[Discuss] Apple FUD?

[smallm at sdf.org (Mike Small)]

IngeGNUe <ingegnue at riseup.net> writes:

> I support some Macs in my day job and I was troubleshooting the Mac not
> writing to NTFS; then I thought, oh, let me just edit /etc/fstab, right?
> Well...apparently, Apple says this is "experimental" and unsupported and
> maybe maybe maybe will break something.
>
> That strikes me as weird because /etc/fstab has been around forever. Is
> this just FUD, is Apple prone to FUD? Or...have they broken
> compatibility with such things as you would see in GNU and BSD?

I don't use Macs currently but it doesn't sound like FUD to me so much
as a matter of their OS happening to have been built upon BSD, what,
cause that other thing didn't work out and the BeOS guy wanted more
money or something, but they're free, even more so than Redhat
employees, to do whatever the hell they want. If it suits them to keep a
particular aspect of the Unixy layer familiar to Unix users great. If
instead they want to hand disk layout over to a chunk of closed C++
system code instead, without troubling themselves to test if if said
chunk will choke on your GNU or BSD inspired edits, well, at least they
warned you about it.

But you must have missed a memo. Apparently we're not supposed to
question whether a Mac is good as a Unix system because if you don't
like anything about it you can always run a different operating system
in a virtual machine running on it. (Sorry, I seem to have left a nerve
exposed.)