Comment by spijdar

12 hours ago

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®.)

11 comments

spijdar

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pxc  11 hours ago

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.

pjmlp  4 hours ago

"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.

torginus  6 hours ago

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.

curt15  12 hours ago

>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".

  • spijdar  12 hours ago

    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...

    • pxc  11 hours ago

      > 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 ;)

      1 reply →

    • icedchai  11 hours ago

      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.

      1 reply →

  • flomo  8 hours ago

    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.)