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m132 | on: macOS Container Machines
Every time I see Apple flaunting Linux containers I can hardly consider it as anything but admitting defeat. It could easily be Darwin, if they still had the capacity.
TheDong | parent | next
Apple set itself up for defeat in the server and developer marketplace as soon as they decided macOS was proprietary code.

Why would any serious developer use closed-source code they can't debug and modify? Especially for a production server?

It's the same reason no serious developers or hackers use macOS, like part of the point of being a developer is being able to dig into the code at any layer and debug and fix things.

m132 | root | parent | next
OpenDarwin was a thing at one point, with mailing lists and other infrastructure hosted by Apple.

That being said, my point isn't that Apple should absolutely focus on making a server OS again. It just saddens me how far behind macOS has fallen as they stopped caring about the fundamentals; back in the day, it would be Linux trailing behind macOS. Nowadays, you can't even have multiple routing tables on the latter, the firewall code was probably last updated in Snow Leopard, and what Apple happily shows off on WWDC is a wrapper around Linux. Something functionally equal can be cobbled up together by anyone sufficiently experienced in minutes, using just Bash, OpenSSH, and QEMU.

I really wish macOS would let me have a similar level of control over applications as Linux with namespaces, without me having to do all the heavy lifting.

vehemenz | root | parent
No offense, but serious developers don’t think this way at all.
groundzeros2015 | parent | next
Just change 30 years of internet history
al_borland | root | parent
For what it's worth, the first web server was a NeXTcube, and NeXTSTEP was the foundation of macOS.
tw04 | parent | next
What is the alternative? They gave up the server market a decade ago and before that they barely actually supported it.

If they were to support darwin containers, what would be the point? Literally nobody would build to it, Linux won.

riffic | root | parent
> Literally nobody would build to it

because nobody does ci/cd against macOS or iOS apps right?

tw04 | root | parent
And what is the revenue stream tied to that ci/cd pipeline they aren’t capturing today? Apple would sell less hardware in order to…?

There aren’t any app developers avoiding the Apple ecosystem because there aren’t Darwin containers. They don’t sell server hardware and by all accounts have no intention of ever reentering that space. So they’d spend a bunch of developer cycles to reduce their own revenue stream with no apparent upside beyond “goodwill” which they’ve never been overly concerned about.

m132 | root | parent
Correct me if I'm wrong, but by the same logic, you could also say this whole containerization framework is of no use either.

If they're investing resources into it regardless, they might at least try making something that Docker for macOS and co. haven't solved the same exact way already. Something that, due to their almost unhealthy obsession with "system integrity", only they can realistically make. Like native containers.

MBCook | root | parent | next
Containers are REALLY REALLY popular. This is a a great value add for developers on Mac who need to deal with Linux containers.

Which is a ton of ‘em.

tw04 | root | parent
Supporting the containerization framework lets them sell more laptops to Linux devs that may have otherwise bought a Dell or hp or insert brand to run Linux natively on or windows with WSL.