today at 10:33 PM
They wanted mo' money from Apple than it was willing to give them.
Anyway, who cares. FreeBSD is Unix no matter what some standards organization says.
today at 12:28 PM
The certification was always a bit odd, applying only to a configuration nobody would run in practice: https://www.osnews.com/story/141633/apples-macos-unix-certif...
today at 2:31 PM
The certification documents read like the world's most abstruse bar trivia quiz...
"1.12 Threads
1.12.1 Cancellation Points
Question 31: Which C stdio functions have cancellation points that occur when a thread is executing?"
https://www.opengroup.org/csq/repository/noreferences=1&RID=...
today at 10:22 PM
I had no idea there was a built-in way to make the filesystem case sensitive. My employer probably does not want me to spend time reinstalling my OS for this now but maybe next time I'm given a MacBook for a job I should do this...
today at 3:48 PM
If you'd try to certify any modern Linux distribution, you'd end up with a very similar list.
- The Linux kernel also has timer coalescing
- Linux also has lazy atime ('relatime') by default
- No Linux distro installs uucp by default, and certainly not suid
- Desktop distros will also run a file indexer of some sort
etc.
today at 4:32 PM
Isnât the difference here that Linux was never trying to claim UNIX certification?
today at 8:42 PM
If I remember correctly, two Linux variants were on the list at one time.
They were:
Inspur K-UX (expired on 3 February 2019)
Huawei EulerOS (expired in September 2022)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspur_K-UX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EulerOS
These were both based on Red Hat.
today at 8:23 PM
And famously, GNU's Not UNIX
today at 8:27 PM
Huawei managed to get their RHEL fork (EulerOS) UNIX certified. However their certificate expired (probably due to sanctions?)
So legally at one point a Linux was Unix.
today at 10:09 PM
The relevant text from the article, (the rest of this comment is a direct quote from the article):
So, if you want your installation of macOS 15.0 to pass the UNIXÂź 03 certification test suites, you need to disable System Integrity Protection, enable the root account, enable core file generation, disable timeout coalescing, mount any APFS partitions with the strictatime option, format your APFS partitions case-sensitive (by default, APFS is case-insensitive, so youâll need to reinstall), disable Spotlight, copy the binaries uucp, uuname, uustat, and uux from /usr/bin to /usr/local/bin and the binaries uucico and uuxqt from /usr/sbin to /usr/local/bin, set the setuid bit on all of these binaries, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH before /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, enable the uucp service, and handle the mystery issues listed in the four Temporary Waivers.
Then, and only then, is your macOS 15.0 actually UNIXÂź 03-certified.
This is batshit insane. I can guarantee you with 100% certainly not a single macOS installation in the entire history of macOS â let alone when just counting macOS 15.0 â has implemented even half of these changes. Iâm sure there is a small number of people who have System Integrity Protection disabled permanently, and an even smaller number of people who have enabled the root account, and an even smaller number of people who have done both of those things â but thatâs it. All the other changes are far too obscure and specific to be of any use to anyone.
today at 1:22 PM
The certification also was kind of bad at actually checking that the standard interfaces behaved as they should.
today at 12:56 PM
Reminds me of (technically) POSIX compatible Windows.
today at 4:10 PM
"""POSIXLY_CORRECT (originally proposed as POSIX_ME_HARDER) is a historical environment variable used in GNU utilities to force strict compliance with the POSIX standard."""
today at 4:42 PM
ah, yes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
the netbsd gallery (https://netbsd.org/gallery/) had a picture of somebody using that on windows xp (iirc) in order to compile pkgsrc packages in a "posix compliant" environment. the picture seem to be gone now :(
today at 12:52 PM
The whole UNIX certified thing is a bit odd to start with, but those addendums are really just saying that because the UNIX compliance tests are thoroughly stuck in the past, a bunch of security measures (that users expect to exist on modern systems) have to be disabled to run the test suite.
today at 8:55 PM
Yup. And why is UUCP still in there? I mean, yes I have used it, so far back that the docs were written in Quenya. But requiring it now?
Btw, MacOS 27 (the current version) still has UUCP.
today at 1:26 PM
SIP is not some irrelevant detail, nor is it an obviously good "modern security practice". A system that the hardware owner cannot modify is not really on the same wavelength as traditional UNIX.
today at 2:00 PM
The hardware owner can modify it all they want, disable SIP. For a large swath of average and non-average users that will not be modifying the closed-source OS they're running, it is obviously good.
Traditional UNIX is does not mean having an open source core you're intended to tinker with. Traditional UNIX was entirely proprietary, connected with well-defined text-based interfaces. This is entirely orthogonal to user control and manipulation of the OS.
today at 8:18 PM
Also worth keeping in mind that macOS is intended for use with commercial third party software thatâs repeatedly been proven untrustworthy, doing things like prodding system internals and installing dodgy kernel extensions where neither is warranted.
SIP is as much defense from the likes of Adobe and Google as it is from more traditional malware.
today at 9:11 PM
For now SIP can be disabled (on mac, not of course on iOS that is completely closed) but I wonder for how much. It's clear that the desire of Apple is to make macOS a closed system like iOS, installing third party software outside the AppStore is more and more difficult, with Gatekeeper that asks you to enter the system settings and warn about "potential insecure stuff" each time you want to run an application downloaded from the internet not signed by Apple (yes I know that if you disable SIP you can get rid of Gatekeeper as well).
