Why does MacOS not use the FreeBSD kernel?

Cause Microsoft made changes. It's Microsoft's software. Apple has no control over that and you help prove my point.

Some time ago, but fairly recently, there were a lot of complaints from just about everywhere about Skype no longer working in Linux and other areas. It was noted that Microsoft had made changes to the software causing these problems. I don't use Skype so I don't have a need to recall those details. I'm betting it's the same as what you had.

Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Microsoft doesn't distribute drivers for Apple. They have NOTHING TO DO with the problem beyond porting Skype to the platform - if you're aware of how driver architecture works, then you'd know that there's zero way that Skype could overwrite or make changes to the webcam driver.

My language? None of it was directed towards you or anyone else here, so it's irrelevant and a strawman you're bringing up to support your assertion and somehow devalue my arguments.

You are only proving my point about windows third party issues

How? I explained that a keyboard, condenser mic and a SMB share worked fine, provided that you read the manual like, you know, anyone with common sense should do.

And then I explained that as long as you use the proper driver provided by the direct supplier of your hardware, not the OEM you buy your gear from, it's no problem. Windows may have lots of problems, namely the in-kernel GUI, the Registry, and the rampant Spyware in 8 and 10
 
Wow...the question on "Why did Apple not use FreeBSD kernel instead of XNU" turned into flame wars on "the best operating system" :)

Will get my popcorn and follow the thread, yay :cool:
 
Now, as far as "price premium" is concerned, until your Windows PC can plug in to a Windows PC communication device or some software and be guaranteed to work as advertised, and if it doesn't, you can walk down to the Windows PC Store to get the problem resolved, there isn't much to talk about.

Now I have never owned any Apple device except for an original iPad given to me for Christmas years ago but has everyone seen the photo of the scientists at a CERN conference a couple of years ago with a hundred or so of them and their Mac notebooks all open? Doesn't sound like they would be as concerned with aesthetics alone.

On the "price premium" bit, are you sure? Ask anyone who repairs Apple laptops at the component level... the one thing you invariably hear each time "boy, these things are made with the crappiest/obsolete/old chips & horrible soldering quality" & followed very closely by "for a 2000$ laptop you'd expect much better build quality". The fact of the matter is most Apple hardware looks neatly polished if you are into austere minimalism. Do also not forget that, like all herding animals/cattle, humans tend to conform to the path commonly taken. So much for that "think different" nonsense. Apple crap has been a "fashion" or "trend" statement much more then actual useful quality reasons.

As for the science geeks, CERN included, there is a much more logical reasoning going on. Pretty much everybody concerned with hardcore physics/astrophysics & a whole variety of other science arenas, use some form of open source OS by default. Usually this is Linux. Nearly every single telescope installation uses some serious Unix kit for operational duties. I get quite a kick of pausing the various astronomy tv shows/documentaries on scenes where one can see some computer desktop in action... I'm always trying to figure out/guess what Unix flavor they are running. It might strike some as surprising, but many hardcore scientific research geeks write their own code. Astro & theoretical physicists in particular. It makes perfect sense that they'd end up using a PC that is already very closely aligned to Unix. Granted macOS has bastardized much of it. I highly doubt it has anything to do with the science geek arena preferring Apple hardware "because it looks good" or "because it is well built".
Do also keep in mind, and this applies greatly to CERN, how much it would cost to have all of their desktop/server computer farms furnished with a genuine MS Windows license. Not to mention the routine legal spats Europe had with Microsoft over the years.

Then there's all the supercomputers theoretical physicists assault with enormous amounts of mathematical gibberish (al-jabr / algebra / gibberish, yes indeed it is of Arabic origin) none of us here on the FreeBSD forums would even try to attempt to understand...
 
Ask anyone who repairs Apple laptops at the component level
I've not asked anyone in the two years since I wrote that and only knew what the engineers at Apple told me before that, not a technician at an Apple store, but your quoted opinion does not sound like fact and your third paragraph about Apple products is definitely opinion alone.

