Apple's macOS Unix certification is a lie

I suspect there are exactly zero customers (of Apple or anyone else) who care to nitpick like this over strict adherence—out of the box—to any version of a UNIX specification. Anyone who really needs to guarantee that their application will be immediately compatible with a new system is simply going to stick with whatever vendor they're already running it on and demand that vendor maintain bug-compatibility with their older versions.

> The cold and harsh truth is that literally nobody but a few nerds like us care about this, and even then the level of care we display is minute.

The author says this, but oh boy you should see how many individuals on /r/macos hinge on "It's good cus UNIX!", not that they understand what a UNIX is or where to find one.

The certification isn't useful. Apple doesn't sell to the types of organizations/governments that would care. And macOS is so limiting in what you can do with it in comparison to not-UNIXes, branding it UNIX is a waste of time.

Let’s break down the serious issues:

- irrelevant, ancient unix-to-unix networking commands (who cares, who the fuck uses this[1])

- core dumps (who cares - enable it if needed)

- file access time may be slow to update (who cares)

- timeout coalescing issues with the test suite when running file access time tests (who cares)

- FS case sensitivity (quirky at best)

I mean… it’s not a lie. I can run plenty of Unix software on MacOS just fine.

This says more about the relevance of the certification than it does about MacOS.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP

Most of the issues are with the default user space and configuration. Maybe they should certify Darwin w/ a FreeBSD user space and HFS+ filesystem instead?

The certification made sense during the late 90s and early 2000s. It made it easy to port most Unix software of the day to Mac OS X. Which then led it to become a major selling point for researchers in academia, those of whom were users of competing commercial Unix operating systems.

Yeah, it's just a sparkling OS.

This is also a lazy criticism. If the definition of UNIX is "certified by The Open Group according to the rules" then it's a UNIX.

Your issue is with the certification criteria, not Apple. Go complain to the certifying body instead.

These violations obliterate that the central promise of Unix—having a convenient, easy-to-use system that gives users great power over their computer. The control that you always have over a real Unix system is, in the Apple world, entirely illusory. Even basic debugging facilities like core dumps don't work! You're confined to a sandbox.

"the ancient times of 2004” - now I feel old

I have to ask: so what? Most of the stuff here is rather specific to the test suite conflicting with security or features and does not adversely users or developers who care about UNIX behavior (SIP is really the only thing that may get in the way, but anyone who cares can disable it). For example, the fact that spotlight might update file access times is presumably not itself a violation of the UNIX standard, it's just something the test suite isn't expecting. The weirdest thing here is the uucp stuff, but that's an obsolete and rather dead technology so I see no reason to complain about macOS not giving those binaries the setuid bit, especially when the workaround so trivial.

I genuinely cared that MacOS billed itself as Unix and this was illuminating for me. The red flags were there, it doesn't even have an official package manager.