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| ▲ | jeremyjh 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The relevance of Open Group and the UNIX brand has been a walking corpse for decades. | |
| ▲ | Grombobulous an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I would guess that your company isn’t actually interested in the UNIX compatibility specifically, more that they’re interested in laptops that can run a similar toolset. They probably also buy MacBooks since they’re reliable, performant, high-endurance (battery life) general purpose business laptops that employees like using and see good productivity with. | |
| ▲ | bananamogul 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think he means macOS as official, certified Unix is dead. macOS as a more Linuxy-friendly place to work on Linuxy-type software, sure. Definitely true compared to Windows. But no one cares if macOS is blessed as Official UNIX. How many people are writing software that they need to be able to run on Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX in 2026? | |
| ▲ | sdcfgy 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We've found it to be a much worse experience than windows for dev stuff. It's a different OS and architecture to the target env (Linux). Aligning with that makes life considerably easier. | | |
| ▲ | coldtea 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Linux doesn't have an "architecture". | | |
| ▲ | sdcfgy 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You know what I mean. ARM vs x86-64 -and- macOS API vs Linux API. And yes, they are different even at the user end on the shell. | | |
| ▲ | plorkyeran 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | All of our production Linux systems are running on Graviton these days, i.e. they’re arm64. | | |
| ▲ | Rohansi 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Your production is not going to be the same as everyone else's. It's also not going to be the ideal for everyone else's, or even possible for everyone else's. | | |
| ▲ | jasomill 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The differences between ARM and x86 are probably less relevant for the majority of server-side development than API and admin interface differences. In practice, anyone seriously developing Linux software on either macOS or Windows is using VMs or containers running the actual Linux kernel, at least for testing, and the difference is that Microsoft has put far more effort into integrating specific support for these things into the OS. |
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| ▲ | Brainspackle 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I've been a software engineer for 25 years, doing Linux stuff at startups and big companies (the biggest even). In all my time as a software engineer, I've seen maybe 3 people who didn't use a MacBook Pro for work. Apple makes the bulk of its money from tech companies and schools and they cater very well to both. If it stops being Unix-like, they lose the thing they make the most money from. They are smarter than that. | | |
| ▲ | torben-friis 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think apple makes the bulk from professionals at all, the iphone is their flagship product and their laptop line has been expanding towards casual markets with budget models. | | |
| ▲ | jeremyjh 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Right but in this thread it is pretty clear we are talking about the money they make from MacOS. | | |
| ▲ | kbolino an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | They don't make any money on macOS anymore. You get it preinstalled on their computers, you can't buy it separately, you can't install it on other computers, and major upgrades are free. | | |
| ▲ | jeremyjh an hour ago | parent [-] | | It is a part of the computer that people pay for. This is like saying they don't get any money from Apple Silicon because its already installed on the motherboard. | | |
| ▲ | kbolino 21 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, they don't make any money from Apple Silicon either. I don't know if anyone remembers how things used to work, but you used to buy software. It came in boxes, with physical media and manuals. Apple has not sold macOS as a discrete physical product in 15 years. It has not charged for major version upgrades in 12 years. Thus, macOS is just a non-revenue-generating constituent part of something else, namely their computers. Obviously, the value proposition of the computer comes from its parts, but they cannot be individually quantified anymore. What can be quantified is the relative revenues and profits from their various divisions, and the original claim that phones & the phone ecosystem make far more money than computers & the computer ecosystem is unchallenged. Splitting hairs about macOS and Apple Silicon is irrelevant to the claim. |
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| ▲ | kibwen 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The money they make from MacOS is a footnote compared to the money they make from phone hardware, the app store transaction tax, and ads. To a first approximation, the only reason that Apple cares about MacOS is so that people can make iOS apps. | | |
| ▲ | jasomill 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | This is a poor approximation, as there would be no need for such an extensive Mac product lineup if this were true. The Mac mini and one laptop product line with two or three sizes would be more than sufficient, and continuing development of first-party Mac applications like Logic and FCP would serve little purpose. | |
| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | jmcs 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Backend developers are already conditioned to use Linux VMs when developing in Mac OS. | | |
| ▲ | splittydev 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | And so are developers on Linux. 99.5% of your backend stuff will run just fine on macOS without any modification, but it's been a good practice for a long time now to run stuff in containers (Docker/OrbStack/podman/etc.) in order to have a reproducible environment free of contamination. My development process in macOS is basically no different than it was on Linux. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I bet you are located in US. | |
| ▲ | sneak 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You’re in a bubble. Windows is still huge, especially in middling companies that dictate it and standard HP/Dell/Lenovo hardware for all 3k staff. It’s insanely common. | | |
| ▲ | orf 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | His point isn’t that it’s common, it’s that a unix-like environment is a key selling point. Given that Windows made WSL in an attempt to capture developer mindshare, that tends to support his comment | | |
| ▲ | 9dev 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | You still end up in uncanny valley often enough, with commands that are missing, or working unexpectedly differently. It often feels like macOS could be made so much better for developers, but Apple just doesn't care because people buy their devices anyway. | | |
| ▲ | spacedcowboy 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s not that. It’s that their lawyers won’t let the engineering side distribute gnu tools. Period. 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. | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The problem is that being a developer is not a synonymous with UNIX. | |