When I worked at Silicon Graphics, the first standard issue to us all was a Mac because everyone had a Mac and everything networked easily with it. You plug in and it worked.

I did not bother to visit previous postings in this two-year old thread, so I don't know what point you're trying to make, but fact is fact. OSX is certified UNIX. CERN scientists use it a lot over Windows.
 
I've not asked anyone in the two years since I wrote that and only knew what the engineers at Apple told me before that, not a technician at an Apple store, but your quoted opinion does not sound like fact and your third paragraph about Apple products is definitely opinion alone.

When I worked at Silicon Graphics, the first standard issue to us all was a Mac because everyone had a Mac and everything networked easily with it. You plug in and it worked.

I did not bother to visit previous postings in this two-year old thread, so I don't know what point you're trying to make, but fact is fact. OSX is certified UNIX. CERN scientists use it a lot over Windows.

For build quality and component source quality, look no further then https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup/videos
In fact, grab yourself a few mugs of tea, sit back & relax and watch a few of his videos. You'll quickly come to notice a trend: same crap design, repeated with same crap quality components, repeated with same crap quality manufacturing. The stunts Apple pulls lately with their hardware is baffling. The trend here is: buy mega-bucks replacement parts from Apple, installed *only* by Apple, and priced thru the roof so you'll be easily inclined to buy some new-obsolete Apple product.
Asking an Apple tech about their "achievements" is like asking a fish to critique a orangutan's ability to climb trees.
Keep in mind, by the way, at the extraordinary levels Apple has gone with proprietary hardware & firmware. There are plenty of examples where they've chosen to add extra pins to the SATA data/power terminal standard, "adjusted" the NVMe form factor to their proprietary needs etc, to lock you into some sort of ignorant death spiral. In their words "because reasons" or "because customer needs".... The fact that so often you can't use a piece of hardware when it is "approved" by Apple, is reason enough. Little firmware chips are added everywhere.

I'll assume you meant SGI as it was decades ago. A time when networking a TI-86 calculator posed a similar challenge. Just because the company choose a particular set of hardware kit to deploy for employees, *and* configured their network to focus solely on that narrow set of specific hardware kit does not mean said hardware is superior.

I'm certain world-class physics nerds would prefer to use a Linux distro, or better yet, a BSD distro on light portable durable hardware that is closely developed to said chosen OS. So far there are limited options, and they are primarily aligned to Linux like say for instance Purism/Librem laptops...virtually none for BSD. Things can, of course, be made to work quite well, but it requires quite a bit of tinkering with the OS before it efficiently runs the hardware. It is not primarily a matter of OSX being Unix certified or not. Rather, it is a matter of (portable) Unix/Linux source & programming deployment on hand right out of the box availability. FermiLabs for instance is a good example.
 
You'll quickly come to notice a trend: same crap design, repeated with same crap quality components, repeated with same crap quality manufacturing.
When someone is posting videos of a computer repair guy with computers that were turned in cause they are broke, I don't expect to see things that are flawless. It would be pretty boring if he showed you perfectly built hardware with no visible issues and you had to endure him using an oscilloscope to find an eventual bad chip. To be fair, I did not bother to look at the videos. Also to be fair, a 0.1% failure of a million PC boards is still 10,000 PC boards. How good manufacturing is since Steve Jobs is gone would be a guess on my part and I assume yours, too.

The trend here is: buy mega-bucks replacement parts from Apple, installed *only* by Apple, and priced thru the roof so you'll be easily inclined to buy some new-obsolete Apple product.
You mean like your laptop? Does Microsoft guarantee hardware you buy will work with their software and provide a Microsoft store to bring it to if it doesn't? Apple guarantees end-to-end their software works with their hardware. They do not guarantee somebody else's hardware or software for anything. Neither does Microsoft or Dell.
Keep in mind, by the way, at the extraordinary levels Apple has gone with proprietary hardware & firmware.
Well, when you have a closed system and you supply the hardware, you can do anything you want. In a software sense, my web dev company has two large clients who only care about performance. So we use whatever software and languages we want without concern for winning any reddit popularity contests. And those clients are far better off because of it.

