It is still a UNIX nontheless, other commercial UNIXes have similar subtleties on their certification.

For a long time, Inspur K-UX, a Red Hat Linux derivitive was a Unix O3 certified system as well. https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3617.htm

You also need to change the /bin/sh symlink (to the included /bin/dash) to avoid multiple bugs in their ancient bash 3.2 showing in POSIX scripts.

If one was to do all these things, would anything break in the OS and supporting software?

> So it seems very fair to say then, that features like SIP and the SSV are genuine turns away from Unix per se

At the end of the day UNIX is an operating system. A dead operating system that hasn’t seen a release outside of Bell Labs since the 80s and even 10th Edition was 1988, and never distributed.

A branch of it persisted through System V and its variants, then it became a spec, then operating systems started calling themselves UNIX according to that spec whether they were Systems V offshoots or reconstructions stemming from Net/2.

We’ve been genuine turns away from Unix per se since before I was born. The SUS and POSIX lets people pretend like we’re not.

None of those things are at all desirable. setuid uucp? Security nightmare. strictatime? Not needed. Linux doesn't do it either.

Apple has retained the good parts of UNIX and ignored the shitty parts. In the end, it is more UNIX than Linux is.

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®.)

It's pretty telling when the comments on the article and here have devolved into pedantic discussions of "well is it REALLY UNIX?" It's the most inconsequential question with no beneficiary except those who want to claim UNIX purity.

[dead]

> Feels like the article is just a cheap dunk on macOS.

That blog, Howard Oakley at eclecticlight.co, is consistently the most informative on the internet about macOS behaviors and internals, that Apple does not explain. He is also the author of several useful tools [1] to help observe and understand some of its underlying details. It's maybe the closest we have to a SysInternals for macOS.

[1] https://eclecticlight.co/free-software-menu/

Eclecticlight and ‘cheap dunk’ ?

No.

This site is a class of its own, in quality of discussions, in quality of software, and in dedication… many years long, consistent quality

The problem is that Oakley is actually wrong. You don't need to edit the property lists. You can simply use the launchctl command-line tool to disable system launchd services after you disable SIP, without having to disable the SSV.

I suspect that Oakley could have explained that, but the thesis stands even without the asterisk, and explaining it would have an issue:

This is going to piss off some Linux folks, but when communicating from a big pulpit about how to bypass parts of MacOS, it's important to be aware that the vast majority of MacOS users are casual, nontechnical users. As such, a popular blog posting "here's how to bypass SIP/SSV lock/whatever" would lead to a wave of users disabling it for less-than-great reasons (aesthetics, conviction that e.g. a given service was causing their system slowness when that service's resource usage was actually symptomatic of something else orchestrated by MacOS going wrong). Those decisions have side effects:

- Folks brick or break their computers, potentially in a way that voids the warranty or support contracts (I hope that software bypasses don't trigger this, but I am cynical).

- Folks chasing a "cleanliness vibe" leave a lot of the system security off once they're done. Someone else in this thread pointed out that without SSV the security of MacOS is on par with most Linux, but MacOS users are a lot bigger attack risk than Linux users: there are more of them, they're wealthier and thus identified as targets of choice by malware/people, and, again--they're casual users and don't have good security spider sense. This isn't a blanket endorsement of every restriction/security feature with no opt-out that MacOS has, just an observation that its userbase is at higher risk for attack than some others--lower than windows, but higher than Linux users.

- Folks induce breakage that bricks their computers on a delay, e.g. during the next system update something chokes after encountering a totally unauthorized/unexpected service geometry and crashes hard enough to cause data loss.

I'm not saying that stuff like SSV-rw should be secret, just that it's probably for the best to not discuss it front and center in a widely-read informational blog whose content is geared towards (power) users rather than technicians. To phrase it with a different example: if someone Googles "how to disable XProtect (antimalware)", great, go nuts. But it's probably for the best that a popular article about "can you reduce resource usage by shutting down system launchd services" doesn't have a "here's how to elevate your permissions and disable whatever you like" blurb, and instead settles for an answer of "no, that's not supported."

> Has Apple perhaps baked in a bit too much into the SSV? Definitely. Even the Chess.app is in there. > Does it really matter? Almost certainly no.

