Re:Some Differences Between macOS and Common Unix Systems
by tsimionescu on Friday December 25, 2020 @12:09PM
(#25537595)
Since Unix doesn't (traditionally at least) offer any access control mechanism more granular than a User, it was only natural that you'd get a lot of "system users" that are required for all sorts of operations but are not in any way associated with human users.
And now, since you have so many system users and almost always a single human user, you start wanting to install programs that will be used by both yourself and those system users, and it would be extremely problematic to go writing into 10 different bin/ and lib/ folders to install the same thing for 10 users.
Not to mention, a lot of software you want to install also runs some daemons or manages some system settings, and obviously requires root access to do so, but mag run into problems if it is not installed for root.
And now, since you have so many system users and almost always a single human user, you start wanting to install programs that will be used by both yourself and those system users, and it would be extremely problematic to go writing into 10 different bin/ and lib/ folders to install the same thing for 10 users.
Not to mention, a lot of software you want to install also runs some daemons or manages some system settings, and obviously requires root access to do so, but mag run into problems if it is not installed for root.