I think that piece by piece Apple wants to go into direction of making macOS just a desktop version of iOS, that is closed and impossible to modify. They will use of course security as an excuse, the practical thing is that with iOS they succeeded because they went to the market with an OS that was already closed, but making users accept that in new version downloading a software from the internet and installing it it's no longer possible takes time. But they are getting there soon to me.
today at 2:48 PM
today at 3:03 PM
Traditional UNIX was entirely proprietary, with source you're intended to tinker with.
AT&T was forbidden by its consent decree from productizing Unix. Licensees received the source code, on an as-is basis, with no official support from AT&T.
today at 4:51 PM
Sure, but that just means UNIX vendors had access to the source code.
It doesn't mean end users had access to the source code.
In fact, vendors would have been prohibited from distributing AT&T source code to customers who weren't themselves AT&T licensees, just as CSRG was prohibited from distributing BSD to customers who weren't licensees before 4.4BSD-Lite.
The same goes for most other proprietary source-available products. For example, game developers can't open source Unreal Engine projects even though Unreal Engine source licenses are available to end users for free.
today at 6:32 PM
You would absolutely normally get source to the vast majority of the unix components with a unix install.
At a bare minimum, you would almost have to have source to the vast majority of the kernel because there was no kernel modules. Sysgenning for a particular system involved compiling the kernel for that set of hardware.
I'm literally working on an early sun system emulator right now, heavily assisted by the standard sec tape that came with the standard software distribution of sunos, which has plenty of AT&T code.
today at 4:34 PM
Sure, if by âyouâ you mean universities, Sun, DEC, IBM, etc.
As a non corporation end user with a sublicense from one of the above licensees (which is the apt analogy for an individual user in my opinion) you most certainly did not receive the source or have the rights to it.
today at 12:27 PM
Tahoe was Unix 03 certified, and is still listed on that page if you filter by standard and choose Unix 03.
Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't yet passed certification.
today at 2:49 PM
I swear I've seen these "[Latest macOS release] does not appear in UNIX certification site" threads every year since the release of Big Sur in 2020.
It takes several months for the certification to appear on the site. What would be newsworthy is if we see a release next year without this release getting certification.
today at 8:07 PM
If you want to start a new trend, you should do this with FIPS 140, which has to be recertified every year. "Apple crypto is no longer FIPS certified"
Even better, last year's 26 releases are still undergoing the process.
today at 8:32 PM
This is what flagging is for.
today at 10:03 PM
This comment should be at the top. The title implies a non-issue: macOS silently disappears because the poster didnât try to change the page's badly designed filter. The latest version of macOS probably will appear in months.
today at 4:21 PM
Apple originally certified Mac OS X as a UNIX because they used the word UNIX all over their website and the Open Group came knocking; they decided it was cheaper/better for goodwill to do the conformance and pay the license fee than to fight the case in court.
Looking now, I see almost no uses of the word UNIX on the website except the docs archive, so I guess theyâve decided to abandon both the certification and the use of the UNIX trademark in macOS.
today at 10:16 PM
The reason Apple went to the trouble was not really a marketing exercise, but rather because a lot of U.S. government contacts required it, or a waver. This is the same reason versions of Windows were also UNIX certified. In neither case did this certification actually make them more "standard" in the way that the rules originally envisioned.
So Apple's use of UNIX in marketing was to make sure they never ran into that as a disqualified on a government contract. My impression is that those contracts largely no longer require that (one small measure of common sense has caught up).
today at 8:32 PM
It is strange now, but Apple made a big deal of marketing it as UNIX back then. Like at the front-page of apple.com. UNIX had a good reputation as solid and serious.
today at 4:33 PM
Maybe. But I don't remember seeing them use the word for the last decade, and the last-but-one release was certified. My first guess would be that it's too new, and hasn't passed certification yet.
today at 12:58 PM
Indeed. And, weirdly, there are items that show up by that 03 standard alongside macOS 26 (e.g. "HP-UX 11i V3 Release B.11.31") that also show on the front page. Is it a latest version kind of thing?
today at 1:32 PM
Yea â said as much in another comment. That looks like it could be the rule â for example your HP-UX version there appears to be the latest, final HP-UX.
today at 1:52 PM
Yep linked page is active certification rather than historical.
today at 12:25 PM
If this is an intentional move, Apple is just acknowledging reality. UNIX(tm) is no longer so relevant compared to the early days of OS X, when Linux was still in its infancy and the Unix certification gave Apple street cred among developers. Most developers these days target Linux for production. That's why Microsoft developed WSL, not WSU.
today at 12:47 PM
> That's why Microsoft developed WSL, not WSU.
Developed WSL and discontinued SFU (Windows Services for UNIX), which they had since NT 4 days.
today at 1:02 PM
SFU 1.0 and 2.0 relied on the MKS Toolkit by MKS/PTC, and SFU 3.0 later adopted the Interix (OpenNT) subsystem, which Microsoft acquired from Softway Systems in 1999.
The original POSIX Subsystem (psxss.exe) was Cutler's team who implemented a minimal POSIX.1 subsystem server alongside Win32 and OS/2. This was done primarily to satisfy US Federal Government procurement requirements (FIPS 151-2).
today at 5:18 PM
True, though to Microsoft's credit, the existence of the POSIX subsystem, even as a proof-of-concept, ensured the underlying kernel design supported the development of products like Interix, just as Windows on Alpha et al. ensured NT remained reasonably portable to future platforms like ARM, unlike say OS/2 where the only non-Intel release (for PowerPC) was basically a prerelease lacking core OS features like networking.
today at 8:18 PM
You're mixing it up with NT's "personalities" of which OS/2 was the primary target at the time. UNIX was purely for FIPS contracts
today at 4:15 PM
SFU ended in XP/2003. Vista/2008 had SUA
today at 6:50 PM
WSLv1 worked via Unix Subsystem.
today at 8:39 PM
Proof? I couldnt find anything to that effect.
today at 12:58 PM
Linux has been effectively Unixâą for me ever since the days when Dennis Ritchie indicated that he used Linux for everything on his web page. Late 2000s at the latest, maybe early 2000s. Unix enough for Dennis should be Unix enough for anyone.
today at 1:35 PM
Well he and others moved away from UNIX, created Plan 9 and Inferno.