Why does waste and broken customization not matter?

Disabling SSV puts your system security on par with any stock linux distro. Most OSes don’t do a cryptographically verified read only root.

Does it really matter? Almost certainly no.

...until they start including things you don't want (remember the CSAM scanning debacle?)

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"I get what they mean, but macOS is even Unix certified."

What do they mean?

To me the blog author is primarily focused on the issue of _control_, i.e., being able to control the hardware that he purchased as opposed to letting a company control it, e.g., through pre-installed software, remotely installed "updates", default settings, etc.

He cannot control its default behaviour hence he wants to "slim MacOS down"

"UNIX" was a pun on the name of another OS that allegedly was accused of being too large and complex. That OS, Multics, was designed to run only on specific hardware from GE and later Honeywell

UNIX was a smaller, less complex alternative that, after its rewrite in C, could more easily run on a variety of hardware and be modified by the people using it

Apple does not allow people using MacOS to modify it

MacOS is proprietary; unlike AT&T's UNIX it has not been released into the research community resulting in non-commercial, open source "MacOS-like" OS projects (HackIntosh notwithstanding)

A user cannot write programs for MacOS without restriction by the company, e.g., prior approval, "developer" fees, etc.

MacOS cannot easily be used on a variety of hardware, only on Apple's proprietary hardware

Compared to non-commercial UNIX-like OS, MacOS is larger and more complex

https://eclecticlight.co/2023/12/04/macos-sonoma-is-setting-...

The next sentence is also interesting actually.

> It’s a closed-source proprietary operating system

Most UNIX systems were proprietary & closed source though?

> macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix.

MacOS is the most UNIXy of the UNIXes

1. Comparatively heavyweight

2. Proprietary

3. UNIX APIs

Yes on paper. Submitted version differs from what customers run at home/work.

There are no sales in it.

Apple leadership makes decisions based on money.

That is also why there is no iPhone mini even though there is a small number of people that really prefer a small phone.

They did provide OS X Server at one time, but the market just wasn't there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server

Those Mac minis are a pain in the ass of a server box that auto-enable FileVault after annual releases, and getting LaunchDaemons just right compared to a Linux OS feels like perpetual iterations. trying to figure out why my apache didn't start after the last reboot. Oh, must have been the Mac log rotator messing with the file permissions again

It's a shame, because I love how efficiently MacOS runs and the form factor/design language of a Mac mini is not something I feel the need to hide in a dark corner

You'll have to leave virtual desktop enabled, and will definitely be using it semi-regularly aside SSH

> Those mac minis make a great little server box but losing 8GB to hundreds of processes

It doesn't matter because all the extra stuff just goes to swap. And you can't disable virtual memory anyways. So in the end you're not really losing anything. Those hundreds of processes are ultimately basically mostly just using up a little bit of your SSD, not your RAM, so it's not a concern.

What would you use it for? To run Docker containers that rely on a Linux VM anyway?

I thought a minimal darwin distro exists, giving you headless macos?

What sort of applications would benefit from MacOS instead of Linux as a headless server OS?

They make that, but they don't offer it to anyone to my knowledge. https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/apples-houston...

> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users

These threads always end up with veiled insults like this. Can you really not understand people who use Windows, Linux and Macs? They each have their strengths depending on what you are doing.

> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want

I've use Macs since my first G4 PB, Linux for longer, and used to develop for Windows though it's been a very long time. I've never felt stopped for doing what I want.

> by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS

Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro. I'm sure desktop Linux has improved since the last time I tried running it as my main computer, but I just not sure what the point is now.

For me it's quite simple: It works and it stays out of my way.

I've owned a macbook since 2010, with a short break during the touchbar era when I got myself an XPS with windows which I dual-booted with ubuntu and later a system76 that comes with their own flavour of Ubuntu, called Pop! Os.

The situation in windows (windows 10 at the time) was abysmal. Completely incoherent UI, settings spread across different menus, ads in start menu, slow and broken search, constant nagging to update windows, to update the drivers, to tell me that the drivers have been updated, to install or update my antivirus, etc. These were not things that I installed myself, these were included with Dell's setup of the machine.

