part of what gives the feeling that ‘root is not root’ on macOS is that you can't really administer macOS like a normal Unix system or like Linux. There's a bunch of things that require interactivity, or a cloud account logged in. There are files that are part of a normal POSIX filesystem which play a certain role in configuring Unix systems which are present on macOS, but literally just don't do anything anymore, in favor of some other format that macOS actually cares about and which is a bigger pain to edit or automate using normal Unix userland tools.

Things like creating users in a script is way more verbose on macOS than on Linux or any BSD I've seen. (The least annoying way to handle it IME is to use a wrapper that imitates NetBSD's utilities for this which is bundled in pkgsrc.)

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