In a lot of ways macOS is that. It’s a very workable Unix and (I wasn’t watching when), Homebrew has gone from being a PITA even on its home turf to working great on everything from NixOS to WSL2.

But I’m still about one free weekend away from virtualizing Linux on my Macs because you just hit a limit with Yubai or Rectangle or Divvy or whatever.

I want a real tiler, I want rounded corners to fuck off, and I’ll pay a little in sub-pixel hinting to get it.

OS X is still basically NeXTSTEP in many regards.

A fairer characterization would be to say it is in NeXTSTEP’s lineage. Not only had a lot changed by 10.0, but at this point Mac OS X has been under development (and forked into multiple OS projects several times over) more than twice as long as NeXT had existed as an independent entity.

Some ways in how the NeXTSTEP culture prevails in 2024.

Its approach to kernel design, the way drivers are written in a OOP based framework, UNIX is there as bottom layer (certified even) but doesn't get the spotlight, Objective-C (and now Swift) frameworks is all that matters for developers invested into the platform, heavy IDE based development (remember famous Sun vs NeXT 1990's commercial), what cool stuff can be done with OS frameworks (starting with products like Lotus Improv or Web Objects).

This is what I meant, not what NSSomething are still in use.

I gotchu and I understand what you mean, just assisting with clarity because it is more fair to say "Mac OS X has continued the lineage of NeXTSTEP" than it is to say "Mac OS X is basically NeXTSTEP."

Think about everything Mac OS X has or has had which NeXTSTEP has never had. DTrace, HFS+ and then APFS, Quartz replaced Display PostScript, OpenGL and Metal, IOKit replaced DriverKit and is now being functionally replaced (at least in part) by something called Driver Kit, Catalyst, SwiftUI, Quick Look, Spotlight, Safari/WebKit, Keychain, Xcode has replaced both Project Builder and Interface Builder, Core Audio, Core Animation, QuickTime and then QTKit and then AVFoundation, I mean the list goes on. Unicode is everywhere now too, which is neat; NeXTSTEP and Mac OS had their own character encodings.

Carbon was also a significant technology for the first few years, as was the first Rosetta (and we have Rosetta 2 now), and the Classic environment.

So, clarifying more than disagreeing. :)

Only under the hood unfortunately. It would be great to have a desktop OS aimed at professional use again, but everybody has been chasing the needs of the mythical "casual user" in the last few decades (which is basically the tiny cross section of the taste and requirements of all computer users lumped together, but that tiny cross section on its own is useless without being extensible and customizable to the needs of each specific user)

What are the features you’d say are required for “professional” use? I can think of a few things that I’d like to see, such as better keyboard navigation and the return of a spatial finder.

But I think that if you asked ten people that question (especially here), you’d get 11 different opinions. So the only option is something that covers a pretty minimalist overlap.

Mostly things that would hurt security unfortunately, e.g. opening up (maybe even requiring) each UI application to be scriptable and (to some extent at least) controlable from the command line (e.g. going full in on ideas like AppleScript and Automator instead of letting those go stale), getting rid of the stupid notarization requirements and quarantine mode for executables downloaded from the the internet, being able to extend OS features with system-wide plugins (e.g. installing new 'data types'), being able to extend the Finder with new features (similar to how TortoiseSVN integrated into the Windows explorer context menues), provide an official package manager (although Homebrew is mostly good enough).

E.g. there should be a toggle which says "this is my computer, I want to do with it what I want, and yes, I know the risks and won't sue Apple if things go sideways").

There kindo of is. Restart in recovery mode, open a terminal and type `csrutil disable`. Also, there are finder extensions that do what you suggest.

Upvoted for useful information that’s harder than it should be to find.

But “maybe brick my box if my hands shake in a weird mode with weird dots” isn’t what GP meant: those of us who are properly backed up and have great net connections can merrily pull stunts like that but it killed the “customize my Mac” apps and stuff, even to the tune of “same size and format of image, even bounce the hash off a server, just square corners”.

So it’s like “pretty sure I’m not driving to the Apple Store today” to “anyone who disagrees with us about shapes should be treated like malware”. That’s quite a leap.

Right now the hardware is such they can pull that: they bought out all the hot shit TSMC stuff.

But Intel 18a is sitting on people’s desks at least under a black cloth: you have to continue to lead on the fundamentals, and hackers liking your shit is maybe the most important one.