On the system76 laptop things were different. Things were calm, I could configure everything as I wanted and things worked. Until at some point I installed a new version of something, which had nothing to do with sound, but it broke sound, just as I was preparing to join a meeting, and just as we were going into the second phase of lockdowns in late 2020 so online meetings were here to stay.

My macbooks are reliable. I've got the M1 as soon as it came out and I never got a single issue with it. I've upgraded twice (I think) across major versions and everything worked. I don't have to worry about it leaving me hanging when I need it.

(And that's not taking into account things like build quality, touchpad quality, battery life, silence, etc)

In the end of the day, I do a lot of debugging as part of my work. When I don't work, I want to choose what I will be debugging, not have it forced on me.

And don't get me wrong: I see where Apple is going, I know that they're a greedy company that want to maintain their iron grip and have the final say on what we can and cannot do on our machines.

However, for me for the time being it's the least bad option.

I can understand it for casual users who just want something simple that works for basic tasks, but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?

I consider myself a power user. What I don't consider myself is a "configuration hobbyist" which some people seem to conflate with power users. I use my Mac to get all kinds of work done. I write shell scripts and I have tons of 3rd party command line tools and open source software that I've installed via Homebrew. What I don't have is a customized desktop environment with power meter widgets and stock tickers in the menu bar and anime girl desktop backgrounds.

I used Linux for 10 years and I got tired of updates breaking things and having to edit configuration files just to get the system back to "normal." The Mac just gives me "normal" and loads of productivity (as well as battery life) out of the box, and it doesn't compromise on the command line power that I want.

"Power Users", whatever that might really mean use MacOS because it works. They use a Mac laptop because it always and instantly wakes from sleep. Because the audio always works, and is always low latency. Because they have work to do, and the OS is extremely reliable. Also because it is light, and the battery lasts for a very long time indeed.

My laptop has been up for 43 days, not very long in a server world, but excellent for a personal device that I use for development, hardware design and audio production. The last time it restarted was probably for an OS upgrade, but I can't recall.

My work linux laptop is also pretty reliable, but this is only because I never upgrade anything on it and only use it for development. Its battery life is terrible, so I only use it plugged into the wall. My work linux desktop has issues with bluetooth audio and graphics, neither of which I can be bothered to fix.

> but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't

A laptop with an excellent screen, speakers, touchpad, desktop-class performance,, great battery life, and runs cool and silent, and a *nix like OS that can run the proprietary/commercial apps I need.

I work on macOS the same way I'd work on Linux; From the terminal with a package manager, docker, etc. Only now I get access to a few commercial apps that aren't on Linux, on hardware that's genuinely a joy to use.

There's no other laptop on the market that touches the apple silicon macbook pros. None. Every close alternative sacrifices something I care about. I tolerate macOS for the hardware, and I'll remain on macs until such hardware exists in Linux land.

> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't

Your definition of power user may vary but for me:

    - Especially for laptops, good integration with hardware (and good hardware), energy efficiency, power management
    - Support from commercial software vendors

>but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't

Flawless suspend/resume, best-in-class battery life, best-in-class touchpad drivers, lots of things "Just Work" that are painful and/or tedious on Linux.

It might be better to ask what Linux offers the laptop user that macos doesn't. I run Linux on my desktop boxes but wouldn't dream of daily-driving a Linux laptop.

>and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?

I consider myself a power user. I have never once felt unable to run the machine the way I want. You can disable SIP and Gatekeeper and whatever else if it pleases you. I still have a terminal and a package manager. If there's a particular utility that I need on Linux I just spin up a VM, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to do that in the last 12 months.

Perfectly working drivers.

As a power user, I want to use, not to fix, my tools.

I might tinker sometimes, but that is unrelated for me.

More broadly, Linux doesn't appeal to me as a primary OS because there's no desktop environment that's a full equivalent of macOS, both in spirit and function. Existing DEs might have some vaguely Mac-like shape or can be configured to be slightly more Mac-like, but nothing gets you the full package (consistent application of a well thought out HIG, holistic approach to design, full embrace of progressive disclosure [as opposed to the extremes of IKEA minimalism or dumping everything and the kitchen sink], etc). Additionally, some things are bizarrely involved to set up despite being commonly needed (see virtualization under Fedora) or will randomly break once in a blue moon (usually after a system upgrade) and require diving beneath the hood to fix.

