There's a lot of chatter here about macOS' Unix certification. But in a post shared by another user, it appears that the actual content of that Unix certification vindicates OP— macOS' official Unix compatibility requires disabling SIP:
> So, if you want your installation of macOS 15.0 to pass the UNIX® 03 certification test suites, you need to disable System Integrity Protection, enable the root account, enable core file generation, disable timeout coalescing, mount any APFS partitions with the strictatime option, format your APFS partitions case-sensitive (by default, APFS is case-insensitive, so you’ll need to reinstall), disable Spotlight, copy the binaries uucp, uuname, uustat, and uux from /usr/bin to /usr/local/bin and the binaries uucico and uuxqt from /usr/sbin to /usr/local/bin, set the setuid bit on all of these binaries, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH before /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, enable the uucp service, and handle the mystery issues listed in the four Temporary Waivers.
So it seems very fair to say then, that features like SIP and the SSV are genuine turns away from Unix per se, even given the fact of the certification.
It's pretty telling when the comments on the article and here have devolved into pedantic discussions of "well is it REALLY UNIX?" It's the most inconsequential question with no beneficiary except those who want to claim UNIX purity.
I've never tried it myself, but it's oft-repeated folk wisdom in Apple circles that enabling filesystem case-sensitivity breaks all manner of third-party software that has only ever been tested on the case-insensitive default.
> So it seems very fair to say then, that features like SIP and the SSV are genuine turns away from Unix per se
At the end of the day UNIX is an operating system. A dead operating system that hasn’t seen a release outside of Bell Labs since the 80s and even 10th Edition was 1988, and never distributed.
A branch of it persisted through System V and its variants, then it became a spec, then operating systems started calling themselves UNIX according to that spec whether they were Systems V offshoots or reconstructions stemming from Net/2.
We’ve been genuine turns away from Unix per se since before I was born. The SUS and POSIX lets people pretend like we’re not.
IMO, that's a pretty poor summary of how the "Unix Wars" really ended. Bell UNIX got productized into System V, and the trademark was dumped off on TOG.
But "Unix" was really more of an ideal. The ideal system may not have existed, but a lot of people saw the potential of the flawed heaven in there. Including Stallman and Torvalds. Imagine "Industry-standard APIs" which are actually non-negotiable, and not just some compliance-test. Well, you need the source code, right? We have a much better "unix" now than we ever had with "UNIX".
The “Unix Wars” battle lines were drawn in 1988 with the formation of the X/Open Group and Unix International, the same year Bell Labs put together the 10th Edition’s manual, more or less demarcating its release according to their own conventions even if it wasn’t sold nor distributed. Their next project was Plan 9.
Incidentally this was also the year of the last major version of AT&T’s System V, System V Release 4. There would be a couple more minor releases after that, but there was never a System V Release 5.
> The ideal system may not have existed, but a lot of people saw the potential of the flawed heaven in there. Including Stallman and Torvalds.
I don’t think Stallman nor Torvalds ever saw anything so romantic in UNIX. You could ask them, but it doesn’t jive with well anything in the historical record.
> We have a much better "unix" now than we ever had with "UNIX".
We have better operating systems, yes, and for a price and some elbow grease, some of them can even use the UNIX trademark which checks a box for some people who might care about that sort of thing.
Obv we have better operating systems, yes. But we also obviously have much, much better de-jure open source standards than the UNIX/unix/etc crowd could ever manage. So the world is better when all those guys gave-up or died.
Stallman and Torvalds were not romantics, but they were tactical and strategic in targeting commercial UNIX. You could tell in the old days the Linux benchmark was Solaris.
> So the world is better when all those guys gave-up or died.
I think this line is a bit harsh but otherwise I think we’re pretty much in agreement now unless there’s something else you would like to add on. Cheers!
Yeah, like a really shitty ancient version of bash. If that's what UNIX means to you, I'm not gonna yuck your yum, but what could be more UNIX like than letting license issues make life worse for your users.
> To the Unix purist, this might appear wasteful and unnecessary, but macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix. It’s a closed-source proprietary operating system designed for use by millions of consumers and regular users. Rather than configuring it using config files or its thousands of property lists, its controls are largely exposed in System Settings, with a few settings hidden away and only accessible through the defaults command.
Is really, really interesting to me, because so many people (including the author) are so invested in the question of whether or not "macOS is Unix". There's so much signaling happening here, people throwing around UNIX all-caps, talking about certifications, the "good parts" of UNIX, that macOS "[is] quite literally [UNIX]", while seemingly missing the author's intention entirely.
You don't have to agree with the author, but a good faith interpretation of "macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix" should be obvious in its meaning. Yes, macOS 26 has been certified by The Open Group to be compliant with the Single UNIX Specification.
You know what else is UNIX certified? IBM's z/OS. Yet I don't think people would be clambering to say that z/OS's USS is "quite literally UNIX" with the same ferocity.
The point the author is clearly attempting to make is that the idea and system of macOS is not Unix. Even if macOS is, legally speaking, "UNIX®", it was not made to be UNIX®. macOS is not built to adhere to the "UNIX® philosophy". The fact NextStep and OS X after it were BSD-compatible is an implementation detail -- a useful one at that -- but an implementation detail nonetheless. It's like Android's use of the Linux kernel underneath. Yes, Android is Linux, but there's a reason why there's a vocal community of people who champion "Real Linux smartphones". Android uses Linux, but Android isn't defined by Linux.
I'm not trying to prove anyone right or wrong here, I just want to give my three cents on the matter. I would call macOS "unix-y" because it's close enough to being a "unix" to be comfortable on the CLI, but I've touched the unix "heart" enough to know it still smells like 2005-ish FreeBSD, largely frozen in time.
Of course, that's good enough for most things. But then, does that make Windows a Unix-like, just because it can run Linux ELF executables via WSL1? Conceivably, if Microsoft cared, they could get UNIX® 03 certification via WSL1, WSL2, or some hacked together reincarnation of SFU with parts from WSL1.
Yes, I know, macOS has a "real" BSD core, and a "real" unix heritage through BSD and OSF/1. The point is that it's not hard (IMO) to see where the author is coming from saying "No, macOS is not a Unix".
(I disagree with him for different reasons -- he ambiguously implies that "Unix" means being open-source, for instance -- but I agree that macOS as a platform is not very Unix-y, even if it is UNIX®.)
The analogy with Android and Linux is dead-on. As is the confusing language with which people talk about these things. "Android isn't Linux" and "macOS isn't Unix" aren't quite the right way to express the sentiments and thoughts behind them— even when those sentiments and thoughts are themselves clear and reasonable.
I don't think Apple's choices to deviate from the Unix standard are necessarily for the worst; many are for the better! But their cultural deviation from the norms of the free Unices and Unix-likes is part of what makes computing on macOS feel constraining and frustrating to me. It seems like that sense of disappointment (shared by many others), and defensiveness in response to it, end up driving a lot of discussions around this.
> Conceivably, if Microsoft cared, they could get UNIX® 03 certification via WSL1, WSL2, or some hacked together reincarnation of SFU with parts from WSL1.
"UNIX® philosophy" doesn't exist, that is a religion like discussion about UNIX spread by FOSS people while arguing for GNU/Linux with their endless list of command line options.
I use UNIX in various flavours since being introduced to it in 1993 via Xenix, and cannot name a single one where this was ever true.
In terms of practical usage, imo it doesn't matter whether macOS is Unix - it's certainly not Linux. The shell is different, the bundled utils are different, the filesystem, configuration and tooling is different enough that if you try to run anything beyond the most basic scripts written for Linux, they will not work.
Which means macOS is a separate platform you need to learn and support.
By this standard, WSL2 is much more Linux than macOS.
>You know what else is UNIX certified? IBM's z/OS. Yet I don't think people would be clambering to say that z/OS's USS is "quite literally UNIX" with the same ferocity.
Does "Unix" still carry some special cachet these days? Linux is more "Unix-like" than MacOS for the reason articulated in the article, but you'll see commenters leap to MacOS's defense by pointing out that MacOS is "literally UNIX".
I think it's a sentimental thing, mixed with a dash of elitism/"purity seeking".
I don't mean that harshly. In my late teens/early 20s, I went through a "phase" where I obsessed with getting "purer and purer". This was mixed with a weird obsession with non-x86 hardware, as well. Lots of NetBSD, FreeBSD and Illumos usage, some Plan9 towards the end, lots of intellectual snobbery about "it feels better", and that sort of thing.
I'm almost 30 now, and my office has "Unix" systems from the 70s up to, well, my M1 MBP with "UNIX®" on it. PDP-11, VAX/ULTRIX, SPARC/SunOS 4, MIPS/IRIX, Alpha/OSF1, I've given them all a spin, running existing software and writing new software to kick the tires of old compilers. That's why I feel comfortable saying macOS really, really doesn't feel like any "UNIX" that I associate with "UNIX".
Although, UNIX was always a confusing term which never really meant all that much to begin with (when talking about commercial OSes/hardware platforms), but that's a whole other conversation...
> In my late teens/early 20s, I went through a "phase" where I obsessed with getting "purer and purer". This was mixed with a weird obsession with non-x86 hardware, as well. Lots of NetBSD, FreeBSD and Illumos usage, some Plan9 towards the end
Sounds really fun and informative!
> lots of intellectual snobbery about "it feels better"
How does that end up being intellectual (or snobbery, for that matter)? It sounds pretty close to "follow your heart" or "I just enjoy it" to me!
> Although, UNIX was always a confusing term which never really meant all that much to begin with (when talking about commercial OSes/hardware platforms), but that's a whole other conversation...
That probably came off a bit too inflammatory/self-deprecating :)
The point for me was realizing that, even though I do like all these systems and OSes, and I understand the appeal of both "pure UNIX" and (on the opposite spectrum) OSes that violently reject "UNIX", this kind of purity isn't actually... useful.
End of the day, with most of the ways I use a computer for productivity, playing, or being social with other people, there are other things that matter a lot more than the "purity" of the OS. And this includes how much "real UNIX" it is. It's cool that Solaris/Illumos is "true blooded unix". And... it doesn't really matter that much. Whether or not a system is or isn't "unix" just doesn't matter, as long as it runs the software you want.
(And for a lot of modern software, "being unix-like" isn't enough; if you're not Linux, Windows, or macOS, good luck!)
The purity is also usually kind of a lie in the first place. I've got a VAX in my office running "real" 4.3BSD, before all the "POSIX-bloat" was added. But you look closely and realize there's tons of "bloat" added, for the purpose of making a more useful OS. There are mixed abstractions, redundant libc extensions, dubious system additions that look like one person needed something and added it in.
It's just so uninteresting to me now to argue about what is or isn't "unix". I still enjoy all those old OSes, but you kind of stop seeing them as "UNIX". The ways that each isn't UNIX is far more interesting, like how ULTRIX and OSF/1 abandoned "unix style" syslogs in favor of a rich binary format via 'uerf'.
I've experimented with all those platforms, and macOS feels to me like "Unix" as much as a Sun SparcStation or SGI Indy from 30 years ago.
What is "Unix" to you? To me, it's the common shell commands / utilities and a POSIX API. If I can download some GNU source, run ./configure; make; make install ... it's Unix.
Certainly, macOS is a "weird" Unix if you compare it to Solaris and look at the administrative bits. But, then again, IBM's AIX is very weird, too. And that's one of the few commercial Unix implementations still kicking.
> Certainly, macOS is a "weird" Unix if you compare it to Solaris and look at the administrative bits. But, then again, IBM's AIX is very weird, too. And that's one of the few commercial Unix implementations still kicking.
That's why I said that "Unix" has always been kind of confusing as a name, because a lot of "Unix"es are very different. I've never used AIX personally, but I know it's pretty funky. And there have been weirder "unix"es, Domain/OS was another weird one. At least a few others had split BSD/SysV "personalities", I've read.
> If I can download some GNU source, run ./configure; make; make install ... it's Unix.
On the one hand, I agree with this.
But then, by that standard, you could call basically every OS in use today "Unix", including Windows via Cygwin, or WSL, or etc...
To me, "Unix" is epitomized by Sun's fix for SunOS 4 for disabling Yellow Pages and using only DNS for hostname lookups.
Their official advice? To unpack the libc shlib, delete the object code for the Yellow Page functions, then repackage it into a new libc version.
That feels like Unix to me, in a way that macOS just never will be. Which is also perfectly okay with me.
So Unix has to feel like dealing with old cruft to you? ;) I remember the SunOS 4 days and the annoying setup process for DNS. Those were the first Unix systems I worked with in a professional capacity.
I have a Sparc in my collection but it's running Solaris and too new to run SunOS 4. I'm considering getting a Sparc 10 or something so I can relive the SunOS days. That was my favorite early 90's Unix. Most open source software had first class support for SunOS.
Linux is "Unix" in my mind, though not UNIX (TM). WSL follows, since it is really virtualization under the hood. (WSL2, at least.). Cygwin seems like a gray area... Unix-like environment maybe?
> So Unix has to feel like dealing with old cruft to you? ;)
Well, maybe :)
It's something about the system being made of a lot of messy parts which can be split apart and taped back together. Reductively, all computers are like this, but SunOS and other "unixes" are more easily put back together.
For instance, besides enabling DNS, I've extended the libc quite a bit, to get modern OpenSSL and curl to build, as well as KDE 1 just for kicks.
You can do the same with almost any OS (that doesn't lock you out with security), but it feels easier with a "Unix". Linux is also very like this!
> I have a Sparc in my collection but it's running Solaris and too new to run SunOS 4.
You could always run NetBSD and use COMPAT_SUNOS to run a SunOS chroot ;) I haven't tried running Xsun this way but it'd probably go...
Haha, I haven't yet, but I want to. Maybe soon! Though extending libc isn't that exciting, really: that's kind of the cool (Unix-y??) thing about it. You just (IIRC) extract the static archive, add whatever .o object files with whatever symbols, add the symbols to a manifest, pack it up, and any C program on the system can call it. Since all C functions were implicit at the time (header files only had structs and enums) you can use trivially add whatever.
> Ultra 5
You should give it a shot! Even NetBSD/sparc64 has support for SunOS 4 binaries... allegedly.
If one was so inclined, you can abuse the kernel a bit and tell the compat layers to use root as their search path. I did this to make a "Linux system" with a NetBSD kernel and full GNU/Linux userland, just for kicks.
In my mind, you could do the same for SunOS. There's also COMPAT_MACH and COMPAT_DARWIN... imagine NeXT/SPARC binary compatibility alongside SunOS.
Back in the early 2000s, RedHat did a study and found the UNIX brandname actually had negative value among IT managers. They saw it as "expensive, proprietary, incompatible" etc. Meanwhile Linux was seen very positively. (So yeah nobody cares, not even the Mac users who pretend to.)
> Here’s our first problem, as those are located in the Signed System Volume (SSV), so we can’t change them in any way. The same applies to the other 417 LaunchDaemons and 460 LaunchAgents that account for most of the processes listed by Activity Monitor. In the days before the SSV it was possible to edit their property lists to prevent them from being launched, but that isn’t possible any more when running modern macOS.
SSV can be disabled. It would be ill-advised to do so, but Apple intentionally allows you to do that. In fact you can strip away every single security layer of macOS, including allowing unsigned kernel extensions to be loaded. This document is a bit outdated, but it should still be possible to do all of that. https://gist.github.com/macshome/15f995a4e849acd75caf14f2e50...
Feels like the article is just a cheap dunk on macOS. Has Apple perhaps baked in a bit too much into the SSV? Definitely. Even the Chess.app is in there.
> Feels like the article is just a cheap dunk on macOS.
That blog, Howard Oakley at eclecticlight.co, is consistently the most informative on the internet about macOS behaviors and internals, that Apple does not explain. He is also the author of several useful tools [1] to help observe and understand some of its underlying details. It's maybe the closest we have to a SysInternals for macOS.
It is. Add we all have off days. Perhaps Howard has had one here. I mean, he is defining what type of OS it is by how it's configuted. Which is just wierd.
I got a chuckle out of that for my own reasons as a long time Mac user as “Mac OS X is Unix” was the brand back in the 10.0-10.3 days, to the point I believe they got a Unix certification by someone, and then again with macOS 15 they got an Open Group UNIX certification.
Funnily enough, they had no certification and weren’t compliant in 10.0-10.3 days, so what they were doing was trademark infringement, hence the lawsuit from the Open Group. 10.4 was the first compliant version. And oh boy they really milked it for several years afterwards.
That just highlights my point about this article being a cheap dunk?
Because I was very disappointed with it ending at “SSV doesn’t let you”. SSV can be disabled, and the author should have known (almost certainly knows) that.
Disabling SSV may have been beyond the scope of the experiment the author was attempting. I suppose he could've been more explicit about that.
From one of his comments on his post:
> I wish whoever takes that project on, every success, even more so at working out how those processes can be disabled completely while keeping the SSV intact.
The thing I find disappointing about the article is that nothing else seems to have been explored. Now no options might exist, but then again, isn't the point of such a write up to find the ones that.... do...?
A lot of people know that modern macOS is a bit of a let down when it comes to modifying it unless you disable a bunch of security layers. So the information gained is basically 0.
Edit: I should clarify that some of the ways they analyze how services are launched etc. are quite interesting, though I hope my prior thought makes sense to some.
Disabling the SSV is perhaps the worst mistake you can make to a macOS install. Howard certainly knows that this is true but has chosen not to explore the details in this article.
His website are deep dives into the technical workings of macOS that no one else does. I’d even argue he has more insights and documentation than Apple. It might sound harsh, but he’s just very clinical about it.
I didn’t claim that eclecticlight writes cheap dunk.
But this article, which starts with
> That’s a question I’m asked repeatedly, which this article tries to answer.
doesn’t actually _try_ to answer the question. It just stops at SSV and draws a meaningless comparision with macOS 9. It also has several factual inaccuracies in there. Notably, the claim that macOS is not UNIX, and the implication that Unix systems must somehow be free and open-source (virtually all Unixes of the day were proprietary & closed source).
I suspect that Oakley could have explained that, but the thesis stands even without the asterisk, and explaining it would have an issue:
This is going to piss off some Linux folks, but when communicating from a big pulpit about how to bypass parts of MacOS, it's important to be aware that the vast majority of MacOS users are casual, nontechnical users. As such, a popular blog posting "here's how to bypass SIP/SSV lock/whatever" would lead to a wave of users disabling it for less-than-great reasons (aesthetics, conviction that e.g. a given service was causing their system slowness when that service's resource usage was actually symptomatic of something else orchestrated by MacOS going wrong). Those decisions have side effects:
- Folks brick or break their computers, potentially in a way that voids the warranty or support contracts (I hope that software bypasses don't trigger this, but I am cynical).
- Folks chasing a "cleanliness vibe" leave a lot of the system security off once they're done. Someone else in this thread pointed out that without SSV the security of MacOS is on par with most Linux, but MacOS users are a lot bigger attack risk than Linux users: there are more of them, they're wealthier and thus identified as targets of choice by malware/people, and, again--they're casual users and don't have good security spider sense. This isn't a blanket endorsement of every restriction/security feature with no opt-out that MacOS has, just an observation that its userbase is at higher risk for attack than some others--lower than windows, but higher than Linux users.
- Folks induce breakage that bricks their computers on a delay, e.g. during the next system update something chokes after encountering a totally unauthorized/unexpected service geometry and crashes hard enough to cause data loss.
I'm not saying that stuff like SSV-rw should be secret, just that it's probably for the best to not discuss it front and center in a widely-read informational blog whose content is geared towards (power) users rather than technicians. To phrase it with a different example: if someone Googles "how to disable XProtect (antimalware)", great, go nuts. But it's probably for the best that a popular article about "can you reduce resource usage by shutting down system launchd services" doesn't have a "here's how to elevate your permissions and disable whatever you like" blurb, and instead settles for an answer of "no, that's not supported."
If you want to piss off even more, those that buy Apple only because they want a shinny UNIX, but don't buy into Apple's culture since Mac OS Classic days, you only need to remind them that Steve Jobs was hardly a UNIX fanboy.
Just like with Microsoft strategies, for NeXT, having NeXTSTEP being based on UNIX was more to check boxes against Sun, and bring software into the platform, not to make it easy to go out, hence the whole userspace stack, even drivers, are based on Objective-C frameworks.
> They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them.
You sure you're replying to the right post? I wasn't really engaging with the "is it UNIX or not" debates elsewhere in the parent threads; just talking about why security bypass wasn't mentioned in TFA.
> This is going to piss off some Linux folks, but when communicating from a big pulpit about how to bypass parts of MacOS, it's important to be aware that the vast majority of MacOS users are casual, nontechnical users.
I think "people who want a UNIX" are pretty rare. Most of the folks who say things that rhyme with that at FOSDEM (as you mentioned in an adjacent thread) are, I'd bet, more likely to be "people who want something Unix-adjacent and similar enough to Linux that behavior of some tools is familiar".
They're still likely to be tilted by the idea that it might be less-than-ethical for hoakley to share security bypass techniques on a popular blog, though. Nobody likes to be told "no", and nobody likes to be reminded they're not the target demographic.
The problem is that Oakley is actually wrong. You don't need to edit the property lists. You can simply use the launchctl command-line tool to disable system launchd services after you disable SIP, without having to disable the SSV.
As for waste - for the past decade or so, the consumer computing world has been in an almost unanimous consensus that computing power is cheap, and that it's not worth optimizing away a few hundred megabytes of storage or RAM. And macOS is _nowhere_ near being the worst offender here. If you really need to point a finger at waste, look no further than Windows, where just about everything these days is a WebView. Now that's waste.
I'm pretty confident that the taskbar on Windows 11 alone eats up more RAM and CPU time than every single macOS service that's running but not actually being used combined.
> What is subjective about objectively saving time in your workflow?
What part of your workflow requires modifying the system volume on macOS? As a long-time power user of macOS, I don't even need to disable SIP. I've worked my workflow around the limitations.
macOS and Linux power users are two different species. One will work around the restrictions imposed by the overlords, the other will beat the system into submission.
Of course you can also beat macOS into submission, but then you're in for a bad time.
The part where I can eliminate the workflow of investigating and killing some misbehaving background process by preventing it from launching.
Or when I changed popup symbol pickers to insert symbols faster, which you can't do now since those symbol files became protected.
A few I don't remember whether it was SIP or SSV, and then many I'm not even aware of, they just haven't been implemented by other people due to these restrictions.
> As a long-time power user of macOS, I don't even need to disable SIP.
Ok, so you're just not that power, but this is not about you, can you imagine other people can do different customizations?
Your defeatist attitude to customization is common, but that still doesn't explain why you think it doesn't matter
The argument is that your customization is fighting against the tide. If you want to remain happy using macOS, it’s better to go in the same direction as Apple. And Apple really doesn’t want you to disable SIP.
The bigger problem with disabling SSV and making changes to it is entirely practical - any macOS update will overwrite them.
Which can be worked around by writing a provisioning script, but in either case will be a significant headache if one would come to rely on the modifications they were to make to the volume.
"I get what they mean, but macOS is even Unix certified."
What do they mean?
To me the blog author is primarily focused on the issue of _control_, i.e., being able to control the hardware that he purchased as opposed to letting a company control it, e.g., through pre-installed software, remotely installed "updates", default settings, etc.
He cannot control its default behaviour hence he wants to "slim MacOS down"
"UNIX" was a pun on the name of another OS that allegedly was accused of being too large and complex. That OS, Multics, was designed to run only on specific hardware from GE and later Honeywell
UNIX was a smaller, less complex alternative that, after its rewrite in C, could more easily run on a variety of hardware and be modified by the people using it
Apple does not allow people using MacOS to modify it
MacOS is proprietary; unlike AT&T's UNIX it has not been released into the research community resulting in non-commercial, open source "MacOS-like" OS projects (HackIntosh notwithstanding)
A user cannot write programs for MacOS without restriction by the company, e.g., prior approval, "developer" fees, etc.