| ▲ | jeremyjh 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In deeply saddens me to think that there is a developer who has not installed gnutils and put them earlier in the PATH. The remaining differences are related more to systems stuff - managing daemons with launchd for example. These aren't really a distraction day-to-day. | | |
| ▲ | jonhohle 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It really is that simple. No different from a BSD or even a non-GNU (busybox, etc.) Linux distribution. If you like GNU tools, use them. | |
| ▲ | 9dev 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s a computer. I can make a computer go beep if I want, that is not the issue. 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. | | |
| ▲ | jeremyjh 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't think you have to grow up in some idyllic era that never existed. Its more like you type 'ls', notice that its total crap, and google it. | | |
| ▲ | 9dev an hour ago | parent [-] | | The point I was making was that knowing what GNU means in the first place probably requires some cultural background that many people lack, especially younger ones. | | |
| ▲ | jeremyjh an hour ago | parent [-] | | Right, and the point I'm making is that you can learn this from Google once you notice there is a difference from how common commands work on Linux and MacOS. You don't need to know about GNU, you just have to wonder why its different. |
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| ▲ | mrweasel 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It already feels a bit like it's two separate operating systems on one machine. It's still usable, but I am starting to notice odd behaviours. Files created in the terminal not showing up in the UI, there seems to be no notification from the filesystem to Finder, informing it that the terminal has created a file. 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. | | |
| ▲ | mingus88 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Developers and operations people are already starting to move to Linux. 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. | | |
| ▲ | hollowonepl 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I personally don’t see macos anyhow competing with Linux or to be anyhow comparable to Linux in each others sweat points. linux dominated server side, so be its fair victory but it’s continually shit kind of clone of many things done in MacOs desktop experience. It just kept cloning Apple since forever to repeat a glimpse of that experience even during Next times with WindowMaker and then with many incarnations of modern desktop systems to compare with OSX and MacOs continually and in that direction. Linux is open, it’s different, that comes with value but still a little handicapped brother to MacOS desktop experience with continually f*up fundamentals even if you include wayland as the base. So is MacOs in servers but there Apple just resigned last year and stopped pretending they have servers. Both have only one thing in common, shell with base posix tools. Nothing else. And none are as open as original idea for Unix as this idea is long dead and linux tries to make Stallman’s wet dream about GNU system come true as his own kernel implementation did not move forward much it at all since mid 80s.. that’s the only UNIX reality that matters.. rest is bureaucracy and 5000 pages of POSIX standard nobody cares about as this is more about C libraries than kernel’s internals. |
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| ▲ | akxowkciwkdkw 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Files created in the terminal not showing up in the UI 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. | | |
| ▲ | mrweasel 5 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Strange, because I have the same issue on two different machines. It doesn't happen all the time, but frequently enough that I assumed that Finder does some re-scan every now and then (or when you open a new Finder window). |
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| ▲ | jameshart 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Microsoft just shipped a full-fledged first class Linux container runtime as part of Windows[1]. I don’t think it even made front page of HN, which shows how far windows has fallen as a developer environment, but it is absolutely something Apple should be offering as a first class capability on OS X. The compatibility of the host OS file system with being mounted into docker images makes it a better environment for running such things. [1] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2026/09/29/wsl-co... | | | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Game and app developers certainly not. |
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| ▲ | Telemakhos 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In some alternative dimension Ternus decides to realize the full potential of the Mach kernel by embracing Hurd in place of XNU. Users are discouraged because the new system is not enough like GNU/Linux. | |
| ▲ | lloeki 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm suspecting some forces at Apple would be perfectly content with ripping most of the BSD core and the assorted CLI out and just have Linux containers spawned in VMs, WSL2-style. | | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Of course they were, even NeXTSTEP was designed to be compatible with UNIX only to compete with UNIX workstations like those from Sun. 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. | |
| ▲ | jeremyjh 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Its called colima and its excellent. https://colima.run/ | | |
| ▲ | moritz 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | and they have a first-party one now as well https://github.com/apple/container | | |
| ▲ | jeremyjh 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I haven't tried it. colima also simplifies linux VMs which is more of an analog to WSL2 than just running containers. It has really nice integration with Incus as well, if you like persistent system containers. | | |
| ▲ | moritz 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I also use colima mostly, it‘s great! (the Apple container thing de facto requires macos 26+) |
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| ▲ | throawayonthe 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | would be awesome |
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| ▲ | sdcfgy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's distinctly problematic there unfortunately. Particularly the moment you add any UI toolkits to it. I've had so many problems with stuff that uses Qt because Qt takes a while to catch up with things Apple broke inside their Cocoa internals. Very irritating platform to work on. 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. | |
| ▲ | totetsu 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What would that going away look like? | | |
| ▲ | sdcfgy 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Swift on Mach | |
| ▲ | john_alan 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | yeah I guess there isn't really much to move to... a new custom Kernel and Userspace? extremely unlikely - I guess it's here to stay, despite not being formally Unix. |
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