[complex_pi]

To all who suggest nix or docker or whatever. Please consider that it should not be necessary in the first place. 20 years ago Apple advertised its laptops as "real Unix on your laptop" which rightly appealed to a lot of scientists

It is fair from the user to expect some stability here.

[lycopodiopsida]

And it delivered - it is a real, as in "certified" unix. You are making here some assumptions about rate of updates, innovation and disruptions which have nothing to do with being a unix or unix-like and were never promised by apple as such.

I've done scientific work on a mac, and it was fine, now I am doing SWE work on a mac and it is fine, too. Such fragile setups would not survive most linux distro updates, the only advantage is that you could find a distro with a very low rate of innovation and thus a very long support window and call it day. But it is, obviously, not a viable choice for apple.

[yakubin]

> But it is, obviously, not a viable choice for apple.

It's not obvious to me. Apple used to release 1 version of MacOS every 1.5-2.5 years[1]. Now it releases 1 every 11 months. And it's not like the recent versions have some groundbreaking innovations in them. Nobody cares about MacOS upgrades outside of worrying about breakage, or getting a recent enough XCode to target newer iPhones.

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history#Releases>

[lycopodiopsida]

"groundbreaking innovation" is mostly "stuff I need" on HN. MacOS has a lot of groundbreaking innovation in it, alone the level of integration with Handoff between different devices is best in class. At the same time, apple is not living in a vacuum like a linux distro, but has to synchronize features between different device classes - it drives an ecosystem, not a macOS distribution.

>Nobody cares about MacOS upgrades

Speak for yourself. Many people do, for the rest, there is debian stable and RHEL.

[yakubin]

> Many people do

Geeks who update everything every 15 minutes and actively follow tech news. Just like there exist people who buy a different set of clothes every season. It seems to me that in the past with the slower release cycle MacOS was more polished and people actually could differentiate between releases. Now most people won’t be even able to tell which one they’re using, and which release is more recent than another.

> for the rest, there is debian stable and RHEL.

Last time I checked RHEL is not an LTS version of MacOS.

[lycopodiopsida]

Last time I checked no one promised and sold an LTS version of macos ever. If you are in a possession of such a contract I suggest to make a claim by apple.