MacOS cannot easily be used on a variety of hardware, only on Apple's proprietary hardware
Compared to non-commercial UNIX-like OS, MacOS is larger and more complex
> To me the blog author is primarily focused on the issue of _control_, i.e., being able to control the hardware that he purchased as opposed to letting a company control it, e.g., through pre-installed software, remotely installed "updates", default settings, etc.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the OS being an UNIX or not. It's a bit weird to see the allusion to UNIX to be fair: Howard Oakley is deep enough down the rabbit hole that I would expect him to know that History is full of proprietary and closed UNIXes.
NB. The blog refers to (a) the "Unix purist" and (b) MacOS not being Unix. Arguably, (a) is more important, irrespective of whether (b) is true (IMO it's ambiguous)
For example, the "Unix purist" might refer to someone who identifies with the "ideals" associated with that OS, e.g., relatively small, portable to potentially any hardware, free to study and modify, etc. And (b) might refer to MacOS not conforming to those "ideals" (despite having a limited license to use a "UNIX" trademark)
At this point, (b) is ambiguous; what is "Unix". It might mean different things to different people
Ironically, Apple took the "Unix" parts of MacOS from open source, non-commercial "UNIX-like" OS projects such as NetBSD and FreeBSD that are not "Certified UNIX"
Some of the drivers are. The core is open source, though. macOS' particular choice for its graphical user land is proprietary as well, but AT&T's UNIX had no such equivalent, aside from some experiments, so that doesn't make sense to use as a point of comparison. Not to mention similar systems in the UNIX-esq space, like SunView, NeWS, VUE, NeXTSTEP, etc. were proprietary too. That has always been par for the course in the world of "graphical UNIX". The so-called "Linux desktop" is the aberration.
You can, of course, run an open source graphical user land, like Gnome, instead on top of macOS' UNIX-y fashioned bits if you so wish.
> The core is open source, though. macOS' particular choice for its graphical user land is proprietary as well
I ran into a kernel panic specific to my macbook's hardware. How do I compile a new kernel with some extra debug printlns and boot it to figure out the panic?
On any actually open source operating system, this is doable, but I'm not holding my breath for any working instruction here. As far as I know, there's no way to modify the source code of, and then boot, the macOS kernel.
Perhaps "the core is open source" doesn't mean that I can run a modified kernel to you?
> How do I compile a new kernel with some extra debug printlns and boot it to figure out the panic?
First, explain how you are doing it with the AT&T UNIX kernel. We can then help you adapt the process to Darwin.
> On any actually open source operating system, this is doable
I suspect you forgot to read the thread. While the grandparent comment considered AT&T UNIX to be "open source", that doesn't mean open source in the way we think of the term today. AT&T UNIX was very much proprietary in its own right. Today, we'd probably say "source available". Whether or not that is doable was dependent on what kind of agreement you had with the owner. They might have let you for a substantial fee, but Apple might let you for a substantial fee too. Have you asked?
AT&T did not ship with the kernel source code, but they often shipped with the compiled object files of the kernel and a command line utility that allowed to change the kernel configuration parameters, after which the kernel would get re-linked into a new one.
Not open source by any definition, but it was a viable way to obtain a new kernel image. The practice has become obsolete after the adoption of loadable kernel modules across nearly all UNIX flavours, with the exception being OpenBSD (if my memory serves me well).
> I ran into a kernel panic specific to my macbook's hardware. How do I compile a new kernel with some extra debug printlns and boot it to figure out the panic?
1. You can find panic logs in Console.app. macOS writes them into NVRAM and stows away into files on its next boot. That will give you the process and kernel extension that was the culprit, and a stack trace.
2. sudo nvram boot-args="debug=0x122" or something like this will increase log output from the kernel. Those debug prints are probably there already. You can even attach a debugger running from somewhere else, presumably over Thunderbolt on newer machines.
All of the commercial Unix operating systems were closed source.
The first open Unix-like is 386BSD which predates Linux. It was said that if 386BSD didn't get mired in a lawsuit, Torvalds would have used it and Linux would not exist.
Same applies to Windows NT POSIX subsystem, had Microsoft been serious about UNIX support on Windows, similar to how IBM and Unisys do on their mainframes and micros, there would be no reason to bother with Linux.
My case was exactly that, I got Slackware in 1995's Summer because that subsystem wasn't enough to do the DG/UX assignments at home.
And the reason BSD survived is the maligned ‘advertising clause’ that most later BSD-type licenses dropped. Berkeley countersued that AT&T had promoted that System V included vi, without the required attribution.
To beef up the historical comparisons, "creates their own workstations on RISC-derived processors" is also (historically) a sign of a (commerical) UNIX, too. It isn't to jarring to mentally replace "macOS Tahoe" with "NeXTSTEP 26".
The compliance trope that a point-in-time-assessment can't be used to support a claim is kind of a lazy take. The certification explicitly states macOS v26.0 Tahoe.
While it's true that it wasn't always truly UNIX compliant, they put in the hard yards to become so (albeit to avoid a $200M lawsuit from The Open Group) [1]
To certify any version of macOS as UNIX, the security had to be significantly altered (disabling SIP) among a few other things. This is why what is shipped is not what is certified as UNIX. You can /make/ it match what is certified as an administrator, but that would be inadvisable.
EDIT: And really, UNIX certification means nothing except to potentially government agencies and people who don't understand what UNIX and/or UNIX certification is. Or why being "certified UNIX" is generally meaningless: see the BSDs, which are much closer to "UNIX" origins than macOS will ever be.
Or Windows, which is frankly just has better architected internals and abandons legacy UNIX ;-)
Yes, that's the point. It's further removed from UNIX than the BSDs are.
macOS contains BSD userland, networking, file system, POSIX, and a couple of other things. But XNU, the kernel, is "X is Not UNIX", if there ever was a statement to be made about the underpinnings of macOS.
You have just described OSF/1 (and later – Tru64) – a certified UNIX with a hybrid kernel operating over a Mach microkernel, BSD userland, POSIX conformance etc.
The people that certify it say that you are wrong. What you think and what actually is are two entirely different things in this case. The fact remains that, according to the OpenGroup (and they are the one that matter here), macOS 26 is UNIX.
macOS 26 that is /altered/ is UNIX. macOS that ships on every Mac is not certified UNIX -- but it can be made to match if you're willing to give up security.
You’re confusing operating mode with operating system.
SIP/SSV don’t create a different macOS, they restrict mutation and introspection. They don’t change the POSIX surface, the SUS semantics, or the kernel interfaces being certified. They just stop test harnesses from instrumenting the system without elevated privilege.
By your logic, no modern OS is anything it claims to be unless you run it in an insecure debug configuration. Linux isn’t POSIX because you need root. Windows isn’t Windows because kernel debugging exists. That’s obviously nonsense.
The Open Group certifies macOS 26 as shipped. Temporarily relaxing protections to run a conformance suite does not produce a “different OS”, it produces a different trust configuration of the same one.
Saying “it’s not really UNIX because SIP is on” is like saying a container isn’t Linux because it doesn’t let you mount /proc without extra privileges.
You didn't read the article, did you? SIP isn't the only alteration. And we don't know all of the changes required due to the waivers.
> if you want your installation of macOS 15.0 to pass the UNIX® 03 certification test suites, you need to disable System Integrity Protection, enable the root account, enable core file generation, disable timeout coalescing, mount any APFS partitions with the strictatime option, format your APFS partitions case-sensitive (by default, APFS is case-insensitive, so you’ll need to reinstall), disable Spotlight, copy the binaries uucp, uuname, uustat, and uux from /usr/bin to /usr/local/bin and the binaries uucico and uuxqt from /usr/sbin to /usr/local/bin, set the setuid bit on all of these binaries, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH before /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, enable the uucp service, and handle the mystery issues listed in the four Temporary Waivers.
Don't be rude. I did read TFA, hence my comments. You didn't understand my comment, did you?
Whether it disabling SIP, enabling root (see the bit about Linux and Posix in my previous comment), enabling case sensitivity in APFS (done for backwards compatibility), or any of the other stuff, the OS shipped remains the same as the tested one, and pay attention because this is the bit you seem to be incapable of grasping, with the extra bits turned on! Some are dumb, some for backwards compatibility and some are genuinely useful.
A Kia Ceed is still the same Kia Seed if the showroom add their stickers, changed the tyres and put some registration plates on it.
> Or Windows, which is frankly just has better architected internals and abandons legacy UNIX ;-)
Current macOS user, and former NT kernel dabbler and VMS user here. That's highly debatable.
On the kernel side, Windows is still filled with legacy VMS-isms. Eg: Object Manager (object/resource model), named objects, handles, how processes and threads work, vmem, scheduling etc etc
On the userspace side, Windows is still filled with legacy DOS-isms.
Don't me wrong, I love the underlying Windows OS, despite its many quirks, but it's filled with perhaps even more legacy cruft and definitely isn't any sort of step above anything else.
I also don't believe anyone actually runs macOS in a UNIX-compliant configuration. Rather, it's a checkbox on some RFP and nobody is clued into why it's actually there, because all the people that did know have since retired.
Drive letters are there for the presentation layer and of course backwards compat. Windows refers to them using device paths internally. You can too, if you wish.
Im sorry, but i dont buy that. Unix certification has nothing to do with number of processes running or "efficiency"! The OS must be SUS compliant, i.e have all the core interfaces in place, all the correct utilities (awk, grep, vi, sed etc) and theres something about header files, filesystem requirements etc. even if the macOS submitted for certification is super trimmed down, it does not matter as long as its a true subset of what is shipped to consumers.
MacOS is certified UNIX i.e its "UNIX", like it or not. On this point the article is just wrong.
Unix is both a family of operating systems and also a trademark. The name is overloaded - "Unix" is more than one thing at the same time. In addition, the trademark is "UNIX" and the operating system family is "Unix"
MacOS is both UNIX and also not Unix at the same time.
If the trademark holders decided to UNIX certify my cat, which is well within their legal right to do so, would that make her UNIX?
Like macOS, my cat does not qualify for the UNIX standard out-of-the-box and I'm far too lazy to configure my cat for an OS standard that's 25 years obsolete.
I don't understand why Apple doesn't offer a headless MacOS or at least a path to a minimal install. Those mac minis make a great little server box but losing 8GB to hundreds of processes, before you've done anything, just feels wasteful and inelegant.
Worse, there's sales in NOT doing it. When I buy a Mac, I get extra memory "just in case." I would've been fine with 24 gigs on my MacBook Pro, but I got 48.
It wasn't an absence of a market. Those of us that had to manage OSX Server soon found out the software was marked by several high-profile bugs, technical debt, and a perceived decline in reliability. I migrated a large number of Macs to Ubuntu Server software. The hardware was great.
I fear the quality of macOS is deteriorating today in the same manner than befell OSX Server.
Right, but I could see an alternate timeline where OS X Server took off, and within a decade took a path similar to Windows Server (pared down services, headless flavor, etc)
I am not sure iOS popularity would justify macOS as a server. What would be the use case? It's not app development; that is done just fine on the standard desktop macOS. It's not backend; that is done just fine on Linux servers, even in Swift if that's your thing.
Those Mac minis are a pain in the ass of a server box that auto-enable FileVault after annual releases, and getting LaunchDaemons just right compared to a Linux OS feels like perpetual iterations. trying to figure out why my apache didn't start after the last reboot. Oh, must have been the Mac log rotator messing with the file permissions again
It's a shame, because I love how efficiently MacOS runs and the form factor/design language of a Mac mini is not something I feel the need to hide in a dark corner
You'll have to leave virtual desktop enabled, and will definitely be using it semi-regularly aside SSH
> Those mac minis make a great little server box but losing 8GB to hundreds of processes
It doesn't matter because all the extra stuff just goes to swap. And you can't disable virtual memory anyways. So in the end you're not really losing anything. Those hundreds of processes are ultimately basically mostly just using up a little bit of your SSD, not your RAM, so it's not a concern.
Yeah but they mostly barely do, and only the memory they actually access gets used, as opposed to everything they've allocated. You can observe the actual aggregate usage in Activity Monitor. This is why it's no problem at all to run something actively using 10-12 GB of memory on a 16 GB Mac.
Can speak for someone who managed a racked [1] Mac Mini racked as a server in 2015~2018:
* Profile Manager / MDM
* Caching server for OS updates
* Thunderbolt connection to a PCIe RAID HBA for a JBOD for NAS file sharing
All these things/use cases now are depreciated, MDM via JAMF in the cloud, internet is fast enough that caching OS updates isn't necessary, and NAS's are much better suited.
I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users (other than cases where you're required to use one e.g. for work). I can understand it for casual users who just want something simple that works for basic tasks, but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want? In Linux you'd solve OP's problem by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS.
> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users
These threads always end up with veiled insults like this. Can you really not understand people who use Windows, Linux and Macs? They each have their strengths depending on what you are doing.
> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want
I've use Macs since my first G4 PB, Linux for longer, and used to develop for Windows though it's been a very long time. I've never felt stopped for doing what I want.
> by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS
Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro. I'm sure desktop Linux has improved since the last time I tried running it as my main computer, but I just not sure what the point is now.
I've recently heard that using Linux is an excuse to spend the day tinkering and ricing and do no productive work. It's the same kind of prejudice, but opposite.
I like the freedom to run my machine the way I want, but I also enjoy something that is reliable and seamless. My macbook air's battery lasts forever. It works flawlessly, almost always. "oh with nixos if you brick it you can rollback..." that's great, but it does not beat working great on the first try.
Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.
> Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.
Same here. macOS has been death by a thousand little cuts, and I'm finally accelerating my move away from it, as Apple locks it down more and more, and as they spend their engineering talent on crap I ultimately don't care about.
While I've switched most of my computers over to Linux, I still have not moved my daily driver over. There are so many silly little things Linux (and its various desktop environments) gets wrong and are just annoying enough to make me not want to use it every day, like scrolling with a trackpad.
> I've recently heard that using Linux is an excuse to spend the day tinkering and ricing and do no productive work.
This is why, despite 20 years of using Linux with many successful Arch and Gentoo installs behind me, I just use Fedora or Mint. I can get a development environment set up in 15 minutes, and when everything inevitably explodes and a system update deletes glibc I haven't invested much.
NixOS is an extreme case, and I only mentioned it as a counter to the OP's article which was talking about the mammoth efforts required to remove unwanted processes. More generally, there are plenty of Linux distros which "just work" out of the box for most use cases.
No insult intended. I genuinely wasn't aware of what advantages macOS offers for a power user (by which I mean someone who wants to do tasks more advanced than browsing, email, etc.). From quickly skimming the replies the common theme seems to be a mixture of battery efficiency, hardware compatibility, and Mac-only software.
> Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro.
Yes, but my comment wasn't made in isolation or directed at people with your objectives. The OP's article is about doing exactly this, but in the opposite direction (expending large amounts of effort to remove unneeded processes). See for example: "if we assume that we need to identify just 500 candidates, and each takes an average of one week to research, that would take over 10 person-years".
Starting with that as the baseline (as opposed to starting from your position which is that you're not interested in spending time on this issue), building up from zero is a lot more straightforward. And, if you use something like NixOS, you generally only have to do it once since the idea of "reinstalling" the OS (e.g. for new versions) largely goes away: subsequent effort is just about changing your mind about what software you want, or what version you want (as with any OS).
The serious answer is that you get an "it-just-works"⁺ Unix-like operating system that gives you a development experience on-par with Linux.
If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.
If you care about configuration for your window manager, desktop environment, or systemd services: you will not like macOS.
If you are a graphics engineer or a kernel engineer: you will (probably) not like macOS.
If you are a C++/Rust/Python/JavaScript/Java/mobile/desktop engineer who wants a rock-solid developer environment and doesn't care about the above: you will like macOS.
You get all the Unix tools you could ever want, whatever shell you want to use (Zsh, Fish, even PowerShell), clang/LLVM, etc.
Does that answer your question?
⁺: caveat being "it just works" is getting less and less true with every macOS release.
This would be my answer, though I also do sysadmin stuff from macOS just fine. I've used OSX/macOS for a long time, I understand how it works and how to move around, and the ecosystem integration is nice. Adobe products, MS products also all work without any hassle along with any software development I want to do. Then there's the hardware which Apple Silicon has been great for. I bought an M1 Max 64gb laptop on release and it still never feels slow. Battery life is great, trackpad works great, etc...
And I say all this knowing that someone can likely get similar use out of a MS or Linux laptop. At this point, just pick what you know and get on with it.
MacOS is fine as a client/dispatch node for SSH/Ansible/Terraform/whatnot; I think they meant that you cannot sysadmin MacOS itself as a target with many of the same tools/techniques you would sysadmin a Linux server.
I wish that weren't true, as someone who struggles with a lot of cross-platform Puppet tooling that I wish behaved better on Mac. No, Nix doesn't help; not when the goal is "configure other people's machines to a baseline but don't otherwise prescribe how they should use them".
Good point. We all end up with different definitions of sys admin. I’ve managed fleets of Linux servers just fine with a macOS as my only client computer, but I’ve never managed other clients. Maybe a Linux client would have helped in that case if sys admin was my singular job, but even then I may have just created a Linux client in my vps to use as the management node.
And I thought that I'm the only one saying that. I bought my first mac just because of that, it was rock-solid, it was unix, and it came with ruby/python/xxx preinstalled so that I could just worry about doing the work.
But from (let's say) El Capitan, I am always postponing upgrades, and recently I've been only upgrading by buying a new machine every 2 ys (except this year, I had to upgrade because of Metal, but I'm still one version below, still scared to upgrade to Tahoe). Every new feature they add to their OS I'm just disabling, every time I upgrade. Either I am not their customer anymore, or they are more and more clueless.
And it's not that hard, I just want it to work so that I can focus on my own stuff.
> If you are a graphics engineer or a kernel engineer: you will (probably) not like macOS.
On the contrary, Metal is the most developer friendly of the modern 3D APIs, and macOS is the best desktop OS having graphical debugging tools in the box, with modern language tooling without the mindset only C and C++ are worthy to be used in graphics programming.
> If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.
Even then, that's debatable. Should say if you like doing sysadmin stuff on your own machine.
I am a sysadmin, and my daily driver is an M4 macbook pro and I wouldn't have it any other way. I admin other machines, I don't want to play sysadmin for my own. But its mostly for the hardware more than any other reason.
Again, my comment wasn't isolated. It was a response to the article. In that article, the person was concerned with tracking down 500+ potentially unneeded processes, and lamenting the difficulty and time consuming nature of doing so.
Perhaps I could have phrased my question better, but what I'm really asking is: for that type of user, why would you pick macOS over Linux when such things are trivial (relatively speaking) in Linux by comparison. Note that I didn't ask "what advantages does macOS have?" I qualified it with: "which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?". I wasn't suggesting that there are no advantages at all. Nuance matters here.
> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
I’ve never felt like I couldn’t run my machine the way I want. When I leave macOS is when I start to miss all integrations and ease of use affordances.
One of the times I made a big push to try Linux again on the client I was fighting with getting HiDPI working well, and the most common response was “you don’t need that”. Huh? Speaking of running the machine how I want.
Every decision is a trade off, even Linux. You feel like you can do anything you want, but it’s just a set of different things you can do. We’re long past the days where someone can buy hardware and write every piece of software from scratch for themselves. We all depend on others to make decisions for us, and some of those decisions will limit us in some way.
At the risk of sounding repetitive, my comments are in the context of the OP's article which is specifically about a scenario where you lack control in macOS. If you're someone who doesn't care about being able to do what the article wants to do, then your use case doesn't fall within the scope of what I'm referring to.
There are a lot of users who don't want to do tasks more advanced than browsing, email, and ssh, and will go far into diminishing returns of additional hardware cost to polish the performance on those three tasks (measured by battery, screen, keyboard, battery, networking, general lack of fussiness, battery, etc.)
By power users do you mean only hackers/programmers/server admins?
How about graphical design professionals? Music producers? And all other types of professionals who work full time in front of their computers? They need high quality machines and operating systems, so there's your customer base for MacOS.
For me it's quite simple: It works and it stays out of my way.
I've owned a macbook since 2010, with a short break during the touchbar era when I got myself an XPS with windows which I dual-booted with ubuntu and later a system76 that comes with their own flavour of Ubuntu, called Pop! Os.
The situation in windows (windows 10 at the time) was abysmal. Completely incoherent UI, settings spread across different menus, ads in start menu, slow and broken search, constant nagging to update windows, to update the drivers, to tell me that the drivers have been updated, to install or update my antivirus, etc. These were not things that I installed myself, these were included with Dell's setup of the machine.
On the system76 laptop things were different. Things were calm, I could configure everything as I wanted and things worked. Until at some point I installed a new version of something, which had nothing to do with sound, but it broke sound, just as I was preparing to join a meeting, and just as we were going into the second phase of lockdowns in late 2020 so online meetings were here to stay.
My macbooks are reliable. I've got the M1 as soon as it came out and I never got a single issue with it. I've upgraded twice (I think) across major versions and everything worked. I don't have to worry about it leaving me hanging when I need it.
(And that's not taking into account things like build quality, touchpad quality, battery life, silence, etc)
In the end of the day, I do a lot of debugging as part of my work. When I don't work, I want to choose what I will be debugging, not have it forced on me.
And don't get me wrong: I see where Apple is going, I know that they're a greedy company that want to maintain their iron grip and have the final say on what we can and cannot do on our machines.
However, for me for the time being it's the least bad option.
I do like the build of Macbooks and especially the solid casing. Unfortunately I could never get used to MacOS even within 2.5 years and it was not quite as reliable for me as it is for many others.
XCode installations failing, Docker installation failing after an OS update never to work again without completely reinstalling OS, plugging in headphones would crash the Macbook (until OS update 6 months after I got it), video calls slowing to a halt, if sharing screen etc.
Also there were some things I just never got used to in Mac like window tabbing & minimize working in a Mac way. Maybe if I hadn't had a personal laptop that used Linux at the same time, I would have gotten used to it a little better, but I just plain hated the way it worked.
To be fair, I think it was still more reliable than varieties of Windows, especially the later ones! If tabbing worked more like under Windows and it allowed a bit more configuration, I might be using Mac these days.
That leaves Linux. Although it's not flawless neither after configuring Debian + i3, it works exactly like I want and the same installation has been reliably working for 5+ years. However, getting to the setup that just works certainly took several tries and depends on laptop compatibility, so... No ideal choices exist right now I think. Just luck and what someone is most used to in the end.
I’ve used Macs nearly exclusively for 13 years and have not gotten used to the window tabbing. I just fundamentally don’t think windows of the same application should be grouped together.
I have very few problems with linux, despite running a fairly unstable rolling release distro. MacOS does have problems. I have no idea whether its more of less reliable, but going on personal experience is not a good sample.
"Power Users", whatever that might really mean use MacOS because it works. They use a Mac laptop because it always and instantly wakes from sleep. Because the audio always works, and is always low latency. Because they have work to do, and the OS is extremely reliable. Also because it is light, and the battery lasts for a very long time indeed.
My laptop has been up for 43 days, not very long in a server world, but excellent for a personal device that I use for development, hardware design and audio production. The last time it restarted was probably for an OS upgrade, but I can't recall.
My work linux laptop is also pretty reliable, but this is only because I never upgrade anything on it and only use it for development. Its battery life is terrible, so I only use it plugged into the wall. My work linux desktop has issues with bluetooth audio and graphics, neither of which I can be bothered to fix.
I can understand it for casual users who just want something simple that works for basic tasks, but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
I consider myself a power user. What I don't consider myself is a "configuration hobbyist" which some people seem to conflate with power users. I use my Mac to get all kinds of work done. I write shell scripts and I have tons of 3rd party command line tools and open source software that I've installed via Homebrew. What I don't have is a customized desktop environment with power meter widgets and stock tickers in the menu bar and anime girl desktop backgrounds.
I used Linux for 10 years and I got tired of updates breaking things and having to edit configuration files just to get the system back to "normal." The Mac just gives me "normal" and loads of productivity (as well as battery life) out of the box, and it doesn't compromise on the command line power that I want.
