this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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macOS is UNIX, certified UNIX actually.
But I mean, if someone had the merest impression of macOS and was very familiar with Linux and never bothered to look any further then I'd understand. Maybe they only played around with macOS a little and saw the terminal app had bash and most all the familiar tools as on Linux. It's not hard to see why they might've thought it's Linux based.
I think 10% of people believe nearly anything. It's basically the rounding error for a survey.
Honestly, if you had asked me 10 minutes ago "Is MacOS based on Linux?" I would have gotten it wrong. But if you asked "Is MacOS based on UNIX or Linux?" I would have gotten it right.
Isnt
zshthe default macos shell?It has been since 2019 but before that it was bash.
I just got around to switching last month
They switched to bash in 2003 with Mac OS X 10.3; before that it was tcsh.
It is now, but it was
bashbefore.But in any case once you start doing anything remotely advanced you’ll find the individual command line utilities are wildly different between macOS and Linux. They seem (are?) much closer to FreeBSD than GNU utilities.
Yeah, it's always fun to find out that a standard looking util on osx actually requires weird args and syntax.
I’m mostly used to it now. Though
-ris supported in macOS’rmcommand I still prefer-Rand use it even on Linux where I believe-ris the preferred argument.Closer, maybe. Similar, not.