Indeed.
I just wonder if macOS will stop being UNIX like.
That is, whilst it still has home brew and a BSD core it’s great. If that goes away it’s no longer a viable alternative to Linux.
I just wonder if macOS will stop being UNIX like.
That is, whilst it still has home brew and a BSD core it’s great. If that goes away it’s no longer a viable alternative to Linux.
Apple is highly incentivized to keep devs on Macs, even if it turned out to be a loss leader for them.
It’s insanely common.
Given that Windows made WSL in an attempt to capture developer mindshare, that tends to support his comment
At Apple, if you even use GPL tools in your workflow you have to seek approval, and most often there’s pushback of “why won’t this (alternative that isn’t GPL) work ?”
Their lawyers aren’t stupid, they understand the GPL and its limits, but they’re simply doing a risk assessment- which one is less risky, the GPL variant or the BSD. For a corporation, that’s generally BSD.
The remaining differences are related more to systems stuff - managing daemons with launchd for example. These aren't really a distraction day-to-day.
The fact that someone who didn’t grow up at the time when open source was an idealistic concept instead of free support to corporations needs to learn about the gnutils and how to install them with homebrew is what makes me sad.
Why do we seriously not have a command-line package manager on macOS yet? Windows has one by now. It’s just sad to me that you need a manual checklist of post-setup steps to turn a Mac into a useful machine for software development.
Developers and operations people are already starting to move to Linux. More and more I see colleague either switching to Linux, or have a mac laptop for administrative tasks and then a Linux workstation, or VMs, where they do their actual work.
I’ve been in this industry for a long time now. Linux always had more credibility among devs and ops folk. This “starting to move” view is weird.
My view is that OS X was acceptable by these teams because it was close enough to Linux and corporate could deal with it.
When I worked in corporate IT Linux was simply not an option for a primary workstation because there was no standard configuration or management tooling that made everyone happy. Macs were an easy compromise.
https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-...
I don’t think it makes business sense for them to mass produce these for a consumer market but a data center of M5 chips sounds amazing for the workloads they’re running.
I don’t think the open source model will ever make an Apple quality UI because that’s the result of highly opinionated executives like Steve Jobs who don’t need to compromise or allow customization.
I’m glad both exist. I use them both and my life is good
You might wanna look into that because that’s not how it works at all. I frequently switch between terminal and GUI apps and have not once noticed Finder failing to catch up with whatever it is I’m doing in the terminal.
[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2026/09/29/wsl-co...
Be mindful of living in an echo chamber. HN is one. There is a startup/SV-oriented culture here, which selects for a specific niche of people that is not representative of the general population. Going by this forum, you'd also think Java and especially C# were dead languages by how many votes and comments their threads get. Yet in the real world, Windows dev environments dwarf Linux, and Java/C# are everywhere in enterprise.
Neither Apple nor NeXT had a UNIX culture, and efforts like A/UX and mkLinux were never that much serious.
Had they acquired Be, BeOS was even less UNIXy than NeXTSTEP.
Imagine the only scriptability you get for the OS is Automator or Shortcuts, https://github.com/apple/container is at best an API at worst a GUI app and certainly not a CLI, and that's it. macOS is MacOS (pre-X). Or iOS-like. Terminal.app spawns a sandboxed Linux microvm. You never see the host from a shell. Dear colima can't even _exist_.
lima does, not colima (well it does because it's lima under the hood)
Edit: love how I get downvoted for facts?! They literally broke Cocoa so it was throwing hopeless useless exceptions at the bottom of the stack when they changed the native file open boxes to run in another process. Two bits of software I use couldn't raise an open file dialog window any more.