> but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't
A laptop with an excellent screen, speakers, touchpad, desktop-class performance,, great battery life, and runs cool and silent, and a *nix like OS that can run the proprietary/commercial apps I need.
I work on macOS the same way I'd work on Linux; From the terminal with a package manager, docker, etc. Only now I get access to a few commercial apps that aren't on Linux, on hardware that's genuinely a joy to use.
There's no other laptop on the market that touches the apple silicon macbook pros. None. Every close alternative sacrifices something I care about. I tolerate macOS for the hardware, and I'll remain on macs until such hardware exists in Linux land.
Same. If the only computing happened on desktop PCs and laptops didn't exist, I'd use Linux.
But as it stands, going from a Macbook to Linux on a laptop is a downgrade. And you have to pay more for the pleasure of a worse experience.
And macOS is "Linux" since it's BSD-based and has a native Unix shell. If macOS were as different from "Linux" as Windows was, then I probably wouldn't put up with it either.
I’d use macOS. Application sandboxing, per directory access controls, signed read only root, xprotect and gatekeeper - security out of the box on common linux OSes is a joke compared to modern macOS.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't
Your definition of power user may vary but for me:
- Especially for laptops, good integration with hardware (and good hardware), energy efficiency, power management
- Support from commercial software vendors
I could probably use linux for a desktop machine, that would work ok. But it's a no-go for laptops. And I've tried... and try regularly...
I just installed Asahi on my MacBook Pro M1 - it's really nice! Battery life is supposed to be slightly worse. External displays are now supposed to work as well, but I haven't tried it.
Exactly this. The question pretends that there is a whole group of "power users" who all do the same thing, but that couldn't be further from the truth IMO. There are users like me who program and don't want to spend forever configuring audio driers, etc. There are power users who like to tinker. And there are people who do a bit of both, to every extent on the scale.
>but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't
Flawless suspend/resume, best-in-class battery life, best-in-class touchpad drivers, lots of things "Just Work" that are painful and/or tedious on Linux.
It might be better to ask what Linux offers the laptop user that macos doesn't. I run Linux on my desktop boxes but wouldn't dream of daily-driving a Linux laptop.
>and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
I consider myself a power user. I have never once felt unable to run the machine the way I want. You can disable SIP and Gatekeeper and whatever else if it pleases you. I still have a terminal and a package manager. If there's a particular utility that I need on Linux I just spin up a VM, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to do that in the last 12 months.
More broadly, Linux doesn't appeal to me as a primary OS because there's no desktop environment that's a full equivalent of macOS, both in spirit and function. Existing DEs might have some vaguely Mac-like shape or can be configured to be slightly more Mac-like, but nothing gets you the full package (consistent application of a well thought out HIG, holistic approach to design, full embrace of progressive disclosure [as opposed to the extremes of IKEA minimalism or dumping everything and the kitchen sink], etc). Additionally, some things are bizarrely involved to set up despite being commonly needed (see virtualization under Fedora) or will randomly break once in a blue moon (usually after a system upgrade) and require diving beneath the hood to fix.
For laptops in particular, it's the absence of laptops that 1) are good at being laptops (great battery life and standby time, are solid but aren't bricks, are inaudible except when being pushed for extended periods, and don't throttle to netbook speeds when unplugged), 2) are designed to be Linux-first, and 3) aren't just a half-baked rebadge of pre-existing models from ODMs like Clevo/Tongfang/Compal.
Funny enough, the closest thing to a great Linux laptop is actually the Steam Deck. Nothing else on the market is as competently integrated. If Valve got into the laptop business I'd be interested.
I could see myself daily driving Linux on a custom built desktop long before I could on a laptop, but the aforementioned broad challenges remain.
Speaking purely on the software preferences, all of those feel like nice-to-haves. I like a well-tuned HiG and widget library as much as the next guy, but the majority of macOS's features are bloat to me. What am I supposed to do with Stage Manager or AppleTV+? Why is Safari allowed to send me notifications begging the user to boot it up and try the new features? Why does the Settings app show a persistent notification when I log out of iCloud?
There was a point in my life when I also thought I needed those creature comforts. Now I've spent 7 years without dailying macOS and I really don't miss it one bit. You could give me a $0.00 Apple Silicon M6 Ultra laptop with 4 days of battery life, and I'd probably still be reaching for my Thinkpad if I wanted to get work done. As a development OS, macOS is borderline intolerable.
> Why is Safari allowed to send me notifications begging the user to boot it up and try the new features?
For what it's worth I've been using macOS (and OS X) for 14 years, and you only get the notification once after a fresh install and you can click close and it's gone forever, sure Linux is better on this front, but I don't want to spend my whole life tinkering my os until it works. It's still a hell of a lot better than Microsoft consistently shoving Edge down your throat.
I don't need many newer macOS features myself. I'd be happy with an experience that's roughly adjacent to that of OS X 10.6 or 10.9, but that's not on offer either.
I do need a laptop that's good at its job, though. If a laptop sucks at its defining qualities, I'd be better served by a backpackable ITX build or maybe a one of those trendy mini-PCs, because at that point the form factor's tradeoffs are too great to justify.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
Primarily much better compatibility with graphical apps. Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite are two that many people need access to. Both have first-party offerings on macOS, and somewhat poor support via wine on Linux.
With Apple Silicon, the hardware is also particularly excellent. And only runs macOS well.
The big thing for me has always been (a) reliability of the hardware (b) good performance/battery trade off (c) nix-like environment.
In my prev. job I had a windows laptop with WSL2 though and I actually was super productive with that. But the laptop hardware offerings at the same price point are rubbish, just not very robust. Linux machines if you're in a corp and want one in the next 6 months are usually even more restrictive on hardware than they are on Windows.
There isn’t any app on windows or linux that can match what Preview does.
One thing you may not know about is you can map anything in the menu bar to a keyboard shortcut. The application doesn’t even know you did that. That’s an operating system feature that neither Windows nor Linux can implement reliably.
Accessibility is another one.
It’s like this all over the operating system. There’s a deep integration with the apps and the UI you wouldn’t notice unless you’re a power user.
Genuine question. I've been a Mac user for decades and on balance think it's quite good, but Preview is one of the most deeply frustrating, buggy, and unintuitive pieces of software on the system--it's at the top of the list of things that I wish I could swap out for something--anything, MS paint would be fine--else that was as deeply integrated in Finder/image/PDF interactions.
I haven’t heard that many complaints about Preview. (Except for PDF forms. Absolute disaster. See 1.) But it’s not perfect and I can definitely appreciate that somebody would a very different opinion of it from my own.
So, I’m sharing my personal experience. This is what I see in it.
It handles both images and PDFs rather well (1) in the same application. And you use the same basic set of annotation tools on both.
I haven’t found anything that can match its combination of accuracy, performance, and features with PDFs. Especially when files get large. (I have a lot of large PDFs.)
And it doesn’t try to do all that much. But it does two very useful things I wouldn’t expect it to do.
- Easily add, remove, and re-order pages in PDFs.
- If you select multiple images in Finder, you can open them all in single Preview window and it acts like a PDF, with each image being a page in the thumbnail sidebar. You can rapidly go through a set of images this way.
I have a lot of high-resolution artwork and a professional grade printer. Preview does an excellent job of staying out of the way. It’s really easy and fast to chop up, resize, and convert images. The color adjustment is constantly useful when it comes to printing things that are too dark.
Exporting to different formats is pretty easy. It uses the system print dialog, which allows you to use all of those features.
1: It’s horrific with PDF forms. I’ve definitely had occasions when it looked filled out but emailed as a blank form. Completely unacceptable. I’ve often resorted generating a new PDF using the print dialog.
And you don't have to install it since it's a stock app. This might sound trivial, but good stock apps cut down on time to get a new machine/install in usable condition substantially, even if you're using a package manager.
Personally I think every computer should come with a Preview equivalent (or better).
You can easily copy and paste rectangular selections from PDF's into Pages. I haven't found anything analogous on other OS'es. I used this to compile exam questions for my students.
It's also great for editing PDF's, you can markup, reorder, rotate and delete pages with ease. Yes other software does that but not as intuitively as Preview.
You can compress PDF's by exporting them and selecting a filter.
It's also the fastest and best-rendering PDF viewer I've used.
> There isn’t any app on windows or linux that can match what Preview does.
And Quickview, and printing to a PDF. Maybe some equivalent exists in Linux/Windows now, but Preview is pretty amazing and something I take for granted every single day.
Less choice is never freeing. I always want the choice available to me, even if I don't wind up going away from the default 99.99% of the time. It's my computer and I must remain in control, not some corporation.
A lot of users still like the mix of a good UI for most tasks, while being able to do a lot of power user stuff without an added layer. Plus many will choose macOS also for the hardware, which support for new chipsets is still rather WIP under Linux.
> A lot of users still like the mix of a good UI for most tasks
This is funny; it's actually the main reason why I asked for a PC when I was up for renewal at work, so I can run Linux on it.
I truly like the hardware of the mbp, especially the screen (don't care about battery life, I mostly use it at a desk with power nearby). The OS itself is fine, since it can easily run most of the tools I use. I also like how it handles special characters (I can easily type French on an US-ANSI keyboard) to the point that I've implemented that on my Linux and Windows machines.
But what kills it for me is the UI behavior. The window management drives me crazy, especially when multiple screens are involved. And there are quite a few aggravating issues, like being unable to control the audio output of my screen's speakers (connected through DP), being unable to turn off external screens (sometimes I just want to use the power of my monitor, which has an integrated KVM).
Yeah, I know there are programs trying to fix these, but I have to go out of my way trying to find them, and then they're hit and miss. On Linux, everything works as expected (though, granted, it's possible I've won the hardware-compatibility lottery, since it actually works better than on Windows).
You appear to have forgotten the state of linux until fairly recently. For literal decades, MacOS "just worked" and it meant that the user did not have to fight their OS to get shit done.
In the professional world where "I did not get any work done today because an update fucked my wifi card" is not a valid excuse, MacOS (and Windows to a lesser degree) triumphed. Large orgs who can afford a whole IT department might be fine deploying linux on their fleet of desktops, but there is always a tremendous amount of testing and validation behind the scenes to ensure that everything "just works". This just was not the case for the indy professional, or small tech startup.
Now, in the past 5 or so years two things happened: 1) linux reached a state where a "normie developer" could take a chance and install it on a work machine and be just fine, and 2) MacOS has regressed enough where OS updates are risky now, and the "it just works" slogan does not really apply any more.
2 days ago I saw a colleague not using his dock. Turns out he can’t update the dock firmware under Linux, and has to live with having a 20% chance of his laptop detecting external displays.
He recently gave up trying to have a wake from sleep that works well too.
I mean, Linux is great, but the paper cuts are still very numerous.
Although I fully agree that the papercuts are sill numerous, allow me a counterpoint:
Recently I bought a cheap epson inktank printer/scanner, with built in wifi. Getting it working on my work Windows PC was a huge faff, struggling to find the right drivers and all that. The main installer for some asinine reason needed location permissions, which was disabled by MDM, so the default route did not work. Let's not even begin talking about getting scanning working...
On my Linux Mint personal laptop, the printer just appeared after I connected it to my network, and it worked perfectly. The built-in scanning app detected the scanner and allowed me to scan without any configs.
This is the first time for me where linux "just work"ed, and I was truly delighted.
I'm a power user. I do FreeBSD kernel performance work for Netflix.
I have a macbook as my work laptop. I use it as a dumb terminal to my FreeBSD desktop, a platform for corp. video conferencing, and to surf the web. Any actual work happens on my desktop (Unless I'm working on something arm64 specific, and am using a VM on the laptop ... but then I'm probably ssh'ed in from my desktop.
Why the macbook? I have never gotten along with Windows (have tried on a few separate occasions). And I'm too lazy to put effort into getting Linux running well on a laptop, since that would still be just a dumb terminal for FreeBSD dev. And I'm not enough of a masochist to run FreeBSD on a laptop. So the macbook is the path of least resistance. It works well as a laptop (suspend / resume, connects to random wifi) and comes with a terminal and ssh client that require zero effort to get working.
In my experience, programmers fall into either of those categories:
1. Those that want to gain full control of their environment, customize to the max and peak in personal satisfaction and productivity, xor...
2. those that want their environment to just. work. and not spend days on end ricing a tiling WM that might instead preferably be spent on actually getting things done.
Linux users largely fall in category 1, Mac users into 2. I don't see this as a skill issue. Even Linux Torvalds famously has been using Fedora because he prefers to focus on more important aspects (i.e., kernel work) than building his own minimal distro from scratch, which starkly contrasts the last point you made.
IMO group 2 is much bigger than group 1, too. I'd find it a boring way of approaching technology personally, but try and find some actual arguments against the established workflows of group 2 apart from slight personal preferences. I can't, really.
I'm an occasional Mac user, whenever their hardware and software align to be useful.
Right now the m4 airs are a delight in regards to form factor, battery life, performance, and generally they look nice.
I have a powerful processor, enough ram, and a battery to drive it and damnit I want to do work on it.
Right now the world of laptops is dark. Any non-mac laptop running linux will have terrible standby battery life because OEMs have removed classic sleep modes for always-on mac-like sleeps, but without the polish and no way to re-enable the legacy sleep modes.
In a couple years, maybe the AI boom will die down and people will be able to afford RAM again, and maybe non-mac laptops will be nice to use again.
4 modifier keys vs 3. Can't go back. Maybe you can get your whole Linux env using 4 modifiers one application at a time, but my god would that be another thing that takes forever on top of everything else you need to configure. No ty.
This was such a big pain for me when switching back to windows / Linux. I’m not sure why it’s not talked about more. 4 modifiers is much better if you are a keyboard “power user” but don’t want to spend days crafting and maintaining a bespoke input system.
A more general point: you can be a “power user” and not have the time to learn about the absurd stack of technologies that is a Linux DE. You may even be a “power user” and not have a job / education related to computers! Shocking!
I'm a dad, I'm doing home improvement stuff, I have cat litter to scoop, I have a day job. I have like 15 minutes at a time to power use my personal computer. I spend it programming. Everything I need to do between opening the lid and typing programs is an affront.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't,
Quite simply, an OS that you don't have to think about. I moved to MacOS from linux after seeing my co-founder use their Macbook basically without any problems, much longer battery life, nice conveniences like shared clipboard and wifi password sharing, airplay, Airpods integration, better screens and font rendering, perfect migrations to new hardware, etc.
While I learned a lot tinkering with linux for a decade, at some point you can't beat something that just works.
It was a marketing campaign ("Switch") during the rise of web programmers and web designers who didn't really know how computers worked, during the hot period of startups when all of them were making a lot of money for the first time and it was sold as a status symbol. Not having a MBP among web programmers was like having greentext among highschoolers.
Now, they didn't know how computers worked because they "didn't have time or interest to worry about that stuff, they wanted something that just worked" it wasn't because they were limited as computer professionals.
And of course, it was unix, so it was at least minimally usable for actual programmers, and then you got homebrew so you had package management and normal software available, and they all started using Linux VMs to run the important stuff, so in the end it was all Linux anyway.
With all that, there was no reason not for it to gradually become a totally adequate environment to work in. Plus you got to buy the exact same thing as everyone in your social group. Talk about the next one like you would talk about the next year of a sportscar model. Have it match your phone. Get excited when they did that yearly thing where they all got on stage and sold the new line, then read Daring Fireball's take.
Linux doesn't have stable APIs or ABIs, has a million ways of doing the same thing (each slightly broken in a different way), has trouble with modern hardware features like HDR or even high-DPI screens, and requires you to fiddle with the terminal and config files for simplest things. MacOS does not. It just works out of the box, mostly. And it even mostly respects you and your work, unlike modern Windows.
For me: pro & creative apps. GIMP/Inkscape will never replace Photoshop/Illustrator/Affinity. Ableton, Logic, Pro Tools, etc. are not available on Linux and with the exception of REAPER, the alternatives are awful. And even with a Linux-compatible DAW, very few plugins are available on Linux.
On macOS, I can work on hobby software & graphics/music.
This is a bit like claiming that a flat head screwdriver can sort of work with a Philips head screw… until it strips the head, you can’t see it and you don’t know how to fix it.
Not bad, but different DAWs cater to different workflows. To me (and most), Bitwig feels much more optimized for creating electronic music than recording guitar or drums. It wouldn't be my first choice for the latter workflow, where I'd prefer REAPER or Logic. You also still have the issue with plugin compatibility and that 99% of commercial plugin vendors don't support Linux.
> 99% of commercial plugin vendors don't support Linux.
It's a bit softened by the fact that many of them can be replaced/recreated with stock bitwig devices (if you're into that). There's also yabridge, though for me personally it has been a bit hit and miss.
battery management, ARM chips, SoC ram, only decent trackpad in laptops, only good audio output in laptops (3V RMS for 150+ Ohm headphones. literally no other laptop has it), etc. These things are only possible on Macs because of economies of scale. But the most important part, to me, is software. again, economies of scale -- almost every polished app comes to Mac OS as the first OS because of the monetization potential per install. Then apps for Windows or Linux are often an afterthought or are non-native.
Mac OS is not great, no platform is perfect. Gotta think what is important to you. Are you using your machine as a thin client? Then maybe Linux is fine. Windows is obviously tragic -- zero advantages there.
about the article, Mac OS can be gutted via disabling SIP (I'm doing it on 1 macbook air), but we have so much compute and RAM that it doesn't make much sense for most use cases. I know that some companies do this with minis/studios to make makeshift servers.
I have it not only because of hardware, but because of color matching for photography/processing RAW images. That's as close to 'professional' as I get to using macOS for personal use (photography is nothing more than a personal hobby, for me).
I also use macOS at work. Plainly, the machines offered are better (MBPs vs. Thinkpad T440s) and come with less impactful EDR. They're simply faster. I do need to fall back to my T440 every now and then. It's not a great experience. That's not the fault of Lenovo or Windows, though. It's just how IT manages the laptops.
But IMO Finder is a piece of trash. The Dock sucks (moves around monitors), how full screen apps are handed sucks... anyway, there's lots of UX issues with macOS. Generally there are 3rd party free and pay-for solutions for all of this... it's just that now I gotta get all this 3rd party stuff and due to the security model, often grant them high level privs.
I think "for work" is very definitely the reason for me. I've run Linux at home since 1994 or so.
As a sysadmin/devops person 90% of my life is emacs, a browser, and collection of terminals. When I get a job I get offered a choice between a windows laptop or a macbook. Sometimes, rarely, I'm allowed Linux, but usually they say "compliance" or that their security scanning software won't support it.
So I use macbooks for work, but I wouldn't pay for one personally. But they allow me to run terraform, git, shells, and similar things in the way that I'm comfortable with.
I don't see why a power user would trust a desktop Linux distro. They are so unprofessional and take 0 accountability for breaking your system. As a power users I need to actually use my computer and not spend all day trying to fix my OS. Fixing the OS should be the vendor's responsibility. Not mine.
I got my first MacBook around 2010 because I was tired of fixing suspend to RAM every few Nvidia driver updates on my ThinkPad. Then I paid for a commercial VM to seamlessly run some Windows software I needed for my freelance work as a translator, removing the need to dual boot two operating systems. Everything just worked, and I could focus on things I wanted to do instead of continuing to tinker with the OS itself. And after years of playing with many different Linux distros, I realised that I did get tired of that. Moreover, a few games that I played, actually had native Mac versions. What's not to like?
These days I do have a Tuxedo laptop for fooling around, and I don't even use laptops on the regular, which is probably why it works well enough. That and integrated Radeon graphics, I'm sure.
> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users
I am not sure how much I qualify, but here is my use case: it can run Photoshop and MS Office, it has Keynote, it can compile just about any software I use or I develop for my job (mostly Physics and computational Chemistry stuff). It has a sane command line. Honestly, it just works for more than simple tasks. The things for which it does not work is games (but that has nothing to do with the merits of the OS) and yes, customisation.
The alternatives are Windows (which I also use for other tasks), which is a nightmare to deal with and requires tons of faffing about to compile codes, and Linux (which is actually what I use most), which does not have a working Office and is very janky.
That is not even considering the fact that MacBooks are the best laptops by a mile (my Mac is a desktop, so it's not relevant to me).
> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
I do run my Linux box like I want. I spent hours upon ours ricing it up and fine tuning everything I cared about. Stuff still occasionally breaks after a minor update and I regularly have to roll back because of a misbehaving NVIDIA driver (at least once a year). On my Mac, I don't need to tweak every aspect of KDE because the default is fine. I don't need to be able to change pid1 because launchd is fine (but nowadays so is systemd). I don't need to install drivers because everything that does not work out of the box can be tweaked with SteerMouse and Karabiner (honestly, I would kill to have something that works that well on Linux). The couple of utilities I use are much, much better than the Linux alternatives and break much less often. So in effect I don't sacrifice much, and the tradeoff is very good.
I won't even consider Windows. It's as customisable as macOS, but its default behaviour is terrible so here the tradeoff is absolutely not worth it.
I don't like the direction Apple is currently taking, so I will re-evaluate in the future, but for now my Mac is the most pleasant to use of my current computers.
> In Linux you'd solve OP's problem by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS.
And then spending a week to make it work, and then spending hours at unpredictable times when an update breaks something. I know, I already do it on my Linux box. It has some good aspects, but also some bad ones, which is why I use a Mac at home.
I got tired of fiddling with Ubuntu settings. I got tired with updates making my desktop UX worse and having to battle to get things back to what I wanted. I got tired of struggling to get wifi to work.
Maybe more than any of that, though, I got tired of every laptop having bad build quality. Maybe the Dell XPS is good, but Lenovo and System76 (my last Linux machine) seemed significantly worse than a MBP. (I could maybe just run Linux on a MBP, but it's a lot more effort for little benefit.)
I would like to replicate my 2005 Ubuntu desktop environment, but when Ubuntu shipped Unity, it was a serious downgrade, and at the time I struggled to get back to something good. I'm now in a macOS middle ground without having to fight the damn thing.
I use a Mac because I have no desire to maintain a Linux box. The software I want is all there, it has a great *nix terminal, and the hardware quality is second to none.
I work with computers all day - at home I just want to be able to focus on the task at hand.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
Access to Apple ecosystem - iCloud e. t. c. If one uses iPhone it's quite convenient to have access to the same cloud services from a laptop. FindMy is a big one for me - if I lost or misplaced my phone I can use FindMy on Macbook to locate it. While it's technically possible to use FindMy via web you'll need the phone as 2FA which is not an option when I'm trying to find it.
For me, battery life and power management – even with the number of services that macOS runs. I run Asahi Linux when docked, but on the go I estimate I get a warmer lap and about ~1/2 hr less.
it's the commercial unix desktop that has commercial app support, cool looking hardware and great power optimizations that lead to great battery life. (also in the ai era, unified memory is pretty awesome)
personally i choose linux (kde) desktops and laptops where allowed because they've just gotten so good (and seem to only be getting better), but i get it.
honestly though i think it's a little sad. the execution just isn't where it used to be and honestly i think the modern macos experience is kinda trash. i would really like to pick one up and be like "oh wow this is so cool everything is so refined if i wasn't so bothered about needing vms and docker for everything i'd consider this" but instead it's more like "wow this is kinda old and crufty and weird and not all that great to be honest i miss kde it's more refined"
This is such a loaded term. I would hazard to guess your definition would include abilities which just arent possible on Mac which would by definition make it a bad choice. You can't replace the audio stack or run headless for example.
Working hardware that I can buy at Media Market ready to go with an operating system that isn't stuck in the 1970's mindset, where people still think TUIs are "modern".
I'm a power user who's past configuring things, instead I want them to just work on their own. I also hate to memorize commands but like using the mouse and click buttons.
it depends on whether you're a power user in terms of getting lots of actual work done, or you're a power user (and this seems much more common) in the sense that you spend lots of time tweaking your productivity setup.
