WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 43598879

(no title)

lunarlull | 11 months ago

Making a switch is one thing, but using Linux from the start for OS X would have made more sense. The only reason that didn't happen is because of Jobs' attachment to his other baby. It wasn't a bad choice, but it was a choice made from vanity and ego over technical merit.

discuss

order

dagmx|11 months ago

You haven’t really expanded on why basing off the Linux kernel would have made more sense, especially at the time.

People have responded to you with timelines explaining why it couldn’t have happened but you seem to keep restating this claim without more substance or context to the time.

Imho Linux would have been the wrong choice and perhaps even the incorrect assumption. Mac is not really BSD based outside of the userland. The kernel was and is significantly different and would’ve hard forked from Linux if they did use it at the time.

Often when people say Linux they mean (the often memes) GNU/Linux , except GNU diverged significantly from the posix command line tools (in that sense macOS is truer) and the GPL3 license is anathema to Apple.

I don’t see any area where basing off Linux would have resulted in materially better results today.

jart|11 months ago

Well for starters, it would have better memory management. The XNU kernel's memory manager has poor time complexity. If I create a bunch of sparse memory maps using mmap() then XNU starts to croak once I have 10,000+ of them.

andrewf|11 months ago

This presumes that Apple brought in Jobs as a decision maker, and NeXTSTEP was attached baggage. At the time, the reverse was true - Apple purchased NeXTSTEP as their future OS, and Jobs came along for the ride. Given the disaster that was Apple's OS initiatives in the 90s, I doubt the Apple board would have bought into a Linux adventure.

lunarlull|11 months ago

Why wouldn't Apple have been interested in a Linux option? They bought NeXTSTEP because of Jobs. Linux was already useable as a desktop OS in 2000, and they could have added in the UX stuff and drivers for their particular macs on top of it. There wouldn't have been any downsides for them, and it would have strengthened something that was hurting their biggest rival.

musicale|11 months ago

In 1996, Apple evaluated the options and decided (quite reasonably) that NeXTSTEP - the whole OS including kernel, userland, and application toolkit – was a better starting point than various other contenders (BeOS, Solaris, ...) to replace the failed Copland. Moreover, by acquiring NeXT, Apple got NeXTSTEP, NeXT's technical staff (including people like Bud Tribble and Avie Tevanian), and (ultimately very importantly) Steve Jobs.

monocasa|11 months ago

AFAICT Linux wasn't even ported to PowerPC at the time of NextSTEP being acquired by Apple.