Posted by john_alan 12 hours ago
We just ssh/http to the real Linux machine that runs our things anyway. These days with commoditized VPN and symmetric residential Gigabit internet, that Linux box does not have to be in the cloud either (specially with LLMs guiding the sysadmin tasks).
Any thin client with a browser, an ssh client and an internet connection will do the job.
Sometimes just having a local machine that you can do everything on is what you need
It was Tahoe, it’s since been removed.
The UNIX03 page still lists it, but I believe that’s a mistake.
macOS has been removed from the main register/list.
Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't passed certification yet? It's less than a month old.
This is just a site rendering issue. Rather than silently removed, it's more like some bug was introduced. macOS 26 is still Unix 03 certified.
People care that macOS has a lot of compatibility with Linux/BSD, but most don't care that it's UNIX® - just as people don't care that Linux/BSD aren't UNIX® compatible. Yes, Linux/BSD are very similar to UNIX® and mostly compatible, but they don't conform to the specification.
You (probably) don't care about the UNIX® specification. You care that your MacBook has good compatibility with Linux/BSD infrastructure. Many people assume that Linux/BSD are UNIX® and just don't pay for certification. They aren't UNIX® compatible. They are extremely similar, but they don't follow the spec 100%.
Sorry for putting the ® everywhere, but people often use UNIX when they mean nix-like operating systems and when we're talking about whether people care about macOS as a UNIX® or not, it matters whether were saying "people want macOS to be UNIX®" vs "people want macOS to have good compatibility with nix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD like it does today." People usually care a lot about the latter and not about the former.
They probably also buy MacBooks since they’re reliable, performant, high-endurance (battery life) general purpose business laptops that employees like using and see good productivity with.
macOS as a more Linuxy-friendly place to work on Linuxy-type software, sure. Definitely true compared to Windows. But no one cares if macOS is blessed as Official UNIX.
How many people are writing software that they need to be able to run on Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX in 2026?
Writing on Mx Mac and deploying on Intel Debian is a little harder in the beginning, but spares you oh, so many footguns down the road. Eventually you might want to deploy to a different OS or arch for cost or convenience reasons. That's a really bad time to find out that your project can't be made to work there without heroics.
And yes, they are different even at the user end on the shell.
In practice, anyone seriously developing Linux software on either macOS or Windows is using VMs or containers running the actual Linux kernel, at least for testing, and the difference is that Microsoft has put far more effort into integrating specific support for these things into the OS.
I just wonder if macOS will stop being UNIX like.
That is, whilst it still has home brew and a BSD core it’s great. If that goes away it’s no longer a viable alternative to Linux.
Apple is highly incentivized to keep devs on Macs, even if it turned out to be a loss leader for them.
It’s insanely common.
Given that Windows made WSL in an attempt to capture developer mindshare, that tends to support his comment
At Apple, if you even use GPL tools in your workflow you have to seek approval, and most often there’s pushback of “why won’t this (alternative that isn’t GPL) work ?”
Their lawyers aren’t stupid, they understand the GPL and its limits, but they’re simply doing a risk assessment- which one is less risky, the GPL variant or the BSD. For a corporation, that’s generally BSD.
The remaining differences are related more to systems stuff - managing daemons with launchd for example. These aren't really a distraction day-to-day.
The fact that someone who didn’t grow up at the time when open source was an idealistic concept instead of free support to corporations needs to learn about the gnutils and how to install them with homebrew is what makes me sad.
Why do we seriously not have a command-line package manager on macOS yet? Windows has one by now. It’s just sad to me that you need a manual checklist of post-setup steps to turn a Mac into a useful machine for software development.
Developers and operations people are already starting to move to Linux. More and more I see colleague either switching to Linux, or have a mac laptop for administrative tasks and then a Linux workstation, or VMs, where they do their actual work.
I’ve been in this industry for a long time now. Linux always had more credibility among devs and ops folk. This “starting to move” view is weird.
My view is that OS X was acceptable by these teams because it was close enough to Linux and corporate could deal with it.
When I worked in corporate IT Linux was simply not an option for a primary workstation because there was no standard configuration or management tooling that made everyone happy. Macs were an easy compromise.
https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-...
I don’t think it makes business sense for them to mass produce these for a consumer market but a data center of M5 chips sounds amazing for the workloads they’re running.
I don’t think the open source model will ever make an Apple quality UI because that’s the result of highly opinionated executives like Steve Jobs who don’t need to compromise or allow customization.
I’m glad both exist. I use them both and my life is good
[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2026/09/29/wsl-co...
You might wanna look into that because that’s not how it works at all. I frequently switch between terminal and GUI apps and have not once noticed Finder failing to catch up with whatever it is I’m doing in the terminal.
Neither Apple nor NeXT had a UNIX culture, and efforts like A/UX and mkLinux were never that much serious.
Had they acquired Be, BeOS was even less UNIXy than NeXTSTEP.
Edit: love how I get downvoted for facts?! They literally broke Cocoa so it was throwing hopeless useless exceptions at the bottom of the stack when they changed the native file open boxes to run in another process. Two bits of software I use couldn't raise an open file dialog window any more.
Is this Apple just not wanting to pay for the certification anymore or does it actually change anything for us devs?
> Is this Apple just not wanting to pay for the certification anymore or does it actually change anything for us devs?
It's probably not about paying and more about tiny differences. Will it change anything for you? Almost certainly not. In fact, it might make things better for you. If anything, Apple's adherence to the UNIX spec can sometimes mean subtle differences in tools between macOS and BSD/Linux. Do you want things like grep or sed that conform to the UNIX spec or that work like grep and sed work in the real world?
And these differences are often small edge cases that don't come up much, but a spec is a spec.
The money is inconsequential for Apple, but at this point it probably makes more sense to just stop calling it UNIX and not worry about shipping a version of a tool exactly meets the UNIX spec - it'd be more useful for their users if it matched the behavior on Linux/BSD.
That grep/sed difference on mac caused me issues so many times, always thought it was just Apple doing their own thing. I didn't realize it was a spec thing.
Both aim to conform to the POSIX, but POSIX is a very spartan spec, people routinely use non-POSIX features without realizing it.
Tahoe, Sequoia, Ventura, and Monterey were in main list until October 7.
Can't figure out the reason.
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27095/why...
https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
More than 1 Linux distributions have been tested, passed, and listed in the past... But you need to pay again every year, and recertify every new version, and they didn't bother keeping it up.
I described them and what this meant in some depth in this 2023 article:
https://www.theregister.com/software/2023/01/17/unix-is-dead...
This is UNIX 03 certified OS with OSS alternatives from I gathered on internet :
- Apple OS X 10.7 - Apple macOS 26 , provide OSS Darwin 9 - Darwin 26
- Oracle Solaris 10 / 11 , provide OSS OpenSolais , then Illumos
- EulerOS 2.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 7 and 8
- Inspur K-UX 2.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 5
- Inspur K-UX 3.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 7
It was Stallman who came up with the name POSIX by the way.
They were CentOS Linux derivatives.
At best a distro could be certified. But that certification would not automatically extend to other distros.
The story behind macOS UNIX certification.