Another good comparison is WSL on windows vs Unix interface on MacOS. Ignore the technical limitations for a sec and just think about the user experience.
WSL is far less usable due to hardware, networking and filesystem inconsistencies when compared to MacOS's complete native integration.
Now I like WSL and use it as my daily driver, but the UX is not complete enough for mass market.
This ARM transition needs to be utterly seamless. 100% compatibility, 100% performance within a year and double-click ease of use
Really I find the exact opposite issue. Way to many things have started to differ between Mac and Linux for Mac to be of any real value. It's actually a negative in a lot of ways because it's close enough to trick you.
I've had to switch to just native linux but when I don't have my work laptop WSL works perfectly for all our tests while Mac fails.
It's a valid concern that linux devs should be aware of , and a reason I use Windows (If 90% of my work is in a linux vm, why pay $2000 more for the privilege with less flexibility).
Part of this is that a lot of things have become a lot more tightly coupled with Linux in the past couple decades. OS X Snow Leopard, often positioned as the “best” macOS release, also had a number of significant differences from Linux, but those differences were more frequently accounted for in software.
Historically, a lot of it was simply Linux vs BSD differences, but nowadays there's a growing gap from Apple's unwillingness to ship any GPL3 code, leaving them with some tools either stuck in time or replaced with alternatives.
I don't get it, WSL is fundamentally not a mass market feature. Meanwhile the "Unix interface" on MacOS is ancient stuff that everyone who actually wants to use it immediately replaces wholesale with something from brew or whatever is en vogue.
You're right in some sense. The Unix interface (Darwin) is the POSIX api & toolchain that Homebrew tools are built on . Yes the included CLI tools are primitive. That Homebrew works so well IMO is a testament to Darwin
IMO Homebrew's success is a testament to the compatibility layer. All of the modern "linux" tools run natively (resident, same FS, Network, hardware) on MacOS and the patches are minimal.
I think the reference to Homebrew may have been using it as a cautionary tale, not a success story. ie. implying the Unix environment that OS X/macOS provides is so messed up that even a project attempting to remedy the shortcomings ended up producing the rather unhinged brew.
I think GP understands that and just disagrees with it.
Brew looks pretty much like a package manager that has to handle binary distributions alongside ports-style source distributions across a range of OS versions and releases and two instruction sets needs to look. It’s a bigger problem than apt purports to solve, for example, more along the lines of FreeBSD with pkg/ports having to coexist via poudriere.
But since nobody really has said why they think it’s ‘unhinged’ that’s just speculation ;)
I don’t think of what MacOS UNIX offers as being equivalent to WSL at all. One is MacOS and the other is Linux and the two are definitely not the same.
MacOS is a nice OS but if you expect it to be Linux you will have a bad time.
WSL is far less usable due to hardware, networking and filesystem inconsistencies when compared to MacOS's complete native integration.
Now I like WSL and use it as my daily driver, but the UX is not complete enough for mass market.
This ARM transition needs to be utterly seamless. 100% compatibility, 100% performance within a year and double-click ease of use