[Phiwise_]

"Obsolete" is too strong a word, I think. OSX isn't an evolution of the Macintosh's operating system; That'd be Pink, which was even mentioned, and it crashed and burned. OSX was far closer to a Linux box and a Mac box on the same desk, therefore the only change really needed is to replace mentions of Unix or specifically Linux with Linux/OSX as far as the points of the piece are concerned. If Jobs had paid Torvalds to call OSX "Apple Linux" (Or maybe just called it Apple Berkeley Unix) for some reason this would be moot.

I also primarily use Windows and don't have a dog in the fight you mentioned. I might actually dislike Linux more than OSX, though it has been quite a while since I've seriously used the one-button OS.

[chipotle_coyote]

> OSX was far closer to a Linux box and a Mac box on the same desk

Setting aside the "more BSD/Mach than Linux", OS X pressed a lot of the same buttons that BeOS did: a GUI system that let you drop to a Unix CLI (in Be's case, Posix rather than Unix, if we're going to be persnickety), but whose GUI was sufficiently complete that users rarely, if ever, had to use the CLI to get things done. Folks who love the CLI (hi, 99% of HN!) find that attitude baffling and shocking, I'm sure, but a lot of people really don't love noodling with text-based UIs. I have friends who've used the Mac for decades -- and I don't mean just use it for email and web browsing, but use it for serious work that generates the bulk of their income (art, desktop publishing, graphic design, music, A/V editing, etc.) -- who almost never open the Terminal app.

> though it has been quite a while since I've seriously used the one-button OS

Given that OS X has supported multi-button mice since 2001, I certainly believe that. :)

[giantrobot]

> Given that OS X has supported multi-button mice since 2001, I certainly believe that. :)

And since MacOS 8 before that...

[Phiwise_]

>Given that OS X has supported multi-button mice since 2001, I certainly believe that.

Just a joke, mate.

[wpm]

macOS shares zero lineage with Linux, which itself shares zero lineage with the UNIX derivatives. It would make zero sense for Apple to call macOS "Apple Linux" when it doesn't use the Linux kernel. Mac OS X is closest to a NeXTStep box with a coat of Mac-like polish on top. Even calling it "Apple Berkeley Unix" wouldn't make sense, because the XNU kernel is a mish mash of both BSD 4.3 and the Mach kernel.

Linux and the UNIX derivates are not even cousins. Not related. Not even the same species. They just both look like crabs a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation.

[jholman]

I used to have a coworker, a senior dev of decades of experience, who insisted that MacOS was a real Linux, "just like BSD". Sigh.

Of course, this belief probably had no downsides or negative consequences, other than hurting my brain, which they probably did not regard as a significant problem.

[13of40]

The crabs analogy isn't a good one, because they evolve independently to play well in a common environment. GNU/Linux is a rewrite of Unix that avoids the licensing and hardware baggage that kept Unix out of reach of non-enterprise users in the 80s and early 90s.

[frabbit]

Your statement seems very strong. Is Mac OS X not based on Darwin? Are you defining "lineage" in some way to only mean licensing and exclude the shared ideas (a kernel manipulating files)? Thanks for the "carcinisation" link.

[frabbit]

To be more precise: this simplified history suggests a shared "lineage" back to the original UNIXes of all of BSDs (and hence Darwin and OSX) and of the GNU/Linux and other OSes https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/3202

So, "zero shared lineage" seems like a very strong statement.

[Phiwise_]

>OS X is closest to a NeXTStep

This is already in the piece. Why waste time repeating it?

[dylan604]

Because the person they replied to used a term like Apple Linux which is ridiculous. So somebody on the internet was wrong and needed to be corrected

[CRConrad]

> somebody on the internet was wrong and needed to be corrected

https://xkcd.com/386/

[Phiwise_]

I used it, and on purpose. If you missed why, you should go back and read again before replying.

[Animats]

Apple was in some ways on the right track with an OS that had no command line. Not having a command line meant you had to get serious about how to control things.

The trouble with the original MacOS was that the underlying OS was a cram job to fit into 128Kb, plus a ROM. It didn't even have a CPU dispatcher, let alone memory protection. So it scaled up badly. That was supposed to be fixed in MacOS 8, "Copeland", which actually made it out to some developers. But Copeland was killed so that Apple could hire Steve Jobs, for which Apple had to bail out the Next failure.

[Phiwise_]

Yes, I, too, have read the OP before.

[SllX]

Linux is not just another word for Unix or Unix-like and Mac OS X/macOS has never used nor shipped with the Linux kernel.