Macos Tahoe Is Certified Unix 03 [pdf]

I guess it's just, might as well keep it going, as an option for future marketing if ever needed. Maybe it helps the salespeople in some enterprise deals? I mean, if it doesn't really cost anything to keep it.

Also, Apple is a huge company, there's the question of who's going to make the call the not update a certification that's negligible within the scope of macOS development. Better to not be that person and just rubberstamp the invoice from The Open Group. If management disagree, they can make the call, but they won't because the cost is to small for them to deal with.

Does anyone want to be the person that removes regression tests from active use, only to be responsible when something breaks that would have been caught by that test? Far easier to just fix your code so the test passes.

(And for many years, OS X then macOS had a reputation for being rock-solid, capable of going much longer betwen restarts, going into BSOD much less frequently than Windows would. Having a set of third-party tests certainly didn't hurt this!)

In some ways, Apple's adherence to UNIX specifications probably makes macOS less useful for you. For example, I wish that grep on macOS was closer to GNU grep. When I look up commands online, I often find answers based on the GNU implementations. Those often work on macOS, but sometimes don't (or have subtly different behavior) because macOS is adhering to the UNIX specification rather than to what those utilities do on the vast majority of systems out there.

I don't think Apple would be removing UNIX-like tools from macOS even without certification. They know how valuable it is that most developers use their systems. Even Microsoft went so far as to implement the Windows Subsystem for Linux for developers. At this point, I think that UNIX certification makes macOS less compatible with the tools and help out there which generally targets Linux. Usually the differences are small, but they certainly can be meaningful.

Everything except a package manager!

The Unix don’t really share much between each other apart from a small core.

The thing I hated the most was spending time building installation scripts or running images for the prod environment, and then go fight macos to replicate the same setup locally. Especially having parralel installs for the system and my user account was a PITA.

One would argue I could just dev on the docker image as well, but then being on a somewhat unixy OS doesn't matter much anymore.

WSL let's the Windows side live it's life (shell level tools can still be injected for convenience), and the linux side be genuinely Linux, not some ersatz, and duplicable to one's heart content. It's still less pain and better perfs than straight docker, and just extremely well integrated in general.

http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/apple_unix_ad.html

POSIX conformance is a cherry on top, and it helps get them certain sales that require a conforming Unix. But that's not the real value to the platform.

For example, Apple federated accounts are a great idea. But, in your global directory the UPN and email must be the same. For us it's not, with good reason. We're not going to change our entire setup globally to suit Mac users that make up 0.5% of our systems. And there's never going to be more unless they become more accommodating. We even looked at JAMF but it's too much work to implement a whole separate management system. And the options in apple's configuration profiles are way too limited.

Another issue, every account that has already been created as a private Apple id on the corporate email must be manually resolved. Impossible with many tens of thousands of users.

AD binding while rudimentarily supported, causes so many issues. If someone's password expires there's no way to log in unless they're physically on the company network. The problem is that our security team demand we bind to AD. Not Azure AD. That's just reality in enterprise.

Having a managed local admin account is also a really big problem and there isn't really any tooling for that.

Maybe if you go all in on Apple like IBM did, then yeah you could adapt your environment to all their quirks. But it's a big blocker for small deployments. And really besides IBM nobody in enterprise did this. Apple meanwhile doesn't really care anyway. They only care about the customer market.

However Aix, Solaris (and Open Solaris derivatives), z/OS, IBM i (AS/400), ClearPath MCP, OS 2200, are still being updated and sold.

That list is not only UNIX systems.

the GNU userland might be common for user facing systems, but it's nowhere close to standard.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Unix specification". But if you mean the international standard POSIX, yes, people care. Red Hat routinely participates in POSIX spec revision.

There are a very few deviations where you have to enable "POSIXLY_CORRECT". If that's what you mean, then you can turn that on. But in every area that matters, Linux distros implement the POSIX spec by default, and you can even turn on the POSIXLY_CORRECT mode to exactly follow it. They extend beyond it, but that is allowed and expected.

The people who build the tools in Linux distros care a lot. I know the implementors of dash and GNU make routinely refer to POSIX. The Linux distros don't have to as much with POSIX because that is generally a conpleted work and it's the maintainers of the tools who must address the updates to POSIX.

Guess it shows that when it comes to compensation promises always get it in writing.

Sorry, I’m probably missing the obvious.

If they balk, it's precisely because they want to be able to be free to cheat you out of it once the work is done.