Just because the company choose a particular set of hardware kit to deploy for employees, *and* configured their network to focus solely on that narrow set of specific hardware kit does not mean said hardware is superior.

Uh, no. It was off-the-shelf Apple hardware and software. The box I was shipped was a still sealed box from Apple. Everyone had one.

I'm certain world-class physics nerds would prefer to use a Linux distro, or better yet, a BSD distro on light portable durable hardware that is closely developed to said chosen OS.
Actually, there's a photo online showing a CERN conference filled with Mac notebooks a few years ago. I'd bet I can find it again.

Not as good as the one I had.
But here's another.
Does NASA count?
 
There are two PhD physicists in this household. One is sitting across from me on the sofa: while she has a PhD in experimental astrophysics, she now works in radiation physics. On her lap is a Dell running Windows. Why Windows? Because as part of her job she needs to use quite a bit of specialized software (expensive commercial stuff), which is only available on Windows (not even on a Mac). The other physicist is sitting in my chair, and I currently have my office Mac on the lap. Sitting next to me is my 10-year old personal MacBook. If you claim that Macs are such total crap, how do you explain that this particular one has survived 10 years of heavy use (albeit with replacing the battery 3 or 4 times and the disk once)? The third computer sitting next to me is a used MacBook, vintage 2015, which I just inherited from my son (who went and got a brand-new MacBook, since he just went off to college); if I have an hour, I'll move from my 10-year old machine to the 3-year old one, but I haven't found the time for that yet.

By the way, I have lost track of how many Macs and iPads our son owns and uses. He used to also have a dedicated Windows machine for gaming; today, when he needs to run Windows games, he dual-boots his Mac hardware into Windows, using an external disk drive.

In the office, our group has about a dozen and a half PhDs, a mixture of physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists. Most have a MacBook as a laptop, while a few instead have a Chromebook. In theory it would be possible to also get a Linux- or Windows laptop, but I don't know anyone closely who has one. One of the fathers of BSD works in my office, and he has a Chromebook. The only people who have Linux laptops in my office that I know of are Linux kernel developers. Three of my colleagues have additional fixed desktop machines, and if I remember right, two are MacPro (the black cylindrical tower), and one is a Linux machine.

Because I have worked in research and physics for so long, I still know lots of active physicists. The vast majority have MacBooks as their go-around machine, a smaller number have Windows laptops. Among physicists who now work solely in computing, you find occasional Linux laptops. Yes, I have worked at CERN (somewhere on the web is a picture of me inside the CERN data center, with a few colleagues), and most people carry a Mac there. Found the picture: http://www.lr.los-gatos.ca.us/2003/09/paul/DSCN0600.sml.jpg

Now, the machines where physicists do data analysis (and CERN has thousands of those in its data centers, and the big internet companies tend to have millions): Those nearly all run Linux. Remember, among supercomputers Linux has 100% market share (none of the publicly known supercomputers in the top 500 in the world runs any operating system other than Linux), and in compute servers (not web, database or business logic servers), the market share of Linux is also above 90%.

Dear puretone: I understand that you hate Apple and the Mac. That's your right. Other people hate spinach. But please do not make up facts that have nothing to do with reality, and are purely based on your emotions.
 
as part of her job she needs to use quite a bit of specialized software (expensive commercial stuff), which is only available on Windows
I continue to be dumbfounded that such software is designed for Windows and not Unix and Unix-like machines. The very large restaurant chain I'm involved with, all our POS machines are linked through Windows and Microsoft software and we have constant issues with it. I notice the TV weather people all have Windows software for their work on TV. In a professional environment, this makes no sense to me at all.
I have lost track of how many Macs and iPads our son owns and uses.
When my son went to university for theatre school, he was the only one in his class that didn't have a Mac. Now he has everything Apple related and life is easier for his theatre company and his "real job".
 