For laptops in particular, it's the absence of laptops that 1) are good at being laptops (great battery life and standby time, are solid but aren't bricks, are inaudible except when being pushed for extended periods, and don't throttle to netbook speeds when unplugged), 2) are designed to be Linux-first, and 3) aren't just a half-baked rebadge of pre-existing models from ODMs like Clevo/Tongfang/Compal.

Funny enough, the closest thing to a great Linux laptop is actually the Steam Deck. Nothing else on the market is as competently integrated. If Valve got into the laptop business I'd be interested.

I could see myself daily driving Linux on a custom built desktop long before I could on a laptop, but the aforementioned broad challenges remain.

> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?

Primarily much better compatibility with graphical apps. Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite are two that many people need access to. Both have first-party offerings on macOS, and somewhat poor support via wine on Linux.

With Apple Silicon, the hardware is also particularly excellent. And only runs macOS well.

> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't ?

Photoshop, illustrator, Final Cut Pro, motion and more.

When I want I open terminal and can do anything I would ever want to do in Linux.

I’ve never spent one second of my life dealing with drivers or recompiling shit or version or so conflicts on a Mac.

Literally hundreds of hours of that on windows and Linux.

There isn’t any app on windows or linux that can match what Preview does.

One thing you may not know about is you can map anything in the menu bar to a keyboard shortcut. The application doesn’t even know you did that. That’s an operating system feature that neither Windows nor Linux can implement reliably.

Accessibility is another one.

It’s like this all over the operating system. There’s a deep integration with the apps and the UI you wouldn’t notice unless you’re a power user.

The big thing for me has always been (a) reliability of the hardware (b) good performance/battery trade off (c) nix-like environment.

In my prev. job I had a windows laptop with WSL2 though and I actually was super productive with that. But the laptop hardware offerings at the same price point are rubbish, just not very robust. Linux machines if you're in a corp and want one in the next 6 months are usually even more restrictive on hardware than they are on Windows.

At some age you realize that tinkering with your OS is a giant waste of time.

I just want a reliable thing that gets me A to B (car analogy) So what if the infotainment screen is too small or climate controls are annoying.

Sometimes having less choice is freeing.

A lot of users still like the mix of a good UI for most tasks, while being able to do a lot of power user stuff without an added layer. Plus many will choose macOS also for the hardware, which support for new chipsets is still rather WIP under Linux.

You appear to have forgotten the state of linux until fairly recently. For literal decades, MacOS "just worked" and it meant that the user did not have to fight their OS to get shit done.

In the professional world where "I did not get any work done today because an update fucked my wifi card" is not a valid excuse, MacOS (and Windows to a lesser degree) triumphed. Large orgs who can afford a whole IT department might be fine deploying linux on their fleet of desktops, but there is always a tremendous amount of testing and validation behind the scenes to ensure that everything "just works". This just was not the case for the indy professional, or small tech startup.

Now, in the past 5 or so years two things happened: 1) linux reached a state where a "normie developer" could take a chance and install it on a work machine and be just fine, and 2) MacOS has regressed enough where OS updates are risky now, and the "it just works" slogan does not really apply any more.

I'm a power user. I do FreeBSD kernel performance work for Netflix.

I have a macbook as my work laptop. I use it as a dumb terminal to my FreeBSD desktop, a platform for corp. video conferencing, and to surf the web. Any actual work happens on my desktop (Unless I'm working on something arm64 specific, and am using a VM on the laptop ... but then I'm probably ssh'ed in from my desktop.

Why the macbook? I have never gotten along with Windows (have tried on a few separate occasions). And I'm too lazy to put effort into getting Linux running well on a laptop, since that would still be just a dumb terminal for FreeBSD dev. And I'm not enough of a masochist to run FreeBSD on a laptop. So the macbook is the path of least resistance. It works well as a laptop (suspend / resume, connects to random wifi) and comes with a terminal and ssh client that require zero effort to get working.

In my experience, programmers fall into either of those categories:

1. Those that want to gain full control of their environment, customize to the max and peak in personal satisfaction and productivity, xor...

