“MacOS is derived BSD/Unix while Linux is derived from Minx/Unix. They both are similar, but not identical toolchains.”

So, what about them is similar and what about them is different ?

If I remember correctly Linux is basically a rewrite and macOS and BSD are built on top. But someone with actual knowledge please correct me If I'm wrong

I think it would require far more than 1k [dR limit] characters to explain it all.

In essence: Linux is encouraging freedom contrary to what MacOS does. Mac on the other hand is focusing on user XP and monetisation of whatever possible (classic unix :eyeroll: ...)

Linux believes that community knows best what they want. MacOS tells community what they want.

At Bell Labs an OS for the PDP-7, later for the PDP-11 and more platforms named Unix was developed.
As Bell labs was legally only active in the telephony sector, they gave it away for free (including the source) to universities, like Berkeley. This particular university released the "Berkeley Software Distribution" (BSD), based on Unix. Later releases replaced some original source files but not all.

After Bell Labs was bought by AT&T, they decided used to make money of Unix: No more free access. After a law suit with Berkeley (the uni illegally distributed AT&T files, but AT&T did follow the licence of BSD files they used for Unix), 4.4BSDLite without any files from AT&T was released.
This is the base for any modern BSD (Free, Net, Open, ...).

The company NeXT build their OS (NeXTStep) on top of earlier BSD distributions. NeXT was later bought by Apple, who used this kernel to make their own one, Darwin. This is in fact the one used in MacOS (OS X, I skipped the independent development of Mac OS 9 here).

MINIX is a microkernel written by Tanenbaum as a research OS for universities as an alternative to high licence costs for AT&T Unix.
Nowadays Intel uses it for their management engine.

Inspired by MINIX, Linus Torvalds started to experiment with development on the new 80386 hardware by Intel, which he later made to a full kernel.

tl;dr: MacOS based on NeXT based on BSD based on Unix.
Linux inspired by MINIX inspired by Unix.

Linux is a separat kernel built by linus torwalds, while inspired by minix it did not use any code from it.

Once it got popular, many features have been incorporated from other sources.

MacOS is built on top of freebsd if I remember correctly so its a Unix derivative.

AFAIK for the similarities macOS is POSIX compliant (certified) and while Linux isn’t certified it mostly is, too.

I didn’t know about Linux before participating in this discussion but now I have learnt a lot of information about Linux from all you guys. I also visited https://topicsmill.com/conversation... site to know about conversation topics. Thank you very much for sharing your personal ideas about Linux which helped me a lot to know about it as well.