It does let you run things as root.

VCFundedGenYer 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not exactly.

What is "root" in macOS is more or less a power user role. Apple took away the true ability to operate as root a long time ago with System Integrity Protection which walls off the critical parts of the OS from the user entirely.

Unfortunately, SIP also restricts basic system functions that are trivial in other OSes. Apple made this very difficult, and MS would have loved to do this in Vista had they not received the backlash that they did.

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frizlab 4 hours ago | parent [-]

You can disable SIP if you want. You can run whatever you want on your machine. Disabling SIP is indeed a security risk… then again, so is running something as root. Having a Mac w/o SIP is no more a security risk than having a Linux w/o a r/o kernel AFAIK.

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asdff 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

The way apple talks about SIP its like a miracle we survived at all pre SIP. Pretty sure I've had SIP disabled for years now when I got nagged for something or whatever and had to disable it.

	▲	frizlab 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		SIP is a good thing and prevents a lot of (usually PEBKAC) problems. It is also the direction where Linux is going (is now? or maybe they gave up? idk, it’s been a while since I heard about immutable distros). For tech-aware people, it is probably not necessary indeed. However, given that now “tech-aware” people are running completely random and unvalidated scripts w/o second thoughts (or even first thoughts actually) on their main machine, I’d say the “tech-aware” line is very very high…

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4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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