> So, if you want your installation of macOS 15.0 to pass the UNIX® 03 certification test suites, you need to disable System Integrity Protection, enable the root account, enable core file generation, disable timeout coalescing, mount any APFS partitions with the strictatime option, format your APFS partitions case-sensitive (by default, APFS is case-insensitive, so you’ll need to reinstall), disable Spotlight, copy the binaries uucp, uuname, uustat, and uux from /usr/bin to /usr/local/bin and the binaries uucico and uuxqt from /usr/sbin to /usr/local/bin, set the setuid bit on all of these binaries, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH before /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, enable the uucp service, and handle the mystery issues listed in the four Temporary Waivers.
https://www.osnews.com/story/141633/apples-macos-unix-certif...
So it seems very fair to say then, that features like SIP and the SSV are genuine turns away from Unix per se, even given the fact of the certification.
SSV can be disabled. It would be ill-advised to do so, but Apple intentionally allows you to do that. In fact you can strip away every single security layer of macOS, including allowing unsigned kernel extensions to be loaded. This document is a bit outdated, but it should still be possible to do all of that. https://gist.github.com/macshome/15f995a4e849acd75caf14f2e50...
Feels like the article is just a cheap dunk on macOS. 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.
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.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140868/macos-15-0-now-unix-03-c...
I can’t say this affects me in any way I’m aware of, but the perception presented here is interesting.
https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
Because I was very disappointed with it ending at “SSV doesn’t let you”. SSV can be disabled, and the author should have known (almost certainly knows) that.
From one of his comments on his post:
> I wish whoever takes that project on, every success, even more so at working out how those processes can be disabled completely while keeping the SSV intact.
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
But this article, which starts with
> That’s a question I’m asked repeatedly, which this article tries to answer.
doesn’t actually _try_ to answer the question. It just stops at SSV and draws a meaningless comparision with macOS 9. It also has several factual inaccuracies in there. Notably, the claim that macOS is not UNIX, and the implication that Unix systems must somehow be free and open-source (virtually all Unixes of the day were proprietary & closed source).
Thanks - then we agree (also on the part of the argumentation about macOS being a certified UNIX OS)
Which can be worked around by writing a provisioning script, but in either case will be a significant headache if one would come to rely on the modifications they were to make to the volume.
I get what they mean, but macOS is even Unix certified. https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
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-...
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the OS being an UNIX or not. It's a bit weird to see the allusion to UNIX to be fair: Howard Oakley is deep enough down the rabbit hole that I would expect him to know that History is full of proprietary and closed UNIXes.
For example, the "Unix purist" might refer to someone who identifies with the "ideals" associated with that OS, e.g., relatively small, portable to potentially any hardware, free to study and modify, etc. And (b) might refer to MacOS not conforming to those "ideals" (despite having a limited license to use a "UNIX" trademark)
At this point, (b) is ambiguous; what is "Unix". It might mean different things to different people
Ironically, Apple took the "Unix" parts of MacOS from open source, non-commercial "UNIX-like" OS projects such as NetBSD and FreeBSD that are not "Certified UNIX"
Some of the drivers are. The core is open source, though. macOS' particular choice for its graphical user land is proprietary as well, but AT&T's UNIX had no such equivalent, aside from some experiments, so that doesn't make sense to use as a point of comparison. Not to mention similar systems in the UNIX-esq space, like SunView, NeWS, VUE, NeXTSTEP, etc. were proprietary too. That has always been par for the course in the world of "graphical UNIX". The so-called "Linux desktop" is the aberration.
You can, of course, run an open source graphical user land, like Gnome, instead on top of macOS' UNIX-y fashioned bits if you so wish.
> It’s a closed-source proprietary operating system
Most UNIX systems were proprietary & closed source though?
The first open Unix-like is 386BSD which predates Linux. It was said that if 386BSD didn't get mired in a lawsuit, Torvalds would have used it and Linux would not exist.
MacOS is the most UNIXy of the UNIXes
1. Comparatively heavyweight
2. Proprietary
3. UNIX APIs
While it's true that it wasn't always truly UNIX compliant, they put in the hard yards to become so (albeit to avoid a $200M lawsuit from The Open Group) [1]
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
https://www.osnews.com/story/141633/apples-macos-unix-certif...