2. those that want their environment to just. work. and not spend days on end ricing a tiling WM that might instead preferably be spent on actually getting things done.

Linux users largely fall in category 1, Mac users into 2. I don't see this as a skill issue. Even Linux Torvalds famously has been using Fedora because he prefers to focus on more important aspects (i.e., kernel work) than building his own minimal distro from scratch, which starkly contrasts the last point you made.

IMO group 2 is much bigger than group 1, too. I'd find it a boring way of approaching technology personally, but try and find some actual arguments against the established workflows of group 2 apart from slight personal preferences. I can't, really.

I'm an occasional Mac user, whenever their hardware and software align to be useful.

Right now the m4 airs are a delight in regards to form factor, battery life, performance, and generally they look nice.

I have a powerful processor, enough ram, and a battery to drive it and damnit I want to do work on it.

Right now the world of laptops is dark. Any non-mac laptop running linux will have terrible standby battery life because OEMs have removed classic sleep modes for always-on mac-like sleeps, but without the polish and no way to re-enable the legacy sleep modes.

In a couple years, maybe the AI boom will die down and people will be able to afford RAM again, and maybe non-mac laptops will be nice to use again.

4 modifier keys vs 3. Can't go back. Maybe you can get your whole Linux env using 4 modifiers one application at a time, but my god would that be another thing that takes forever on top of everything else you need to configure. No ty.

> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't,

Quite simply, an OS that you don't have to think about. I moved to MacOS from linux after seeing my co-founder use their Macbook basically without any problems, much longer battery life, nice conveniences like shared clipboard and wifi password sharing, airplay, Airpods integration, better screens and font rendering, perfect migrations to new hardware, etc.

While I learned a lot tinkering with linux for a decade, at some point you can't beat something that just works.

It was a marketing campaign ("Switch") during the rise of web programmers and web designers who didn't really know how computers worked, during the hot period of startups when all of them were making a lot of money for the first time and it was sold as a status symbol. Not having a MBP among web programmers was like having greentext among highschoolers.

Now, they didn't know how computers worked because they "didn't have time or interest to worry about that stuff, they wanted something that just worked" it wasn't because they were limited as computer professionals.

And of course, it was unix, so it was at least minimally usable for actual programmers, and then you got homebrew so you had package management and normal software available, and they all started using Linux VMs to run the important stuff, so in the end it was all Linux anyway.

With all that, there was no reason not for it to gradually become a totally adequate environment to work in. Plus you got to buy the exact same thing as everyone in your social group. Talk about the next one like you would talk about the next year of a sportscar model. Have it match your phone. Get excited when they did that yearly thing where they all got on stage and sold the new line, then read Daring Fireball's take.

It just happens to be so that hardware which power users like to use comes with macOS installed.

Linux doesn't have stable APIs or ABIs, has a million ways of doing the same thing (each slightly broken in a different way), has trouble with modern hardware features like HDR or even high-DPI screens, and requires you to fiddle with the terminal and config files for simplest things. MacOS does not. It just works out of the box, mostly. And it even mostly respects you and your work, unlike modern Windows.

I have it not only because of hardware, but because of color matching for photography/processing RAW images. That's as close to 'professional' as I get to using macOS for personal use (photography is nothing more than a personal hobby, for me).

I also use macOS at work. Plainly, the machines offered are better (MBPs vs. Thinkpad T440s) and come with less impactful EDR. They're simply faster. I do need to fall back to my T440 every now and then. It's not a great experience. That's not the fault of Lenovo or Windows, though. It's just how IT manages the laptops.

But IMO Finder is a piece of trash. The Dock sucks (moves around monitors), how full screen apps are handed sucks... anyway, there's lots of UX issues with macOS. Generally there are 3rd party free and pay-for solutions for all of this... it's just that now I gotta get all this 3rd party stuff and due to the security model, often grant them high level privs.

For me: pro & creative apps. GIMP/Inkscape will never replace Photoshop/Illustrator/Affinity. Ableton, Logic, Pro Tools, etc. are not available on Linux and with the exception of REAPER, the alternatives are awful. And even with a Linux-compatible DAW, very few plugins are available on Linux.