In these efforts they also tried to create successor languages to C, Alef and Limbo (for userspace), and never cared that much about anything past C89.
He has settled with Linux because that is the winner of UNIX wars, which predated Linux wars on Distrowatch.
As for the original UNIX,
"Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy"
-- Rob Pike
today at 4:23 PM
Yes, Unix = Linux for all intents and purposes in 2026. When I started in the early 90s, there was a galaxy of Unices - SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and many others people people don't even remember (ConvexOS anyone?). Heck, back then if you wanted to run a particular software for your industry, you might have to buy and install a specific proprietary Unix.
Today? It's all Linux or Windows (of course, now also Web/SaaS). All these different Unices have fallen by the wayside in favor of Linux. Yes, some are still around but the mindshare has been in Linux for the last 20 years.
I suspect you could rip out a ton of autoconf rules and no one would notice.
today at 9:04 PM
There's still a lot of people on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc
today at 1:29 PM
Caring about which systems are branded UNIX is like caring about which NBA player was paid to endorse a particular brand of athletic footwear.
today at 1:30 PM
I've been using Linux for 30+ years now and have always considered it free (as in speech) Unix. For my purposes, the difference was always more legal and philosophical than practical. Of course, I was a student back then and didn't need to run the commercial software of the time.
today at 3:18 PM
Iâm pretty sure Federal procurement is the big driver of relevance for this certification. They have always had a huge Fed business.
If they are in fact dropping it, thatâs why. But⊠Apple often âfinishesâ the enterprise features with a point release.
today at 3:00 PM
Sure, I just hope macOS doesn't end up doing some custom thing rather than staying Unix/Linux like, which we've had with macOS/OS X till now.
today at 11:57 AM
If true, a better title would be "macOS is no longer UNIX certified".
today at 5:45 PM
This is fine and I hope it's permanent. Unix certification never really captured what once made "OS X is a Unix" attractive or exciting to many.
What I care about, at least, are experiences of ease, convenience, compatibility, control, order, and freedom around a programmable system that invites the blurring of the lines between user and developer, between quotidian use and automation, and between decoration and reshaping. Such experiences still involve many of the same elements as they did two decades ago: a composable language of commands, commonly observed conventions, well-organized hierarchies of files, formal software freedom, powerful package management systems, great in-band/offline documentation, etc. But Unix certification isn't the center of gravity around which such experiences revolve, if it ever was. And for that matter, neither is macOS.
today at 9:11 PM
Tahoe:
https://www.opengroup.org//openbrand/register/xy.htm
I imagine that the cert will be listed for Golden Gate soon.
today at 5:32 PM
"silently" doesn't occur in the title, so is clickbait drama editorializing.
today at 5:57 PM
LLMs love "silent" and "quiet."
Also the suggestion Apple was entirely removed is false; see https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm
today at 6:09 PM
it's "silently" never left. :)
today at 6:12 PM
indeed, some may even call it a quiet load bearing footgun haha
today at 1:39 PM
It is still there.
For those that don't know how to use a filter drop down, check UNIX 03 version.
today at 1:51 PM
Thatâs historical. The linked page is active. Zzz
today at 5:03 PM
While it may simply acknowledge reality, Iâve already moved my main development off macOS to a NixOS workstation months ago. Too much friction in an OS that is clearly trying to be more âconsumerâ than âcreativeâ at this point.
Which is a damn shame, because AI dev is going to result in a massive influx of new software right when Apple makes it ever more difficult to do so on its platform.
I still make Mac builds, but it is more of an afterthought on a secondary Mac build machine now.
You know something has peaked when they become less open and more âclawbackyâ; that is basically collecting interest on an investment (marketshare) instead of remaining more open (at the cost of some things). âIncreased securityâ is always the rationale.
today at 5:20 PM
> but it is more of an afterthought
If the platform I use is an afterthought for you then your software becomes afterthought for me as well.
today at 8:47 PM
Shit. Gonna have to make MacOS the top priority so osjdosnxkwjdk centers my software in their mind.
today at 3:48 PM
MacOS 26 is still listed: https://www.opengroup.org//openbrand/register/xy.htm
Was it delisted from a different âproduct standardâ, or is this submission about macOS 27 not being listed?
today at 8:25 PM
Why is the client OS important?
We just ssh/http to the real Linux machine that runs our things anyway. These days with commoditized VPN and symmetric residential Gigabit internet, that Linux box does not have to be in the cloud either (specially with LLMs guiding the sysadmin tasks).
Any thin client with a browser, an ssh client and an internet connection will do the job.
today at 8:29 PM
Less things that can go wrong.
Sometimes just having a local machine that you can do everything on is what you need
today at 8:19 PM
today at 11:57 AM
I see macOS 26 listed under the Unix 03 standard. Was macOS 27 listed and then removed? The submission title + site contents combined do not give enough info to assess what exactly was silently removed.
today at 12:11 PM
macOS was listed on the main register (the link in this submission).
