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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Oh sure, I still remember getting my first 1/4” tape of the GNU tools source code through the post. This is why it’s so hilarious to me when the kids nowadays complain that MacOS has different command line tools to Linux. “Why can’t they just use GNU?”.

Get off my lawn! ;)

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Ironically, BSD was already available when GNU was created. Since that is what macOS uses, I guess the question could be “why didn’t everybody just use BSD”?

I suspect two of the many reasons for GNU usage were

(1) crazy command options (it only takes one or two to ease your workflow over the what the system distro supplied, plus the same behavior for the same flags across platforms)

(2) the lawsuit (probably an understatement - it was Serious back then)

Edit: added "usage" for clarity, s/statment/statement

Also why when on a macOS system I never felt the urge to install Homebrew or something similar, it is just another UNIX flavour.

How do you usually install software? Always building from source?

It's interesting to say that it's "just another UNIX flavour" when the most common flavours today all have some form of package management.

Turns out there is plenty of commercial software, and UNIX tools in the box are more than enough for my workflows.

isnt the macos system called NOT UNIX ? ^.^

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3700.htm

Apple macOS is a UNIX™ and has been for decades, both in Arm and x86 implementations, and before that in PowerPC form.

Two Linux distros, both derived from CentOS Linux, have also held certification in the past.

Whether an OS is a UNIX™ or not is nothing to do with whether it is based on AT&T code and has not been since Novell bought AT&T Unix Labs and donated the trademark to the Open Group in 1993. For three decades, whether it's a Unix or not depends solely on whether it passes Unix compatibility testing.

Linux is a Unix and so is macOS.

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