You can't tell me that Microsoft is able to ship entire distribution's userlands (Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, and more) through the Windows Store, including all their GPL3 components, and Apple can't figure out how to ship an updated version of base64.
If I'm grumbling, it's just because making devops/CI scripts work on Windows and Linux is easier than MacOS and Linux these days because my colleagues run into issues like "base64" or "uuidgen" having different arguments in the extremely dated MacOS userland, and they then have to brew install a bunch of isolated components.
Having to deal with three variants is relatively simple.
Now having to deal with DG/UX, Aix, Tru64, SGI, HP-UX, Solaris, BSD and the new incumbent Linux, that was fun.
And we can tell our kids we had this thing called endianness which showed up in structure packing, system calls, network byte ordering, and hopefully portable binary file formats. Thankfully we had RPC and IDL to save us from that mess... not.
Oh and don't forget the windowing system war on top of the Unix war, all with different desktop and library concepts: CDE, Motif, Openwin, NeWS, DM, X11 and X10 at least.
One compatibility honorable mention goes to Apollo for at least making an attempt at flavor normalization: you could have an env var that would resolve a symlink at every file access near the top of the filesystem, where there would be a collection of different BSD/SystemV/Aegis(?) all running at once. [2]
1. https://maultech.com/chrislott/resources/cstyle/ifdefs.pdf
To this date, this is the only network protocol I have ever seen that not only allowed you to choose the endianness you will use in the header, but also the floating point format.
Don't forget AIX/ESA (a weird beast), NextSTEP (which is still with us, in disguise), the HPC crowd (UNICOS, OSF/1 AD...), SINIX (my first contact with the internet, thanks to Siemens/Nixdorf)...
The reason I switched to Mac in 2006 was that I ended up using a friend's Mac for a month while abroad so I could get some work done. When I got back to a place where I could get a new Viao at a reasonable price it occurred to me that I hadn't been fighting with the Mac a single time. Wifi always worked, everything I plugged into it just worked as well, the software I ended up installing just worked too, Apache and SVN ran fine, there was a good Terminal app out of the box, etc. This was in stark contrast with the decades long experience I had had with PCs until then. On any given week I had been invariably spending between a half-hour and a day fighting with Windows in some way or another. Which could mean trying to figure out why Wifi or some random printer didn't work, looking for drivers, reinstalling or reconfiguring some piece of software, and so forth. Has this improved materially since the past decade?
Bundled apps to me are a wash. Preview >> Edge for PDFs and Terminal.app >> Cmd.exe, but explorer.exe >> Finder and Task Manager >> Activity Monitor.
Another big plus for windows is everything to do with graphics drivers and GPU support if you're into this. I also find WSL overall now better than Mac's Darwin since you get up to date Linux packages which beats homebrew in my books. Performance of WSL is also pretty good, much better than running a VM. This is really what turned Windows around for me, making it a very viable alternative.
Linux is a lot less stable, as a laptop OS, than Windows or OSX. Suspend and resume in presence and absence of multiple monitors is like rolling dice; locks up about 15% of the time.
And Windows still requires random reboots for updates, of course usually at the worst possible time (fortunately I only use windows in VMs for testing). God how I hate Windows, it's unbearable really, after 5 minutes at the third nagging stupid popup (update Java! update Acrobat! update antivirus! don't turn off the computer, installing update 2 on 10532!) I want to throw the thing out of the window :)
A mix of dock and undock with multiple monitors is dodgy; like rolling a die. Plugging in the display port cable after a resume from a prior docked suspend, for a presentation, is flipping a coin.
Can't remember any major problems with Linux on laptops for latest 5 years. All works like charm.
If you use a cheap/noname/non-popular hardware - it happens, yes, but in Windows world too.
It's the multi-monitor / dock interaction. It's just not solid.
I've had issues with USB-C docks. I've had zero issues over four different Thinkpads (FC28 and FC29) with the Lenovo Thunderbolt dock.
Old thinkpads with 7-row keyboards had proper ergonomics, to my mind anyway.
Sorry but have you heard of Visual Studio?
A sluggish clumsy bloated IDE? What's good about it? I've used it for a couple of years when I wrote directshow filters, and it was a complete shit back in a days (2015-2017).
* terrible clumsy project system, where changing a flag is a quest. As abominable as autotools.
* using non-vcproj projects is a pain, especially when you have a bunch of make files
* It's slow as hell.
* Language support is lacking. No OCaml, no Lisp, hell, even C11 is a quest.
After they've added a package manager and clang support, it became less painful, but fur from great experience.