On macOS, I can work on hobby software & graphics/music.

battery management, ARM chips, SoC ram, only decent trackpad in laptops, only good audio output in laptops (3V RMS for 150+ Ohm headphones. literally no other laptop has it), etc. These things are only possible on Macs because of economies of scale. But the most important part, to me, is software. again, economies of scale -- almost every polished app comes to Mac OS as the first OS because of the monetization potential per install. Then apps for Windows or Linux are often an afterthought or are non-native.

Mac OS is not great, no platform is perfect. Gotta think what is important to you. Are you using your machine as a thin client? Then maybe Linux is fine. Windows is obviously tragic -- zero advantages there.

about the article, Mac OS can be gutted via disabling SIP (I'm doing it on 1 macbook air), but we have so much compute and RAM that it doesn't make much sense for most use cases. I know that some companies do this with minis/studios to make makeshift servers.

I don't see why a power user would trust a desktop Linux distro. They are so unprofessional and take 0 accountability for breaking your system. As a power users I need to actually use my computer and not spend all day trying to fix my OS. Fixing the OS should be the vendor's responsibility. Not mine.

> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users

I am not sure how much I qualify, but here is my use case: it can run Photoshop and MS Office, it has Keynote, it can compile just about any software I use or I develop for my job (mostly Physics and computational Chemistry stuff). It has a sane command line. Honestly, it just works for more than simple tasks. The things for which it does not work is games (but that has nothing to do with the merits of the OS) and yes, customisation.

The alternatives are Windows (which I also use for other tasks), which is a nightmare to deal with and requires tons of faffing about to compile codes, and Linux (which is actually what I use most), which does not have a working Office and is very janky.

That is not even considering the fact that MacBooks are the best laptops by a mile (my Mac is a desktop, so it's not relevant to me).

> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?

I do run my Linux box like I want. I spent hours upon ours ricing it up and fine tuning everything I cared about. Stuff still occasionally breaks after a minor update and I regularly have to roll back because of a misbehaving NVIDIA driver (at least once a year). On my Mac, I don't need to tweak every aspect of KDE because the default is fine. I don't need to be able to change pid1 because launchd is fine (but nowadays so is systemd). I don't need to install drivers because everything that does not work out of the box can be tweaked with SteerMouse and Karabiner (honestly, I would kill to have something that works that well on Linux). The couple of utilities I use are much, much better than the Linux alternatives and break much less often. So in effect I don't sacrifice much, and the tradeoff is very good.

I won't even consider Windows. It's as customisable as macOS, but its default behaviour is terrible so here the tradeoff is absolutely not worth it.

I don't like the direction Apple is currently taking, so I will re-evaluate in the future, but for now my Mac is the most pleasant to use of my current computers.

> In Linux you'd solve OP's problem by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS.

And then spending a week to make it work, and then spending hours at unpredictable times when an update breaks something. I know, I already do it on my Linux box. It has some good aspects, but also some bad ones, which is why I use a Mac at home.

I got my first MacBook around 2010 because I was tired of fixing suspend to RAM every few Nvidia driver updates on my ThinkPad. Then I paid for a commercial VM to seamlessly run some Windows software I needed for my freelance work as a translator, removing the need to dual boot two operating systems. Everything just worked, and I could focus on things I wanted to do instead of continuing to tinker with the OS itself. And after years of playing with many different Linux distros, I realised that I did get tired of that. Moreover, a few games that I played, actually had native Mac versions. What's not to like?

These days I do have a Tuxedo laptop for fooling around, and I don't even use laptops on the regular, which is probably why it works well enough. That and integrated Radeon graphics, I'm sure.

I got tired of fiddling with Ubuntu settings. I got tired with updates making my desktop UX worse and having to battle to get things back to what I wanted. I got tired of struggling to get wifi to work.

Maybe more than any of that, though, I got tired of every laptop having bad build quality. Maybe the Dell XPS is good, but Lenovo and System76 (my last Linux machine) seemed significantly worse than a MBP. (I could maybe just run Linux on a MBP, but it's a lot more effort for little benefit.)

