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Comment by legohead | Hacker News Reader

It sounds cool, but even though his remarks are clear, I'm still confused!

I got a Mac primarily because of its linux side, but it is actually Linux.

This is still Windows, but with a Linux "side" to it? If I apt-get install redis, do I make it startup like I would in linux, or do I use windows services? In the screenshot there's a /mnt directory, is that behaving the same as it does in linux?

This is so confusing... but if it's legit, then I would actually look at switching back to windows.

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> I got a Mac primarily because of its linux side, but it is actually Linux.

No, it's not. OSX is literally UNIX. OSX is based off Darwin, which is based off BSD.

To be more specific, darwin was originally based on BSD4.4-lite2 and FreeBSD with the Mach hybrid microkernel. It has diverged significantly since with lots of new APIs in userland, but all major BSD apis are still there - it is still a POSIX compliant system

NeXTSTEP originally used 4.3BSD-Tahoe as its base with Mach, and Darwin's a direct descendent of that.

When I look at it, I basically see NeXTSTEP which is UNIX... I see a lot of OS X is BSD, or, OS X is Darwin + BSD, all I see is NeXTSTEP with a worse interface...

When I say OX is literally UNIX, the emphasis is on the word 'literally'. To be classified as a UNIX system, meaning that an OS maker can use the UNIX trademark, the system have to be certified by the The Open Group.

BSD was UNIX, yet neither of it's 2 prevalent derivatives (FreeBSD and OpenBSD) has applied for certification. They are classified as Unix-like; the same is true for any Linux distribution.

To some people, this may be semantics, but one of the reasons that drew me to OSX was the certification.

What appeals to you about the certification? Are there ways in which OS X behaves in a "more standard" way than FreeBSD ?

yes, I got the reference. I was talking about personal impressions, I was not clear about it though, sorry. I still remember when they (Apple) run an ad showing a powerbook running Mac OS X saying "Send other UNIX to /dev/null", how excited I was at the time :-P

Almost all of the userland command-line tools are from BSD. The most important exception is clang which is independent (though Apple has historically been the biggest contributor).

Also, large parts of the kernel are from BSD.

> I got a Mac primarily because of its linux side, but it is actually Linux.

No part of Mac OS comes from Linux at all. Also, most of the standard tools are from BSD, not GNU.

Maybe you meant "it's a UNIX-like system" but those predate Linux by 30 years or so, and at any rate Windows + Cygwin was already a UNIX-like system to a similar extent, so that's not really relevant to what was accomplished here.

Macs aren't actually linux, they are based (a port I think) on Unix though and are very close relatives to linux.

There is a distinction because you will notice much larger differences between Mac and [insert linux distro here] compared to linux distros to each other.

They are not "very close relatives to linux" unless you also think Solaris, Windows+cygwin, FreeBSD etc. are also very close relatives to Linux. In which case the term becomes meaningless because almost every mainstream OS is a close relative of every other one.

And that's why we all should conert to TempleOS once and for all.

To be more accurate, your Mac isn't Linux, it's BSD. Luckily that *NIX underpinning is often enough to make it a solid development platform even when deploying to Linux.

It's not really BSD either; it's a mix of a bunch of stuff. The kernel XNU is a hybrid between Mach and BSD. I think there are also a few GNU utilities in the base system but I could be wrong about that (?)

    $ uname
    Darwin
    $ /usr/bin/cmp --version
    cmp (GNU diffutils) 2.8.1
    [...]

Right! I though there was still some GNU stuff floating around ;). Thanks for the example.

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