Less maintenance on my own kit after spending a day maintaining some else’s kit.
Linux userspace is utter chaos. When I’m pricing out lumber or other personal projects, I don’t want that held up by any number of fresh in memory Linux what-the-fresh-hell-is-this moments.
That is it. Will pay nearly whatever Apple commands to avoid having my personal (desktop) time invaded by Linux and the never ending reinventing solved problems and discovering new ones.
Upside though, Linux by now may actually have an even dozen of methods to configure a wired ethernet device. I quit counting.
Haha right. They last so much longer than non-Mac laptops from a hardware PoV, and especially how long they end up being used. That's why they retain their second hand value so much better than Windows laptops, because you can buy a Macbook of a few years old, know exactly what you're getting and that it will last another few years unless you're extremely unlucky.
Nobody ever sees my Mac but me and the monitor is a horrible old Dell one with a thick black bezel. If we were talking about iPhones, I might agree with your point.
I'm not sure who the author is, but the fact they choose to be stymied by SSV (which can be disabled) to avoid investigation down that path, which is similar to the path enthusiasts do with Windows to build tools like Tiny11, NTLite, and distributions like Atlas, feels intellectually lazy. Asserting that macOS is not UNIX (it is, quite literally, including the most recent release Tahoe) and then arguing with folks who corrected them in the comments, makes me think the author wasn't really interested in answering the question they put forth and instead were trying to mystify readers to shut down exploration and curiosity.
It is entirely possible to gain an understanding of those processes running on your computing system and to decide which process you don't want to run at startup, this is regardless of the desires and intents of the maker of the computing system, as long as you retain control of the hardware. Many of the Windows optimization tools at various points even involved community made binary patching. There's no basis to claim that it's not possible to understand or take actions, it's just that the Mac community has a different set of priorities and focus areas than other computing communities, so nobody in the community has yet invested the effort to do so.
You could summarize this blog post as answering "No" to the question in its title, without actually exploring the question to determine if that's a true answer. It's not a true answer, and won't be until we completely lose control over our own hardware.
Howard Oakley has been writting about macOS internals for a long time, and 99% of the time, his essays and articles are excellent. This is not one of them. Don't be put off by this one article - the site is a goldmine.
Man you got me on readability. Just yesterday I had to input a random string WiFi password in a printer with only arrow keys to select each character. The password had an upper-case I in it but the moronic designers of the little password label that came with the router selected a font where “I” and “l” are indistinguishable. Took me like ten minutes to get the damn thing connected.
I only got it right because I looked up the password on my Mac, whose keychain app displays them in gloriously readable monospaced font. FFS
Yes, I thought OP was going that direction from the title. I keep reading posts hoping someone has found the solution but there's always a tradeoff.
I think it's important enough that maybe apple will announce something at WWDC. The AIs need better isolation primitives. Running software from un-trusted sources needs easier and more flexible isolation guarantees. Automated builds need lighter weight virtualization options. A dockerfile that you can specify includes xcode-tools, the accessibility APIs. Volume mounting. Network controls. etc.
https://github.com/dockur/macos is a little too clunky? Tart VM or manually doing apple's container CLI is maybe most of the way there, but images are huge.
I'm working on a Docker-like software for macOS Guests on macOS Hosts. Prototype's done.
No, Dockur is ancient for Intel macOS which is almost useless in today's development as some dev tools are only available for Apple Silicon macOS which cannot be virtualized that way.
I think for many the key driver behind wanting to slim down the OS isn’t RAM or CPU use. It’s wanting to control their experience of using the computer. If the OS didn’t feel bloated nobody would care if there were 1000 processes that occasionally woke up briefly.
So what makes the OS feel bloated? It’s stuff you don’t need or want pushing its way into the foreground so you can’t ignore it. Notifications and popups are a huge culprit. Best most anxiety reducing thing I did yesterday was turn off pointless notifications like Music showing the name of the new song it’s playing. And used Little Snitch to make sure I’m never getting an update downloaded or nagged about ever again.
> Does that matter, though? This whole sequence was completed in 0.144 seconds, using lightweight inter-process communication with negligible use of resources, and only repeats hourly.
Once upon a time there were teams at Apple obsessing over stuff like this because in aggregate it’s a meaningful impact on battery, especially for a service that is functionally disabled. Wonder if it doesn’t matter or there’s low hanging fruit and just so much “dead code” that isn’t actively owned by anyone but also not causing enough problems to matter.
Several years ago I remember making something that could be considered a custom "distro" of macOS that would be VM-oriented and as minimal as it could be for CI purposes, by starting with the recovery/installer partition and adding what I needed while deleting what I didn't. Not surprisingly, there was next-to-no precedent of such that I could find, and my biggest source of information was the Hackintosh community. Nonetheless it was not too difficult, if tedious, to do so, and the final disk image size I arrived at was less than 1GB. In general the macOS community is, to put it bluntly, mostly computer-illiterate non-power-users who will either advocate against you or otherwise have no idea what you're talking about. In contrast there's a HUGE amount of existing information on modding Windows, and of course Linux sits at the other extreme.
For those wanting some semblance of control over macOS system processes, consider experimenting with App Tamer ( https://stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/ ). I was sceptical about it but "rogue" system processes, like Spotlight Indexer / Engine, that randomly demanded and hogged 100% of the CPU is now a thing of the past for me, after I used App Tamer to set it to not use more than 20% of CPU resources. It can supposedly stop (kill?) processes too, and I am experimenting with that too. But yeah, I think it's time to dump macOS (thankfully, I am still using an older version so my experience is less shitty).
That doesn't seem to actually provide a usable OS to run on any remotely recent Apple hardware. The most recent test build available for download is a virtual machine image of a version that aligns with macOS from eight years ago.
That and losing the ability to connect displays via USB-C is what’s keeping me from switching sadly.
I love what the Asahi team is doing and I’m confident they’ll get it figured out. I wish I could do something to help, but this type of programming is far beyond my skill level so there’s not much I can do other than donate here and there.
That's not actually true - they're just working on upstreaming all of the code into the Linux kernel. Development is still going strong and M3 will be added soon after upstream work has been done, as it's expected to be trivial. M4 has the added challenge of another security layer, if I understood it correctly, but once that's solved, the rest of the architecture hasn't changed much. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OAiOfCcYFM&pp=ygULYXNhaGkgb... for details.
Comparing Tahoe to Windows 7 is hyperbolic. 7 had Media Player, 8 had Groove Music. 7 was welcomed as a feature-rich upgrade, 8 was boycotted as a user-hostile downgrade.
I don't know what school of contemporary design you hail from, but you can't piss on my back and tell me it's raining. Liquid Glass needs an 8.1 update, at the very least.
The Windows 7 vs 8 analogy doesn’t support your argument, it undermines it. Windows 8 wasn’t disliked because it was “modern”, it was disliked because it broke core interaction models in a way that actively obstructed use. macOS Tahoe hasn’t done anything remotely comparable. No Start screen catastrophe, no forced touch-first UI on non-touch hardware, no fundamental workflow regression.
What you’re reacting to is aesthetic drift, not functional decay. Liquid Glass is a visual language experiment, not a UX rupture. You may dislike it, that’s fine, but equating it to Windows 8 is category error. One is a design iteration layered on top of a relatively stable interaction model, the other was a structural interface failure.
Also, invoking Media Player vs Groove Music as if those are meaningful historical markers of “user-hostile downgrade” is... generous to the point of fiction. Windows 8’s problem was input metaphors, not media apps.
This isn’t Apple becoming Microsoft. It’s Apple doing what Apple always does: overreaching aesthetically, then sanding it down in point releases until everyone forgets they were angry in the first place. Which, incidentally, is exactly what happened with Aqua, iOS 7, Big Sur, and every other supposed apocalypse.
Has MacOS ever been better than Windows for allowing fine grained control over system services?
I've been a Mac user for my entire life so maybe I didn't understand what things were like with Windows, but the fundamental problem identified by Howard, that there are many many system daemons and it is expected that the user not know what they are, or what they do, and to just leave them alone, has been the case for at least 20 years, I think.
The entire point of Macintosh is that you don't need to know anything about it (and Apple used to actively try to hide things you didn't need to know about). Or at least that is the user it has always been targeted at since the original Mac OS was released.
Windows used to be known as the OS you'd "have to" tinker with.
Early versions of OS X allowed more freedom in what you could do with the OS. As soon as SSV/SIP entered, that cut off a lot of freeform access.
Every login steam steals focus no less than two times. Steam is one of the few login items I'd choose to keep, but wasting the first 30 seconds of login is too heavy a price to pay.
I don't know if you've used Windows lately, but Windows is orders of magnitude less pleasant than MacOS (or even previous bad Windows versions like Vista).
Our machines all have CPUs that can execute on the order of 10^9 instructions every second. Why waste time worrying about a few hundred processes that use next to no CPU time?
The needless processes / bloat still burn electricity though. I'd have to guess that given the millions of installed macOS machines it's a non-trivial amount of wasted electricity. Long gone are the days of ruthlessly optimizing software for the limited hardware.
Apple has done more than anyone to make its hardware more energy-efficient and its software too. It even warns you about which apps are using the most power.
macOS is far from perfect, but when the background services are working properly, I don't see any evidence that they're any significant driver of energy usage.
On the other hand, when they're buggy and suddenly start consuming 100% CPU all the time for no reason...
Indeed, these processes are not all sitting there doing nothing.
Two processes in particular have been this exact sort of problem for me: mds_stores and mediaanalysisd. On three separate Macs (all Apple Silicon), I've observed the case heating up whenever the computer is plugged in but not actively being used. Assuming Activity Monitor is more or less accurate, the culprit seems to be those two, who always have massive amounts of accumulated CPU time, but never seem to actually be using CPU when watched. I suspect, given what they supposedly do, that they're also needlessly exhausting SSD write cycles, but that's harder to analyze/prove. Naturally, they are also in the untouchable area of the file system. Completely disabling Spotlight, which you can do without disabling SIP, seems to always fix this problem, albeit at the cost of seriously decreased usability. I've also had mixed results with just limiting the categories of Spotlight indexing in System Settings.
Yeah, that's not supposed to be happening. Yet it does. For me it's fseventsd that goes crazy sometimes. These processes are all meant to be lightweight, but they're just buggy and end up in bizarre loops. Once my Mac crashed because it was endlessly downloading the same Aerial screen saver videos in a temp directory until it ran out of space.
> To the Unix purist, this might appear wasteful and unnecessary, but macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix. It’s a closed-source proprietary operating system designed for use by millions of consumers and regular users.
Not only it is a certified UNIX, regardless of the yes and buts being discussed in other threads already, the complaint would apply to all commercial UNIXes, some of them still around not yet killed by Linux.
Well, one of the "nice" things about classic mac OS, was that you could write an app that could register with the system, to receive every user event (like keypresses and mouse movements). We used to make fun extensions, with this...
I'm sure that couldn't ever be abused...
The new UNIX-based OS may have its warts, but it is just a bit more secure.
On modern macOS applications can flag an input field as secure, which blocks keypress interception. The permission is fairly new, but the actual feature has always been there as part of the window server. I used it back in the 10.4 days to implement macro recording.
Classic Mac OS extensions on the other hand had free rein to modify any part of the kernel. They really could modify anything.
It would be nice to be able remove some or all of the iOS bloatware apps but you have to disable system protection and they will just reappear on the next macOS update. They really need something similar to the "Windows Components" screen that lets you check or uncheck things that are bundled in the windows install.
That is no longer the case after Windows 7. Windows 7 Embed allowed for full bloatware removal to the point of removing Windows Updater.
Windows 10 IoT still forces the bloatware on the users; XBox bar, Cortana, ... Windows 11 IoT is even worse, they are starting to remove the local only user account ability in the OS that is designed for product hosting.
BSD and Linux are the only modern OSes that allow the removal of bloatware. This is why in 2026 I have the job of porting software that ran on Windows Embedded to run on Linux.
Was really hoping this would be an article on the OS file size. /system using 80GB on a 250gb drive is crazy. Don't get me started on the state of library directories and app bloat.
It's sad to see apple go from customer experience first to investor satisfaction first. There is a lot of pressure on iOS26 and Tahoe being bloated and slow with planned obsolescence clearly taking centre stage.
People can hope that apple takes their operating systems as seriously as their ARM chips, but it doesn't seem likely. A cycle of 'performance and bug fixes year' will happen which gives them an excuse to bloat further operating systems that are in the pipeline. This is the worst part. We will fix now to show you we can do it and then bloat it in subsequent years so that you upgrade your devices.
I love how we want to trim macOS down. I totally get it. I open Activity Monitor and think, "WTF?" At the same time, my current job requires I use a Windows laptop, and I have to admit, "Wow, we have it pretty good over here..."
Not saying this isn't a valiant effort, but I kind of feel like Mac users are stretched out on a lounge chair at the beach complaining the Bloody Mary could be a touch more spicy.
For decades now, we've had to deal with articles like this one. People who know just enough to sound credible mislead those who known even less into mutilating their systems in the name of "optimization". This genre is a menace.
Much harm has arisen out of the superstitious fear of 100% CPU use. Why wouldn't you want a compute bound task to use all available compute? It'll finish faster that way. We keep the system responsive with priorities and interactivity-aware thresholds, not by making a scary-looking but innocuous number go down in an ultimately counterproductive way.
The article's naive treatment of memory is also telling. The "Memory" column in the task manager is RSS. It counts shared memory multiple times, once for each process. You literally can't say the 5MB "adds up". It quite literally is not amenable to the arithmetic operation of addition in a way that produces a physically meaningful result. It is absolute nonsense, and when you make optimization decisions based on garbage input, you produce garbage output.
It's hard to blame Apple for locking down the OS core like this. People try to "optimize" Windows all the time by disabling load-bearing services that cost almost nothing just so "number go down" and they get that fuzzy feeling they've optimized their computer. Then the rest of the world has to deal with bug reports in which some API mysteriously doesn't work because the user broke his own system but blames you anyway.
> Much harm has arisen out of the superstitious fear of 100% CPU use. Why wouldn't you want a compute bound task to use all available compute? It'll finish faster that way.
Because it hurts the speed/responsiveness of stuff you actually care about. It also has other negative side effects like fan noise and temperature, which with bad insulation in MacBook it can even physically burn.
Pretty obvious stuff if you don't discard issues as superstitions
> It'll finish faster that way.
The usefulness of which might be none: some background maintenance process finishes in 5 seconds that I don't notice vs in 1 seconds while turning the fans on or making my app slower
> We keep the system responsive with priorities and interactivity-aware thresholds,
Only in your fantasy, in reality you fail at that, so "superstitions" arise
> It's hard to blame Apple for locking down the OS core like this.
Of course, if you ignore real issues with bloat, and only notice the mistakes, but that's a self-inflicted perspective
> by disabling load-bearing services
The article mentions that there is not even basic information on what services do, it's similar in Windows, so maybe the proper way out is teach people and also debloat the OS proactively to give them less of an incentive to do it themselves?
The right way to make the system stick to thermal constraints is to modulate clock speed and cooling, not randomly throttle workloads so some task manager reports they're running inefficiently
One of the ways both macOS and iOS get good battery life is burst-y CPU loads to return the CPU to idle as quickly as possible. They also both run background tasks like Spotlight on the e-cores whenever possible. So some process maxing out an e-core is using a lot less power than one maxing out a p-core. Background processes maxing out a core occasionally is not as much of a problem as a lot of people seem to assume.
Perhaps it did a while ago. Now, https://www.bazhenov.me/posts/activity-monitor-anatomy/ is a good read. Thanks. It's much better than RSS, although I'm at still not sure that I like the inclusion of private compressed memory. In any case, thanks for the correction.
I read through a few and don't see anything that would meet this description. However, the fact that you saw fit to hurl an insult, something the author did not do, it's clear who the tool is.
There's a lot of chatter here about macOS' Unix certification. But in a post shared by another user, it appears that the actual content of that Unix certification vindicates OP— macOS' official Unix compatibility requires disabling SIP:
> So, if you want your installation of macOS 15.0 to pass the UNIX® 03 certification test suites, you need to disable System Integrity Protection, enable the root account, enable core file generation, disable timeout coalescing, mount any APFS partitions with the strictatime option, format your APFS partitions case-sensitive (by default, APFS is case-insensitive, so you’ll need to reinstall), disable Spotlight, copy the binaries uucp, uuname, uustat, and uux from /usr/bin to /usr/local/bin and the binaries uucico and uuxqt from /usr/sbin to /usr/local/bin, set the setuid bit on all of these binaries, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH before /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, enable the uucp service, and handle the mystery issues listed in the four Temporary Waivers.
https://www.osnews.com/story/141633/apples-macos-unix-certif...
So it seems very fair to say then, that features like SIP and the SSV are genuine turns away from Unix per se, even given the fact of the certification.
It is still a UNIX nontheless, other commercial UNIXes have similar subtleties on their certification.
For a long time, Inspur K-UX, a Red Hat Linux derivitive was a Unix O3 certified system as well. https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3617.htm
It's pretty telling when the comments on the article and here have devolved into pedantic discussions of "well is it REALLY UNIX?" It's the most inconsequential question with no beneficiary except those who want to claim UNIX purity.
If one was to do all these things, would anything break in the OS and supporting software?
I've never tried it myself, but it's oft-repeated folk wisdom in Apple circles that enabling filesystem case-sensitivity breaks all manner of third-party software that has only ever been tested on the case-insensitive default.
I tried running with case sensitive file system. MacOS itself is fine, but a lot of software isn’t.
You also need to change the /bin/sh symlink (to the included /bin/dash) to avoid multiple bugs in their ancient bash 3.2 showing in POSIX scripts.
> So it seems very fair to say then, that features like SIP and the SSV are genuine turns away from Unix per se
At the end of the day UNIX is an operating system. A dead operating system that hasn’t seen a release outside of Bell Labs since the 80s and even 10th Edition was 1988, and never distributed.
A branch of it persisted through System V and its variants, then it became a spec, then operating systems started calling themselves UNIX according to that spec whether they were Systems V offshoots or reconstructions stemming from Net/2.
We’ve been genuine turns away from Unix per se since before I was born. The SUS and POSIX lets people pretend like we’re not.
IMO, that's a pretty poor summary of how the "Unix Wars" really ended. Bell UNIX got productized into System V, and the trademark was dumped off on TOG.
But "Unix" was really more of an ideal. The ideal system may not have existed, but a lot of people saw the potential of the flawed heaven in there. Including Stallman and Torvalds. Imagine "Industry-standard APIs" which are actually non-negotiable, and not just some compliance-test. Well, you need the source code, right? We have a much better "unix" now than we ever had with "UNIX".
The “Unix Wars” battle lines were drawn in 1988 with the formation of the X/Open Group and Unix International, the same year Bell Labs put together the 10th Edition’s manual, more or less demarcating its release according to their own conventions even if it wasn’t sold nor distributed. Their next project was Plan 9.
Incidentally this was also the year of the last major version of AT&T’s System V, System V Release 4. There would be a couple more minor releases after that, but there was never a System V Release 5.
> The ideal system may not have existed, but a lot of people saw the potential of the flawed heaven in there. Including Stallman and Torvalds.
I don’t think Stallman nor Torvalds ever saw anything so romantic in UNIX. You could ask them, but it doesn’t jive with well anything in the historical record.
> We have a much better "unix" now than we ever had with "UNIX".
We have better operating systems, yes, and for a price and some elbow grease, some of them can even use the UNIX trademark which checks a box for some people who might care about that sort of thing.
Obv we have better operating systems, yes. But we also obviously have much, much better de-jure open source standards than the UNIX/unix/etc crowd could ever manage. So the world is better when all those guys gave-up or died.
Stallman and Torvalds were not romantics, but they were tactical and strategic in targeting commercial UNIX. You could tell in the old days the Linux benchmark was Solaris.
> So the world is better when all those guys gave-up or died.
I think this line is a bit harsh but otherwise I think we’re pretty much in agreement now unless there’s something else you would like to add on. Cheers!
9front it's the last 'Unix' release after Unix v8 and Unix v10.
Then that would be Inferno, given how little Plan 9 shares with UNIX, and Inferno had the same authors.
Plan 9 isn’t UNIX. 9front isn’t Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
None of those things are at all desirable. setuid uucp? Security nightmare. strictatime? Not needed. Linux doesn't do it either.
Apple has retained the good parts of UNIX and ignored the shitty parts. In the end, it is more UNIX than Linux is.
Yeah, like a really shitty ancient version of bash. If that's what UNIX means to you, I'm not gonna yuck your yum, but what could be more UNIX like than letting license issues make life worse for your users.
Hey, at least it isn't *BSD! (Or, well...)
macOS switched to zsh a while ago. i don’t see what that minor choice has to do with being or not being UNIX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix but if you've not seen them before then maybe start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
I know enough about Unix that shipping an outdated binary in the base system is entirely unsurprising :-)
bash doesn't mean UNIX, in fact UNIX means being able to chose your shell.
I'm fairly certain that the UNIX standard isn't limited to the manpage for chsh.
Then you are also fairly certain that it doesn't include latest version of bash, rather sh, and are aware of what the difference means.
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I don't disagree, but what does that possibly have to do with macOS being a Unix or not?
fantastic point… about… what? certainly not TFA…
The visceral response to the statement:
> To the Unix purist, this might appear wasteful and unnecessary, but macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix. It’s a closed-source proprietary operating system designed for use by millions of consumers and regular users. Rather than configuring it using config files or its thousands of property lists, its controls are largely exposed in System Settings, with a few settings hidden away and only accessible through the defaults command.
Is really, really interesting to me, because so many people (including the author) are so invested in the question of whether or not "macOS is Unix". There's so much signaling happening here, people throwing around UNIX all-caps, talking about certifications, the "good parts" of UNIX, that macOS "[is] quite literally [UNIX]", while seemingly missing the author's intention entirely.
You don't have to agree with the author, but a good faith interpretation of "macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix" should be obvious in its meaning. Yes, macOS 26 has been certified by The Open Group to be compliant with the Single UNIX Specification.
You know what else is UNIX certified? IBM's z/OS. Yet I don't think people would be clambering to say that z/OS's USS is "quite literally UNIX" with the same ferocity.
The point the author is clearly attempting to make is that the idea and system of macOS is not Unix. Even if macOS is, legally speaking, "UNIX®", it was not made to be UNIX®. macOS is not built to adhere to the "UNIX® philosophy". The fact NextStep and OS X after it were BSD-compatible is an implementation detail -- a useful one at that -- but an implementation detail nonetheless. It's like Android's use of the Linux kernel underneath. Yes, Android is Linux, but there's a reason why there's a vocal community of people who champion "Real Linux smartphones". Android uses Linux, but Android isn't defined by Linux.
I'm not trying to prove anyone right or wrong here, I just want to give my three cents on the matter. I would call macOS "unix-y" because it's close enough to being a "unix" to be comfortable on the CLI, but I've touched the unix "heart" enough to know it still smells like 2005-ish FreeBSD, largely frozen in time.
Of course, that's good enough for most things. But then, does that make Windows a Unix-like, just because it can run Linux ELF executables via WSL1? Conceivably, if Microsoft cared, they could get UNIX® 03 certification via WSL1, WSL2, or some hacked together reincarnation of SFU with parts from WSL1.
Yes, I know, macOS has a "real" BSD core, and a "real" unix heritage through BSD and OSF/1. The point is that it's not hard (IMO) to see where the author is coming from saying "No, macOS is not a Unix".
(I disagree with him for different reasons -- he ambiguously implies that "Unix" means being open-source, for instance -- but I agree that macOS as a platform is not very Unix-y, even if it is UNIX®.)
The analogy with Android and Linux is dead-on. As is the confusing language with which people talk about these things. "Android isn't Linux" and "macOS isn't Unix" aren't quite the right way to express the sentiments and thoughts behind them— even when those sentiments and thoughts are themselves clear and reasonable.
