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Whenever I use the CLI on a mac, I am frustrated by the absense of all the GNU extensions that aren't there when I use the core utilities, and that the version of bash is ancient.

I mean I still prefer it over windows, but it is not the same experience as linux.

I’m not well-versed enough to know how well it measures up, but Mac switched to ZSH as default shell about a year ago.

I think zsh might well be more powerful than bash but it's extremely opinionated about how it does stuff (unless you want to go down a configuration rabbit hole) - for me, coming off 20+ years of bash muscle memory, it was unusable and I switched back.

The last time I used a Mac I remember the absolute headfuck that was all the different ways to make it "more unixy"

"Oh just use Macports!"

"No macports is trash, use Homebrew!"

"Homebrew sucks, use Gentoo/kMacOSX!"

Of course none of them were particularly interoperable at the time and all had extremely arcane invocations and setups. It was very lipstick on a pig

I haven't used homebrew but I use macports all the time without any issues. shrug

Not much more of a headfuck than the flavours of Linux distros and their package managers and guis. "More unixy" is also a bad pun, there's nothing more unixy about it, just a package manager - pick one and use it. Been using homebrew without much of a problem almost for a decade.

I'm very happy with Homebrew. I find the model way easier than Linux packages.

It is the same experience as UNIX though, including the fact that each flavour has its own way of doing stuff.

This is really a non-issue and easy to get around. You can easily install the GNU utilities which take precedence in your PATH. I installed them all with Homebrew in a few minutes, including bash5. You can follow this guide[0] as a start.

[0] https://gist.github.com/skyzyx/3438280b18e4f7c490db8a2a2ca0b...

It is an issue if I need to rewrite my scripts specifically for macOS and they are no longer cross-platform.

Yeah, you can alias all utilities called g<something> to <something>, but you can't reasonably expect all users of your scripts to do so as well.

Using macOS is PITA.

If you're using GNU extensions, then you are not writing cross-platform scripts in the first place.

The value of great looking hardware and a great looking OS is strong.

The value of being able to open the lid on a brand new machine and just run a terminal is significant. It’s compelling.

It sounds so silly but it’s the same silly that makes us buy the same beer and the same coffee and shop in the same stores all the time.

I migrated off macOS for good during the pandemic though. I yearned for rc.local and xinitrc too much. I live a somewhat (ahem) humbler life now with i3, Firefox, python, vim, and Notable: they were all I really needed, but I miss the shiny.

Same. Only reason I even look at OSX is because of the terminal/BASH and how easy that makes programming-related work. For everything else, I think windows is way better.

I actually like the Mac GUI for GUI specific tools, but to each their own. No big deal. I used to use Macs in the early days and always had a separate unix workstation. When OSX gave me both, I was all set.

I've used OSX a lot back 8-10 years ago and while it is in fact a Unix that doesn't mean it is just another *Nix distro, there were some massive disadvantages to it for my use cases (people who can stand constantly switching between touch pad and keyboard seemed to fare a bit better in this regard as their touch pads were excellent):

- modifier keys varied by application (was it alt-shift-left, CMD-shift or ctrl-shift-left I should use to select one word back in this app..?)

- CMD-tab only switching between applications is probably nice if you have good time to ponder your next move. When I only want to go back to whatever application-or-window I came from and I end up a completely different place because the last place I were was another window of the same application it breaks my flow and it is infuriating.

So yes. I'd very much want a Linux distro on it.

It's unpopular because it's not good or solid, unless you don't care about openness and privacy. In which case you're not really worth thinking about in the context of Linux distros. There is plenty of closed software that compromises your privacy around.

Agree completely. My OSX environment fully mirrors various Linux deployment environments I run well enough to test any kind of shell scripting or crontabs or anything else I need to test locally before deploying them. Also, Parallels and VMWare both say they'll release M1 compatible virtual machines soon should you need a specific release to test on. I don't see the point of shelling out for Apple hardware if you just want to run a Linux distribution as your main OS. I'm more bothered by the current inability to boot into Windows.

> I suspect if Windows had been unix based like Mac OS, Linux would not have become quite so popular.

I fully agree with you. Microsoft's biggest mistake was not giving the POSIX subsystem the same level of relevance than Win32 and just carrying it around to fill check boxes.

Had they been serious about it, it would have been more than enough for UNIX like workflows.

It's an old, crufty Unix that had various components replaced with proprietary Apple software. Take a look at how a modern Unix does networking, versus how Apple is forcing the market to use their proprietary network APIs.