Comment by vegabook
1 day ago
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.
What would you use it for? To run Docker containers that rely on a Linux VM anyway?
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
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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).
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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
What sort of applications would benefit from MacOS instead of Linux as a headless server OS?
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