I don't think Apple's choices to deviate from the Unix standard are necessarily for the worst; many are for the better! But their cultural deviation from the norms of the free Unices and Unix-likes is part of what makes computing on macOS feel constraining and frustrating to me. It seems like that sense of disappointment (shared by many others), and defensiveness in response to it, end up driving a lot of discussions around this.
> Conceivably, if Microsoft cared, they could get UNIX® 03 certification via WSL1, WSL2, or some hacked together reincarnation of SFU with parts from WSL1.
They probably could if they really want to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
The Windows NT kernel was designed to extend and embrace .
"UNIX® philosophy" doesn't exist, that is a religion like discussion about UNIX spread by FOSS people while arguing for GNU/Linux with their endless list of command line options.
I use UNIX in various flavours since being introduced to it in 1993 via Xenix, and cannot name a single one where this was ever true.
Well no, it does exist, but not in UNIX itself, in Plan 9.
I never found it there, and even if measures in some strange way to make it true, doesn't seem to have helped Plan 9 adoption.
Commands still have plenty command line configurations for their executions.
In terms of practical usage, imo it doesn't matter whether macOS is Unix - it's certainly not Linux. The shell is different, the bundled utils are different, the filesystem, configuration and tooling is different enough that if you try to run anything beyond the most basic scripts written for Linux, they will not work.
Which means macOS is a separate platform you need to learn and support.
By this standard, WSL2 is much more Linux than macOS.
>You know what else is UNIX certified? IBM's z/OS. Yet I don't think people would be clambering to say that z/OS's USS is "quite literally UNIX" with the same ferocity.
Does "Unix" still carry some special cachet these days? Linux is more "Unix-like" than MacOS for the reason articulated in the article, but you'll see commenters leap to MacOS's defense by pointing out that MacOS is "literally UNIX".
I think it's a sentimental thing, mixed with a dash of elitism/"purity seeking".
I don't mean that harshly. In my late teens/early 20s, I went through a "phase" where I obsessed with getting "purer and purer". This was mixed with a weird obsession with non-x86 hardware, as well. Lots of NetBSD, FreeBSD and Illumos usage, some Plan9 towards the end, lots of intellectual snobbery about "it feels better", and that sort of thing.
I'm almost 30 now, and my office has "Unix" systems from the 70s up to, well, my M1 MBP with "UNIX®" on it. PDP-11, VAX/ULTRIX, SPARC/SunOS 4, MIPS/IRIX, Alpha/OSF1, I've given them all a spin, running existing software and writing new software to kick the tires of old compilers. That's why I feel comfortable saying macOS really, really doesn't feel like any "UNIX" that I associate with "UNIX".
Although, UNIX was always a confusing term which never really meant all that much to begin with (when talking about commercial OSes/hardware platforms), but that's a whole other conversation...
> In my late teens/early 20s, I went through a "phase" where I obsessed with getting "purer and purer". This was mixed with a weird obsession with non-x86 hardware, as well. Lots of NetBSD, FreeBSD and Illumos usage, some Plan9 towards the end
Sounds really fun and informative!
> lots of intellectual snobbery about "it feels better"
How does that end up being intellectual (or snobbery, for that matter)? It sounds pretty close to "follow your heart" or "I just enjoy it" to me!
> Although, UNIX was always a confusing term which never really meant all that much to begin with (when talking about commercial OSes/hardware platforms), but that's a whole other conversation...
Seems like a relevant one, for this context ;)
That probably came off a bit too inflammatory/self-deprecating :)
The point for me was realizing that, even though I do like all these systems and OSes, and I understand the appeal of both "pure UNIX" and (on the opposite spectrum) OSes that violently reject "UNIX", this kind of purity isn't actually... useful.
End of the day, with most of the ways I use a computer for productivity, playing, or being social with other people, there are other things that matter a lot more than the "purity" of the OS. And this includes how much "real UNIX" it is. It's cool that Solaris/Illumos is "true blooded unix". And... it doesn't really matter that much. Whether or not a system is or isn't "unix" just doesn't matter, as long as it runs the software you want.
(And for a lot of modern software, "being unix-like" isn't enough; if you're not Linux, Windows, or macOS, good luck!)
The purity is also usually kind of a lie in the first place. I've got a VAX in my office running "real" 4.3BSD, before all the "POSIX-bloat" was added. But you look closely and realize there's tons of "bloat" added, for the purpose of making a more useful OS. There are mixed abstractions, redundant libc extensions, dubious system additions that look like one person needed something and added it in.
It's just so uninteresting to me now to argue about what is or isn't "unix". I still enjoy all those old OSes, but you kind of stop seeing them as "UNIX". The ways that each isn't UNIX is far more interesting, like how ULTRIX and OSF/1 abandoned "unix style" syslogs in favor of a rich binary format via 'uerf'.
I've experimented with all those platforms, and macOS feels to me like "Unix" as much as a Sun SparcStation or SGI Indy from 30 years ago.
What is "Unix" to you? To me, it's the common shell commands / utilities and a POSIX API. If I can download some GNU source, run ./configure; make; make install ... it's Unix.
Certainly, macOS is a "weird" Unix if you compare it to Solaris and look at the administrative bits. But, then again, IBM's AIX is very weird, too. And that's one of the few commercial Unix implementations still kicking.
> Certainly, macOS is a "weird" Unix if you compare it to Solaris and look at the administrative bits. But, then again, IBM's AIX is very weird, too. And that's one of the few commercial Unix implementations still kicking.
That's why I said that "Unix" has always been kind of confusing as a name, because a lot of "Unix"es are very different. I've never used AIX personally, but I know it's pretty funky. And there have been weirder "unix"es, Domain/OS was another weird one. At least a few others had split BSD/SysV "personalities", I've read.
> If I can download some GNU source, run ./configure; make; make install ... it's Unix.
On the one hand, I agree with this.
But then, by that standard, you could call basically every OS in use today "Unix", including Windows via Cygwin, or WSL, or etc...
To me, "Unix" is epitomized by Sun's fix for SunOS 4 for disabling Yellow Pages and using only DNS for hostname lookups.
Their official advice? To unpack the libc shlib, delete the object code for the Yellow Page functions, then repackage it into a new libc version.
That feels like Unix to me, in a way that macOS just never will be. Which is also perfectly okay with me.
So Unix has to feel like dealing with old cruft to you? ;) I remember the SunOS 4 days and the annoying setup process for DNS. Those were the first Unix systems I worked with in a professional capacity.
I have a Sparc in my collection but it's running Solaris and too new to run SunOS 4. I'm considering getting a Sparc 10 or something so I can relive the SunOS days. That was my favorite early 90's Unix. Most open source software had first class support for SunOS.
Linux is "Unix" in my mind, though not UNIX (TM). WSL follows, since it is really virtualization under the hood. (WSL2, at least.). Cygwin seems like a gray area... Unix-like environment maybe?
> So Unix has to feel like dealing with old cruft to you? ;)
Well, maybe :)
It's something about the system being made of a lot of messy parts which can be split apart and taped back together. Reductively, all computers are like this, but SunOS and other "unixes" are more easily put back together.
For instance, besides enabling DNS, I've extended the libc quite a bit, to get modern OpenSSL and curl to build, as well as KDE 1 just for kicks.
You can do the same with almost any OS (that doesn't lock you out with security), but it feels easier with a "Unix". Linux is also very like this!
> I have a Sparc in my collection but it's running Solaris and too new to run SunOS 4.
You could always run NetBSD and use COMPAT_SUNOS to run a SunOS chroot ;) I haven't tried running Xsun this way but it'd probably go...
Do you blog about any of this? Extending SunOS libc sounds pretty cool!
I did install OpenBSD on the Sparc (Ultra 5) at one point, before going back to an older Solaris. Maybe I'll try NetBSD next!
Haha, I haven't yet, but I want to. Maybe soon! Though extending libc isn't that exciting, really: that's kind of the cool (Unix-y??) thing about it. You just (IIRC) extract the static archive, add whatever .o object files with whatever symbols, add the symbols to a manifest, pack it up, and any C program on the system can call it. Since all C functions were implicit at the time (header files only had structs and enums) you can use trivially add whatever.
> Ultra 5
You should give it a shot! Even NetBSD/sparc64 has support for SunOS 4 binaries... allegedly.
If one was so inclined, you can abuse the kernel a bit and tell the compat layers to use root as their search path. I did this to make a "Linux system" with a NetBSD kernel and full GNU/Linux userland, just for kicks.
In my mind, you could do the same for SunOS. There's also COMPAT_MACH and COMPAT_DARWIN... imagine NeXT/SPARC binary compatibility alongside SunOS.
Hmmm. :)
Yes it does. It means: do my POSIX sh scripts using only POSIX utilities and their specified options/behaviour work here?
Back in the early 2000s, RedHat did a study and found the UNIX brandname actually had negative value among IT managers. They saw it as "expensive, proprietary, incompatible" etc. Meanwhile Linux was seen very positively. (So yeah nobody cares, not even the Mac users who pretend to.)
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> Here’s our first problem, as those are located in the Signed System Volume (SSV), so we can’t change them in any way. The same applies to the other 417 LaunchDaemons and 460 LaunchAgents that account for most of the processes listed by Activity Monitor. In the days before the SSV it was possible to edit their property lists to prevent them from being launched, but that isn’t possible any more when running modern macOS.
SSV can be disabled. It would be ill-advised to do so, but Apple intentionally allows you to do that. In fact you can strip away every single security layer of macOS, including allowing unsigned kernel extensions to be loaded. This document is a bit outdated, but it should still be possible to do all of that. https://gist.github.com/macshome/15f995a4e849acd75caf14f2e50...
Feels like the article is just a cheap dunk on macOS. Has Apple perhaps baked in a bit too much into the SSV? Definitely. Even the Chess.app is in there.
Does it really matter? Almost certainly no.
> Feels like the article is just a cheap dunk on macOS.
That blog, Howard Oakley at eclecticlight.co, is consistently the most informative on the internet about macOS behaviors and internals, that Apple does not explain. He is also the author of several useful tools [1] to help observe and understand some of its underlying details. It's maybe the closest we have to a SysInternals for macOS.
[1] https://eclecticlight.co/free-software-menu/
It is. Add we all have off days. Perhaps Howard has had one here. I mean, he is defining what type of OS it is by how it's configuted. Which is just wierd.
I got a chuckle out of that for my own reasons as a long time Mac user as “Mac OS X is Unix” was the brand back in the 10.0-10.3 days, to the point I believe they got a Unix certification by someone, and then again with macOS 15 they got an Open Group UNIX certification.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140868/macos-15-0-now-unix-03-c...
I can’t say this affects me in any way I’m aware of, but the perception presented here is interesting.
Funnily enough, they had no certification and weren’t compliant in 10.0-10.3 days, so what they were doing was trademark infringement, hence the lawsuit from the Open Group. 10.4 was the first compliant version. And oh boy they really milked it for several years afterwards.
https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
That just highlights my point about this article being a cheap dunk?
Because I was very disappointed with it ending at “SSV doesn’t let you”. SSV can be disabled, and the author should have known (almost certainly knows) that.
Disabling SSV may have been beyond the scope of the experiment the author was attempting. I suppose he could've been more explicit about that.
From one of his comments on his post:
> I wish whoever takes that project on, every success, even more so at working out how those processes can be disabled completely while keeping the SSV intact.
The thing I find disappointing about the article is that nothing else seems to have been explored. Now no options might exist, but then again, isn't the point of such a write up to find the ones that.... do...?
A lot of people know that modern macOS is a bit of a let down when it comes to modifying it unless you disable a bunch of security layers. So the information gained is basically 0.
Edit: I should clarify that some of the ways they analyze how services are launched etc. are quite interesting, though I hope my prior thought makes sense to some.
Disabling the SSV is perhaps the worst mistake you can make to a macOS install. Howard certainly knows that this is true but has chosen not to explore the details in this article.
His website are deep dives into the technical workings of macOS that no one else does. I’d even argue he has more insights and documentation than Apple. It might sound harsh, but he’s just very clinical about it.
Eclecticlight and ‘cheap dunk’ ?
No.
This site is a class of its own, in quality of discussions, in quality of software, and in dedication… many years long, consistent quality
I didn’t claim that eclecticlight writes cheap dunk.
But this article, which starts with
> That’s a question I’m asked repeatedly, which this article tries to answer.
doesn’t actually _try_ to answer the question. It just stops at SSV and draws a meaningless comparision with macOS 9. It also has several factual inaccuracies in there. Notably, the claim that macOS is not UNIX, and the implication that Unix systems must somehow be free and open-source (virtually all Unixes of the day were proprietary & closed source).
> I didn’t claim that eclecticlight writes cheap dunk
Thanks - then we agree (also on the part of the argumentation about macOS being a certified UNIX OS)
I suspect that Oakley could have explained that, but the thesis stands even without the asterisk, and explaining it would have an issue:
This is going to piss off some Linux folks, but when communicating from a big pulpit about how to bypass parts of MacOS, it's important to be aware that the vast majority of MacOS users are casual, nontechnical users. As such, a popular blog posting "here's how to bypass SIP/SSV lock/whatever" would lead to a wave of users disabling it for less-than-great reasons (aesthetics, conviction that e.g. a given service was causing their system slowness when that service's resource usage was actually symptomatic of something else orchestrated by MacOS going wrong). Those decisions have side effects:
- Folks brick or break their computers, potentially in a way that voids the warranty or support contracts (I hope that software bypasses don't trigger this, but I am cynical).
- Folks chasing a "cleanliness vibe" leave a lot of the system security off once they're done. Someone else in this thread pointed out that without SSV the security of MacOS is on par with most Linux, but MacOS users are a lot bigger attack risk than Linux users: there are more of them, they're wealthier and thus identified as targets of choice by malware/people, and, again--they're casual users and don't have good security spider sense. This isn't a blanket endorsement of every restriction/security feature with no opt-out that MacOS has, just an observation that its userbase is at higher risk for attack than some others--lower than windows, but higher than Linux users.
- Folks induce breakage that bricks their computers on a delay, e.g. during the next system update something chokes after encountering a totally unauthorized/unexpected service geometry and crashes hard enough to cause data loss.
I'm not saying that stuff like SSV-rw should be secret, just that it's probably for the best to not discuss it front and center in a widely-read informational blog whose content is geared towards (power) users rather than technicians. To phrase it with a different example: if someone Googles "how to disable XProtect (antimalware)", great, go nuts. But it's probably for the best that a popular article about "can you reduce resource usage by shutting down system launchd services" doesn't have a "here's how to elevate your permissions and disable whatever you like" blurb, and instead settles for an answer of "no, that's not supported."
If you want to piss off even more, those that buy Apple only because they want a shinny UNIX, but don't buy into Apple's culture since Mac OS Classic days, you only need to remind them that Steve Jobs was hardly a UNIX fanboy.
Just like with Microsoft strategies, for NeXT, having NeXTSTEP being based on UNIX was more to check boxes against Sun, and bring software into the platform, not to make it easy to go out, hence the whole userspace stack, even drivers, are based on Objective-C frameworks.
"Why We Have to Make UNIX Invisible."
https://www.usenix.org/blog/vault-steve-jobs-keynotes-1987-u...
> They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180628214613/https://www.cake....
"NeXT marketing strategy video (1991)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU
You sure you're replying to the right post? I wasn't really engaging with the "is it UNIX or not" debates elsewhere in the parent threads; just talking about why security bypass wasn't mentioned in TFA.
Yes I am,
> This is going to piss off some Linux folks, but when communicating from a big pulpit about how to bypass parts of MacOS, it's important to be aware that the vast majority of MacOS users are casual, nontechnical users.
See Steve Jobs remark about grandmothers.
Ah, I see now, thanks.
I think "people who want a UNIX" are pretty rare. Most of the folks who say things that rhyme with that at FOSDEM (as you mentioned in an adjacent thread) are, I'd bet, more likely to be "people who want something Unix-adjacent and similar enough to Linux that behavior of some tools is familiar".
They're still likely to be tilted by the idea that it might be less-than-ethical for hoakley to share security bypass techniques on a popular blog, though. Nobody likes to be told "no", and nobody likes to be reminded they're not the target demographic.
> those that buy Apple only because they want a shinny UNIX
Those people don’t exist. People buy Apple for many good reasons; this isn’t one of them.
Yes they do, you only have to walk FOSDEM corridors to find them.
There are DOZENS of us!
The problem is that Oakley is actually wrong. You don't need to edit the property lists. You can simply use the launchctl command-line tool to disable system launchd services after you disable SIP, without having to disable the SSV.
this.
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd.plist
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto.plist
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-helper.plist
> Has Apple perhaps baked in a bit too much into the SSV? Definitely. Even the Chess.app is in there. > Does it really matter? Almost certainly no.
Why does waste and broken customization not matter?
Broken customization is entirely subjective.
As for waste - for the past decade or so, the consumer computing world has been in an almost unanimous consensus that computing power is cheap, and that it's not worth optimizing away a few hundred megabytes of storage or RAM. And macOS is _nowhere_ near being the worst offender here. If you really need to point a finger at waste, look no further than Windows, where just about everything these days is a WebView. Now that's waste.
I'm pretty confident that the taskbar on Windows 11 alone eats up more RAM and CPU time than every single macOS service that's running but not actually being used combined.
What is subjective about objectively saving time in your workflow? Or saving space that you can save more of your precious photos?
Also why should I care about worst offenders, that's not a coherent argument when discussing this specific offender.
P.S. Also, in what kind of world subjective perspective doesn't matter for the subject?
> What is subjective about objectively saving time in your workflow?
What part of your workflow requires modifying the system volume on macOS? As a long-time power user of macOS, I don't even need to disable SIP. I've worked my workflow around the limitations.
macOS and Linux power users are two different species. One will work around the restrictions imposed by the overlords, the other will beat the system into submission.
Of course you can also beat macOS into submission, but then you're in for a bad time.
The part where I can eliminate the workflow of investigating and killing some misbehaving background process by preventing it from launching.
Or when I changed popup symbol pickers to insert symbols faster, which you can't do now since those symbol files became protected.
A few I don't remember whether it was SIP or SSV, and then many I'm not even aware of, they just haven't been implemented by other people due to these restrictions.
> As a long-time power user of macOS, I don't even need to disable SIP.
Ok, so you're just not that power, but this is not about you, can you imagine other people can do different customizations?
Your defeatist attitude to customization is common, but that still doesn't explain why you think it doesn't matter
The argument is that your customization is fighting against the tide. If you want to remain happy using macOS, it’s better to go in the same direction as Apple. And Apple really doesn’t want you to disable SIP.
Disabling SSV puts your system security on par with any stock linux distro. Most OSes don’t do a cryptographically verified read only root.
The bigger problem with disabling SSV and making changes to it is entirely practical - any macOS update will overwrite them.
Which can be worked around by writing a provisioning script, but in either case will be a significant headache if one would come to rely on the modifications they were to make to the volume.
Does it really matter? Almost certainly no.
...until they start including things you don't want (remember the CSAM scanning debacle?)
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> To the Unix purist, this might appear wasteful and unnecessary, but macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix.
I get what they mean, but macOS is even Unix certified. https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
"I get what they mean, but macOS is even Unix certified."
What do they mean?
To me the blog author is primarily focused on the issue of _control_, i.e., being able to control the hardware that he purchased as opposed to letting a company control it, e.g., through pre-installed software, remotely installed "updates", default settings, etc.
He cannot control its default behaviour hence he wants to "slim MacOS down"
"UNIX" was a pun on the name of another OS that allegedly was accused of being too large and complex. That OS, Multics, was designed to run only on specific hardware from GE and later Honeywell
UNIX was a smaller, less complex alternative that, after its rewrite in C, could more easily run on a variety of hardware and be modified by the people using it
Apple does not allow people using MacOS to modify it
MacOS is proprietary; unlike AT&T's UNIX it has not been released into the research community resulting in non-commercial, open source "MacOS-like" OS projects (HackIntosh notwithstanding)
A user cannot write programs for MacOS without restriction by the company, e.g., prior approval, "developer" fees, etc.
MacOS cannot easily be used on a variety of hardware, only on Apple's proprietary hardware
Compared to non-commercial UNIX-like OS, MacOS is larger and more complex
https://eclecticlight.co/2023/12/04/macos-sonoma-is-setting-...
> To me the blog author is primarily focused on the issue of _control_, i.e., being able to control the hardware that he purchased as opposed to letting a company control it, e.g., through pre-installed software, remotely installed "updates", default settings, etc.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the OS being an UNIX or not. It's a bit weird to see the allusion to UNIX to be fair: Howard Oakley is deep enough down the rabbit hole that I would expect him to know that History is full of proprietary and closed UNIXes.
NB. The blog refers to (a) the "Unix purist" and (b) MacOS not being Unix. Arguably, (a) is more important, irrespective of whether (b) is true (IMO it's ambiguous)
For example, the "Unix purist" might refer to someone who identifies with the "ideals" associated with that OS, e.g., relatively small, portable to potentially any hardware, free to study and modify, etc. And (b) might refer to MacOS not conforming to those "ideals" (despite having a limited license to use a "UNIX" trademark)
At this point, (b) is ambiguous; what is "Unix". It might mean different things to different people
Ironically, Apple took the "Unix" parts of MacOS from open source, non-commercial "UNIX-like" OS projects such as NetBSD and FreeBSD that are not "Certified UNIX"
HP-UX and IBM AIX are probably shocked to learn that they, too, are not Unix
Sadly, HP-UX just reached EOL. I think their Integrity servers let you choose between RHEL and SLES now?
Perhaps the reason Apple sought the "Certified UNIX" label was to please business customers
A user cannot write programs for MacOS without restriction by the company, e.g., prior approval, "developer" fees, etc.
Adding emphasis on "without restriction"
Opinions may differ but to me using Apple's "Darwin OS" is different from using a BSD project OS
For one, I cannot install Darwin without also installing a gigantic GUI
XNU, or XINU, stands for "X Is Not UNIX"
To me, that giant Apple GUI is not UNIX
NB. I do not use a graphical layer or "terminal emulator". I only use textmode
You can write a UNIX program for MacOS though.
> MacOS is proprietary
Some of the drivers are. The core is open source, though. macOS' particular choice for its graphical user land is proprietary as well, but AT&T's UNIX had no such equivalent, aside from some experiments, so that doesn't make sense to use as a point of comparison. Not to mention similar systems in the UNIX-esq space, like SunView, NeWS, VUE, NeXTSTEP, etc. were proprietary too. That has always been par for the course in the world of "graphical UNIX". The so-called "Linux desktop" is the aberration.
You can, of course, run an open source graphical user land, like Gnome, instead on top of macOS' UNIX-y fashioned bits if you so wish.
> The core is open source, though. macOS' particular choice for its graphical user land is proprietary as well
I ran into a kernel panic specific to my macbook's hardware. How do I compile a new kernel with some extra debug printlns and boot it to figure out the panic?
On any actually open source operating system, this is doable, but I'm not holding my breath for any working instruction here. As far as I know, there's no way to modify the source code of, and then boot, the macOS kernel.
Perhaps "the core is open source" doesn't mean that I can run a modified kernel to you?
> How do I compile a new kernel with some extra debug printlns and boot it to figure out the panic?
First, explain how you are doing it with the AT&T UNIX kernel. We can then help you adapt the process to Darwin.
> On any actually open source operating system, this is doable
I suspect you forgot to read the thread. While the grandparent comment considered AT&T UNIX to be "open source", that doesn't mean open source in the way we think of the term today. AT&T UNIX was very much proprietary in its own right. Today, we'd probably say "source available". Whether or not that is doable was dependent on what kind of agreement you had with the owner. They might have let you for a substantial fee, but Apple might let you for a substantial fee too. Have you asked?
AT&T did not ship with the kernel source code, but they often shipped with the compiled object files of the kernel and a command line utility that allowed to change the kernel configuration parameters, after which the kernel would get re-linked into a new one.
