[HN Gopher] Apple macOS 15 Sequoia is officially Unix
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Apple macOS 15 Sequoia is officially Unix
Author : pjmlp
Score : 71 points
Date : 2024-10-12 20:33 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| dmd wrote:
| This isn't new for Sequioa. OS X has been certified by the Open
| Group for decades now.
| dmd wrote:
| (According to wikipedia: All versions of macOS from Mac OS X
| Leopard to macOS 10.15 Catalina, except for OS X Lion,[68] have
| been registered on Intel-based systems, and all versions from
| macOS 11 Big Sur, the successor to macOS Catalina, to macOS 14
| Sonoma have been registered on both x86-64 and ARM64 systems.)
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Yeah this is misleadingly worded as if this is something new
| for Apple. They've been officially certified as Unix for 16
| years now.
| weikju wrote:
| What's new is a new level?tier? Of the certification that
| macOS sequoia has been certified for, rather than the overall
| Unix certification. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41698775
| nasretdinov wrote:
| I wonder what's the reason for Apple to do this though?
| Convincing more people to run a macOS server instead of a
| Linux/BSD one is unlikely the reason (in my mind), but it doesn't
| make any other sense either...
| linguae wrote:
| Official Unix certification may matter at workplaces and
| institutions where such certifications are required for meeting
| some type of compliance criteria. For example, if I remember
| correctly, early versions of Windows NT had a POSIX
| compatibility layer, which was crucial for getting Windows NT
| accepted by some US government agencies.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Still, I hope Apple resurrects their server line... hardware
| and software. It'd be nice to have a server oriented UNIX
| running on Apple Silicon without resorting to Linux.
| mattl wrote:
| OpenBSD works on Apple silicon, has done for the last few
| releases.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| Cutler must have hated that layer!
| lemme_tell_ya wrote:
| > I wonder what's the reason for Apple to do this though?
|
| > it was done to get Apple out of a $200M lawsuit filed by The
| Open Group, for use of the UNIX(tm) trademark in advertising.
|
| https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
| mmastrac wrote:
| I'm hoping this pushes them to finally implement the glaring gaps
| in Unix compat: specifically pipe2.
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| But is pipe2 not Linux specific? It isn't POSIX, AFAIK.
| rockenman1234 wrote:
| How is macOS certified as 'Unix' but the modern BSD's aren't?
| Didn't they all come from the same codebase?
| mattl wrote:
| Apple paid for certification.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| certification costs money
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Being certified Unix has nothing to do with being based on
| Unix code either anymore, Huawei paid for their Linux distro
| based on RHEL (EulerOS) to be certified Unix once.
| sbuk wrote:
| > Being certified Unix has nothing to with being based on
| Unix code...
|
| Never has. In very simple terms, it was always about
| standardizing OS interfaces for variant Unices. Over time,
| it's moved on to be aligned with POSIX.
| daneel_w wrote:
| They did not come from the same codebase, though that's less
| relevant in this case.
| mdasen wrote:
| It's not simply that certification costs money. It's that a lot
| of modern UNIX-like operating systems don't adhere to the UNIX
| spec. For example, the OpenBSD man pages specify the ways in
| which they diverge from POSIX and UNIX in the Standards
| section: https://man.openbsd.org/sh.1#STANDARDS,
| https://man.openbsd.org/awk.1#STANDARDS. Often times these are
| small deviations that might not matter to most people, but it
| means that they aren't UNIX.
|
| Terry Lambert has written about the work he did to make Mac OS
| X UNIX compliant: https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-
| an-OS-to-be-Unix...
|
| I don't know how much it costs for the Open Group to certify an
| OS as UNIX compliant (if anything).
|
| A lot of the time, things are compliant in most of the common
| stuff, but they might not implement all of UNIX or POSIX. Close
| isn't compliant, but it's enough that most people don't care.
| For example, do you care if your Linux disto comes with the
| `pax` command? Or do you just use `tar`?
|
| Apple had started calling OS X UNIX and was being sued for
| calling it UNIX when it wasn't actually UNIX. They decided it'd
| be cheaper to do the work to make OS X UNIX compliant than to
| deal with the lawsuit and that's what they did. BSDs never
| cared about calling themselves UNIX so they never went into the
| nitty gritty of making themselves UNIX compliant.
| tempodox wrote:
| This sounds rather dry and abstract. What I would rather like to
| know is: If I installed Sequoia on my x86_64 Mac, what would I
| lose in comparison to Ventura? I assume newer OSs increasingly
| drop x64 support.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Not much
| tester756 wrote:
| Why is this relevant?
|
| Who is interested about such certification?
| Terretta wrote:
| Anyone who either develops or requires POSIX (now UNIX)
| compliant services or tools?
| rzzzt wrote:
| Historically, the US Government. NIST mandated that only those
| operating systems should be used where existing applications
| can easily be ported to and fro, and POSIX compliant OS-s tick
| all the boxes. Windows NT got its POSIX subsystem for this
| reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Which was hobbled to the point of uselessness are purely a
| box ticking exercise.
| Animats wrote:
| Most cross-platform applications for desktops and servers. If
| you write to the POSIX standard, it will work on a wide range
| of systems. Many applications don't need to go beyond that.
| prisenco wrote:
| Does Apple have renewed server plans on the horizon?