I would like to replicate my 2005 Ubuntu desktop environment, but when Ubuntu shipped Unity, it was a serious downgrade, and at the time I struggled to get back to something good. I'm now in a macOS middle ground without having to fight the damn thing.

I have a life and plan to live it, not spend all day configuring my computer to do basic things that macOS does perfectly.

"I've never personally understood" seems to be a lack of imagination.

I use a Mac because I have no desire to maintain a Linux box. The software I want is all there, it has a great *nix terminal, and the hardware quality is second to none. I work with computers all day - at home I just want to be able to focus on the task at hand.

> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't

https://www.apple.com/macos/continuity/

> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?

Access to Apple ecosystem - iCloud e. t. c. If one uses iPhone it's quite convenient to have access to the same cloud services from a laptop. FindMy is a big one for me - if I lost or misplaced my phone I can use FindMy on Macbook to locate it. While it's technically possible to use FindMy via web you'll need the phone as 2FA which is not an option when I'm trying to find it.

For me, battery life and power management – even with the number of services that macOS runs. I run Asahi Linux when docked, but on the go I estimate I get a warmer lap and about ~1/2 hr less.

It's the hardware.

I don't like MacOS, but you can't beat their silicon and the laptops "feel" better in general.

I had a system76 for a while and I loved pop OS but that hardware...

I used Linux exclusively for 13 years. Moved to Mac because I wanted a laptop that could give me 10+ hours of battery backup.

> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users

We are all users of power, electrical power specifically. And macOS, running on modern Mac hardware, is very power efficient.

(Yes it’s a dumb pun, but it also points to one reason that sophisticated users still choose macOS.)

it's the commercial unix desktop that has commercial app support, cool looking hardware and great power optimizations that lead to great battery life. (also in the ai era, unified memory is pretty awesome)

personally i choose linux (kde) desktops and laptops where allowed because they've just gotten so good (and seem to only be getting better), but i get it.

honestly though i think it's a little sad. the execution just isn't where it used to be and honestly i think the modern macos experience is kinda trash. i would really like to pick one up and be like "oh wow this is so cool everything is so refined if i wasn't so bothered about needing vms and docker for everything i'd consider this" but instead it's more like "wow this is kinda old and crufty and weird and not all that great to be honest i miss kde it's more refined"

Working hardware that I can buy at Media Market ready to go with an operating system that isn't stuck in the 1970's mindset, where people still think TUIs are "modern".

Define power user.

This is such a loaded term. I would hazard to guess your definition would include abilities which just arent possible on Mac which would by definition make it a bad choice. You can't replace the audio stack or run headless for example.

>what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't

Better security than any Linux distro.

I'm a power user who's past configuring things, instead I want them to just work on their own. I also hate to memorize commands but like using the mouse and click buttons.

"Power users" like to get their work done.

In LInux, you can spend a bunch of time configuring your system to get simple stuff setup. The opposite of "getting work done".

As a mobile app dev, I'm forced to use macOS: no iOS SDK on Windows/Linux/etc

I'd love to know what's good ARM notebook which works fine with Linux.

it depends on whether you're a power user in terms of getting lots of actual work done, or you're a power user (and this seems much more common) in the sense that you spend lots of time tweaking your productivity setup.

Out of the box, macOS is substantially more secure than any common linux OS.

It actually works, reasonably well, out of the box.

when i read threads like this i remember the ancient slashdot meme: this is surely the year of desktop linux

Less maintenance on my own kit after spending a day maintaining some else’s kit.

Linux userspace is utter chaos. When I’m pricing out lumber or other personal projects, I don’t want that held up by any number of fresh in memory Linux what-the-fresh-hell-is-this moments.

That is it. Will pay nearly whatever Apple commands to avoid having my personal (desktop) time invaded by Linux and the never ending reinventing solved problems and discovering new ones.

Upside though, Linux by now may actually have an even dozen of methods to configure a wired ethernet device. I quit counting.

Pixelmator Pro

Good luck running graphic design, music production, or video editing apps on Linux.

> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption

Howard Oakley has been writting about macOS internals for a long time, and 99% of the time, his essays and articles are excellent. This is not one of them. Don't be put off by this one article - the site is a goldmine.

