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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

WSL is such a pain compared to just using a unix os from the get, which is of course what macos is. People forget that it is in fact a unix distro.

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Unix certification requires things like case sensitive file systems, which MacOS can do, but doesn't so they had to supply a special configuration for certification.

So no. The MacOS you use is not Unix.

No, people don't.

It's just that mishmash of OSFMK (with BSD APIs of 1991 or so) with random additions of newer APIs does not necessarily make it a great Unix to work with in 2026

People really get hard up about it shipping with some older versions of some tools. But if you are really that much of a unix nerd then you'd also know that is solved in 5 mins with a brew one liner.

I am enough of a nerd to know that people will come with assumptions about libc based on Free/Net/OpenBSD and get burned because no, you can't fix the system libc with brew oneliner

If your work is so dependent on a certain libc version then congrats, macos is already a better thin client for connecting to a remote dev box host than windows out the box. You already have ssh and scp and rsync and tmux out of the box and the laptop is genuinely the best in the market from a hardware standpoint. I code like this. Computer can probably chug for 16 hours without hurting for a charger just running an ssh connection.

SSH and co are part of Windows for quite some time now.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

As for tmux, I know UNIX since 1993, went through Xenix, DG/UX, Solaris, NeXTSTEP before GNU/Linux started to take off, worked across Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, OS/X before GNU/Linux really took off.

To this day I don't care tmux exists, just open a couple of terminal windows.

If you are going to mention jobs across sessions, nohup does the job.

If I wanted 16 hours for just SSH, I would have went with X-series thinkpad already back in 2015 or so when it easily reached 26 hours without suspend in my friend's testing. As a thin client it also sucks, because keyboard, never figured if they fixed grounding of the chassis, the "let's make your doctor ask if you're suicidal" hard edges near wrists, and so on.

Except UNIX and GNU/Linux aren't the same thing, which is why so many folks keep complaining about their UNIX experience in macOS.

They buy macOS and then complain macOS isn't Linux, duh!

a UNIX distro which interfaces well with Linux. A fact which makes life way easier in the interoperability department.

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