It was Tahoe, itâs since been removed.
The UNIX03 page still lists it, but I believe thatâs a mistake.
macOS has been removed from the main register/list.
today at 12:29 PM
The index page seems to only list the status of current OS versions.
Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't passed certification yet? It's less than a month old.
today at 5:21 PM
macOS Tahoe was certified on launch (September 14th 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45238930
today at 5:30 PM
Yes, that is interesting and certainly lends credence to the OPâs interpretation.
today at 12:35 PM
The this is much ado about nothing. Every single entry on the page you linked goes to its product page with the exact Unix standard it is certified as. Once you select a filter, you cannot get back to unfiltered list without the back button on the browser.
This is just a site rendering issue. Rather than silently removed, it's more like some bug was introduced. macOS 26 is still Unix 03 certified.
today at 6:08 PM
macOS is still very much registered: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm
today at 1:17 PM
today at 12:01 PM
Well Unix as a standard is completely dead. macOS as a Unix is completely dead. I expect another branch in the already complicated as hell tree of Unixes.
today at 1:03 PM
macOS as Unix is not dead â the compatibility with developer and unix infrastructure it has is an important reason why the company I work for uses MacBooks (at least I believe so).
today at 8:47 PM
Does your company care about compatibility with UNIXÂź infrastructure or that it's compatible with Linux/BSD infrastructure?
People care that macOS has a lot of compatibility with Linux/BSD, but most don't care that it's UNIXÂź - just as people don't care that Linux/BSD aren't UNIXÂź compatible. Yes, Linux/BSD are very similar to UNIXÂź and mostly compatible, but they don't conform to the specification.
You (probably) don't care about the UNIXÂź specification. You care that your MacBook has good compatibility with Linux/BSD infrastructure. Many people assume that Linux/BSD are UNIXÂź and just don't pay for certification. They aren't UNIXÂź compatible. They are extremely similar, but they don't follow the spec 100%.
Sorry for putting the Âź everywhere, but people often use UNIX when they mean nix-like operating systems and when we're talking about whether people care about macOS as a UNIXÂź or not, it matters whether were saying "people want macOS to be UNIXÂź" vs "people want macOS to have good compatibility with nix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD like it does today." People usually care a lot about the latter and not about the former.
today at 1:30 PM
The relevance of Open Group and the UNIX brand has been a walking corpse for decades.
today at 4:35 PM
I would guess that your company isnât actually interested in the UNIX compatibility specifically, more that theyâre interested in laptops that can run a similar toolset.
They probably also buy MacBooks since theyâre reliable, performant, high-endurance (battery life) general purpose business laptops that employees like using and see good productivity with.
today at 4:26 PM
I think he means macOS as official, certified Unix is dead.
macOS as a more Linuxy-friendly place to work on Linuxy-type software, sure. Definitely true compared to Windows. But no one cares if macOS is blessed as Official UNIX.
How many people are writing software that they need to be able to run on Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX in 2026?
today at 1:30 PM
We've found it to be a much worse experience than windows for dev stuff. It's a different OS and architecture to the target env (Linux). Aligning with that makes life considerably easier.
today at 6:37 PM
If you're using a language compiled to bytecode or interpreted, then the OS and arch don't matter a whole lot (so long as you don't have to deal with Window's weird filename conventions or other oddnesses). If you're using compiled-to-bytecode languages, there's a huge advantage in forcing your code to be cross-arch safe from day one, lest ye accidentally end up with something that can only build on the exact CPU in your devs' laptops or can only run on the flavor of WSL you're using that year.
Writing on Mx Mac and deploying on Intel Debian is a little harder in the beginning, but spares you oh, so many footguns down the road. Eventually you might want to deploy to a different OS or arch for cost or convenience reasons. That's a really bad time to find out that your project can't be made to work there without heroics.
today at 7:03 PM
Why not develop on the same env? I mean if I were you my macbook would just be an ssh client to the x86-64 dev box that emulates the target env. So many advantages to offshoring the compute to some server (my preference is your own hardware ofc but theres flexibility in cloud). For one, the laptop is not getting hot just being a dummy ssh client. I can spill a coffee on it during a build and nothing happens, build goes on and I am just out a thin client I can replace immediately with anything with ssh installed, my cellphone included if I am so desperate.
today at 2:03 PM
Linux doesn't have an "architecture".
today at 2:06 PM
You know what I mean. ARM vs x86-64 -and- macOS API vs Linux API.
And yes, they are different even at the user end on the shell.
today at 2:31 PM
All of our production Linux systems are running on Graviton these days, i.e. theyâre arm64.
today at 3:25 PM
Your production is not going to be the same as everyone else's. It's also not going to be the ideal for everyone else's, or even possible for everyone else's.
today at 5:33 PM
The differences between ARM and x86 are probably less relevant for the majority of server-side development than API and admin interface differences.
In practice, anyone seriously developing Linux software on either macOS or Windows is using VMs or containers running the actual Linux kernel, at least for testing, and the difference is that Microsoft has put far more effort into integrating specific support for these things into the OS.
today at 12:12 PM
Indeed.
I just wonder if macOS will stop being UNIX like.
