Well, I don’t know the details about portability, but there are a couple of pages in their documentation where they straight up say they keep the tools updated, and the APIs are the same except <a list of maybe ten low-level differences> (which differences are in such areas of which I have never heard even with some rudimentary understanding of what Unix syscalls look like and what some parts of a kernel are).

if you’re used to the command line, a lot will seem familiar at a first glance

Until one runs into “unknown option --help” and the multitude of other quality-of-life improvements that at least FreeBSD never ported. I frankly doubt it that they changed a noticeable amount in that department in the past twenty years.

Thanks for the writeup, I have trouble falling asleep on some days, and rereading it a couple times will definitely help.

Anyway, not sure what SUS is, but MacOS was indeed certified as a Unix. They also keep tools and APIs compatibility with FreeBSD so stuff is portable between them, and not just for shits and giggles.

They know macOS as an “easier alternative for normies”

Questionable amount of knowledge for techies if they aren’t aware that MacOS has a nearly full-blown FreeBSD inside. Then again, discourse on Reddit and Lemmy is the same way. But a lot of webdevs love MacOS, which also leads to tons of open-source utils for it, that I don’t have to download as binaries from a site last updated in 2016.

There’s a sorta-famous photo from CERN, from early 2010s, with a room full of folks who work there, all with Macbooks. A dude I know went to CERN sometimes for his university, and came to me with a question of why he’s seen so many Macs there. I explained that it’s a Unix but with a GUI made for people.

Fun fact: you actually can in Pascal, even when building from binary dependencies.

Countable nouns vs mass nouns.