EDIT: And really, UNIX certification means nothing except to potentially government agencies and people who don't understand what UNIX and/or UNIX certification is. Or why being "certified UNIX" is generally meaningless: see the BSDs, which are much closer to "UNIX" origins than macOS will ever be.
Or Windows, which is frankly just has better architected internals and abandons legacy UNIX ;-)
MacOS is BSD over Mach, which is itself derived from BSD.
macOS contains BSD userland, networking, file system, POSIX, and a couple of other things. But XNU, the kernel, is "X is Not UNIX", if there ever was a statement to be made about the underpinnings of macOS.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...
You should read through the actual certification - https://www.opengroup.org/csq/repository/noreferences=1&RID=... (there are a couple more in the repo).
To run the VSX conformance test suite we first disable SIP as follows: [...]
Feel free to disable SIP on your Mac. I certainly won't be doing so on mine.
There were several actual Unixes released based on Mach, and some of them more purely Mach than macOS/NeXT ever have been.
What is the point that you are making?
Current macOS user, and former NT kernel dabbler and VMS user here. That's highly debatable.
On the kernel side, Windows is still filled with legacy VMS-isms. Eg: Object Manager (object/resource model), named objects, handles, how processes and threads work, vmem, scheduling etc etc
On the userspace side, Windows is still filled with legacy DOS-isms.
Don't me wrong, I love the underlying Windows OS, despite its many quirks, but it's filled with perhaps even more legacy cruft and definitely isn't any sort of step above anything else.
I also don't believe anyone actually runs macOS in a UNIX-compliant configuration. Rather, it's a checkbox on some RFP and nobody is clued into why it's actually there, because all the people that did know have since retired.
In both cases: "Quite a bit", but I wish the base Windows OS would evolve away from legacy as much as macOS has. Start with eliminating drive letters.
Drive letters are there for the presentation layer and of course backwards compat. Windows refers to them using device paths internally. You can too, if you wish.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/io/file-pa...
MacOS is certified UNIX i.e its "UNIX", like it or not. On this point the article is just wrong.
MacOS is both UNIX and also not Unix at the same time.
If the trademark holders decided to UNIX certify my cat, which is well within their legal right to do so, would that make her UNIX?
An important nuance you seem to be missing is that SUSv3 is equivalent to "IEEE Std 1003.1-2001" (that is, POSIX 2001).
In practice, I've had to work around more POSIX compatibility issues in macOS than in all other actively developed (Free) Unix-likes, combined.
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.
I fear the quality of macOS is deteriorating today in the same manner than befell OSX Server.
https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/apple-blasts-mac-os-x...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
https://www.letemsvetemapplem.eu/en/2024/10/19/chyby-v-macos...
.. macOS but with a utility to install apache/ldap/smtp/carddav and caldav.
very useful for a home server.
absolutely no benefit over Linux for the majority of the workloads it was designed to simplify.
It wouldn't really give you much unfortunately, certainly didn't run noticeably leaner.
(I think at some point "server" just became an .app that was available via the app store).
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.
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
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.
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.
I like the freedom to run my machine the way I want, but I also enjoy something that is reliable and seamless. My macbook air's battery lasts forever. It works flawlessly, almost always. "oh with nixos if you brick it you can rollback..." that's great, but it does not beat working great on the first try.
Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.
Same here. macOS has been death by a thousand little cuts, and I'm finally accelerating my move away from it, as Apple locks it down more and more, and as they spend their engineering talent on crap I ultimately don't care about.
While I've switched most of my computers over to Linux, I still have not moved my daily driver over. There are so many silly little things Linux (and its various desktop environments) gets wrong and are just annoying enough to make me not want to use it every day, like scrolling with a trackpad.
> Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro.
Yes, but my comment wasn't made in isolation or directed at people with your objectives. The OP's article is about doing exactly this, but in the opposite direction (expending large amounts of effort to remove unneeded processes). See for example: "if we assume that we need to identify just 500 candidates, and each takes an average of one week to research, that would take over 10 person-years".
Starting with that as the baseline (as opposed to starting from your position which is that you're not interested in spending time on this issue), building up from zero is a lot more straightforward. And, if you use something like NixOS, you generally only have to do it once since the idea of "reinstalling" the OS (e.g. for new versions) largely goes away: subsequent effort is just about changing your mind about what software you want, or what version you want (as with any OS).
The serious answer is that you get an "it-just-works"⁺ Unix-like operating system that gives you a development experience on-par with Linux.
