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by pornel 271 days ago
Apple got spooked by GPL v3 anti-tivoization clauses and stopped updating GNU tools in 2007.

macOS still has a bunch of GNU tools, but they appear to be incompatible with GNU tools used everywhere else, because they're so outdated.
1 comments
wkat4242 271 days ago
And Apple is doing a lot of Tivoization these days. They're not yet actually stopping apps that they haven't "notarized" but they're not making it easier. One of the many reasons I left the Mac platform, both private and at work. The other reason was more and more reliance on the iCloud platform for new features (many of its services don't work on other OSes like Windows and Linux - I use all those too)

The problem with the old tools is that I don't have admin rights at work so it's not easy to install coreutils. Or even homebrew.

I can understand why they did it though. Too many tools these days advocate just piping some curl into a root shell which is pretty insane. Homebrew does this too.

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flocked 271 days ago
Couldn't you simply use macOS without the iCloud features? Which features require iCloud to work?
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wkat4242 271 days ago
You can but there's just not much point anymore.

I don't remember all the specifics but every time there was a new macos I could cross most of the new features off. Nope this one requires iCloud or an apple ID. Nope this one only works with other macs or iPhones. Stuff like that. The Mac didn't use to be a walled garden. You can still go outside of their ecosystem (unlike on iOS) but then there's not much point. You're putting a square peg in a round hole.

Now, Apple isn't the only one doing this. Microsoft is making it ever harder to use windows without a Microsoft account. That's why I'm gravitating more and more to foss OSes. But there are new problems now, like with Firefox on Linux I constantly get captcha'd. M365 (work) blocks random features or keeps signing me out. My bank complains my system is not 'trusted'. Euh what about trusting your actual customers instead of a mega corp? I don't want my data locked in or monitored by a commercial party.

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