macOS is UNIX. If your workflow is heavy on the command line, it feels pretty similar to Linux, which is no surprise. The userspace is definitely different (it’s not GNU) but if you ssh into a macOS box, you should feel pretty much at home.
I feel like a lot of these flame wars are basically just “I like Y GUI better.” Which is one of the great things about Linux of course, that I can run i3 and you can run Plasma. For me, having a more-or-less unified (command line) interface across my Linux laptop, my various home lab SBCs, my VPS, and my work laptop is pretty nice.
(And yes. I would much, much, much prefer i3 to yabai on macOS.)
In this case, I think the OS being closed source and kind of a “walled garden” where a company controls everything is what most Linux users dislike about Mac.
None, or at least very few of us hate on FreeBSD or OpenIndiana the way we do on macOSX, so it’s not about it being UNIX. Furthermore, some Linux DEs can resemble the mac interface a bit, like GNOME, or even KDE if it’s customized a certain way. Granted, GNOME does have a few haters among us, but not at the same level as Apple.
macOS: there are very few issues, but when you encounter one, it’s impossible to fix
Linux: there are lots of issues, and but they are all fixable, but each fix might be a rabbit hole of figuring out how to compile someone’s GitHub project they seemingly abandoned 4 years ago.
But boy oh boy, do you learn things from those rabbit holes. It can be a MASSIVE pain, but I enjoy that I’m at least picking up XP points whenever I make time to fix stuff and learn more.
Honestly the only issues I run into on macOS are things that I’m probably doing to waste time anyway, like enable some random feature or setting that might be useful 1 in 1000 use cases and when that use case rolls around I’d have forgotten about the feature and end up doing it manually anyway.
It’s technically Unix, but with randomised directories, with illegible logs, with a lot of the openness taken out and replaced by Apple’s “our way or the highway”. It’s Unix for people who didn’t want Unix anyway.
If your workflow is heavy on the command-line you’d probably get more value out of Windows with WSL than you would from MacOS… At least then it’s Linux everywhere rather than having to remember the differences between GNU coreutils and MacOS coreutils.
Sure, but you can also brew install coreutils on macOS.
My point is only that macOS is UNIX. Linux looks a whole lot like UNIX**. But no matter how much you squint, Windows isn’t UNIX. Which is completely fine, and everyone is entitled to prefer whatever OS they choose. For me personally, macOS feels familiar. I will always choose Linux if I have the choice, but barring that, I’ll take an OS where I can rsync over my .zshrc and .vimrc with minimal shenanigans.
**And in some cases is UNIX — EulerOS, a Linux distro, was UNIX-certified.