That is, whilst it still has home brew and a BSD core itâs great. If that goes away itâs no longer a viable alternative to Linux.
today at 12:26 PM
I've been a software engineer for 25 years, doing Linux stuff at startups and big companies (the biggest even). In all my time as a software engineer, I've seen maybe 3 people who didn't use a MacBook Pro for work. Apple makes the bulk of its money from tech companies and schools and they cater very well to both. If it stops being Unix-like, they lose the thing they make the most money from. They are smarter than that.
today at 12:30 PM
I don't think apple makes the bulk from professionals at all, the iphone is their flagship product and their laptop line has been expanding towards casual markets with budget models.
today at 6:42 PM
They absolutely do not want their developers to mass migrate to another platform. Walk into any SF startup and you'll see 100% Mac laptops, except for the Finance guy who needs Excel on Windows, and that one dev who insists on Linux, and all those devs build webpages that work on Safari, and iOS apps before they (maybe) eventually get around to making an Android app.
Apple is highly incentivized to keep devs on Macs, even if it turned out to be a loss leader for them.
today at 1:32 PM
Right but in this thread it is pretty clear we are talking about the money they make from MacOS.
today at 4:42 PM
They don't make any money on macOS anymore. You get it preinstalled on their computers, you can't buy it separately, you can't install it on other computers, and major upgrades are free.
today at 5:13 PM
It is a part of the computer that people pay for. This is like saying they don't get any money from Apple Silicon because its already installed on the motherboard.
today at 5:44 PM
today at 2:14 PM
The money they make from MacOS is a footnote compared to the money they make from phone hardware, the app store transaction tax, and ads. To a first approximation, the only reason that Apple cares about MacOS is so that people can make iOS apps.
today at 5:38 PM
This is a poor approximation, as there would be no need for such an extensive Mac product lineup if this were true. The Mac mini and one laptop product line with two or three sizes would be more than sufficient, and continuing development of first-party Mac applications like Logic and FCP would serve little purpose.
today at 2:43 PM
today at 12:42 PM
Backend developers are already conditioned to use Linux VMs when developing in Mac OS.
today at 2:57 PM
And so are developers on Linux. 99.5% of your backend stuff will run just fine on macOS without any modification, but it's been a good practice for a long time now to run stuff in containers (Docker/OrbStack/podman/etc.) in order to have a reproducible environment free of contamination. My development process in macOS is basically no different than it was on Linux.
today at 1:41 PM
I bet you are located in US.
today at 12:27 PM
Youâre in a bubble. Windows is still huge, especially in middling companies that dictate it and standard HP/Dell/Lenovo hardware for all 3k staff.
Itâs insanely common.
today at 12:32 PM
His point isnât that itâs common, itâs that a unix-like environment is a key selling point.
Given that Windows made WSL in an attempt to capture developer mindshare, that tends to support his comment
today at 12:50 PM
You still end up in uncanny valley often enough, with commands that are missing, or working unexpectedly differently. It often feels like macOS could be made so much better for developers, but Apple just doesn't care because people buy their devices anyway.
today at 1:53 PM
Itâs not that. Itâs that their lawyers wonât let the engineering side distribute gnu tools. Period.
At Apple, if you even use GPL tools in your workflow you have to seek approval, and most often thereâs pushback of âwhy wonât this (alternative that isnât GPL) work ?â
Their lawyers arenât stupid, they understand the GPL and its limits, but theyâre simply doing a risk assessment- which one is less risky, the GPL variant or the BSD. For a corporation, thatâs generally BSD.
today at 1:43 PM
The problem is that being a developer is not a synonymous with UNIX.
today at 1:36 PM
In deeply saddens me to think that there is a developer who has not installed gnutils and put them earlier in the PATH.
The remaining differences are related more to systems stuff - managing daemons with launchd for example. These aren't really a distraction day-to-day.
today at 2:25 PM
It really is that simple. No different from a BSD or even a non-GNU (busybox, etc.) Linux distribution. If you like GNU tools, use them.
today at 2:26 PM
Itâs a computer. I can make a computer go beep if I want, that is not the issue.
The fact that someone who didnât grow up at the time when open source was an idealistic concept instead of free support to corporations needs to learn about the gnutils and how to install them with homebrew is what makes me sad.
Why do we seriously not have a command-line package manager on macOS yet? Windows has one by now. Itâs just sad to me that you need a manual checklist of post-setup steps to turn a Mac into a useful machine for software development.
today at 2:41 PM
I don't think you have to grow up in some idyllic era that never existed. Its more like you type 'ls', notice that its total crap, and google it.
today at 4:50 PM
The point I was making was that knowing what GNU means in the first place probably requires some cultural background that many people lack, especially younger ones.
today at 5:10 PM
Right, and the point I'm making is that you can learn this from Google once you notice there is a difference from how common commands work on Linux and MacOS. You don't need to know about GNU, you just have to wonder why its different.
today at 12:34 PM
It already feels a bit like it's two separate operating systems on one machine. It's still usable, but I am starting to notice odd behaviours. Files created in the terminal not showing up in the UI, there seems to be no notification from the filesystem to Finder, informing it that the terminal has created a file.
Developers and operations people are already starting to move to Linux. More and more I see colleague either switching to Linux, or have a mac laptop for administrative tasks and then a Linux workstation, or VMs, where they do their actual work.
today at 1:02 PM
> Developers and operations people are already starting to move to Linux.
Iâve been in this industry for a long time now. Linux always had more credibility among devs and ops folk. This âstarting to moveâ view is weird.
My view is that OS X was acceptable by these teams because it was close enough to Linux and corporate could deal with it.