If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.
If you care about configuration for your window manager, desktop environment, or systemd services: you will not like macOS.
If you are a graphics engineer or a kernel engineer: you will (probably) not like macOS.
If you are a C++/Rust/Python/JavaScript/Java/mobile/desktop engineer who wants a rock-solid developer environment and doesn't care about the above: you will like macOS.
You get all the Unix tools you could ever want, whatever shell you want to use (Zsh, Fish, even PowerShell), clang/LLVM, etc.
Does that answer your question?
⁺: caveat being "it just works" is getting less and less true with every macOS release.
And I say all this knowing that someone can likely get similar use out of a MS or Linux laptop. At this point, just pick what you know and get on with it.
Even then, that's debatable. Should say if you like doing sysadmin stuff on your own machine.
I am a sysadmin, and my daily driver is an M4 macbook pro and I wouldn't have it any other way. I admin other machines, I don't want to play sysadmin for my own. But its mostly for the hardware more than any other reason.
It's been out for a while.. why are you interested in the debate if you've come this far, have no idea, but want to lead with a counter-assertion?
Perhaps I could have phrased my question better, but what I'm really asking is: for that type of user, why would you pick macOS over Linux when such things are trivial (relatively speaking) in Linux by comparison. Note that I didn't ask "what advantages does macOS have?" I qualified it with: "which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?". I wasn't suggesting that there are no advantages at all. Nuance matters here.
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.
He recently gave up trying to have a wake from sleep that works well too.
I mean, Linux is great, but the paper cuts are still very numerous.
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.
XCode installations failing, Docker installation failing after an OS update never to work again without completely reinstalling OS, plugging in headphones would crash the Macbook (until OS update 6 months after I got it), video calls slowing to a halt, if sharing screen etc.
Also there were some things I just never got used to in Mac like window tabbing & minimize working in a Mac way. Maybe if I hadn't had a personal laptop that used Linux at the same time, I would have gotten used to it a little better, but I just plain hated the way it worked.
To be fair, I think it was still more reliable than varieties of Windows, especially the later ones! If tabbing worked more like under Windows and it allowed a bit more configuration, I might be using Mac these days.
That leaves Linux. Although it's not flawless neither after configuring Debian + i3, it works exactly like I want and the same installation has been reliably working for 5+ years. However, getting to the setup that just works certainly took several tries and depends on laptop compatibility, so... No ideal choices exist right now I think. Just luck and what someone is most used to in the end.
I have very few problems with linux, despite running a fairly unstable rolling release distro. MacOS does have problems. I have no idea whether its more of less reliable, but going on personal experience is not a good sample.
This was reason for me as well. More than decade. Unfortunately it is not the case anymore.
Hardware is still best (in my opinion) but software is not.
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.
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.
But as it stands, going from a Macbook to Linux on a laptop is a downgrade. And you have to pay more for the pleasure of a worse experience.
And macOS is "Linux" since it's BSD-based and has a native Unix shell. If macOS were as different from "Linux" as Windows was, then I probably wouldn't put up with it either.
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.
There was a point in my life when I also thought I needed those creature comforts. Now I've spent 7 years without dailying macOS and I really don't miss it one bit. You could give me a $0.00 Apple Silicon M6 Ultra laptop with 4 days of battery life, and I'd probably still be reaching for my Thinkpad if I wanted to get work done. As a development OS, macOS is borderline intolerable.
For what it's worth I've been using macOS (and OS X) for 14 years, and you only get the notification once after a fresh install and you can click close and it's gone forever, sure Linux is better on this front, but I don't want to spend my whole life tinkering my os until it works. It's still a hell of a lot better than Microsoft consistently shoving Edge down your throat.
I do need a laptop that's good at its job, though. If a laptop sucks at its defining qualities, I'd be better served by a backpackable ITX build or maybe a one of those trendy mini-PCs, because at that point the form factor's tradeoffs are too great to justify.
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
As a power user, I want to use, not to fix, my tools.
I might tinker sometimes, but that is unrelated for me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is funny; it's actually the main reason why I asked for a PC when I was up for renewal at work, so I can run Linux on it.
I truly like the hardware of the mbp, especially the screen (don't care about battery life, I mostly use it at a desk with power nearby). The OS itself is fine, since it can easily run most of the tools I use. I also like how it handles special characters (I can easily type French on an US-ANSI keyboard) to the point that I've implemented that on my Linux and Windows machines.