Not open source by any definition, but it was a viable way to obtain a new kernel image. The practice has become obsolete after the adoption of loadable kernel modules across nearly all UNIX flavours, with the exception being OpenBSD (if my memory serves me well).
> I ran into a kernel panic specific to my macbook's hardware. How do I compile a new kernel with some extra debug printlns and boot it to figure out the panic?
1. You can find panic logs in Console.app. macOS writes them into NVRAM and stows away into files on its next boot. That will give you the process and kernel extension that was the culprit, and a stack trace.
2. sudo nvram boot-args="debug=0x122" or something like this will increase log output from the kernel. Those debug prints are probably there already. You can even attach a debugger running from somewhere else, presumably over Thunderbolt on newer machines.
The next sentence is also interesting actually.
> It’s a closed-source proprietary operating system
Most UNIX systems were proprietary & closed source though?
All of the commercial Unix operating systems were closed source.
The first open Unix-like is 386BSD which predates Linux. It was said that if 386BSD didn't get mired in a lawsuit, Torvalds would have used it and Linux would not exist.
Same applies to Windows NT POSIX subsystem, had Microsoft been serious about UNIX support on Windows, similar to how IBM and Unisys do on their mainframes and micros, there would be no reason to bother with Linux.
My case was exactly that, I got Slackware in 1995's Summer because that subsystem wasn't enough to do the DG/UX assignments at home.
And the reason BSD survived is the maligned ‘advertising clause’ that most later BSD-type licenses dropped. Berkeley countersued that AT&T had promoted that System V included vi, without the required attribution.
> macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix.
MacOS is the most UNIXy of the UNIXes
1. Comparatively heavyweight
2. Proprietary
3. UNIX APIs
To beef up the historical comparisons, "creates their own workstations on RISC-derived processors" is also (historically) a sign of a (commerical) UNIX, too. It isn't to jarring to mentally replace "macOS Tahoe" with "NeXTSTEP 26".
Yes on paper. Submitted version differs from what customers run at home/work.
The compliance trope that a point-in-time-assessment can't be used to support a claim is kind of a lazy take. The certification explicitly states macOS v26.0 Tahoe.
While it's true that it wasn't always truly UNIX compliant, they put in the hard yards to become so (albeit to avoid a $200M lawsuit from The Open Group) [1]
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
To certify any version of macOS as UNIX, the security had to be significantly altered (disabling SIP) among a few other things. This is why what is shipped is not what is certified as UNIX. You can /make/ it match what is certified as an administrator, but that would be inadvisable.
https://www.osnews.com/story/141633/apples-macos-unix-certif...
EDIT: And really, UNIX certification means nothing except to potentially government agencies and people who don't understand what UNIX and/or UNIX certification is. Or why being "certified UNIX" is generally meaningless: see the BSDs, which are much closer to "UNIX" origins than macOS will ever be.
Or Windows, which is frankly just has better architected internals and abandons legacy UNIX ;-)
> is. Or why being "certified UNIX" is generally meaningless: see the BSDs, which are much closer to "UNIX" origins than macOS will ever be
MacOS is BSD over Mach, which is itself derived from BSD.
Yes, that's the point. It's further removed from UNIX than the BSDs are.
macOS contains BSD userland, networking, file system, POSIX, and a couple of other things. But XNU, the kernel, is "X is Not UNIX", if there ever was a statement to be made about the underpinnings of macOS.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...
You have just described OSF/1 (and later – Tru64) – a certified UNIX with a hybrid kernel operating over a Mach microkernel, BSD userland, POSIX conformance etc.
What is the point that you are making?
This is a very silly argument.
There were several actual Unixes released based on Mach, and some of them more purely Mach than macOS/NeXT ever have been.
The people that certify it say that you are wrong. What you think and what actually is are two entirely different things in this case. The fact remains that, according to the OpenGroup (and they are the one that matter here), macOS 26 is UNIX.
macOS 26 that is /altered/ is UNIX. macOS that ships on every Mac is not certified UNIX -- but it can be made to match if you're willing to give up security.
You should read through the actual certification - https://www.opengroup.org/csq/repository/noreferences=1&RID=... (there are a couple more in the repo).
To run the VSX conformance test suite we first disable SIP as follows: [...]
Feel free to disable SIP on your Mac. I certainly won't be doing so on mine.
You’re confusing operating mode with operating system.
SIP/SSV don’t create a different macOS, they restrict mutation and introspection. They don’t change the POSIX surface, the SUS semantics, or the kernel interfaces being certified. They just stop test harnesses from instrumenting the system without elevated privilege.
By your logic, no modern OS is anything it claims to be unless you run it in an insecure debug configuration. Linux isn’t POSIX because you need root. Windows isn’t Windows because kernel debugging exists. That’s obviously nonsense.
The Open Group certifies macOS 26 as shipped. Temporarily relaxing protections to run a conformance suite does not produce a “different OS”, it produces a different trust configuration of the same one.
Saying “it’s not really UNIX because SIP is on” is like saying a container isn’t Linux because it doesn’t let you mount /proc without extra privileges.
You didn't read the article, did you? SIP isn't the only alteration. And we don't know all of the changes required due to the waivers.
> if you want your installation of macOS 15.0 to pass the UNIX® 03 certification test suites, you need to disable System Integrity Protection, enable the root account, enable core file generation, disable timeout coalescing, mount any APFS partitions with the strictatime option, format your APFS partitions case-sensitive (by default, APFS is case-insensitive, so you’ll need to reinstall), disable Spotlight, copy the binaries uucp, uuname, uustat, and uux from /usr/bin to /usr/local/bin and the binaries uucico and uuxqt from /usr/sbin to /usr/local/bin, set the setuid bit on all of these binaries, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH before /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, enable the uucp service, and handle the mystery issues listed in the four Temporary Waivers.
Don't be rude. I did read TFA, hence my comments. You didn't understand my comment, did you?
Whether it disabling SIP, enabling root (see the bit about Linux and Posix in my previous comment), enabling case sensitivity in APFS (done for backwards compatibility), or any of the other stuff, the OS shipped remains the same as the tested one, and pay attention because this is the bit you seem to be incapable of grasping, with the extra bits turned on! Some are dumb, some for backwards compatibility and some are genuinely useful.
A Kia Ceed is still the same Kia Seed if the showroom add their stickers, changed the tyres and put some registration plates on it.
The certification test suites are clearly a superset of what most "Unix" applications require.
I haven't used UUCP since the 90's, have you? I ran a UUCP node for about 5 years. Fun times, but not exactly useful today.
> Or Windows, which is frankly just has better architected internals and abandons legacy UNIX ;-)
Current macOS user, and former NT kernel dabbler and VMS user here. That's highly debatable.
On the kernel side, Windows is still filled with legacy VMS-isms. Eg: Object Manager (object/resource model), named objects, handles, how processes and threads work, vmem, scheduling etc etc
On the userspace side, Windows is still filled with legacy DOS-isms.
Don't me wrong, I love the underlying Windows OS, despite its many quirks, but it's filled with perhaps even more legacy cruft and definitely isn't any sort of step above anything else.
I also don't believe anyone actually runs macOS in a UNIX-compliant configuration. Rather, it's a checkbox on some RFP and nobody is clued into why it's actually there, because all the people that did know have since retired.
What lineage of OS predates both DOS and VMS? :-)
As the popular phrase goes: "It's legacy, all the way down". What matters is what's left of those legacies in current revs.
In both cases: "Quite a bit", but I wish the base Windows OS would evolve away from legacy as much as macOS has. Start with eliminating drive letters.
> Start with eliminating drive letters.
Drive letters are there for the presentation layer and of course backwards compat. Windows refers to them using device paths internally. You can too, if you wish.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/io/file-pa...
Im sorry, but i dont buy that. Unix certification has nothing to do with number of processes running or "efficiency"! The OS must be SUS compliant, i.e have all the core interfaces in place, all the correct utilities (awk, grep, vi, sed etc) and theres something about header files, filesystem requirements etc. even if the macOS submitted for certification is super trimmed down, it does not matter as long as its a true subset of what is shipped to consumers.
MacOS is certified UNIX i.e its "UNIX", like it or not. On this point the article is just wrong.
Unix is both a family of operating systems and also a trademark. The name is overloaded - "Unix" is more than one thing at the same time. In addition, the trademark is "UNIX" and the operating system family is "Unix"
MacOS is both UNIX and also not Unix at the same time.
If the trademark holders decided to UNIX certify my cat, which is well within their legal right to do so, would that make her UNIX?
Unlike macOS, your cat does not, and will not, meet the industry-accepted standard that describes unix as we know it today.
https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/xym0.htm
Like macOS, my cat does not qualify for the UNIX standard out-of-the-box and I'm far too lazy to configure my cat for an OS standard that's 25 years obsolete.
> as we know it today
An important nuance you seem to be missing is that SUSv3 is equivalent to "IEEE Std 1003.1-2001" (that is, POSIX 2001).
In practice, I've had to work around more POSIX compatibility issues in macOS than in all other actively developed (Free) Unix-likes, combined.
Mayhaps not with a `cat(1)` alone, but really they just need to expand their menagerie now.
Or perhaps they just won't certify your cat just as Apple won't start making Windows PCs…?
I don't understand why Apple doesn't offer a headless MacOS or at least a path to a minimal install. Those mac minis make a great little server box but losing 8GB to hundreds of processes, before you've done anything, just feels wasteful and inelegant.
There are no sales in it.
Apple leadership makes decisions based on money.
That is also why there is no iPhone mini even though there is a small number of people that really prefer a small phone.
Worse, there's sales in NOT doing it. When I buy a Mac, I get extra memory "just in case." I would've been fine with 24 gigs on my MacBook Pro, but I got 48.
mr money bags over here
Oh yeah. I should've gone for a M4 Max w/128 gigs.
[dead]
They did provide OS X Server at one time, but the market just wasn't there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server
It wasn't an absence of a market. Those of us that had to manage OSX Server soon found out the software was marked by several high-profile bugs, technical debt, and a perceived decline in reliability. I migrated a large number of Macs to Ubuntu Server software. The hardware was great.
I fear the quality of macOS is deteriorating today in the same manner than befell OSX Server.
https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/apple-blasts-mac-os-x...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
https://www.letemsvetemapplem.eu/en/2024/10/19/chyby-v-macos...
Mac OS X Server was..
.. macOS but with a utility to install apache/ldap/smtp/carddav and caldav.
very useful for a home server.
absolutely no benefit over Linux for the majority of the workloads it was designed to simplify.
It wouldn't really give you much unfortunately, certainly didn't run noticeably leaner.
(I think at some point "server" just became an .app that was available via the app store).
> very useful for a home server.
That sounds like a giant customer base, if paired with the right software for personal / small organization web publishing, blogging, and e-mail.
It's a shame that things turned out differently.
Right, but I could see an alternate timeline where OS X Server took off, and within a decade took a path similar to Windows Server (pared down services, headless flavor, etc)
Not very useful context considering that was before iOS development took off
I am not sure iOS popularity would justify macOS as a server. What would be the use case? It's not app development; that is done just fine on the standard desktop macOS. It's not backend; that is done just fine on Linux servers, even in Swift if that's your thing.
Builds
You don't need any feature from the old server OS for this, though. You just need your workstation to be on a network.
My workstation is ill-suited to be a CI runner, even if it is networked
Right. A way to rephrase this would be: what feature from the old Mac Os X Server is missing from the current macOS desktop to make it possible?
A network connected to what
Which Apple gladly sells their own Xcode Cloud infrastructure instead.
Yes. Somehow it’s actually even worse
> that was before iOS development took off
It was offered through the 2010s, iOS development had taken off by then, and the last release was in 2021.
In fact the number of unique apps available on IOS has declined since the 2010s
Those Mac minis are a pain in the ass of a server box that auto-enable FileVault after annual releases, and getting LaunchDaemons just right compared to a Linux OS feels like perpetual iterations. trying to figure out why my apache didn't start after the last reboot. Oh, must have been the Mac log rotator messing with the file permissions again
It's a shame, because I love how efficiently MacOS runs and the form factor/design language of a Mac mini is not something I feel the need to hide in a dark corner
You'll have to leave virtual desktop enabled, and will definitely be using it semi-regularly aside SSH
I use LingonX to setup which apps and scripts run when. Never had a problem.
> Those mac minis make a great little server box but losing 8GB to hundreds of processes
It doesn't matter because all the extra stuff just goes to swap. And you can't disable virtual memory anyways. So in the end you're not really losing anything. Those hundreds of processes are ultimately basically mostly just using up a little bit of your SSD, not your RAM, so it's not a concern.
They’re not in swap if those processes wake up to do things
Yeah but they mostly barely do, and only the memory they actually access gets used, as opposed to everything they've allocated. You can observe the actual aggregate usage in Activity Monitor. This is why it's no problem at all to run something actively using 10-12 GB of memory on a 16 GB Mac.
They make that, but they don't offer it to anyone to my knowledge. https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/apples-houston...
I thought a minimal darwin distro exists, giving you headless macos?
What sort of applications would benefit from MacOS instead of Linux as a headless server OS?
What would you use it for? To run Docker containers that rely on a Linux VM anyway?
Can speak for someone who managed a racked [1] Mac Mini racked as a server in 2015~2018:
* Profile Manager / MDM * Caching server for OS updates * Thunderbolt connection to a PCIe RAID HBA for a JBOD for NAS file sharing
All these things/use cases now are depreciated, MDM via JAMF in the cloud, internet is fast enough that caching OS updates isn't necessary, and NAS's are much better suited.
[1] https://www.sonnettech.com/product/legacyproducts/xmacminise...
I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users (other than cases where you're required to use one e.g. for work). I can understand it for casual users who just want something simple that works for basic tasks, but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want? In Linux you'd solve OP's problem by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS.
> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users
These threads always end up with veiled insults like this. Can you really not understand people who use Windows, Linux and Macs? They each have their strengths depending on what you are doing.
> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want
I've use Macs since my first G4 PB, Linux for longer, and used to develop for Windows though it's been a very long time. I've never felt stopped for doing what I want.
> by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS
Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro. I'm sure desktop Linux has improved since the last time I tried running it as my main computer, but I just not sure what the point is now.
I've recently heard that using Linux is an excuse to spend the day tinkering and ricing and do no productive work. It's the same kind of prejudice, but opposite.
I like the freedom to run my machine the way I want, but I also enjoy something that is reliable and seamless. My macbook air's battery lasts forever. It works flawlessly, almost always. "oh with nixos if you brick it you can rollback..." that's great, but it does not beat working great on the first try.
Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.
> Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.
Same here. macOS has been death by a thousand little cuts, and I'm finally accelerating my move away from it, as Apple locks it down more and more, and as they spend their engineering talent on crap I ultimately don't care about.
While I've switched most of my computers over to Linux, I still have not moved my daily driver over. There are so many silly little things Linux (and its various desktop environments) gets wrong and are just annoying enough to make me not want to use it every day, like scrolling with a trackpad.
> I've recently heard that using Linux is an excuse to spend the day tinkering and ricing and do no productive work.
This is why, despite 20 years of using Linux with many successful Arch and Gentoo installs behind me, I just use Fedora or Mint. I can get a development environment set up in 15 minutes, and when everything inevitably explodes and a system update deletes glibc I haven't invested much.
NixOS is an extreme case, and I only mentioned it as a counter to the OP's article which was talking about the mammoth efforts required to remove unwanted processes. More generally, there are plenty of Linux distros which "just work" out of the box for most use cases.
No insult intended. I genuinely wasn't aware of what advantages macOS offers for a power user (by which I mean someone who wants to do tasks more advanced than browsing, email, etc.). From quickly skimming the replies the common theme seems to be a mixture of battery efficiency, hardware compatibility, and Mac-only software.
> Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro.
Yes, but my comment wasn't made in isolation or directed at people with your objectives. The OP's article is about doing exactly this, but in the opposite direction (expending large amounts of effort to remove unneeded processes). See for example: "if we assume that we need to identify just 500 candidates, and each takes an average of one week to research, that would take over 10 person-years".
Starting with that as the baseline (as opposed to starting from your position which is that you're not interested in spending time on this issue), building up from zero is a lot more straightforward. And, if you use something like NixOS, you generally only have to do it once since the idea of "reinstalling" the OS (e.g. for new versions) largely goes away: subsequent effort is just about changing your mind about what software you want, or what version you want (as with any OS).
> what advantages macOS offers for a power user
The serious answer is that you get an "it-just-works"⁺ Unix-like operating system that gives you a development experience on-par with Linux.
If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.
If you care about configuration for your window manager, desktop environment, or systemd services: you will not like macOS.
If you are a graphics engineer or a kernel engineer: you will (probably) not like macOS.
If you are a C++/Rust/Python/JavaScript/Java/mobile/desktop engineer who wants a rock-solid developer environment and doesn't care about the above: you will like macOS.
You get all the Unix tools you could ever want, whatever shell you want to use (Zsh, Fish, even PowerShell), clang/LLVM, etc.
Does that answer your question?
⁺: caveat being "it just works" is getting less and less true with every macOS release.
This would be my answer, though I also do sysadmin stuff from macOS just fine. I've used OSX/macOS for a long time, I understand how it works and how to move around, and the ecosystem integration is nice. Adobe products, MS products also all work without any hassle along with any software development I want to do. Then there's the hardware which Apple Silicon has been great for. I bought an M1 Max 64gb laptop on release and it still never feels slow. Battery life is great, trackpad works great, etc...
And I say all this knowing that someone can likely get similar use out of a MS or Linux laptop. At this point, just pick what you know and get on with it.
> I also do sysadmin stuff from macOS
MacOS is fine as a client/dispatch node for SSH/Ansible/Terraform/whatnot; I think they meant that you cannot sysadmin MacOS itself as a target with many of the same tools/techniques you would sysadmin a Linux server.
I wish that weren't true, as someone who struggles with a lot of cross-platform Puppet tooling that I wish behaved better on Mac. No, Nix doesn't help; not when the goal is "configure other people's machines to a baseline but don't otherwise prescribe how they should use them".
Good point. We all end up with different definitions of sys admin. I’ve managed fleets of Linux servers just fine with a macOS as my only client computer, but I’ve never managed other clients. Maybe a Linux client would have helped in that case if sys admin was my singular job, but even then I may have just created a Linux client in my vps to use as the management node.
And I thought that I'm the only one saying that. I bought my first mac just because of that, it was rock-solid, it was unix, and it came with ruby/python/xxx preinstalled so that I could just worry about doing the work.
But from (let's say) El Capitan, I am always postponing upgrades, and recently I've been only upgrading by buying a new machine every 2 ys (except this year, I had to upgrade because of Metal, but I'm still one version below, still scared to upgrade to Tahoe). Every new feature they add to their OS I'm just disabling, every time I upgrade. Either I am not their customer anymore, or they are more and more clueless.
And it's not that hard, I just want it to work so that I can focus on my own stuff.
> If you are a graphics engineer or a kernel engineer: you will (probably) not like macOS.
On the contrary, Metal is the most developer friendly of the modern 3D APIs, and macOS is the best desktop OS having graphical debugging tools in the box, with modern language tooling without the mindset only C and C++ are worthy to be used in graphics programming.
> If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.
Even then, that's debatable. Should say if you like doing sysadmin stuff on your own machine.
I am a sysadmin, and my daily driver is an M4 macbook pro and I wouldn't have it any other way. I admin other machines, I don't want to play sysadmin for my own. But its mostly for the hardware more than any other reason.
I think a surprising number of kernel engineers like Macs
[dead]
> I genuinely wasn't aware of what advantages macOS offers
It's been out for a while.. why are you interested in the debate if you've come this far, have no idea, but want to lead with a counter-assertion?
Again, my comment wasn't isolated. It was a response to the article. In that article, the person was concerned with tracking down 500+ potentially unneeded processes, and lamenting the difficulty and time consuming nature of doing so.
Perhaps I could have phrased my question better, but what I'm really asking is: for that type of user, why would you pick macOS over Linux when such things are trivial (relatively speaking) in Linux by comparison. Note that I didn't ask "what advantages does macOS have?" I qualified it with: "which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?". I wasn't suggesting that there are no advantages at all. Nuance matters here.
> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
I’ve never felt like I couldn’t run my machine the way I want. When I leave macOS is when I start to miss all integrations and ease of use affordances.
One of the times I made a big push to try Linux again on the client I was fighting with getting HiDPI working well, and the most common response was “you don’t need that”. Huh? Speaking of running the machine how I want.
Every decision is a trade off, even Linux. You feel like you can do anything you want, but it’s just a set of different things you can do. We’re long past the days where someone can buy hardware and write every piece of software from scratch for themselves. We all depend on others to make decisions for us, and some of those decisions will limit us in some way.
That "which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want" is utterly superfluous.
The way I want to run my machine is by running macOS and using its features, app ecosystem, and so on.
Not once have I ever felt I've had to make a sacrifice to do so.
At the risk of sounding repetitive, my comments are in the context of the OP's article which is specifically about a scenario where you lack control in macOS. If you're someone who doesn't care about being able to do what the article wants to do, then your use case doesn't fall within the scope of what I'm referring to.
Why are we making personal attacks, instead of simply listing all of the unique system-selling features in macOS?
There are a lot of users who don't want to do tasks more advanced than browsing, email, and ssh, and will go far into diminishing returns of additional hardware cost to polish the performance on those three tasks (measured by battery, screen, keyboard, battery, networking, general lack of fussiness, battery, etc.)
> a power user
By power users do you mean only hackers/programmers/server admins?
How about graphical design professionals? Music producers? And all other types of professionals who work full time in front of their computers? They need high quality machines and operating systems, so there's your customer base for MacOS.
For me it's quite simple: It works and it stays out of my way.
I've owned a macbook since 2010, with a short break during the touchbar era when I got myself an XPS with windows which I dual-booted with ubuntu and later a system76 that comes with their own flavour of Ubuntu, called Pop! Os.
The situation in windows (windows 10 at the time) was abysmal. Completely incoherent UI, settings spread across different menus, ads in start menu, slow and broken search, constant nagging to update windows, to update the drivers, to tell me that the drivers have been updated, to install or update my antivirus, etc. These were not things that I installed myself, these were included with Dell's setup of the machine.
On the system76 laptop things were different. Things were calm, I could configure everything as I wanted and things worked. Until at some point I installed a new version of something, which had nothing to do with sound, but it broke sound, just as I was preparing to join a meeting, and just as we were going into the second phase of lockdowns in late 2020 so online meetings were here to stay.
My macbooks are reliable. I've got the M1 as soon as it came out and I never got a single issue with it. I've upgraded twice (I think) across major versions and everything worked. I don't have to worry about it leaving me hanging when I need it.
(And that's not taking into account things like build quality, touchpad quality, battery life, silence, etc)
In the end of the day, I do a lot of debugging as part of my work. When I don't work, I want to choose what I will be debugging, not have it forced on me.
And don't get me wrong: I see where Apple is going, I know that they're a greedy company that want to maintain their iron grip and have the final say on what we can and cannot do on our machines.
However, for me for the time being it's the least bad option.
I do like the build of Macbooks and especially the solid casing. Unfortunately I could never get used to MacOS even within 2.5 years and it was not quite as reliable for me as it is for many others.
XCode installations failing, Docker installation failing after an OS update never to work again without completely reinstalling OS, plugging in headphones would crash the Macbook (until OS update 6 months after I got it), video calls slowing to a halt, if sharing screen etc.
Also there were some things I just never got used to in Mac like window tabbing & minimize working in a Mac way. Maybe if I hadn't had a personal laptop that used Linux at the same time, I would have gotten used to it a little better, but I just plain hated the way it worked.
To be fair, I think it was still more reliable than varieties of Windows, especially the later ones! If tabbing worked more like under Windows and it allowed a bit more configuration, I might be using Mac these days.
That leaves Linux. Although it's not flawless neither after configuring Debian + i3, it works exactly like I want and the same installation has been reliably working for 5+ years. However, getting to the setup that just works certainly took several tries and depends on laptop compatibility, so... No ideal choices exist right now I think. Just luck and what someone is most used to in the end.
