Comment by 9dev
11 hours ago
You still end up in uncanny valley often enough, with commands that are missing, or working unexpectedly differently. It often feels like macOS could be made so much better for developers, but Apple just doesn't care because people buy their devices anyway.
It’s not that. It’s that their lawyers won’t let the engineering side distribute gnu tools. Period.
At Apple, if you even use GPL tools in your workflow you have to seek approval, and most often there’s pushback of “why won’t this (alternative that isn’t GPL) work ?”
Their lawyers aren’t stupid, they understand the GPL and its limits, but they’re simply doing a risk assessment- which one is less risky, the GPL variant or the BSD. For a corporation, that’s generally BSD.
The problem is that being a developer is not a synonymous with UNIX.
In deeply saddens me to think that there is a developer who has not installed gnutils and put them earlier in the PATH.
The remaining differences are related more to systems stuff - managing daemons with launchd for example. These aren't really a distraction day-to-day.
It really is that simple. No different from a BSD or even a non-GNU (busybox, etc.) Linux distribution. If you like GNU tools, use them.
It’s a computer. I can make a computer go beep if I want, that is not the issue.
The fact that someone who didn’t grow up at the time when open source was an idealistic concept instead of free support to corporations needs to learn about the gnutils and how to install them with homebrew is what makes me sad.
Why do we seriously not have a command-line package manager on macOS yet? Windows has one by now. It’s just sad to me that you need a manual checklist of post-setup steps to turn a Mac into a useful machine for software development.
I don't think you have to grow up in some idyllic era that never existed. Its more like you type 'ls', notice that its total crap, and google it.
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