When I worked in corporate IT Linux was simply not an option for a primary workstation because there was no standard configuration or management tooling that made everyone happy. Macs were an easy compromise.
today at 4:19 PM
I personally donât see macos anyhow competing with Linux or to be anyhow comparable to Linux in each others sweat points. linux dominated server side, so be its fair victory but itâs continually shit kind of clone of many things done in MacOs desktop experience. It just kept cloning Apple since forever to repeat a glimpse of that experience even during Next times with WindowMaker and then with many incarnations of modern desktop systems to compare with OSX and MacOs continually and in that direction. Linux is open, itâs different, that comes with value but still a little handicapped brother to MacOS desktop experience with continually f*up fundamentals even if you include wayland as the base. So is MacOs in servers but there Apple just resigned last year and stopped pretending they have servers. Both have only one thing in common, shell with base posix tools. Nothing else. And none are as open as original idea for Unix as this idea is long dead and linux tries to make Stallmanâs wet dream about GNU system come true as his own kernel implementation did not move forward much it at all since mid 80s.. thatâs the only UNIX reality that matters.. rest is bureaucracy and 5000 pages of POSIX standard nobody cares about as this is more about C libraries than kernelâs internals.
today at 1:48 PM
Microsoft just shipped a full-fledged first class Linux container runtime as part of Windows[1]. I donât think it even made front page of HN, which shows how far windows has fallen as a developer environment, but it is absolutely something Apple should be offering as a first class capability on OS X. The compatibility of the host OS file system with being mounted into docker images makes it a better environment for running such things.
[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2026/09/29/wsl-co...
today at 1:59 PM
https://github.com/apple/container
today at 3:05 PM
Well⊠thatâs handy.
today at 5:51 PM
Has it really, though? Because outside the HN bubble, Windows still seems to be the most common developer environment for most things that don't specifically target Linux or Apple platforms, and a popular option even then (e.g., in game dev).
today at 5:29 PM
> Files created in the terminal not showing up in the UI
You might wanna look into that because thatâs not how it works at all. I frequently switch between terminal and GUI apps and have not once noticed Finder failing to catch up with whatever it is Iâm doing in the terminal.
today at 6:00 PM
Strange, because I have the same issue on two different machines. It doesn't happen all the time, but frequently enough that I assumed that Finder does some re-scan every now and then (or when you open a new Finder window).
today at 10:04 PM
Finder windows subscribe to filesystem events, so the reaction is pretty much instantaneous.
today at 1:43 PM
Game and app developers certainly not.
today at 12:21 PM
I'm suspecting some forces at Apple would be perfectly content with ripping most of the BSD core and the assorted CLI out and just have Linux containers spawned in VMs, WSL2-style.
today at 1:46 PM
Of course they were, even NeXTSTEP was designed to be compatible with UNIX only to compete with UNIX workstations like those from Sun.
Neither Apple nor NeXT had a UNIX culture, and efforts like A/UX and mkLinux were never that much serious.
Had they acquired Be, BeOS was even less UNIXy than NeXTSTEP.
today at 1:37 PM
Its called colima and its excellent.
today at 2:01 PM
and they have a first-party one now as well
https://github.com/apple/container
today at 2:38 PM
I haven't tried it. colima also simplifies linux VMs which is more of an analog to WSL2 than just running containers. It has really nice integration with Incus as well, if you like persistent system containers.
today at 3:31 PM
I also use colima mostly, itâs great! (the Apple container thing de facto requires macos 26+)
today at 1:31 PM
would be awesome
today at 1:43 PM
In some alternative dimension Ternus decides to realize the full potential of the Mach kernel by embracing Hurd in place of XNU. Users are discouraged because the new system is not enough like GNU/Linux.
today at 12:16 PM
What would that going away look like?
today at 12:25 PM
Swift on Mach
today at 3:03 PM
yeah I guess there isn't really much to move to... a new custom Kernel and Userspace? extremely unlikely - I guess it's here to stay, despite not being formally Unix.
today at 12:25 PM
It's distinctly problematic there unfortunately. Particularly the moment you add any UI toolkits to it. I've had so many problems with stuff that uses Qt because Qt takes a while to catch up with things Apple broke inside their Cocoa internals. Very irritating platform to work on.
Edit: love how I get downvoted for facts?! They literally broke Cocoa so it was throwing hopeless useless exceptions at the bottom of the stack when they changed the native file open boxes to run in another process. Two bits of software I use couldn't raise an open file dialog window any more.
today at 12:12 PM
I never quite understood what the point of this was beyond marketing. Linux is also not listed probably because no one ever paid to have it listed
today at 12:36 PM
Apparently it was for legal reasons. Apple was sued by the Open Group for describing Mac OS X as UnixÂź so they decided it was cheaper to bring it up to spec rather than to fight the lawsuit.
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27095/why...
https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
today at 6:58 PM
This is incorrect.
More than 1 Linux distributions have been tested, passed, and listed in the past... But you need to pay again every year, and recertify every new version, and they didn't bother keeping it up.
I described them and what this meant in some depth in this 2023 article:
https://www.theregister.com/software/2023/01/17/unix-is-dead...
today at 2:10 PM
Enterpise espeically banking need standard and certification for reliability thats why , also certain Linux distro had certified before from China based on RHEL.
This is UNIX 03 certified OS with OSS alternatives from I gathered on internet :
- Apple OS X 10.7 - Apple macOS 26 , provide OSS Darwin 9 - Darwin 26
- Oracle Solaris 10 / 11 , provide OSS OpenSolais , then Illumos
- EulerOS 2.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 7 and 8
- Inspur K-UX 2.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 5
- Inspur K-UX 3.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 7
today at 12:34 PM
It is specific Linux distributions that would be Unix-certified. Huawei had one; not sure if it has ever been on this page.
today at 12:23 PM
Enterprise. Checklists.
today at 12:36 PM
It was a legal problem, and an interesting story: https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
today at 12:30 PM
And Gnuâs Not UNIX.
today at 12:44 PM
It would be marvelous to see GNU/Linux certified as a UNIX specifically with rmsâs preferred GNU/Linux as the name.
today at 12:53 PM
They could even just call it GNU is now UNIX.
