[threeseed]

1) We are talking about the late 90s, well before Ubuntu, where Desktop Linux was pretty poor in terms of features and polish.

2) Apple had no money or time to invest in rewriting NeXTStep for a completely new kernel they had no experience in. Especially when so many of the dev team was involved in sorting out Apple's engineering and tech strategy as well as all the features needed to make it more Mac like.

3) Apple was still using PowerPC at the time which NeXTStep supported but Linux did not. It took IBM a couple of years to get Linux running.

[CharlesW]

> Apple had no money or time to invest in rewriting NeXTStep for a completely new kernel they had no experience in.

And even if they had had the money and time, Avie Tevanian¹ was a principal designer and engineer of Mach². There was no NeXTSTEP-based path where the Mach-derived XNU would not be at the core of Apple's new OS family.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avie_Tevanian ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)

[bigger_cheese]

>1) We are talking about the late 90s, well before Ubuntu, where Desktop Linux was pretty poor in terms of features and polish.

I think it's hard to understate how much traction Linux had in the late 90's/ early 2000's. It felt like ground breaking stuff was happening pretty much all the time, major things were changing rapidly every release and it felt exciting and genuinely revolutionary to download updates and try out all the new things it really felt like you were on the bleeding edge, your system would break all the time but it was fun and exciting.

I remember reading Slashdot daily being excited to try out every new distribution I'd see on distrowatch, I'd download and build kernels fairly regularly etc.

Things I can remember from back in those days:

- LILO to GRUB boot loader changes

- Going from EXT2 to EXT3 and all the other experimental filesystems that kept coming out.

- Sound system changing from OSS to ASLA

- Introduction of /sys

- Gentoo and all the memes (funroll-loops website)

- Udev and being able to hotplug usb devices

- Signalfd

- Splice/VMsplice

- Early wireless support and the cursed "ndiswrapper"

Nowadays Linux is pretty stable and dare I say it "boring" (in a good way). It's probably mostly because I've gotten older and have way less free time to spend living on the bleeding edge. It feels like Linux has gone from something you had to wrestle with constantly to have a working system to a spot where nowadays everything "mostly works" out of the box. I can't remember last time I've had to cntrl + alt + backspace my desktop for example.

Last major thing I can remember hearing about and being excited for was io_uring.

[pjmlp]

Yes, and all of that completely uninteresing for Apple's customer base.

[kergonath]

> Apple had no money or time to invest in rewriting NeXTStep for a completely new kernel they had no experience in.

I broadly agree, but it is more nuanced than that. They actually had experience with Linux. Shortly before acquiring NeXT, they did the opposite of what you mentioned and ported Linux to the Mach microkernel for their MkLinux OS. It was cancelled at some point, but had things turned a bit differently, it could have ended up more important than it actually did.