I’ve used Macs nearly exclusively for 13 years and have not gotten used to the window tabbing. I just fundamentally don’t think windows of the same application should be grouped together.
> It works and it stays out of my way.
This was reason for me as well. More than decade. Unfortunately it is not the case anymore.
Hardware is still best (in my opinion) but software is not.
One problem with system76?
I have very few problems with linux, despite running a fairly unstable rolling release distro. MacOS does have problems. I have no idea whether its more of less reliable, but going on personal experience is not a good sample.
"Power Users", whatever that might really mean use MacOS because it works. They use a Mac laptop because it always and instantly wakes from sleep. Because the audio always works, and is always low latency. Because they have work to do, and the OS is extremely reliable. Also because it is light, and the battery lasts for a very long time indeed.
My laptop has been up for 43 days, not very long in a server world, but excellent for a personal device that I use for development, hardware design and audio production. The last time it restarted was probably for an OS upgrade, but I can't recall.
My work linux laptop is also pretty reliable, but this is only because I never upgrade anything on it and only use it for development. Its battery life is terrible, so I only use it plugged into the wall. My work linux desktop has issues with bluetooth audio and graphics, neither of which I can be bothered to fix.
> My laptop has been up for 43 days
You made me check mine...40 days. Last reboot was likely for a macOS system update.
I can understand it for casual users who just want something simple that works for basic tasks, but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
I consider myself a power user. What I don't consider myself is a "configuration hobbyist" which some people seem to conflate with power users. I use my Mac to get all kinds of work done. I write shell scripts and I have tons of 3rd party command line tools and open source software that I've installed via Homebrew. What I don't have is a customized desktop environment with power meter widgets and stock tickers in the menu bar and anime girl desktop backgrounds.
I used Linux for 10 years and I got tired of updates breaking things and having to edit configuration files just to get the system back to "normal." The Mac just gives me "normal" and loads of productivity (as well as battery life) out of the box, and it doesn't compromise on the command line power that I want.
> but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't
A laptop with an excellent screen, speakers, touchpad, desktop-class performance,, great battery life, and runs cool and silent, and a *nix like OS that can run the proprietary/commercial apps I need.
I work on macOS the same way I'd work on Linux; From the terminal with a package manager, docker, etc. Only now I get access to a few commercial apps that aren't on Linux, on hardware that's genuinely a joy to use.
There's no other laptop on the market that touches the apple silicon macbook pros. None. Every close alternative sacrifices something I care about. I tolerate macOS for the hardware, and I'll remain on macs until such hardware exists in Linux land.
Same. If the only computing happened on desktop PCs and laptops didn't exist, I'd use Linux.
But as it stands, going from a Macbook to Linux on a laptop is a downgrade. And you have to pay more for the pleasure of a worse experience.
And macOS is "Linux" since it's BSD-based and has a native Unix shell. If macOS were as different from "Linux" as Windows was, then I probably wouldn't put up with it either.
I’d use macOS. Application sandboxing, per directory access controls, signed read only root, xprotect and gatekeeper - security out of the box on common linux OSes is a joke compared to modern macOS.
Good points, especially about sandboxing.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't
Your definition of power user may vary but for me:
I could probably use linux for a desktop machine, that would work ok. But it's a no-go for laptops. And I've tried... and try regularly...What about Asahi?
It’s so tempting.
I just installed Asahi on my MacBook Pro M1 - it's really nice! Battery life is supposed to be slightly worse. External displays are now supposed to work as well, but I haven't tried it.
Aside from all the hardware that doesn't work.
Perfectly working drivers.
As a power user, I want to use, not to fix, my tools.
I might tinker sometimes, but that is unrelated for me.
Exactly this. The question pretends that there is a whole group of "power users" who all do the same thing, but that couldn't be further from the truth IMO. There are users like me who program and don't want to spend forever configuring audio driers, etc. There are power users who like to tinker. And there are people who do a bit of both, to every extent on the scale.
>but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't
Flawless suspend/resume, best-in-class battery life, best-in-class touchpad drivers, lots of things "Just Work" that are painful and/or tedious on Linux.
It might be better to ask what Linux offers the laptop user that macos doesn't. I run Linux on my desktop boxes but wouldn't dream of daily-driving a Linux laptop.
>and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
I consider myself a power user. I have never once felt unable to run the machine the way I want. You can disable SIP and Gatekeeper and whatever else if it pleases you. I still have a terminal and a package manager. If there's a particular utility that I need on Linux I just spin up a VM, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to do that in the last 12 months.
More broadly, Linux doesn't appeal to me as a primary OS because there's no desktop environment that's a full equivalent of macOS, both in spirit and function. Existing DEs might have some vaguely Mac-like shape or can be configured to be slightly more Mac-like, but nothing gets you the full package (consistent application of a well thought out HIG, holistic approach to design, full embrace of progressive disclosure [as opposed to the extremes of IKEA minimalism or dumping everything and the kitchen sink], etc). Additionally, some things are bizarrely involved to set up despite being commonly needed (see virtualization under Fedora) or will randomly break once in a blue moon (usually after a system upgrade) and require diving beneath the hood to fix.
For laptops in particular, it's the absence of laptops that 1) are good at being laptops (great battery life and standby time, are solid but aren't bricks, are inaudible except when being pushed for extended periods, and don't throttle to netbook speeds when unplugged), 2) are designed to be Linux-first, and 3) aren't just a half-baked rebadge of pre-existing models from ODMs like Clevo/Tongfang/Compal.
Funny enough, the closest thing to a great Linux laptop is actually the Steam Deck. Nothing else on the market is as competently integrated. If Valve got into the laptop business I'd be interested.
I could see myself daily driving Linux on a custom built desktop long before I could on a laptop, but the aforementioned broad challenges remain.
Speaking purely on the software preferences, all of those feel like nice-to-haves. I like a well-tuned HiG and widget library as much as the next guy, but the majority of macOS's features are bloat to me. What am I supposed to do with Stage Manager or AppleTV+? Why is Safari allowed to send me notifications begging the user to boot it up and try the new features? Why does the Settings app show a persistent notification when I log out of iCloud?
There was a point in my life when I also thought I needed those creature comforts. Now I've spent 7 years without dailying macOS and I really don't miss it one bit. You could give me a $0.00 Apple Silicon M6 Ultra laptop with 4 days of battery life, and I'd probably still be reaching for my Thinkpad if I wanted to get work done. As a development OS, macOS is borderline intolerable.
> Why is Safari allowed to send me notifications begging the user to boot it up and try the new features?
For what it's worth I've been using macOS (and OS X) for 14 years, and you only get the notification once after a fresh install and you can click close and it's gone forever, sure Linux is better on this front, but I don't want to spend my whole life tinkering my os until it works. It's still a hell of a lot better than Microsoft consistently shoving Edge down your throat.
I don't need many newer macOS features myself. I'd be happy with an experience that's roughly adjacent to that of OS X 10.6 or 10.9, but that's not on offer either.
I do need a laptop that's good at its job, though. If a laptop sucks at its defining qualities, I'd be better served by a backpackable ITX build or maybe a one of those trendy mini-PCs, because at that point the form factor's tradeoffs are too great to justify.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
Primarily much better compatibility with graphical apps. Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite are two that many people need access to. Both have first-party offerings on macOS, and somewhat poor support via wine on Linux.
With Apple Silicon, the hardware is also particularly excellent. And only runs macOS well.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't ?
Photoshop, illustrator, Final Cut Pro, motion and more.
When I want I open terminal and can do anything I would ever want to do in Linux.
I’ve never spent one second of my life dealing with drivers or recompiling shit or version or so conflicts on a Mac.
Literally hundreds of hours of that on windows and Linux.
The big thing for me has always been (a) reliability of the hardware (b) good performance/battery trade off (c) nix-like environment.
In my prev. job I had a windows laptop with WSL2 though and I actually was super productive with that. But the laptop hardware offerings at the same price point are rubbish, just not very robust. Linux machines if you're in a corp and want one in the next 6 months are usually even more restrictive on hardware than they are on Windows.
There isn’t any app on windows or linux that can match what Preview does.
One thing you may not know about is you can map anything in the menu bar to a keyboard shortcut. The application doesn’t even know you did that. That’s an operating system feature that neither Windows nor Linux can implement reliably.
Accessibility is another one.
It’s like this all over the operating system. There’s a deep integration with the apps and the UI you wouldn’t notice unless you’re a power user.
What does Preview do that's hard to match?
Genuine question. I've been a Mac user for decades and on balance think it's quite good, but Preview is one of the most deeply frustrating, buggy, and unintuitive pieces of software on the system--it's at the top of the list of things that I wish I could swap out for something--anything, MS paint would be fine--else that was as deeply integrated in Finder/image/PDF interactions.
I haven’t heard that many complaints about Preview. (Except for PDF forms. Absolute disaster. See 1.) But it’s not perfect and I can definitely appreciate that somebody would a very different opinion of it from my own.
So, I’m sharing my personal experience. This is what I see in it.
It handles both images and PDFs rather well (1) in the same application. And you use the same basic set of annotation tools on both.
I haven’t found anything that can match its combination of accuracy, performance, and features with PDFs. Especially when files get large. (I have a lot of large PDFs.)
And it doesn’t try to do all that much. But it does two very useful things I wouldn’t expect it to do.
- Easily add, remove, and re-order pages in PDFs.
- If you select multiple images in Finder, you can open them all in single Preview window and it acts like a PDF, with each image being a page in the thumbnail sidebar. You can rapidly go through a set of images this way.
I have a lot of high-resolution artwork and a professional grade printer. Preview does an excellent job of staying out of the way. It’s really easy and fast to chop up, resize, and convert images. The color adjustment is constantly useful when it comes to printing things that are too dark.
Exporting to different formats is pretty easy. It uses the system print dialog, which allows you to use all of those features.
1: It’s horrific with PDF forms. I’ve definitely had occasions when it looked filled out but emailed as a blank form. Completely unacceptable. I’ve often resorted generating a new PDF using the print dialog.
And you don't have to install it since it's a stock app. This might sound trivial, but good stock apps cut down on time to get a new machine/install in usable condition substantially, even if you're using a package manager.
Personally I think every computer should come with a Preview equivalent (or better).
Also, Preview is the easiest way to sign anything sent as PDF.
Forms are hit and miss. I assume there's a PDF issue since some forms work great.
You can easily copy and paste rectangular selections from PDF's into Pages. I haven't found anything analogous on other OS'es. I used this to compile exam questions for my students.
It's also great for editing PDF's, you can markup, reorder, rotate and delete pages with ease. Yes other software does that but not as intuitively as Preview.
You can compress PDF's by exporting them and selecting a filter.
It's also the fastest and best-rendering PDF viewer I've used.
> There isn’t any app on windows or linux that can match what Preview does.
And Quickview, and printing to a PDF. Maybe some equivalent exists in Linux/Windows now, but Preview is pretty amazing and something I take for granted every single day.
At some age you realize that tinkering with your OS is a giant waste of time.
I just want a reliable thing that gets me A to B (car analogy) So what if the infotainment screen is too small or climate controls are annoying.
Sometimes having less choice is freeing.
> Sometimes having less choice is freeing.
Less choice is never freeing. I always want the choice available to me, even if I don't wind up going away from the default 99.99% of the time. It's my computer and I must remain in control, not some corporation.
A lot of users still like the mix of a good UI for most tasks, while being able to do a lot of power user stuff without an added layer. Plus many will choose macOS also for the hardware, which support for new chipsets is still rather WIP under Linux.
> A lot of users still like the mix of a good UI for most tasks
This is funny; it's actually the main reason why I asked for a PC when I was up for renewal at work, so I can run Linux on it.
I truly like the hardware of the mbp, especially the screen (don't care about battery life, I mostly use it at a desk with power nearby). The OS itself is fine, since it can easily run most of the tools I use. I also like how it handles special characters (I can easily type French on an US-ANSI keyboard) to the point that I've implemented that on my Linux and Windows machines.
But what kills it for me is the UI behavior. The window management drives me crazy, especially when multiple screens are involved. And there are quite a few aggravating issues, like being unable to control the audio output of my screen's speakers (connected through DP), being unable to turn off external screens (sometimes I just want to use the power of my monitor, which has an integrated KVM).
Yeah, I know there are programs trying to fix these, but I have to go out of my way trying to find them, and then they're hit and miss. On Linux, everything works as expected (though, granted, it's possible I've won the hardware-compatibility lottery, since it actually works better than on Windows).
You appear to have forgotten the state of linux until fairly recently. For literal decades, MacOS "just worked" and it meant that the user did not have to fight their OS to get shit done.
In the professional world where "I did not get any work done today because an update fucked my wifi card" is not a valid excuse, MacOS (and Windows to a lesser degree) triumphed. Large orgs who can afford a whole IT department might be fine deploying linux on their fleet of desktops, but there is always a tremendous amount of testing and validation behind the scenes to ensure that everything "just works". This just was not the case for the indy professional, or small tech startup.
Now, in the past 5 or so years two things happened: 1) linux reached a state where a "normie developer" could take a chance and install it on a work machine and be just fine, and 2) MacOS has regressed enough where OS updates are risky now, and the "it just works" slogan does not really apply any more.
It is still hit and miss on laptops with Linux, even those from Tuxedo, System 76 or XPS, plenty of forum comments to search for.
2 days ago I saw a colleague not using his dock. Turns out he can’t update the dock firmware under Linux, and has to live with having a 20% chance of his laptop detecting external displays.
He recently gave up trying to have a wake from sleep that works well too.
I mean, Linux is great, but the paper cuts are still very numerous.
Although I fully agree that the papercuts are sill numerous, allow me a counterpoint:
Recently I bought a cheap epson inktank printer/scanner, with built in wifi. Getting it working on my work Windows PC was a huge faff, struggling to find the right drivers and all that. The main installer for some asinine reason needed location permissions, which was disabled by MDM, so the default route did not work. Let's not even begin talking about getting scanning working...
On my Linux Mint personal laptop, the printer just appeared after I connected it to my network, and it worked perfectly. The built-in scanning app detected the scanner and allowed me to scan without any configs.
This is the first time for me where linux "just work"ed, and I was truly delighted.
That’s taken it from a paper cut to a limb amputation.
I'm a power user. I do FreeBSD kernel performance work for Netflix.
I have a macbook as my work laptop. I use it as a dumb terminal to my FreeBSD desktop, a platform for corp. video conferencing, and to surf the web. Any actual work happens on my desktop (Unless I'm working on something arm64 specific, and am using a VM on the laptop ... but then I'm probably ssh'ed in from my desktop.
Why the macbook? I have never gotten along with Windows (have tried on a few separate occasions). And I'm too lazy to put effort into getting Linux running well on a laptop, since that would still be just a dumb terminal for FreeBSD dev. And I'm not enough of a masochist to run FreeBSD on a laptop. So the macbook is the path of least resistance. It works well as a laptop (suspend / resume, connects to random wifi) and comes with a terminal and ssh client that require zero effort to get working.
In my experience, programmers fall into either of those categories:
1. Those that want to gain full control of their environment, customize to the max and peak in personal satisfaction and productivity, xor...
2. those that want their environment to just. work. and not spend days on end ricing a tiling WM that might instead preferably be spent on actually getting things done.
Linux users largely fall in category 1, Mac users into 2. I don't see this as a skill issue. Even Linux Torvalds famously has been using Fedora because he prefers to focus on more important aspects (i.e., kernel work) than building his own minimal distro from scratch, which starkly contrasts the last point you made.
IMO group 2 is much bigger than group 1, too. I'd find it a boring way of approaching technology personally, but try and find some actual arguments against the established workflows of group 2 apart from slight personal preferences. I can't, really.
I'm an occasional Mac user, whenever their hardware and software align to be useful.
Right now the m4 airs are a delight in regards to form factor, battery life, performance, and generally they look nice.
I have a powerful processor, enough ram, and a battery to drive it and damnit I want to do work on it.
Right now the world of laptops is dark. Any non-mac laptop running linux will have terrible standby battery life because OEMs have removed classic sleep modes for always-on mac-like sleeps, but without the polish and no way to re-enable the legacy sleep modes.
In a couple years, maybe the AI boom will die down and people will be able to afford RAM again, and maybe non-mac laptops will be nice to use again.
4 modifier keys vs 3. Can't go back. Maybe you can get your whole Linux env using 4 modifiers one application at a time, but my god would that be another thing that takes forever on top of everything else you need to configure. No ty.
This was such a big pain for me when switching back to windows / Linux. I’m not sure why it’s not talked about more. 4 modifiers is much better if you are a keyboard “power user” but don’t want to spend days crafting and maintaining a bespoke input system.
A more general point: you can be a “power user” and not have the time to learn about the absurd stack of technologies that is a Linux DE. You may even be a “power user” and not have a job / education related to computers! Shocking!
I'm a dad, I'm doing home improvement stuff, I have cat litter to scoop, I have a day job. I have like 15 minutes at a time to power use my personal computer. I spend it programming. Everything I need to do between opening the lid and typing programs is an affront.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't,
Quite simply, an OS that you don't have to think about. I moved to MacOS from linux after seeing my co-founder use their Macbook basically without any problems, much longer battery life, nice conveniences like shared clipboard and wifi password sharing, airplay, Airpods integration, better screens and font rendering, perfect migrations to new hardware, etc.
While I learned a lot tinkering with linux for a decade, at some point you can't beat something that just works.
It was a marketing campaign ("Switch") during the rise of web programmers and web designers who didn't really know how computers worked, during the hot period of startups when all of them were making a lot of money for the first time and it was sold as a status symbol. Not having a MBP among web programmers was like having greentext among highschoolers.
Now, they didn't know how computers worked because they "didn't have time or interest to worry about that stuff, they wanted something that just worked" it wasn't because they were limited as computer professionals.
And of course, it was unix, so it was at least minimally usable for actual programmers, and then you got homebrew so you had package management and normal software available, and they all started using Linux VMs to run the important stuff, so in the end it was all Linux anyway.
With all that, there was no reason not for it to gradually become a totally adequate environment to work in. Plus you got to buy the exact same thing as everyone in your social group. Talk about the next one like you would talk about the next year of a sportscar model. Have it match your phone. Get excited when they did that yearly thing where they all got on stage and sold the new line, then read Daring Fireball's take.
It just happens to be so that hardware which power users like to use comes with macOS installed.
Linux doesn't have stable APIs or ABIs, has a million ways of doing the same thing (each slightly broken in a different way), has trouble with modern hardware features like HDR or even high-DPI screens, and requires you to fiddle with the terminal and config files for simplest things. MacOS does not. It just works out of the box, mostly. And it even mostly respects you and your work, unlike modern Windows.
For me: pro & creative apps. GIMP/Inkscape will never replace Photoshop/Illustrator/Affinity. Ableton, Logic, Pro Tools, etc. are not available on Linux and with the exception of REAPER, the alternatives are awful. And even with a Linux-compatible DAW, very few plugins are available on Linux.
On macOS, I can work on hobby software & graphics/music.
As far as I know, current Photoshop works fine under Linux woth wine [0].
[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Adobe-Photoshop-2025-Wine-Patc...
This is a bit like claiming that a flat head screwdriver can sort of work with a Philips head screw… until it strips the head, you can’t see it and you don’t know how to fix it.
How's Bitwig these days? I've not checked it for years.
https://www.bitwig.com/
Not bad, but different DAWs cater to different workflows. To me (and most), Bitwig feels much more optimized for creating electronic music than recording guitar or drums. It wouldn't be my first choice for the latter workflow, where I'd prefer REAPER or Logic. You also still have the issue with plugin compatibility and that 99% of commercial plugin vendors don't support Linux.
> 99% of commercial plugin vendors don't support Linux.
It's a bit softened by the fact that many of them can be replaced/recreated with stock bitwig devices (if you're into that). There's also yabridge, though for me personally it has been a bit hit and miss.
battery management, ARM chips, SoC ram, only decent trackpad in laptops, only good audio output in laptops (3V RMS for 150+ Ohm headphones. literally no other laptop has it), etc. These things are only possible on Macs because of economies of scale. But the most important part, to me, is software. again, economies of scale -- almost every polished app comes to Mac OS as the first OS because of the monetization potential per install. Then apps for Windows or Linux are often an afterthought or are non-native.
Mac OS is not great, no platform is perfect. Gotta think what is important to you. Are you using your machine as a thin client? Then maybe Linux is fine. Windows is obviously tragic -- zero advantages there.
about the article, Mac OS can be gutted via disabling SIP (I'm doing it on 1 macbook air), but we have so much compute and RAM that it doesn't make much sense for most use cases. I know that some companies do this with minis/studios to make makeshift servers.
I have it not only because of hardware, but because of color matching for photography/processing RAW images. That's as close to 'professional' as I get to using macOS for personal use (photography is nothing more than a personal hobby, for me).
I also use macOS at work. Plainly, the machines offered are better (MBPs vs. Thinkpad T440s) and come with less impactful EDR. They're simply faster. I do need to fall back to my T440 every now and then. It's not a great experience. That's not the fault of Lenovo or Windows, though. It's just how IT manages the laptops.
But IMO Finder is a piece of trash. The Dock sucks (moves around monitors), how full screen apps are handed sucks... anyway, there's lots of UX issues with macOS. Generally there are 3rd party free and pay-for solutions for all of this... it's just that now I gotta get all this 3rd party stuff and due to the security model, often grant them high level privs.
I think "for work" is very definitely the reason for me. I've run Linux at home since 1994 or so.
As a sysadmin/devops person 90% of my life is emacs, a browser, and collection of terminals. When I get a job I get offered a choice between a windows laptop or a macbook. Sometimes, rarely, I'm allowed Linux, but usually they say "compliance" or that their security scanning software won't support it.
So I use macbooks for work, but I wouldn't pay for one personally. But they allow me to run terraform, git, shells, and similar things in the way that I'm comfortable with.
I don't see why a power user would trust a desktop Linux distro. They are so unprofessional and take 0 accountability for breaking your system. As a power users I need to actually use my computer and not spend all day trying to fix my OS. Fixing the OS should be the vendor's responsibility. Not mine.
I got my first MacBook around 2010 because I was tired of fixing suspend to RAM every few Nvidia driver updates on my ThinkPad. Then I paid for a commercial VM to seamlessly run some Windows software I needed for my freelance work as a translator, removing the need to dual boot two operating systems. Everything just worked, and I could focus on things I wanted to do instead of continuing to tinker with the OS itself. And after years of playing with many different Linux distros, I realised that I did get tired of that. Moreover, a few games that I played, actually had native Mac versions. What's not to like?
These days I do have a Tuxedo laptop for fooling around, and I don't even use laptops on the regular, which is probably why it works well enough. That and integrated Radeon graphics, I'm sure.
> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users
I am not sure how much I qualify, but here is my use case: it can run Photoshop and MS Office, it has Keynote, it can compile just about any software I use or I develop for my job (mostly Physics and computational Chemistry stuff). It has a sane command line. Honestly, it just works for more than simple tasks. The things for which it does not work is games (but that has nothing to do with the merits of the OS) and yes, customisation.
The alternatives are Windows (which I also use for other tasks), which is a nightmare to deal with and requires tons of faffing about to compile codes, and Linux (which is actually what I use most), which does not have a working Office and is very janky.
That is not even considering the fact that MacBooks are the best laptops by a mile (my Mac is a desktop, so it's not relevant to me).
> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
I do run my Linux box like I want. I spent hours upon ours ricing it up and fine tuning everything I cared about. Stuff still occasionally breaks after a minor update and I regularly have to roll back because of a misbehaving NVIDIA driver (at least once a year). On my Mac, I don't need to tweak every aspect of KDE because the default is fine. I don't need to be able to change pid1 because launchd is fine (but nowadays so is systemd). I don't need to install drivers because everything that does not work out of the box can be tweaked with SteerMouse and Karabiner (honestly, I would kill to have something that works that well on Linux). The couple of utilities I use are much, much better than the Linux alternatives and break much less often. So in effect I don't sacrifice much, and the tradeoff is very good.