It was Stallman who came up with the name POSIX by the way.
today at 6:59 PM
As described in the thread, EulerOS and Inspur K/UX were both certified in the past.
They were CentOS Linux derivatives.
today at 2:53 PM
IIRC there were some UNIX Linux distributions in the past but the certification wasnât renewed
today at 4:11 PM
Linux canât be listed, because Linux is not an operating system. Itâs just a kernel. Unix specifies a whole operating system, which includes things like libc, cat, sh etc.
At best a distro could be certified. But that certification would not automatically extend to other distros.
today at 8:24 PM
I didn't realize macOS was actually certified UNIX since 2007, thought it was just marketing.
Is this Apple just not wanting to pay for the certification anymore or does it actually change anything for us devs?
today at 8:39 PM
There's a long story behind it, but Apple started saying that Mac OS X was UNIX, but UNIX was a trademark. So Apple decided that they either needed to alter OS X to conform to UNIX standards or buy the trademark. They chose the former.
> Is this Apple just not wanting to pay for the certification anymore or does it actually change anything for us devs?
It's probably not about paying and more about tiny differences. Will it change anything for you? Almost certainly not. In fact, it might make things better for you. If anything, Apple's adherence to the UNIX spec can sometimes mean subtle differences in tools between macOS and BSD/Linux. Do you want things like grep or sed that conform to the UNIX spec or that work like grep and sed work in the real world?
And these differences are often small edge cases that don't come up much, but a spec is a spec.
The money is inconsequential for Apple, but at this point it probably makes more sense to just stop calling it UNIX and not worry about shipping a version of a tool exactly meets the UNIX spec - it'd be more useful for their users if it matched the behavior on Linux/BSD.
today at 8:51 PM
Thanks for explaining.
That grep/sed difference on mac caused me issues so many times, always thought it was just Apple doing their own thing. I didn't realize it was a spec thing.
today at 8:46 PM
today at 1:24 PM
HN thread, 150+ comments:
The story behind macOS UNIX certification.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29984016
today at 6:11 PM
today at 4:40 PM
Why would anyone care about what the Open Group has to say in this day and age? Is anyone actually still using SCO or AIX any more?
today at 5:00 PM
Maybe itâs time to come out with a new standard that supersedes POSIX and Unix cert?
Standards are useful and the fact that these have lasted this long is IMHO evidence of that
today at 1:15 PM
today at 2:47 PM
Perhaps Apple decided to get out of the way and let IBM and SCO duke it out on that page ;-)
today at 12:04 PM
It could be that macOS 27 never got Unix certified. Wayback Machine on Oct 7th only shows macOS 26 being Unix certified.
https://web.archive.org/web/20261007103902/https://www.openg...
today at 12:12 PM
27 wasnât certified and 26 was listed but is now removed.
today at 2:47 PM
From that Wayback page, it looks like only one version of macOS is certified at any one time: the latest version. Since macOS Golden Gate was only recently released, perhaps it's a process blip and we'll see Golden Gate listed soon.
today at 6:07 PM
Nope, Sequoia and Tahoe both remain registered: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm
today at 3:44 PM
26 is in UNIX 03, if you use the pulldown
today at 5:52 PM
The registry of remaining products is a list of irrelevant operating systems hardly anyone uses anymore.
today at 1:34 PM
"Silently removed" meaning Apple probably did not bother going for certification of macOS 27.
And I'm not sure why it would be non-silently/loudly removed: is there an expectation of a press release or weblog post about non-certification?
today at 1:47 PM
today at 12:05 PM
I could see this being corporate incompetence or a genuine deviation. I wonder which one it is.
today at 11:57 AM
Better for both sides. They clearly have different visions for what an OS should do.
today at 12:21 PM
What? The Open Group has no vision for what an OS should do, it simply writes standards describing what implementations are already doing.
today at 12:22 PM
And does this have any actual impact on either the OS itself or its users?
today at 3:05 PM
well not specifically, but directionally could mean less adherence to a UNIX like environment.
today at 1:24 PM
It saddens me to think of all the CPU cycles spent on hosting online discussions that mention the fact that MacOS officially licenses the UNIX brand.
today at 1:32 PM
unix registry silently removed from relevance.
linux compatibility is way more relevant now.
today at 1:10 PM
Solaris as well, apparently
today at 1:10 PM
They used to marketing Mac OS X around Unix, but not anymore.
today at 1:17 PM
At that time they were trying to lure people from other Unixen such as Solaris for workstation use. Not any more.
today at 1:21 PM
Unix? What's this?
today at 2:16 PM
This is inevitable, there is no escaping it.
today at 4:22 PM
This doesn't mean anything. The official Unix registry is completely irrelevant to the modern world. Nobody uses OSX pretending it's compatible with Solaris. Like Microsoft, Apple only cared about this certification because it used to be a checkbox on certain government procurement tenders.
today at 2:42 PM
When you're small, you need the certificates and badges others give you to be seen and be validated. I really don't think anyone needs to become familiar with Apple or macOS and that any of these certificates now matter a tiny amount to a multi trillion dollar corporation.
Given the amount and volume of software that mac has, the fact that almost all new interesting stuff are released for mac first or even mac alone, I also don't think it needs to attach itself to bigger names for platforms.