Man you got me on readability. Just yesterday I had to input a random string WiFi password in a printer with only arrow keys to select each character. The password had an upper-case I in it but the moronic designers of the little password label that came with the router selected a font where “I” and “l” are indistinguishable. Took me like ten minutes to get the damn thing connected.

I only got it right because I looked up the password on my Mac, whose keychain app displays them in gloriously readable monospaced font. FFS

Yes, I thought OP was going that direction from the title. I keep reading posts hoping someone has found the solution but there's always a tradeoff.

I think it's important enough that maybe apple will announce something at WWDC. The AIs need better isolation primitives. Running software from un-trusted sources needs easier and more flexible isolation guarantees. Automated builds need lighter weight virtualization options. A dockerfile that you can specify includes xcode-tools, the accessibility APIs. Volume mounting. Network controls. etc.

https://github.com/dockur/macos is a little too clunky? Tart VM or manually doing apple's container CLI is maybe most of the way there, but images are huge.

[dead]

That doesn't seem to actually provide a usable OS to run on any remotely recent Apple hardware. The most recent test build available for download is a virtual machine image of a version that aligns with macOS from eight years ago.

Losing Thunderbolt is a bit too much, isn't it?

I thought development for it was not in a good place?

Isn't the battery life shit? Maybe I'll try it

Windows 7 you mean.

Windows 11 is far deeper into the sewer.

Has MacOS ever been better than Windows for allowing fine grained control over system services?

I've been a Mac user for my entire life so maybe I didn't understand what things were like with Windows, but the fundamental problem identified by Howard, that there are many many system daemons and it is expected that the user not know what they are, or what they do, and to just leave them alone, has been the case for at least 20 years, I think.

As long as apps can continue to steal focus on windows, windows will always be worse.

I don't know if you've used Windows lately, but Windows is orders of magnitude less pleasant than MacOS (or even previous bad Windows versions like Vista).

The needless processes / bloat still burn electricity though. I'd have to guess that given the millions of installed macOS machines it's a non-trivial amount of wasted electricity. Long gone are the days of ruthlessly optimizing software for the limited hardware.

(Generally, to avoid confusion, the classic version is written "Mac OS" and the modern version "macOS", with various versions of "OS X" between.)

Modern macOS can do this too, you just have to ask the user for permission. You can see it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Input Monitoring

That is no longer the case after Windows 7. Windows 7 Embed allowed for full bloatware removal to the point of removing Windows Updater.

Windows 10 IoT still forces the bloatware on the users; XBox bar, Cortana, ... Windows 11 IoT is even worse, they are starting to remove the local only user account ability in the OS that is designed for product hosting.

BSD and Linux are the only modern OSes that allow the removal of bloatware. This is why in 2026 I have the job of porting software that ran on Windows Embedded to run on Linux.

They should have to advertise the usable space. Right now it is like opening a can of beans and finding it half water.

For decades now, we've had to deal with articles like this one. People who know just enough to sound credible mislead those who known even less into mutilating their systems in the name of "optimization". This genre is a menace.

Much harm has arisen out of the superstitious fear of 100% CPU use. Why wouldn't you want a compute bound task to use all available compute? It'll finish faster that way. We keep the system responsive with priorities and interactivity-aware thresholds, not by making a scary-looking but innocuous number go down in an ultimately counterproductive way.

The article's naive treatment of memory is also telling. The "Memory" column in the task manager is RSS. It counts shared memory multiple times, once for each process. You literally can't say the 5MB "adds up". It quite literally is not amenable to the arithmetic operation of addition in a way that produces a physically meaningful result. It is absolute nonsense, and when you make optimization decisions based on garbage input, you produce garbage output.

It's hard to blame Apple for locking down the OS core like this. People try to "optimize" Windows all the time by disabling load-bearing services that cost almost nothing just so "number go down" and they get that fuzzy feeling they've optimized their computer. Then the rest of the world has to deal with bug reports in which some API mysteriously doesn't work because the user broke his own system but blames you anyway.

I read through a few and don't see anything that would meet this description. However, the fact that you saw fit to hurl an insult, something the author did not do, it's clear who the tool is.

you can slim it down, see https://github.com/parasew/tahoe-disenshittify/blob/main/res...