I won't even consider Windows. It's as customisable as macOS, but its default behaviour is terrible so here the tradeoff is absolutely not worth it.
I don't like the direction Apple is currently taking, so I will re-evaluate in the future, but for now my Mac is the most pleasant to use of my current computers.
> In Linux you'd solve OP's problem by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS.
And then spending a week to make it work, and then spending hours at unpredictable times when an update breaks something. I know, I already do it on my Linux box. It has some good aspects, but also some bad ones, which is why I use a Mac at home.
I got tired of fiddling with Ubuntu settings. I got tired with updates making my desktop UX worse and having to battle to get things back to what I wanted. I got tired of struggling to get wifi to work.
Maybe more than any of that, though, I got tired of every laptop having bad build quality. Maybe the Dell XPS is good, but Lenovo and System76 (my last Linux machine) seemed significantly worse than a MBP. (I could maybe just run Linux on a MBP, but it's a lot more effort for little benefit.)
I would like to replicate my 2005 Ubuntu desktop environment, but when Ubuntu shipped Unity, it was a serious downgrade, and at the time I struggled to get back to something good. I'm now in a macOS middle ground without having to fight the damn thing.
I use a Mac because I have no desire to maintain a Linux box. The software I want is all there, it has a great *nix terminal, and the hardware quality is second to none. I work with computers all day - at home I just want to be able to focus on the task at hand.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't
https://www.apple.com/macos/continuity/
I have a life and plan to live it, not spend all day configuring my computer to do basic things that macOS does perfectly.
"I've never personally understood" seems to be a lack of imagination.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
Access to Apple ecosystem - iCloud e. t. c. If one uses iPhone it's quite convenient to have access to the same cloud services from a laptop. FindMy is a big one for me - if I lost or misplaced my phone I can use FindMy on Macbook to locate it. While it's technically possible to use FindMy via web you'll need the phone as 2FA which is not an option when I'm trying to find it.
For me, battery life and power management – even with the number of services that macOS runs. I run Asahi Linux when docked, but on the go I estimate I get a warmer lap and about ~1/2 hr less.
It's the hardware.
I don't like MacOS, but you can't beat their silicon and the laptops "feel" better in general.
I had a system76 for a while and I loved pop OS but that hardware...
I used Linux exclusively for 13 years. Moved to Mac because I wanted a laptop that could give me 10+ hours of battery backup.
it's the commercial unix desktop that has commercial app support, cool looking hardware and great power optimizations that lead to great battery life. (also in the ai era, unified memory is pretty awesome)
personally i choose linux (kde) desktops and laptops where allowed because they've just gotten so good (and seem to only be getting better), but i get it.
honestly though i think it's a little sad. the execution just isn't where it used to be and honestly i think the modern macos experience is kinda trash. i would really like to pick one up and be like "oh wow this is so cool everything is so refined if i wasn't so bothered about needing vms and docker for everything i'd consider this" but instead it's more like "wow this is kinda old and crufty and weird and not all that great to be honest i miss kde it's more refined"
> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users
We are all users of power, electrical power specifically. And macOS, running on modern Mac hardware, is very power efficient.
(Yes it’s a dumb pun, but it also points to one reason that sophisticated users still choose macOS.)
Define power user.
This is such a loaded term. I would hazard to guess your definition would include abilities which just arent possible on Mac which would by definition make it a bad choice. You can't replace the audio stack or run headless for example.
>what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't
Better security than any Linux distro.
Working hardware that I can buy at Media Market ready to go with an operating system that isn't stuck in the 1970's mindset, where people still think TUIs are "modern".
I'm a power user who's past configuring things, instead I want them to just work on their own. I also hate to memorize commands but like using the mouse and click buttons.
"Power users" like to get their work done.
In LInux, you can spend a bunch of time configuring your system to get simple stuff setup. The opposite of "getting work done".
As a mobile app dev, I'm forced to use macOS: no iOS SDK on Windows/Linux/etc
I'd love to know what's good ARM notebook which works fine with Linux.
it depends on whether you're a power user in terms of getting lots of actual work done, or you're a power user (and this seems much more common) in the sense that you spend lots of time tweaking your productivity setup.
Out of the box, macOS is substantially more secure than any common linux OS.
It actually works, reasonably well, out of the box.
when i read threads like this i remember the ancient slashdot meme: this is surely the year of desktop linux
Less maintenance on my own kit after spending a day maintaining some else’s kit.
Linux userspace is utter chaos. When I’m pricing out lumber or other personal projects, I don’t want that held up by any number of fresh in memory Linux what-the-fresh-hell-is-this moments.
That is it. Will pay nearly whatever Apple commands to avoid having my personal (desktop) time invaded by Linux and the never ending reinventing solved problems and discovering new ones.
Upside though, Linux by now may actually have an even dozen of methods to configure a wired ethernet device. I quit counting.
Pixelmator Pro
Good luck running graphic design, music production, or video editing apps on Linux.
> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption
Haha right. They last so much longer than non-Mac laptops from a hardware PoV, and especially how long they end up being used. That's why they retain their second hand value so much better than Windows laptops, because you can buy a Macbook of a few years old, know exactly what you're getting and that it will last another few years unless you're extremely unlucky.
You can do that as long as you're comfortable with unfixable processor security vulnerabilities.
The same thing is true for laptops like Frameworks or Thinkpads running linux, just conspicuous to a different audience.
At this point, not-a-Mac often stands out more if you want to cite conspicuous consumption.
Nobody ever sees my Mac but me and the monitor is a horrible old Dell one with a thick black bezel. If we were talking about iPhones, I might agree with your point.
I'm not sure who the author is, but the fact they choose to be stymied by SSV (which can be disabled) to avoid investigation down that path, which is similar to the path enthusiasts do with Windows to build tools like Tiny11, NTLite, and distributions like Atlas, feels intellectually lazy. Asserting that macOS is not UNIX (it is, quite literally, including the most recent release Tahoe) and then arguing with folks who corrected them in the comments, makes me think the author wasn't really interested in answering the question they put forth and instead were trying to mystify readers to shut down exploration and curiosity.
It is entirely possible to gain an understanding of those processes running on your computing system and to decide which process you don't want to run at startup, this is regardless of the desires and intents of the maker of the computing system, as long as you retain control of the hardware. Many of the Windows optimization tools at various points even involved community made binary patching. There's no basis to claim that it's not possible to understand or take actions, it's just that the Mac community has a different set of priorities and focus areas than other computing communities, so nobody in the community has yet invested the effort to do so.
You could summarize this blog post as answering "No" to the question in its title, without actually exploring the question to determine if that's a true answer. It's not a true answer, and won't be until we completely lose control over our own hardware.
Howard Oakley has been writting about macOS internals for a long time, and 99% of the time, his essays and articles are excellent. This is not one of them. Don't be put off by this one article - the site is a goldmine.
Not directly related, but look at this Mac OS 9 screenshot from the article:
https://eclecticlight.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/macos914...
Look at the contrast. Look at the buttons. Look at the scrollbars. Look at the readability. Look at the clear button labels.
If only our computers still looked like that...
Man you got me on readability. Just yesterday I had to input a random string WiFi password in a printer with only arrow keys to select each character. The password had an upper-case I in it but the moronic designers of the little password label that came with the router selected a font where “I” and “l” are indistinguishable. Took me like ten minutes to get the damn thing connected.
I only got it right because I looked up the password on my Mac, whose keychain app displays them in gloriously readable monospaced font. FFS
I badly need slimmed down macOS for CI VMs. Yeah, some little things can be cut out but most of the time not.
On the other hand, macOS is not that much memory-hungry as one might think. Like, a 4GB VM can start and build software.
Yes, I thought OP was going that direction from the title. I keep reading posts hoping someone has found the solution but there's always a tradeoff.
I think it's important enough that maybe apple will announce something at WWDC. The AIs need better isolation primitives. Running software from un-trusted sources needs easier and more flexible isolation guarantees. Automated builds need lighter weight virtualization options. A dockerfile that you can specify includes xcode-tools, the accessibility APIs. Volume mounting. Network controls. etc.
https://github.com/dockur/macos is a little too clunky? Tart VM or manually doing apple's container CLI is maybe most of the way there, but images are huge.
I'm working on a Docker-like software for macOS Guests on macOS Hosts. Prototype's done.
No, Dockur is ancient for Intel macOS which is almost useless in today's development as some dev tools are only available for Apple Silicon macOS which cannot be virtualized that way.
Anywhere I can watch for its release?
Unfortunately, no public visibility yet.
And I have no idea what would be a good place to announce it besides HN
I think for many the key driver behind wanting to slim down the OS isn’t RAM or CPU use. It’s wanting to control their experience of using the computer. If the OS didn’t feel bloated nobody would care if there were 1000 processes that occasionally woke up briefly.
So what makes the OS feel bloated? It’s stuff you don’t need or want pushing its way into the foreground so you can’t ignore it. Notifications and popups are a huge culprit. Best most anxiety reducing thing I did yesterday was turn off pointless notifications like Music showing the name of the new song it’s playing. And used Little Snitch to make sure I’m never getting an update downloaded or nagged about ever again.
> Does that matter, though? This whole sequence was completed in 0.144 seconds, using lightweight inter-process communication with negligible use of resources, and only repeats hourly.
Once upon a time there were teams at Apple obsessing over stuff like this because in aggregate it’s a meaningful impact on battery, especially for a service that is functionally disabled. Wonder if it doesn’t matter or there’s low hanging fruit and just so much “dead code” that isn’t actively owned by anyone but also not causing enough problems to matter.
[dead]
Several years ago I remember making something that could be considered a custom "distro" of macOS that would be VM-oriented and as minimal as it could be for CI purposes, by starting with the recovery/installer partition and adding what I needed while deleting what I didn't. Not surprisingly, there was next-to-no precedent of such that I could find, and my biggest source of information was the Hackintosh community. Nonetheless it was not too difficult, if tedious, to do so, and the final disk image size I arrived at was less than 1GB. In general the macOS community is, to put it bluntly, mostly computer-illiterate non-power-users who will either advocate against you or otherwise have no idea what you're talking about. In contrast there's a HUGE amount of existing information on modding Windows, and of course Linux sits at the other extreme.
For those wanting some semblance of control over macOS system processes, consider experimenting with App Tamer ( https://stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/ ). I was sceptical about it but "rogue" system processes, like Spotlight Indexer / Engine, that randomly demanded and hogged 100% of the CPU is now a thing of the past for me, after I used App Tamer to set it to not use more than 20% of CPU resources. It can supposedly stop (kill?) processes too, and I am experimenting with that too. But yeah, I think it's time to dump macOS (thankfully, I am still using an older version so my experience is less shitty).
Having trouble understanding how this discussion, and TFA don't mention:
https://www.puredarwin.org/
which would be where I'd go if total control of the OS on Apple hardware was wanted.
That doesn't seem to actually provide a usable OS to run on any remotely recent Apple hardware. The most recent test build available for download is a virtual machine image of a version that aligns with macOS from eight years ago.
Surprised that that wasn't mentioned as a reason for this.
Rather a shame it's so far behind.
If you don't like the conclusion, and you have an M1 or M2, see also https://alx.sh
Asahi's not perfect, but there's no restrictions. You bought the computer, after all.
Losing Thunderbolt is a bit too much, isn't it?
That and losing the ability to connect displays via USB-C is what’s keeping me from switching sadly. I love what the Asahi team is doing and I’m confident they’ll get it figured out. I wish I could do something to help, but this type of programming is far beyond my skill level so there’s not much I can do other than donate here and there.
DP over USB-C is coming soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OAiOfCcYFM&t=1681s
I thought development for it was not in a good place?
That's not actually true - they're just working on upstreaming all of the code into the Linux kernel. Development is still going strong and M3 will be added soon after upstream work has been done, as it's expected to be trivial. M4 has the added challenge of another security layer, if I understood it correctly, but once that's solved, the rest of the architecture hasn't changed much. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OAiOfCcYFM&pp=ygULYXNhaGkgb... for details.
Looks pretty much stalled to me and with new versions coming every 1.x year it is unlikely to improve much.
Seems ok enough if you want to use a M1 mini as desktop or server.
Isn't the battery life shit? Maybe I'll try it
It's such a shame that we have come to this. MacOS is basically Windows now. :(
Windows 7 you mean.
Windows 11 is far deeper into the sewer.
Post Big Sur, macOS has felt alarmingly close to Windows 8.
It really hasn't. The hyperbole here has been though.
Comparing Tahoe to Windows 7 is hyperbolic. 7 had Media Player, 8 had Groove Music. 7 was welcomed as a feature-rich upgrade, 8 was boycotted as a user-hostile downgrade.
I don't know what school of contemporary design you hail from, but you can't piss on my back and tell me it's raining. Liquid Glass needs an 8.1 update, at the very least.
The Windows 7 vs 8 analogy doesn’t support your argument, it undermines it. Windows 8 wasn’t disliked because it was “modern”, it was disliked because it broke core interaction models in a way that actively obstructed use. macOS Tahoe hasn’t done anything remotely comparable. No Start screen catastrophe, no forced touch-first UI on non-touch hardware, no fundamental workflow regression.
What you’re reacting to is aesthetic drift, not functional decay. Liquid Glass is a visual language experiment, not a UX rupture. You may dislike it, that’s fine, but equating it to Windows 8 is category error. One is a design iteration layered on top of a relatively stable interaction model, the other was a structural interface failure.
Also, invoking Media Player vs Groove Music as if those are meaningful historical markers of “user-hostile downgrade” is... generous to the point of fiction. Windows 8’s problem was input metaphors, not media apps.
This isn’t Apple becoming Microsoft. It’s Apple doing what Apple always does: overreaching aesthetically, then sanding it down in point releases until everyone forgets they were angry in the first place. Which, incidentally, is exactly what happened with Aqua, iOS 7, Big Sur, and every other supposed apocalypse.
Slop belongs in the sewer
Has MacOS ever been better than Windows for allowing fine grained control over system services?
I've been a Mac user for my entire life so maybe I didn't understand what things were like with Windows, but the fundamental problem identified by Howard, that there are many many system daemons and it is expected that the user not know what they are, or what they do, and to just leave them alone, has been the case for at least 20 years, I think.
The entire point of Macintosh is that you don't need to know anything about it (and Apple used to actively try to hide things you didn't need to know about). Or at least that is the user it has always been targeted at since the original Mac OS was released.
Windows used to be known as the OS you'd "have to" tinker with.
Early versions of OS X allowed more freedom in what you could do with the OS. As soon as SSV/SIP entered, that cut off a lot of freeform access.
As long as apps can continue to steal focus on windows, windows will always be worse.
Apps can do that on macOS too — Steam is a very good example.
Every login steam steals focus no less than two times. Steam is one of the few login items I'd choose to keep, but wasting the first 30 seconds of login is too heavy a price to pay.
I personally can’t name any examples and I have been using Macs for design and development for 15 years.
It's worse on a Mac, not only can they streal input focus directly, but also visual focus by continuously jumping up at the dock
I don't know if you've used Windows lately, but Windows is orders of magnitude less pleasant than MacOS (or even previous bad Windows versions like Vista).
Our machines all have CPUs that can execute on the order of 10^9 instructions every second. Why waste time worrying about a few hundred processes that use next to no CPU time?
The needless processes / bloat still burn electricity though. I'd have to guess that given the millions of installed macOS machines it's a non-trivial amount of wasted electricity. Long gone are the days of ruthlessly optimizing software for the limited hardware.
Apple has done more than anyone to make its hardware more energy-efficient and its software too. It even warns you about which apps are using the most power.
macOS is far from perfect, but when the background services are working properly, I don't see any evidence that they're any significant driver of energy usage.
On the other hand, when they're buggy and suddenly start consuming 100% CPU all the time for no reason...
> Apple has done more than anyone to make its hardware more energy-efficient and its software too.
Are you not aware that they have just rolled out bad OS (phones and computers) design that is less energy efficient?
Indeed, these processes are not all sitting there doing nothing.
Two processes in particular have been this exact sort of problem for me: mds_stores and mediaanalysisd. On three separate Macs (all Apple Silicon), I've observed the case heating up whenever the computer is plugged in but not actively being used. Assuming Activity Monitor is more or less accurate, the culprit seems to be those two, who always have massive amounts of accumulated CPU time, but never seem to actually be using CPU when watched. I suspect, given what they supposedly do, that they're also needlessly exhausting SSD write cycles, but that's harder to analyze/prove. Naturally, they are also in the untouchable area of the file system. Completely disabling Spotlight, which you can do without disabling SIP, seems to always fix this problem, albeit at the cost of seriously decreased usability. I've also had mixed results with just limiting the categories of Spotlight indexing in System Settings.
Yeah, that's not supposed to be happening. Yet it does. For me it's fseventsd that goes crazy sometimes. These processes are all meant to be lightweight, but they're just buggy and end up in bizarre loops. Once my Mac crashed because it was endlessly downloading the same Aerial screen saver videos in a temp directory until it ran out of space.
Found the Electron apps vibe coder.
> To the Unix purist, this might appear wasteful and unnecessary, but macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix. It’s a closed-source proprietary operating system designed for use by millions of consumers and regular users.
Not only it is a certified UNIX, regardless of the yes and buts being discussed in other threads already, the complaint would apply to all commercial UNIXes, some of them still around not yet killed by Linux.
Well, one of the "nice" things about classic mac OS, was that you could write an app that could register with the system, to receive every user event (like keypresses and mouse movements). We used to make fun extensions, with this...
I'm sure that couldn't ever be abused...
The new UNIX-based OS may have its warts, but it is just a bit more secure.
(Generally, to avoid confusion, the classic version is written "Mac OS" and the modern version "macOS", with various versions of "OS X" between.)
Modern macOS can do this too, you just have to ask the user for permission. You can see it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Input Monitoring
On modern macOS applications can flag an input field as secure, which blocks keypress interception. The permission is fairly new, but the actual feature has always been there as part of the window server. I used it back in the 10.4 days to implement macro recording.
Classic Mac OS extensions on the other hand had free rein to modify any part of the kernel. They really could modify anything.
Yeah. I can see why they made the decision they did.
It would be nice to be able remove some or all of the iOS bloatware apps but you have to disable system protection and they will just reappear on the next macOS update. They really need something similar to the "Windows Components" screen that lets you check or uncheck things that are bundled in the windows install.
That is no longer the case after Windows 7. Windows 7 Embed allowed for full bloatware removal to the point of removing Windows Updater.
Windows 10 IoT still forces the bloatware on the users; XBox bar, Cortana, ... Windows 11 IoT is even worse, they are starting to remove the local only user account ability in the OS that is designed for product hosting.
BSD and Linux are the only modern OSes that allow the removal of bloatware. This is why in 2026 I have the job of porting software that ran on Windows Embedded to run on Linux.
Misleading title, should be “you can’t”
What Srouji giveth, Federighi taketh away. Apple's version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
I have often considered making a set of scripts to do just exactly this (after disabling the SSV so that the system can be modified).
It would be no less secure than any modern or common linux OS, which do not use a read only signed root.
Was really hoping this would be an article on the OS file size. /system using 80GB on a 250gb drive is crazy. Don't get me started on the state of library directories and app bloat.
They should have to advertise the usable space. Right now it is like opening a can of beans and finding it half water.
It's sad to see apple go from customer experience first to investor satisfaction first. There is a lot of pressure on iOS26 and Tahoe being bloated and slow with planned obsolescence clearly taking centre stage.
People can hope that apple takes their operating systems as seriously as their ARM chips, but it doesn't seem likely. A cycle of 'performance and bug fixes year' will happen which gives them an excuse to bloat further operating systems that are in the pipeline. This is the worst part. We will fix now to show you we can do it and then bloat it in subsequent years so that you upgrade your devices.
I love how we want to trim macOS down. I totally get it. I open Activity Monitor and think, "WTF?" At the same time, my current job requires I use a Windows laptop, and I have to admit, "Wow, we have it pretty good over here..."
Not saying this isn't a valiant effort, but I kind of feel like Mac users are stretched out on a lounge chair at the beach complaining the Bloody Mary could be a touch more spicy.
Instead of forcing iOS onto laptops, they locked down MacOS.
For decades now, we've had to deal with articles like this one. People who know just enough to sound credible mislead those who known even less into mutilating their systems in the name of "optimization". This genre is a menace.
Much harm has arisen out of the superstitious fear of 100% CPU use. Why wouldn't you want a compute bound task to use all available compute? It'll finish faster that way. We keep the system responsive with priorities and interactivity-aware thresholds, not by making a scary-looking but innocuous number go down in an ultimately counterproductive way.
The article's naive treatment of memory is also telling. The "Memory" column in the task manager is RSS. It counts shared memory multiple times, once for each process. You literally can't say the 5MB "adds up". It quite literally is not amenable to the arithmetic operation of addition in a way that produces a physically meaningful result. It is absolute nonsense, and when you make optimization decisions based on garbage input, you produce garbage output.
It's hard to blame Apple for locking down the OS core like this. People try to "optimize" Windows all the time by disabling load-bearing services that cost almost nothing just so "number go down" and they get that fuzzy feeling they've optimized their computer. Then the rest of the world has to deal with bug reports in which some API mysteriously doesn't work because the user broke his own system but blames you anyway.
> Much harm has arisen out of the superstitious fear of 100% CPU use. Why wouldn't you want a compute bound task to use all available compute? It'll finish faster that way.
Because it hurts the speed/responsiveness of stuff you actually care about. It also has other negative side effects like fan noise and temperature, which with bad insulation in MacBook it can even physically burn. Pretty obvious stuff if you don't discard issues as superstitions
> It'll finish faster that way.
The usefulness of which might be none: some background maintenance process finishes in 5 seconds that I don't notice vs in 1 seconds while turning the fans on or making my app slower
> We keep the system responsive with priorities and interactivity-aware thresholds,
Only in your fantasy, in reality you fail at that, so "superstitions" arise
> It's hard to blame Apple for locking down the OS core like this.
Of course, if you ignore real issues with bloat, and only notice the mistakes, but that's a self-inflicted perspective
> by disabling load-bearing services
The article mentions that there is not even basic information on what services do, it's similar in Windows, so maybe the proper way out is teach people and also debloat the OS proactively to give them less of an incentive to do it themselves?
The right way to make the system stick to thermal constraints is to modulate clock speed and cooling, not randomly throttle workloads so some task manager reports they're running inefficiently
The right way is also not to bloat your OS, but again, we live in a reality we live in, where people also go left!
One of the ways both macOS and iOS get good battery life is burst-y CPU loads to return the CPU to idle as quickly as possible. They also both run background tasks like Spotlight on the e-cores whenever possible. So some process maxing out an e-core is using a lot less power than one maxing out a p-core. Background processes maxing out a core occasionally is not as much of a problem as a lot of people seem to assume.
> The "Memory" column in the task manager is RSS. It counts shared memory multiple times, once for each process.
It’s “footprint” and no it does not do that
Perhaps it did a while ago. Now, https://www.bazhenov.me/posts/activity-monitor-anatomy/ is a good read. Thanks. It's much better than RSS, although I'm at still not sure that I like the inclusion of private compressed memory. In any case, thanks for the correction.
You're not wrong. Let's hope that articles, like the OP's post, shed light on further optimizations that Apple is now fully in charge of making.
I see nothing in the post that convinces me Apple ought to change a single thing.
Regardless of whether its UNIX or not, the author's tone in the replies to all the comments under that particular comment really put me off.
Don’t read the comments. Author responds like a tool.
I read through a few and don't see anything that would meet this description. However, the fact that you saw fit to hurl an insult, something the author did not do, it's clear who the tool is.
I’m more of an arse than a tool.
TL/DR: No.
Betteridge's law of headlines applies.
you can slim it down, see https://github.com/parasew/tahoe-disenshittify/blob/main/res...
I love the "disenshittify" moniker. Good find, thanks!