I think the financial burden of Ubuntu Mobile, Unity 8, and Mir; and the immediate rise of docker and WSL made canonical fully shift to server, so much so that their website no longer is about a better os for people, but what can it do for your cloud. Other distros also followed its path and Linus became all in on servers and IoT. I see windows as the biggest pile of trash in the world. Infinitely inconsistent, buggy, patched worked, visionless and rotting. Honestly that is one piece of software that is worse that AI slop.
And so what is there for Apple to compete with honestly? Haiku? Solaris?
today at 2:52 PM
> I see windows as the biggest pile of trash in the world.
I mean I don't disagree with that, but you're in dire need of a reality check wrt Apple's dominance
It's not even the most used OS. It's userbase has certainly grown over the last 20 years, but it's still at <30% on desktop...
There are however some demographics in which it's more represented, and that's probably just such a bubble where you're coming from
today at 3:19 PM
Usage and quality are not particularly correlated, though.
today at 4:01 PM
I never said they were?
And if you're honest, macOS has sadly dropped in quality too...
But the reason why I wrote my comment was just that you gave off the feeling that you consider macOS to be the only relevant desktop operating system, which seemed like a very strange view to have given the reality of it's userbase.
today at 3:40 PM
How is SCO still a thing?
today at 2:42 PM
It now looks like a museum of obsolete operating systems.
today at 12:35 PM
Xnuâs Not Unix!
today at 2:45 PM
Who is running Xinu today?
today at 12:12 PM
[flagged]
today at 2:24 PM
[flagged]
today at 12:50 PM
[dead]
today at 1:35 PM
[dead]
today at 12:25 PM
[flagged]
today at 1:50 PM
Why even spend the time making an account to post such a comment.
People are so strange.
today at 12:31 PM
Intellectually curious people with even a mild interest in the history of computing.
today at 3:12 PM
Intellectually prudent people may note that macOS's status as "Unix" depended on temporary waivers and insane, unattainable OS modifications.
There's probably a high-nines percentage of Mac owners that have never configured their Mac to be Unix compliant, and never will.
today at 5:01 PM
None of that is relevant to the point. Historical curiosity does not concern itself with practicality.
today at 1:43 PM
It'd matter if this certification came with an extensive test suite guaranteeing some degree of compliance. Instead, you have macOS defaulting to an antediluvian bash as /bin/sh full of ridiculous bugs like this:
$ cat test.sh
var=
echo "${var+{\}}"
cat <<EOF
${var+\"foo\"}
EOF
$ /bin/sh test.sh
{\}
\"foo\"
$ /bin/dash test.sh
{}
"foo"
today at 3:02 PM
These days it defaults to zsh instead of bash. The shipped bash is ancient due to (I believe) being last version released as GPL-2.0.
today at 7:24 PM
I'm not speaking about the default login shell, which is indeed zsh, but what /bin/sh points to.
today at 7:01 PM
[flagged]
today at 4:42 PM
In many ways, macOS is kind of driving towards irrelevance.
Apple wants it to be more like iOS (so they can control what you do on it) while users want a normal computer they can do computer things on without it spewing ads or applying political pressure when someone tries to hold Apple accountable (e.g. the EU trying to make Apple stop abusing their market position).
today at 5:32 PM
> In many ways, macOS is kind of driving towards irrelevance.
You mean the second most used desktop OS with about 15% of the global consumer OS market? About 30% of consumer desktops in the US alone? That âirrelevantâ macOS?
today at 6:02 PM
Indeed it is one in the same. The middle layer of MacOS has been rotting for years, the introduction of gatekeeper and SIP has made downloading and running programs or observing your system a pain. Software developers are being pushed toward App models and many other examples exist. For people who simply need a computer that works MacOS is moving futher away from that goal with every release.
today at 12:46 PM
I won't be surprised if you will have to boot into recovery, disable SIP, come back to user-space and run those unsafe 'ls' and 'cat' commands you were trying to live dangerously with on '~/Library', and then go back to recovery again to renable SIP to stay safe. You may also have to do that to install every software you want to install and use on your (is it?) mac other than the ones that are from companies that had tied up with and signed Apple's USA certificaiton (i.e User Safety Allianceâą; involving non-publicly disclosed deals), or from the smaller devs who were not small enough and could pay a few thousand dollars annually and sent Apple 3 kidneys annually to publish softwares with very reduced scope and access on the device/OS. The data transfer between your mac and those app endpoints will be so protected that even your own self-destructive hands and insufficient intellect won't be able to gather what is happening beneath the Apple's hardware hardcoded encryption. All for safety beyond the UNIX way. So not all surprising.
today at 9:49 PM
Have you ever considered, oh maybe using a Mac rather than making up complete bollocks(*)? Or perhaps looking up the well-documented and fully supported procedure for installing unsigned software? Or maybe noticing that the procedure is usually only needed for applications like FreeTube where the developer has a reason to remain anonymous? Yes, you can disable SIP. But you will struggle to find a need to do so.
(*) My lawyers have asked me to point out that the case of Regina vs Sex Pistols (1977) established that this term refers to a priest in Old English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Mind_the_Bollocks,_Here%...).
today at 1:20 PM
Except you don't.
today at 1:44 PM
Is this âmake shit upâ day, or something ?
today at 4:15 PM
> make shit up
When it's about the fruit company, is there a difference? Unless it's for the eyes of the beholden i.e., le iFans.
today at 1:28 PM
oh no! security measures! scary!
today at 3:02 PM
They are, when used against the user.