I thing macos sucks for Linux development. There is not enough memory and disk space for virtualization, so you run random scripts from Internet on your main machine. Command line tools are decades old and obsolete...

macOS is great for UNIX, the best development for GNU/Linux is by definition GNU/Linux.

As grey beard never came to my mind that using a Solaris workstation would be great for HP-UX development, as one possible example among many combinations during the UNIX wars.

The culture of reaching out to macOS for doing GNU/Linux only proves the point of how broken GNU/Linux desktop still happens to be, which Microsoft was quite clever to capitalise on with WSL.

I was going to write very long answer. But I am drunk, my English is very bad, and do not care. So here are just a few key points:

* can I run Xfce or other WM on MacOS if its unix? On FreeBSD it is not o problem. I do not care about Mac native WM. Unix is about choice, I do not feel like that on Mac.

* It is not 1990tie. Everyone uses virtualization, even development for Solaris.

* Look at ollama install instructions. It expects you to pipe random URL into your shell and execute it. It asks for sudo password! How many MacOS users will do that on their only laptop, because they can not afford any extra RAM for virtualization or separate machine?! It is like doing random hookups at bar without condom!

* I do not care about operating system. For my it is a just a launcher for VirtualBox where I do my work. I need a lot of cheap RAM and SSD space for my workflow. Windows machine can do that, MacOS not (10000 USD machine does not count).

* GNU/Linux is so 2000. Many people run stack that has no GNU whatsoever. MacOS is very premium machine for this type of 1990ties mentality (single personal machine).

* Look into QubeOS I have machine for emails, browser, debuging... Machine where I can see production data has no access to Internet at all. Machine that can modify github repos is paranoidly locked down... I have a few physical machines on separate network to test random opensource stuff. It would cost probably million USD to replicate that on MacOS network eccosystem!

* I do not care about hardware. My laptop with 8TB SSD and 64GB RAM costs less than 1000 USD. Sometimes I just donate it to someone while traveling, not to carry extra two kilos (I replace RAM sticks and NVME disks). I got 10 of those on sale for 400 USD!

How is not enough memory or storage a problem of the operating system?

Problem of the macOS licensing model, which mandates excessive margins for bundled memory and storage.

I usually bought a Mac every 1.5 years or so, because I liked being on the cutting edge. However, I am now still rocking a 2021 MacBook Pro 14" because it's still great. In half a year the model is about 3 years old. When I purchased it, it was close to 3000 Euro, and it has 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD.

If I'd sell it, I'd still get between 1000 and 1500 Euro. Let's say for the sake of the argument I get 1200 when it is three years old, then the yearly cost was 600 Euro. Which is... cheap for a tool that I use daily and my income depends on? I mean, if I had to drive by car to work, my yearly cost would be much more than 600 Euro.

I would readily agree that Apple overcharges for memory and SSD, but the amortized cost is not really large.

If you depend on this machine for living... You should have a spare machine. Way to recover data very fast if it breaks.... Way to fix it... It gets expensive pretty fast.

Also if you travel with Mac, you need to carry two laptops. There is no easy way to move NVME drive to new machine like with Pc laptops.

Ehm, why? What you are saying does not make sense at all. I do hourly incremental backups to fast blob storage. If my Mac breaks, I can pick up another one and be back up and running in no time. The other good thing is that it doesn't matter where I buy it or go for repairs, since Apple has great worldwide service.

Besides that I never had a Mac break down when I travel and I've owned MacBooks since 2007 and travelled a lot with them (including years of daily bike rides, including hilly terrain).

My MacBook is one of the products I literally never worry about.

Meanwhile, my Framework laptop from 2021 has twice the RAM and storage, was significantly cheaper, and runs an even more unix-like graphical environment.

But it doesn't have macOS. And that's where we started at: macOS is popular, because it's a great graphical UNIX.

Because the operating system only supports devices with limited memory and storage.

I would love to run macos on my beefy workstation. But MacOS support for AMD Ryzen sucks.

It's not that Mac hardware is only available with limited memory and storage (you can get a MacBook Pro with 128 GB of RAM and 8 TB of storage, or you can get a Mac Pro and throw in a bunch of M.2 drives on PCIe cards), it's just that the pricing on them is ridiculous.

But that’s not a problem of macOS.

It's not a problem of macOS in the strictest sense but we're talking about highly vertically integrated platforms. You don't get macOS without a mac, so it _is_ a macOS problem in that sense.

Does Homebrew not mess up permissions on a multiuser system anymore? (haven’t checked for a while, using MacPorts)