But what kills it for me is the UI behavior. The window management drives me crazy, especially when multiple screens are involved. And there are quite a few aggravating issues, like being unable to control the audio output of my screen's speakers (connected through DP), being unable to turn off external screens (sometimes I just want to use the power of my monitor, which has an integrated KVM).
Yeah, I know there are programs trying to fix these, but I have to go out of my way trying to find them, and then they're hit and miss. On Linux, everything works as expected (though, granted, it's possible I've won the hardware-compatibility lottery, since it actually works better than on Windows).
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.
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.
As a sysadmin/devops person 90% of my life is emacs, a browser, and collection of terminals. When I get a job I get offered a choice between a windows laptop or a macbook. Sometimes, rarely, I'm allowed Linux, but usually they say "compliance" or that their security scanning software won't support it.
So I use macbooks for work, but I wouldn't pay for one personally. But they allow me to run terraform, git, shells, and similar things in the way that I'm comfortable with.
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 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.
On macOS, I can work on hobby software & graphics/music.
It's a bit softened by the fact that many of them can be replaced/recreated with stock bitwig devices (if you're into that). There's also yabridge, though for me personally it has been a bit hit and miss.
[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Adobe-Photoshop-2025-Wine-Patc...
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.
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 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...
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"
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.
A more general point: you can be a “power user” and not have the time to learn about the absurd stack of technologies that is a Linux DE. You may even be a “power user” and not have a job / education related to computers! Shocking!
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.
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'd love to know what's good ARM notebook which works fine with Linux.
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.
Better security than any Linux distro.
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.
In LInux, you can spend a bunch of time configuring your system to get simple stuff setup. The opposite of "getting work done".
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.
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.
On the other hand, macOS is not that much memory-hungry as one might think. Like, a 4GB VM can start and build software.
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.
No, Dockur is ancient for Intel macOS which is almost useless in today's development as some dev tools are only available for Apple Silicon macOS which cannot be virtualized that way.
macOS is far from perfect, but when the background services are working properly, I don't see any evidence that they're any significant driver of energy usage.
On the other hand, when they're buggy and suddenly start consuming 100% CPU all the time for no reason...
Two processes in particular have been this exact sort of problem for me: mds_stores and mediaanalysisd. On three separate Macs (all Apple Silicon), I've observed the case heating up whenever the computer is plugged in but not actively being used. Assuming Activity Monitor is more or less accurate, the culprit seems to be those two, who always have massive amounts of accumulated CPU time, but never seem to actually be using CPU when watched. I suspect, given what they supposedly do, that they're also needlessly exhausting SSD write cycles, but that's harder to analyze/prove. Naturally, they are also in the untouchable area of the file system. Completely disabling Spotlight, which you can do without disabling SIP, seems to always fix this problem, albeit at the cost of seriously decreased usability. I've also had mixed results with just limiting the categories of Spotlight indexing in System Settings.
which would be where I'd go if total control of the OS on Apple hardware was wanted.
Rather a shame it's so far behind.
It is entirely possible to gain an understanding of those processes running on your computing system and to decide which process you don't want to run at startup, this is regardless of the desires and intents of the maker of the computing system, as long as you retain control of the hardware. Many of the Windows optimization tools at various points even involved community made binary patching. There's no basis to claim that it's not possible to understand or take actions, it's just that the Mac community has a different set of priorities and focus areas than other computing communities, so nobody in the community has yet invested the effort to do so.
You could summarize this blog post as answering "No" to the question in its title, without actually exploring the question to determine if that's a true answer. It's not a true answer, and won't be until we completely lose control over our own hardware.
Windows 11 is far deeper into the sewer.
I don't know what school of contemporary design you hail from, but you can't piss on my back and tell me it's raining. Liquid Glass needs an 8.1 update, at the very least.
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.
Windows used to be known as the OS you'd "have to" tinker with.
Early versions of OS X allowed more freedom in what you could do with the OS. As soon as SSV/SIP entered, that cut off a lot of freeform access.
Asahi's not perfect, but there's no restrictions. You bought the computer, after all.
Seems ok enough if you want to use a M1 mini as desktop or server.
It would be no less secure than any modern or common linux OS, which do not use a read only signed root.
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.
It’s “footprint” and no it does not do that