[wtallis]

There was never a right time for Apple to make such a switch. NeXTSTEP predates Linux, and when it was adapted into Mac OS X, Apple couldn't afford a wholesale kernel replacement project on top of everything else, and Linux in the late 1990s was far from being an obviously superior choice. Once they were a few versions in to OS X and solidly established as the most successful UNIX-like OS for consumer PCs, switching to a Linux base would have been an expensive risk with very little short-term upside.

Maybe if Apple had been able to keep classic MacOS going five years longer, or Linux had matured five years earlier, the OS X transition could have been very different. But throwing out XNU in favor of a pre-2.6 Linux kernel wouldn't have made much sense.

[swatson741]

I agree with all of this. Moreover depending on what Torvalds chooses to do Apple may have ended up with a more expensive XNU in the end which would have been a disaster. Although I think Apple can deal with Torvalds just fine who really knows how that would have played out.

[inopinatus]

It would not be fine. It would have never been fine. It would have been a titanic clash of egos and culture, producing endless bickering and finger-pointing, with little meeting of minds. Apple runs the most vertically integrated general systems model outside of mainframes. Linux and its ecosystem represent the least.

In any case, as others have noted, the timeline here w.r.t nextstep is backwards.

[lunarlull]

Making a switch is one thing, but using Linux from the start for OS X would have made more sense. The only reason that didn't happen is because of Jobs' attachment to his other baby. It wasn't a bad choice, but it was a choice made from vanity and ego over technical merit.

[dagmx]

You haven’t really expanded on why basing off the Linux kernel would have made more sense, especially at the time.

People have responded to you with timelines explaining why it couldn’t have happened but you seem to keep restating this claim without more substance or context to the time.

Imho Linux would have been the wrong choice and perhaps even the incorrect assumption. Mac is not really BSD based outside of the userland. The kernel was and is significantly different and would’ve hard forked from Linux if they did use it at the time.

Often when people say Linux they mean (the often memes) GNU/Linux , except GNU diverged significantly from the posix command line tools (in that sense macOS is truer) and the GPL3 license is anathema to Apple.

I don’t see any area where basing off Linux would have resulted in materially better results today.

[jart]

Well for starters, it would have better memory management. The XNU kernel's memory manager has poor time complexity. If I create a bunch of sparse memory maps using mmap() then XNU starts to croak once I have 10,000+ of them.

[dagmx]

Please re read the comment you’re responding to about how the kernel would have diverged significantly even if they did use the Linux kernel. Unless you think a three decade old kernel would have the same characteristics as today.

What benefit would it have had at the time? What guarantees would it have given at the time that would have persisted three decades later?

[andrewf]

This presumes that Apple brought in Jobs as a decision maker, and NeXTSTEP was attached baggage. At the time, the reverse was true - Apple purchased NeXTSTEP as their future OS, and Jobs came along for the ride. Given the disaster that was Apple's OS initiatives in the 90s, I doubt the Apple board would have bought into a Linux adventure.

[lunarlull]

Why wouldn't Apple have been interested in a Linux option? They bought NeXTSTEP because of Jobs. Linux was already useable as a desktop OS in 2000, and they could have added in the UX stuff and drivers for their particular macs on top of it. There wouldn't have been any downsides for them, and it would have strengthened something that was hurting their biggest rival.

[musicale]

> Linux was already useable as a desktop OS in 2000

Apple made its decision in 1996.

[pjmlp]

Not only was the acquisition during the 1990's, as someone that happened to be a Linux zealot up to around 2004, usable was quite relative in 2000, if one had the right desktop parts.

And it only became usable as Solaris/AIX/HP-UX replacement thanks to the money IBM, Oracle and Compaq pumped into Linux's development around 2000, it is even on the official timeline history.

[icedchai]

In the early 2000's, Linux was practically unusable as a desktop OS because the only "fully functional" web browser was Internet Explorer. Netscape 4.x "worked" but was incredibly unstable and crashed roughly every half hour. Mozilla / Phoenix / Firefox wasn't done yet. Chrome didn't exist.

It was a very different world. We won't even talk about audio and video playback. I was an early Linux user, having done my first install in 1993, and sadly ran Windows on my desktop then because the Linux desktop experience was awful.

[f33d5173]

Safari came out in 2003.

[icedchai]

Yeah, but I didn't use a Mac back then. And early 2000's web development was heavily biased towards IE.

[wpm]

Jobs initially did not want to come back to Apple. Apple bought NeXTSTEP because between it and BeOS, Jean-Louis Gassee overplayed his hand and was asking way too much money for the acquisition. Apple then defaulted to NeXT. Jobs thought Apple was hopeless just like everyone else did at the time and didn't want to take over a doomed company to steer it into the abyss, and it's not like NeXT was doing great at the time.

>There wouldn't have been any downsides for them

Really? NO downsides???

- throwing away a decade and a half of work and engineering experience (Avie Tevanian helped write Mach, this is like having Linus being your chief of software development and saying "just switch to Hurd!")

- uncertain licensing (Apple still ships ancient bash 3.2 because of GPL)

- increased development time to a shipping, modern OS (it already took them 5 years to ship 10.0, and it was rough)

That's just off the top of my head. I believe you think there wouldn't have been any downsides because you didn't stop to think of any, or are ideaologically disposed to present the Linux kernel in 1996 as being better or safer than XNU.

[_rpf]

> Jean-Louis Gassee overplayed his hand

Well, there’s a parallel universe! Beige boxes running BeOS late-90s-cool maybe, but would we still have had the same upending results for mobile phones, industrial design, world integration, streaming media services…

[DeathArrow]

>it would have strengthened something that was hurting their biggest rival.

If by biggest rival you mean Microsoft, it was Microsoft who saved Apple from bancrupcy in 1997.

[kfir]

Microsoft did that not out of charity to Apple but as an attempt to fend off the DOJ trial accusing it of being a monopoly

[philistine]

The investment Microsoft famously made in Apple in 1997 did not prevent Apple from going bankrupt. By the time the money was in Apple's accounts, its fortunes were already reversed.

The fact Microsoft announced they were investing, and that they were committed to continue shipping Office to Mac, definitely helped.

[musicale]

In 1996, Apple evaluated the options and decided (quite reasonably) that NeXTSTEP - the whole OS including kernel, userland, and application toolkit – was a better starting point than various other contenders (BeOS, Solaris, ...) to replace the failed Copland. Moreover, by acquiring NeXT, Apple got NeXTSTEP, NeXT's technical staff (including people like Bud Tribble and Avie Tevanian), and (ultimately very importantly) Steve Jobs.

[monocasa]

AFAICT Linux wasn't even ported to PowerPC at the time of NextSTEP being acquired by Apple.

[johndoe0815]

Apple was firstly involved in porting Linux to PPC, albeit running on top of Mach 3 in MkLinux, since early 1996:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux