[henryfjordan]

You can totally run Windows or Linux on a macbook with some effort. Apple even built Bootcamp to make it easy to dual boot...

Or are you saying you should be able to take OSX elsewhere? it's not a "monopoly" that Apple built OSX and only support it on their own hardware. It is not monopolistic to build something supported on one platform and not others.

[_ph_]

The thing is, that if you want to run MacOS, you have to buy Apple hardware. There is no choice for MacOS users, so the market cannot decide whether they want more or less repairable laptops. You have to buy whatever Apple is offering.

[saagarjha]

I think there were issues with Linux at some point because of the nonstandard NVMe drive that Apple was using. Were those ever fixed?

[henryfjordan]

I'm not sure, I've never tried installing Linux on a Macbook Pro. I know that it is/was possible for certain hardware but also that it was never easy or straight forward. Apple doesn't help but they aren't making their laptops reject unsigned code or anything like they do for the phones.

Given that OSX and Linux are so similar under the hood and that standing up a VM is so easy, I've never really seen the point of installing linux except to say you can.

[saagarjha]

> Given that OSX and Linux are so similar under the hood and that standing up a VM is so easy

Similar in what way?

[henryfjordan]

They both share their roots in Unix. Linux is an open port of Unix whereas OSX is a fork of BSD which is itself also derived from Unix

`ls`, `mv`, `cp` and other command line utility functions work relatively similarly across OSX and Linux. OSX has a package manager (brew) that works similarly to Package Managers found on Linux, etc...

If you learn to use Linux, switching to OSX is relatively painless compared to Windows (although WSL might have changed that)

[dehrmann]

> OSX has a package manager (brew)

To be clear, it's not supported by Apple. I've also been favoring MacPorts, lately because of brew's broken file ownership model.

[saagarjha]

Ah, I was expecting you to say something lower level than that. Homebrew is however quite unlike package managers I've used on Linux, and even MacPorts is a little different…I've heard that WSL is pretty decent and presumably APT works on it, though I haven't touched it since it first came out and it was broken in some way that I cared about.

[pcnix]

You'll find that linuxbrew exists, apart from the AUR being a thing. And yes, apt and other distro package managers work perfectly fine in both wsl and wsl2.

[pjmlp]

The UNIX on NeXT and derived OS is just there mostly for compatibility purposes, and not much else.

http://www.nextop.de/NeXTstep_3.3_Developer_Documentation/

https://www.amazon.com/Mac-OS-Internals-Approach-paperback/d...

https://www.amazon.com/Mac-OS-iOS-Internals-Apples/dp/111805...