I continue to be dumbfounded that such software is designed for Windows and not Unix and Unix-like machines.
From the viewpoint of a software developer, I agree. It would be more pleasant to develop for Unix or Mac. But you need to consider this: There are superb toolsets and software components that are available on Windows. For example, if you need database-like functionality but keep the database accessible to non-programmers, the ability to easily integrate with MS Access is highly valuable. Now, similar solutions may exist in Unix/Mac land, but they are less common, and less end-user friendly, and more targeted at computer hackers.

So why is there more software for Windows? Because on desktop/laptop machines, Windows still has a very high market share (around 90%). If a company were to offer software only for Linux and other Unixes, it would be restricted to a small single-digit percent of the market. And the Mac is somewhere in the middle (on a log scale, it is roughly 10%). Like it or not, that's a sad fact about market share.

The very large restaurant chain I'm involved with, all our POS machines are linked through Windows and Microsoft software ...
The software my wife buys is purely for scientific / engineering purposes, and costs a lot of money (licenses tend to run 5-digit amounts in US-$). It is highly specialized, and not many copies are sold. I'm sure the developers could not afford creating versions for multiple OSes.

I notice the TV weather people all have Windows software for their work on TV. In a professional environment, this makes no sense to me at all.
It makes perfect sense. If you use a computer for a specialized application (and weather display on TV is a highly specialized function), you probably buy software that costs a heck of a lot of money. At that point, the computer it runs on and the OS of that computer are small and irrelevant: they are just tools to deliver the software. Sure, integrating a Windows machine into a network and a workflow is harder. But compared to the large investment into specialized software, and the corresponding large value that the software delivers, that factor is so small as to not be relevant. The convenience of the software developer is a more important factor.

And finally, today's Windows on today's hardware is actually reasonably good solution. It doesn't crash all the time any longer (like it did 20 or 30 years ago), the file system doesn't suffer data loss all the time, device drivers and integration with hardware are pretty darn good (usually better than with Linux and much better than *BSD, look at all the problems people have with GPUs and WiFi). I can not get mad at a corporate solution that is build on Windows end-user machines; that can be perfectly sensible.
 
There are superb toolsets and software components that are available on Windows.
Yes. Superb tools for handling Microsoft software on Windows but my complaint is that one should not be using Windows for professional software.

So why is there more software for Windows? Because on desktop/laptop machines, Windows still has a very high market share (around 90%).
That includes the general public but I am talking about professionals. In the kitchen of my restaurant, and all restaurants, you don't find the same pots and pans and knives and machinery you find at home. So why is this true of professional software?

At that point, the computer it runs on and the OS of that computer are small and irrelevant: they are just tools to deliver the software. Sure, integrating a Windows machine into a network and a workflow is harder.
Which again begs the question. Why put it on Windows if cost does not matter and Windows is harder?

Windows on today's hardware is actually reasonably good solution.
I'm not talking hardware. I'm talking software. And all the good things you talk about may work fine but they don't work as good as on a Linux or BSD machine. When I designed the hardware for a medical computer for eye surgery, a while back, Windows was never a consideration.

device drivers and integration with hardware are pretty darn good (usually better than with Linux and much better than *BSD
We just upgraded to Windows 7 two years ago from XP. Our POS systems are custom built celeron CPU devices we can't open. The drivers and hardware my company uses for our workstations and servers are not custom machines but they work pretty darn good for 15 years and we built the workstations about a thousand dollars cheaper for each one and STILL get charged for support.

Why do we professional programmers use BSD with off-the-shelf hardware but the TV weatherman and my restaurant chain can't? This makes NO sense to me whatsoever.
 
Once FreeBSD is shipped with a GUI (Or a GUI version) and provides an easy, graphical means of installing third party software and drivers; we can argue for mere mortals using FreeBSD. No matter the "Professional".

Otherwise, we're beating a dead horse; as it's never going to happen. ;)
 
we can argue for mere mortals using FreeBSD. No matter the "Professional".
That's one thing I forgot to mention before going to bed that I knew someone would bring up. That "mere mortals" can't manage or use a Linux or FreeBSD machine to use or run the professional software for work which is pure poppycock. The POS terminals at my restaurants are Windows machines but you would not know that by looking at them. The software interface looks and works nothing like Windows from a user standpoint and if it was some other OS no one would know. And that's often true for some POS machines where iPads are often the hardware device nowadays.