I am now working on Linux with Sublime Text, Makefiles and the command line. I am most comfortable with that setup but there are many features that I miss from VS: the debugger, online help, code navigation, ...
Not that these features don't exist in other editors and IDEs, but with VS, they worked reliably and out of the box.
Note: VSCode is completely different. It is a multi-platform text editor, one of the best in town. A bit lacking in the performance department though, that's why I am still using Sublime Text.
I'm confident most of the .NET community is very happy with Visual Studio.
In my opinion, Visual Studio massively outclasses Eclipse, VSCode and Netbeans. It even makes IntelliJ (which is pretty great too) look a bit inadequate.
(I use Emacs these days though.)
>I'm confident most of the .NET community is very happy with Visual Studio
.NET is not the only ecosystem people develop for. There are embedded C/Forth, web frontend/backend, written in Java, Scala, Ruby, Python, other stuff. VS sucks for nearly everything safe C#/C++ for windows.
Besides, even for C# people use an additional plugin, resharper, so VS is not enough even for its target ecosystem.
Those that have CPU cycles and memory to spare do.
I have a laptop with 64GB of memory just because I need to run VS + ReSharper in a VM. Seriously.
Whenever I have to use other offerings like Eclipse, Netbeans or Android Studio for other languages I am never very satisfied with them. Android Studio in particular breaks gradle and projects between updates, although Flutter seems to work.
Look at a bunch of Apple manpages. Many of them say FreeBSD.
Which is to say, "let users run their own software". There's value in formal authentication of third party software as a default configuration, but let's not pretend that's what lockdown is about.
The discussion is literally about replacing the default shell...
I believe that they are suggesting that Apple would be required to let you sign your own software if you do choose and give owners the right to opt to have their os trust software they OR Apple signed.
There is something that was addressed in the gpl community called tivoization.
Tivos dvrs were Linux boxes wherein they shared their source technically complying with the letter of the gpl but in fact locking them down so users couldn't modify the devices violating to many peoples mind the spirit and clearly expressed intent of the license.
This is if I understand correctly dealt with in gpl 3 which is what I think the poster is talking about.
Apple ios devices are non free in the same fashion as Tivos which is incompatible with gpl3
On macOS, you can run anything out of the box (depending on security/gatekeeper settings) and you can replace or modify system executables (such as /bin/bash) if you turn off SIP (which is slightly tricky to do but can be done from recovery mode.)
Running your own customized /usr/local/bin/bash is easy of course, and package managers like MacPorts or Brew make it simple to install various shells including the latest bash.
On iOS, however, there might be an issue, as you have to sign executables with XCode, but unfortunately Apple reduced free developer provisioning profiles from one year down to two weeks in order to block third-party app stores and malware, and to get more people to sign up for the paid developer program. Moreover, there is also no Apple-sanctioned way to modify system executables that I am aware of.
I wouldn't even classify turning off SIP as "slightly tricky". You boot into recovery mode, open the terminal, type in two words, and press enter.
Besides, this is separate from the GPLv3 question. You can absolutely recompile bash and replace macOS's version with your own, so I don't understand why this is a problem for Apple.
I know it sounds crazy, but they have for years now been taking steps - like this - which nobody seems to find a rational cause for, but which step by step seem to remove obstacles of technically, legal, or user expectations in line with making OS X an app store only platform, and if possible completely replace OS X with iOS.
It's certainly possible that Apple has intentions other than to make the platform better and a discussion can be had on if the tradeoffs are worth it, but it's ridiculous to claim that there are zero benefits to anyone but Apple.
We're talking about what Apple could be planning that would violate the GPLv3. As long as the signing can be disabled by the user, there shouldn't be a GPLv3 violation.
I also expect zillions of helpful nieces/nephews would flip that checkbox for their uncles/aunts, and, accidentally or on purpose, leave it that way.
Even if that isn’t true, making it harder for malware to flip that flag already is a rational reason to implement it this way.
I do worry very much about SIP becoming impossible to disable some day. Don't ban knives because people might cut themselves.
1) Gatekeeper makes it harder to run malware; unsigned executables don't run by default, and signed malware can have its developer keys revoked by Apple.
2) SIP makes it harder for malware to modify system files.
The obvious "rational" business benefit to Apple is that:
3) Gatekeeper makes it harder to sell Mac apps without Apple getting a 30% cut
If Bash were also being used on iOS that would be different, but I'm quite confident that will never happen.
But preventing ALL Macs from turning off Gatekeeper and SIP? I think that would be unpopular.
(Of course, one could disable SIP altogether.)
I suspect they also recognize that applying the GPL would force them to release things they otherwise consider private.