People have responded to you with timelines explaining why it couldn’t have happened but you seem to keep restating this claim without more substance or context to the time.
Imho Linux would have been the wrong choice and perhaps even the incorrect assumption. Mac is not really BSD based outside of the userland. The kernel was and is significantly different and would’ve hard forked from Linux if they did use it at the time.
Often when people say Linux they mean (the often memes) GNU/Linux , except GNU diverged significantly from the posix command line tools (in that sense macOS is truer) and the GPL3 license is anathema to Apple.
I don’t see any area where basing off Linux would have resulted in materially better results today.
What benefit would it have had at the time? What guarantees would it have given at the time that would have persisted three decades later?
Apple made its decision in 1996.
And it only became usable as Solaris/AIX/HP-UX replacement thanks to the money IBM, Oracle and Compaq pumped into Linux's development around 2000, it is even on the official timeline history.
If by biggest rival you mean Microsoft, it was Microsoft who saved Apple from bancrupcy in 1997.
The fact Microsoft announced they were investing, and that they were committed to continue shipping Office to Mac, definitely helped.
>There wouldn't have been any downsides for them
Really? NO downsides???
- throwing away a decade and a half of work and engineering experience (Avie Tevanian helped write Mach, this is like having Linus being your chief of software development and saying "just switch to Hurd!")
- uncertain licensing (Apple still ships ancient bash 3.2 because of GPL)
- increased development time to a shipping, modern OS (it already took them 5 years to ship 10.0, and it was rough)
That's just off the top of my head. I believe you think there wouldn't have been any downsides because you didn't stop to think of any, or are ideaologically disposed to present the Linux kernel in 1996 as being better or safer than XNU.
Well, there’s a parallel universe! Beige boxes running BeOS late-90s-cool maybe, but would we still have had the same upending results for mobile phones, industrial design, world integration, streaming media services…
It was a very different world. We won't even talk about audio and video playback. I was an early Linux user, having done my first install in 1993, and sadly ran Windows on my desktop then because the Linux desktop experience was awful.