So when you have some professional with a BS degree operating scientific software (weather) that interfaces with other machines running scientific software, why isn't it on a professional machine with a professional operating system and not one that spends half its time geared toward games and gaming and installing software you never use or want and ads?
 
Once FreeBSD is shipped with a GUI (Or a GUI version) and provides an easy, graphical means of installing third party software and drivers; we can argue for mere mortals using FreeBSD. No matter the "Professional".

Otherwise, we're beating a dead horse; as it's never going to happen. ;)

Microsoft released Windows Server Core in 2008 because of a growing need for an OS without a GUI for "professional uses". If FreeBSD decided to come with a GUI, it would be like taking a step backwards.

Not to mention, OpenBSD "comes with a GUI" and I don't exactly see that on everyday Joe's Macbook. Granted OpenBSD provides a GUI for technical / security / historical reasons rather than to make it "easy and fun" for a user but it shows that users don't want a GUI, they want a "brand" and an experience.

Heck, I can guarantee that if Apple told its users that the CLI is faster and more efficient than any GUI so we decided to go with it, you would see professional users, hobbiests and perhaps even hipsters "becoming one with the command line" ;)

But you are right, it is never going to happen and at this point... I am quite sure we don't want it to happen.
 
A GUI is superfluous eye candy for users. Plan 9 has a GUI with rio which is no frills but gets the job done. I prefer it’s minimalist design.

Ironically I think where Plan 9 "lost" it was by losing touch with the CLI system and diverting focus away from it instead of developing it further. For example the shell is extremely basic (no history, tab completion or history). It also did not provide cli tools such as Vi. Acme and Sam are GUI text editors which don't even allow you to use the arrow keys to go up or down a line. Yes, in those days UNIX at the time was also more primitive than today but most shells provided a better cli and keyboard experience than Plan 9. The important one was job control.

These days I use a slightly hacked up rio (X11 based rio clone) from plan9port and interestingly a lot of people look at my screen and say, "Wow, it looks kind of modern and minimalistic". This is slightly surprising to me but does actually show that trends do seem to come in cycles. For example rio's flat simplistic look does unfortunately tend to resemble Microsoft's weird metro crud ;).
 
So when you have some professional with a BS degree operating scientific software (weather) that interfaces with other machines running scientific software, why isn't it on a professional machine with a professional operating system and not one that spends half its time geared toward games and gaming and installing software you never use or want and ads?

I don't understand this question. The word "Professional" doesn't mean anything.

It's like arguing "Why isn't this color of goat not your favorite color?"

If we can get rid of this vagueness and address actual use cases we can better answer these types of questions.

I consider FreeBSD a good "integral systems" platform. But for content creation, gaming, enterprise office work, for example; it falls short.

FreeBSD can be a usable desktop. But it's first impressions (basically a naked base OS) will not entice a lot of people.
 
Or you can have my view which is that FreeBSD is a DiY toolkit for anyone who likes to tinker their OS the way they like it. That's not going to attract a lot of people who just want a working desktop system on initial install and can then forget the inner workings of the OS, which is fine but please look elsewhere if you fall into this group.
 
Or you can have my view which is that FreeBSD is a DiY toolkit for anyone who likes to tinker their OS the way they like it. That's not going to attract a lot of people who just want a working desktop system on initial install and can then forget the inner workings of the OS, which is fine but please look elsewhere if you fall into this group.

Precisely.
 
I think Apple has never targetted power users, hence shipping an up to date shell is somehwere down in their priority list. The areas that macOS shines are aesthetics, ease of use and these sort of cosmetic things (kudos on them, MacbookPro is a good combination of well designed hardware + a nice looking OS).

