Comment by mrweasel

I'd say that you care about it being UNIX-like, not UNIX®. You don't care that Linux isn't UNIX. You don't care that GNU versions of things like ed and awk are slightly off-spec.

In some ways, Apple's adherence to UNIX specifications probably makes macOS less useful for you. For example, I wish that grep on macOS was closer to GNU grep. When I look up commands online, I often find answers based on the GNU implementations. Those often work on macOS, but sometimes don't (or have subtly different behavior) because macOS is adhering to the UNIX specification rather than to what those utilities do on the vast majority of systems out there.

I don't think Apple would be removing UNIX-like tools from macOS even without certification. They know how valuable it is that most developers use their systems. Even Microsoft went so far as to implement the Windows Subsystem for Linux for developers. At this point, I think that UNIX certification makes macOS less compatible with the tools and help out there which generally targets Linux. Usually the differences are small, but they certainly can be meaningful.

While macOS only really gets Unix certified they design of the flavor of unix from FreeBSD. Homebrew is also the best port system and package manager I have ever used because it requires no thinking. I actually dislike using Linux because now I have to learn the replacement from ifconfig, the creation of launchd IMHO is way better than init.d and systemd, and the command line diskutil and other additions still feel like its more Unix like while Linux feels like its moving toward its own thing. Before I was using macOS I was using OpenBSD as my daily driver since high school. I still don't understand though why Ubuntu has the ability to break /boot because there isn't enough space to add another kernel to there...

The enterprise support is actually pretty bad. they offer some cool stuff like DEP but there's so many strings attached that for enterprise it's rarely actually possible in practice. Many things are boneheadedly designed.

For example, Apple federated accounts are a great idea. But, in your global directory the UPN and email must be the same. For us it's not, with good reason. We're not going to change our entire setup globally to suit Mac users that make up 0.5% of our systems. And there's never going to be more unless they become more accommodating. We even looked at JAMF but it's too much work to implement a whole separate management system. And the options in apple's configuration profiles are way too limited.

Another issue, every account that has already been created as a private Apple id on the corporate email must be manually resolved. Impossible with many tens of thousands of users.

AD binding while rudimentarily supported, causes so many issues. If someone's password expires there's no way to log in unless they're physically on the company network. The problem is that our security team demand we bind to AD. Not Azure AD. That's just reality in enterprise.

Having a managed local admin account is also a really big problem and there isn't really any tooling for that.

Maybe if you go all in on Apple like IBM did, then yeah you could adapt your environment to all their quirks. But it's a big blocker for small deployments. And really besides IBM nobody in enterprise did this. Apple meanwhile doesn't really care anyway. They only care about the customer market.

There is absolutely no way that happens. Apple cares about Unix compatibility for very good business reasons. Apple gets a lot of value from being even just Unix-ish. It's the same reasons Microsoft eventually knuckled under and made WSL -- the ubiquity of Unix conventions and tooling is just too cemented in the industry.

POSIX conformance is a cherry on top, and it helps get them certain sales that require a conforming Unix. But that's not the real value to the platform.

There was a time when OS X was new that Apple leaned pretty hard into the OS X is UNIX(tm) story. I was working in academia at the time where the Serious Work was being done on SunOS/Solaris and saw print ads aimed at scientists reminding them that OS X was a Real UNIX:

http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/apple_unix_ad.html

It's not for everyone, but at some point I got tired of the FreeBSD layer being there but not cared for, and WSL+git for windows kinda provides a decent compromise in that regard.

The thing I hated the most was spending time building installation scripts or running images for the prod environment, and then go fight macos to replicate the same setup locally. Especially having parralel installs for the system and my user account was a PITA.

One would argue I could just dev on the docker image as well, but then being on a somewhat unixy OS doesn't matter much anymore.

WSL let's the Windows side live it's life (shell level tools can still be injected for convenience), and the linux side be genuinely Linux, not some ersatz, and duplicable to one's heart content. It's still less pain and better perfs than straight docker, and just extremely well integrated in general.

Considering the core utils have even been ported to Windows, I don’t really see what you would lose.

The Unix don’t really share much between each other apart from a small core.

> I still get everything that I need from a "Unix like" standpoint

Everything except a package manager!

There are some infuriating issues though, I have wiped out a couple files on OSX using sed with the -i option to replace a text within a file only to realised OSX would wipe it out instead ....

AFAIK Stallman didn't care about UNIX, considering he is more of a LISP guy. GNU targeted UNIX because it was the popular OS at the time.

Nailed it.

I don't think Richard Stallman much cares. The first thing every programmer does on a Mac is install GNU software.

That's my question too, why continue to bother? Apple doesn't even have any separate "Server" OS anymore. I can't find anything mentioning UNIX on any apple.com marketing pages.

I guess it's just, might as well keep it going, as an option for future marketing if ever needed. Maybe it helps the salespeople in some enterprise deals? I mean, if it doesn't really cost anything to keep it.

My (wholly unsupported) guess is that there are government or megacorp bids somewhere for Unix systems for employees, and this checks that box. The buyer could update their requirements, but why do that when you can just make your vendor jump through the hoop?

Not at Apple and don't have any knowledge here, but I'd imagine that the UNIX test suite, ever since it began passing, has been a useful set of additional regression tests even outside the certification context.

Does anyone want to be the person that removes regression tests from active use, only to be responsible when something breaks that would have been caught by that test? Far easier to just fix your code so the test passes.

(And for many years, OS X then macOS had a reputation for being rock-solid, capable of going much longer betwen restarts, going into BSOD much less frequently than Windows would. Having a set of third-party tests certainly didn't hurt this!)

I obviously don't know, but I could easily imagine that Apples legal team has flagged it as a potential risk and the cost of keep the certification up to date is minimal, compared to some imagined risk. Safer to pay the fee, and not having to worry about someone at Apple accidentally calling macOS a Unix system in public.

Also, Apple is a huge company, there's the question of who's going to make the call the not update a certification that's negligible within the scope of macOS development. Better to not be that person and just rubberstamp the invoice from The Open Group. If management disagree, they can make the call, but they won't because the cost is to small for them to deal with.

there’s no downside as far as i’m aware.

I think it’s a quiet but deliberate strategy to keep macOS the spiritual successor to NeXTSTEP. While many of Jobs principles are under pressure at current day Apple, his ghost lives on.

They definitely are, not all though, HP-UX is on life support.

However Aix, Solaris (and Open Solaris derivatives), z/OS, IBM i (AS/400), ClearPath MCP, OS 2200, are still being updated and sold.

That list is not only UNIX systems.

I don't think Solaris is Unix certified anymore. It was previously, but the current supported versions are not.