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Comment by gaspoweredcat | Hacker News Reader

well you learn something every day (and it also shows my complete lack of apple knowledge) i always thought apples operating systems were unix based.

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BSD can be called a direct descendant of the original Unix, in contrast to Linux. So macOS is Unix.

Also, macOS became officially Unix-certified in 2007 [0], so it can legitimately claim to be a version of Unix.

But it's still based on BSD, which is a descendent of the original AT&T Unix.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/apple/2007/08/mac-os-x-leopard-recei...

Reminds me of the old quote (no idea who the original author is): "BSD is what you get when a bunch of UNIX hackers sit down to try to port a UNIX system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a UNIX system for the PC."

I don't see why - all the design decisions of the original unix are alive and kicking in linux. User and kernel space. Nothing fundamentally separates the two.

Actually they are not. POSIX? Sure. But Linux is notorious for NIH and is incredibly off in the weeds in incompatible and broken ways from the UNIX world. Have you tried porting software written for Linux to another platform??

I don't see what point you're trying to make. UNIX does not guarantee portability, so of course software for Linux doesn't work out-of-the-box, or even build for that matter, in other UNIXoids.

Linux's NIH syndrome, however unfortunate it is, has not expanded into its unix roots. (yet?)

They still are! *BSDs are types of UNIX, so is macOS.

Is not osx more of a next kernel with NIX(BSD) userland ?

Yes and no. The macOS kernel is a hybrid kernel, containing three major subsystems:

  * Core IPC is from Carnegie-Mellon's Mach microkernel.
  * Interprocess communication and virtual file system APIs from BSD.
  * A custom driver API written in C++ called IOKit.

However, the kernel is probably the least interesting part of your computer; what users consider the ‘operating system’ lies in the user land. As long as the kernel works and supports your hardware devices, you needn't care. As an example, both FreeBSD and Windows can pretend to be a Linux kernel and run a nearly complete GNU user land, and multiple quite different user lands exist on top of the Linux kernel, the most prominent being Android and the GNU tools.

> Windows can pretend to be a Linux kernel and run a nearly complete GNU user land

I've recently taken to calling it 'GNU plus Windows'.

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