| synergy20 wrote:
| my problem with macos is not Unix certification but its
| keyboard,the odd CMD key messed up with my other ten non Mac
| keyboards
| chongli wrote:
| I think it's what you're used to. I'm used to the Mac keyboard
| (since 1994) and I much prefer the command key for keyboard
| shortcuts. I can use my thumb all day but pressing control with
| my pinkie starts to hurt really quickly!
| aaomidi wrote:
| I need to find a guide on how to get the Mac keyboard
| experience on Linux. I agree that it's objectively better.
| coolcoder613 wrote:
| I agree. I really like the ALT shortcuts on Haiku, and I
| remap my external keyboard on macOS so command is mapped to
| ALT rather than Super.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Press Ctrl with a side of your palm, I've been doing that for
| years after a brief stint with emacs, no problems with the
| finger.
|
| Also, on decent keyboards (not necessarily _expensive_ ) you
| can remap the keys anyway.
| ninkendo wrote:
| I love CMD because it's part of the copy/paste shortcut but not
| used for any terminal control codes. So there's no confusion
| about whether you're going to accidentally SIGTERM something in
| the terminal by trying to copy text.
|
| I really really wish I could have this behavior on Linux... but
| alas, every app under the sun chooses its own copy/paste
| shortcut and they all use ctrl+C/V by convention so you can't
| configure it globally without rewriting every app (ok maybe you
| could narrow it down to a few GUI libraries like gtk/qt/etc but
| it's still a huge undertaking.)
|
| I'd settle for "ctrl-c is copy if text is selected, SIGTERM
| otherwise" logic, which I think Windows's console uses, but
| none of the Linux terminals I've tried support that. I'm left
| with ctrl-shift-C for copy, which leaks into my muscle memory,
| then I accidentally use that combo in the web browser too and
| it opens developer tools or something. So annoying.
| yegle wrote:
| Copy on selection is ubiquitous in all terminal apps.
| Shift+insert can be a reliable "paste" shortcut in most
| places.
| ninkendo wrote:
| I can't stand X11-style copy-on-select/middle-click-paste,
| and disable that everywhere if that's what you're referring
| to. I habitually highlight text as I read it and hate it
| when it blows away my existing copy buffer. I want explicit
| copying, I just don't want it to collide with SIGTERM.
| sbuk wrote:
| Shift+ins is CUA, an actual standard. Which makes far more
| sense than parroting Microsoft's decision to use CTRL as a
| modifier, aping Mac OSs keyboard shortcuts in Windows 3.1.
| yegle wrote:
| TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
| ninkendo wrote:
| That's fine for paste, but copy is the real problem.
| Also, shift and insert are very very far apart from each
| other and are not one-handable if you're holding the
| mouse with the other hand.
| sbuk wrote:
| Copy is Ctrl+Ins, cut is Shift+Del. Looking at my ANSI
| keyboard, all are achievable with one hand. Though, when
| these were designed, GUI's on IBM based machines weren't
| really a thing and two-handed keyboard shortcuts were
| common-place.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I've used MacOS with an old IBM model M for 20 years... I map
| the caps lock key to CMD, as I dislike and never use caps lock.
| clhodapp wrote:
| I've never understood how they keep getting certified when, if I
| recall correctly, POSIX semaphores are broken on MacOS
| amiga386 wrote:
| The brown M&M test is: can you call poll() on a terminal device?
|
| This lack of functionality has been in existence since Mac OS X's
| inception. It's the reason why a cross-platform software _always_
| has to support both select() and poll() to check if a user is
| typing on the terminal -- select() just for Mac OS X, and poll()
| for every other system. Wouldn't it be nice if we could
| standardise on poll()?
|
| Compare what macOS manpages say:
|
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Sy...
|
| > BUGS: The poll() system call currently _does not support
| devices_.
|
| with the requirements for certification:
|
| https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799.2024edition...
|
| > The poll() and ppoll() functions _shall support_ regular files,
| _terminal and pseudo-terminal devices_ , FIFOs, pipes, and
| sockets.
|
| Is the bug fixed in macOS 15 or is this certification yet another
| load of horseshit?
| divbzero wrote:
| Certification aside, Linux and macOS are so similar that I only
| think about the difference in the rare instances where they
| differ: three that come to mind are xdg-open _vs._ open , systemd
| _vs._ launchd, and sed -i _vs._ sed -i ''.
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| GNU vs BSD grep is the main one for me. And all the other
| extremely convenient GNU-isms that I've grown used to in
| GNU/Linux.
| torstenvl wrote:
| The only GNU-ism I really missed was the `--group-
| directories-first` option for `ls`
|
| But that was easy enough to fix. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| kelnos wrote:
| GNU coreutils often have many different options than their BSD
| counterparts. They both (generally) share a POSIX-specified
| base wrt options and behavior, but if you commonly only work
| with one of the two, it's easy to accidentally write non-
| portable shell scripts.
| lucsky wrote:
| LXC vs... um... (sigh)...
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Curious, why does it matter?
| sbuk wrote:
| Marketing. They called OS X, as it was at the time, 'UNIX' but
| didn't pay the Open Group for certification. The Open Group
| sued, and Apple figured it was cheaper to certify, so they did,
| and have done ever since.
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