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Comment by kokonokko1337 | Hacker News Reader

> "It also happens to be a Mac, with an operating system that looks nice and doesn’t suck"

Yes Apple has some of the best hardware out there, albeit overpriced. But the software is such a hindrance and I can't take anyone that states otherwise seriously. If only it had proper Linux support (and the Asahi people do an amazing job but you can reverse-engineer only so many stuff with limited funding, and then you have to do it again for new models). MacOS is good if you just want to have a standard experience, which to be fair is most people. It's good for just setting up an LLM server I guess since the hardware is a perfect fit. I wouldn't touch it otherwise.

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What exactly is missing from macOS that makes you feel the need for Linux?

I get it on Windows systems, at least when someone wants to use Linux-type tooling. But macOS already supports pretty much all of that natively?

Comparing to Linux is too general. You need to say what distro and what install level. I really only use headless Linux, but I've never logged into a fresh install and not had to do some sort of 'apt install devel-packages' equivalent for which ever distro being used. That's the same thing with macOS after choosing which package manager to use. I don't see how Linux vs macOS is very different

> What exactly is missing from macOS that makes you feel the need for Linux?

For starters, the source code.

And why would you need that to run LLMs?

Apart from that, for the UNIX part, the source is available for quite a few components:

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions

notably also the kernel

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu

> Apart from that, for the UNIX part, the source is available for quite a few components:

Strictly speaking, Apple can claim to ship a UNIX® operating system:

* https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm

* https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

Strictly speaking, Apple cannot. macOS as-shipped cannot complete the UNIX v3 certification test suite until you:

  disable System Integrity Protection, enable the root account, enable core file generation, disable timeout coalescing, mount any APFS partitions with the strictatime option, format your APFS partitions case-sensitive (by default, APFS is case-insensitive, so you’ll need to reinstall), disable Spotlight, copy the binaries uucp, uuname, uustat, and uux from /usr/bin to /usr/local/bin and the binaries uucico and uuxqt from /usr/sbin to /usr/local/bin, set the setuid bit on all of these binaries, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH before /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, enable the uucp service, and handle the mystery issues listed in the four Temporary Waivers.

https://www.osnews.com/story/141633/apples-macos-unix-certif...

Yeah for a while they used that in marketing copy actually, but it's been a while I think.

Darwin is still available. Open source no one’s picked up the gauntlet…

> And why would you need that to run LLMs?

kokonokko1337 already said it was good enough to run LLMs, presumably RunSet isn't saying the source code is needed to run an inference server.

They say, not doing anything with Linux’s source code other than mentioning its existence.

The Asahi Linux group goal should have been organizing themselves by taking out a license on Arm processor (probably too late with the present owners) and building a new Linux Distro to go with it instead of being a parasite on someone else’s existing hardware, if the three ex-engineers from Apple could do something like that why couldn’t they aim higher?

Why waste time spending years reverse engineering. Wouldn’t it have been easier to raise money for such an endeavor? I hope someone will come along in the future in kindergarten, junior high or high school who doesn’t know any better will try something like this. I’m too old. for such a journey.

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