Yet they just released a CoW FS (APFS) which IMHO under many aspects already beats the Btrfs/Bcachefs/Reiser4 crap (stable native encryption, full snapshots, checksums, subvolumes, pool scrub, self-healing, 64bit inode number, delta compression, HFS2APFS conversion without data loss, I/O QoS to prioritize accesses that are immediately visible to the user, over background activity that doesn't have the same time-constraints). The Apple Store is full of powerful development tools, whereas the MacPorts+pkgsrc couple just offers most of the FOSS utils available on other *nix systems, Electron -based stuff aside; for Apple devs, Swift/Xcode are fine tools. I think macOS is a great Unix OS: 1) implements 4.3 BSD's POSIX API, file system hierarchy, network stack, user/group ids and permissions, etc.. on top of the modular Mach base, with its threads, synchronization
objects, scheduler, memory management; 2) follows OpenGroup's SUS and is registered Unix; 3) the Darwin userland adopts several tools from FreeBSD's as well as, in a less significant portion NetBSD and OpenBSD in this order. Since Darwin is opensource, getting at least a vague idea of what of FreeBSD is in Darwin should be as easy as https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/search?q=FreeBSD&unscoped_q=FreeBSD
Aside from the the arguable security/stability/memory protection boost which microkernels imply, another noticeable thing XNU added to traditional UNIX was Mach's the Carnegie-Mellon hardware abstraction, designed to enable CMU to develop an operating system for a massive parallel multi processor. However, parallelism is not just as in multi core systems, but also dedicated processors: disk transfer, video rendering, screen management. Apparently Quartz is designed with this kind of abstraction in mind; I think Quartz is the right implementation of a modular display server/compositor, with a design that both Mir and Wayland somehow missed (even with a15 years delay). Overall, macOS it's well engineered, consistent, secure, easy to use and maintain, intuitive. The fact they factually abandoned development on the server/performance side since a decade or so (let's not forget some top supercomputers used to run OS X in the early '00s) doesn't mean they're all about aesthetics and do not care about quality and correctness.
 
The word "Professional" doesn't mean anything.

It's like arguing "Why isn't this color of goat not your favorite color?"
Of course it does. A professional is one who does things for a living and is paid to do so, directly or indirectly. Anything else is a home or hobbyist adventure. How the goat analogy fits here, I don't know.
 
puretone Louis's channel is very good. Not only because he shows how some solutions are crappy in Apple products but also he exposes their dirty practices: starting from repair policies to 3rd party parts providers. He's not a kid yapping about how bad apple products are -- he's showing us what they are like and provide a way to fix them (if you have skill). If not he provides you a service and does it for you. That's "put your money where your mouth is" by my standards.

I have a 3800 EUR iMac and had broken hinges (stand). I found out it's the standard issue with these iMacs. Official shop wanted ridiculous money for repair and wanted that computer for a week (!). When I dissembled it I saw that this isn't a design flaw -- it was put there on purpose to milk people yet again (YT provides many detail videos on this and reasoning behind it). I fixed it by creating proper metal rings for few cents.
Personally I liked an older fella who got mad and drilled through the stand and fixed it with a regular screw :)
Don't get me started on LiteOn PSUs in iMacs..

But as with everything there's a problem when you have fanatic cloud of people around something. Be it pro-something or against it.

In my experience though there's no single OS that does everything to my liking. Luckily I can choose. And I'm even more lucky that many of them come free or charge.
 
When I dissembled it I saw that this isn't a design flaw -- it was put there on purpose to milk people yet again
This sort of statement gets me every time. I've been with a number of hardware manufacturers for decades and at no time did anyone ever
suggest building in something to fail so we could milk the customer for money. It's a ridiculous accusation
 
It's a ridiculous accusation
No, it's not mate. Small plastic washers doing all the work on a set held by 15 screws and heavy springs ? That's ridiculous. Also captured on video here: broken stand.

I've also been around handful of engineers designing heavy machinery ( from prototypes to actual manufacturing ) and no, even intern would not design such thing. Some products are built with a pre-calculated retention and expected lifespan. And some are pure bad design. And yes, that "expected" lifespan is sometimes (=not always) being lowered to keep money coming -- this is not something new.
 
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