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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see more customisation tools appearing for macOS, as just a few years ago I was looking for ways to strip down the OS (CI related), and while such info was widely available in the Windows world, to the point that customised "distros" are available, it was nearly nonexistent for macOS; only the Hackintosh community had some useful articles on how things worked.

Could the rise of LLMs and vibe-coding have motivated people who otherwise wouldn't bother?

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It’s hard to strip it down these days as the OS image and its core, immutable filesystem cannot be edited. Admittedly this helps keep idiots from destroying their filesystem and also blocks many malware attacks on the system, but, for example. I don’t believe you can delete the chess program.

This is one of those things where you have to ask yourself "how do you get it so wrong?". I get the idea of protecting from malware/self-harm, but to not allow removal of such a pointless app is just befuddling. At least Microsoft trying to say that Explorer was core to the OS, but a chess app? I never did buy into Explorer being core until the day I accidentally pasted an URL into File Explorer's path and it rendered the webpage. I don't understand why someone thought that was necessary to allow to happen, but there it was, core to the OS.

I think it’s because all those apps use core technologies so their bundle size is tiny. You hide them and never think about them (like the old windows media player). Most of windows optional features are very much in your face all the time.

please explain how a chess game is core technology

Not that the are core technologies, more like they use whatever default libraries (Frameworks in Apple parlance) that are already there. Just like no one bothered to remove paint or wordpad in the old days (even with only 20gb of hdd)

Just like no one bothered to remove paint or wordpad in the old days (even with only 20gb of hdd)

Trivial to remove (just delete the files), but also very little in the way of savings --- less than 1MB each.

and its core, immutable filesystem cannot be edited

That's a half-truth at best; I can just open the disk image in a hex editor if nothing else understands the format.

Hackintoshers have figured out how to add/modify drivers etc. It's certainly not without obstacles, but that's still very far from "impossible". If I remember correctly, you need to re-snapshot the FS and tell the bootloader to boot from it.

(And necessarily, ignoring the countless cries of "it can't be done" was how I was able to accomplish my goal... I knew that it was possible since I could edit any bit of the FS; figuring out which files I could remove and patch was the hard and undocumented part.)

The entire system is signed and verified at boot. Any change to a macOS system outside of /Users, /Applications, and whatever else the OS lets you edit can't really be edited without disabling System Integrity Protection (which isn't recommended)

The sealing of the filesystem can be disabled trivially, though, via a command line tool that Apple ships with MacOS that you run from recovery mode.

And then you can remount `/` as read-write, and create a new blessed snapshot with your changes made to it.

This doesn't actually delete the signed snapshot though, so the space consumed by `/System/Applications/Chess` still is consumed. I'm not sure if MacOS will allow deleting the final sealed snapshot for `/`. It might, I don't know that anyone is clamoring for it though.

I don't have my detailed notes from when I did this, but I believe you should be able to copy everything you want to keep to a new filesystem.

> It’s hard to strip it down these days as the OS image and its core, immutable filesystem cannot be edited.

Does disabling SIP, rebooting, making changes, then turning it back on and rebooting again not work anymore?

One has to also `csrutil authenticated-root disable`, and then to get changes to stick use `bless` to create a new snapshot to boot.

But that's it.

Ah okay, interesting, stuff has gotten slightly more complicated since the last time I tried this, but fundamentally it sounds about the same in terms of "boot into recovery, run a couple of custom commands, make changes, boot back".

yep. it's still very possible, and apple still ships all the tools needed to modify the root filesystem.

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