MacOS is only licensed for use in Apple branded hardware, as I understand it. Even running it in a VM could be problematic if that host isn't running MacOS.
So your issue isnt the openness in terms of being limited on what you can do on it, and more that you want it to be bloated with drivers for millions of various pieces of hardware like Windows, got it.
> and more that you want it to be bloated with drivers for millions of various pieces of hardware like Windows, got it.
MacOS is bloated anyways; they might as well use that bloat for something important like backwards-compatibility and not zombie-code left over from the PowerPC era. That's just an objective failure, on Apple's behalf; they break software support more often than Microsoft and even Linux at this point. A professional OS really has no excuse to break someone's software and leave it broken. Even Microsoft gets that.
So... yeah, you know what? I do want it to be bloated with drivers, because whatever they're stuffing it with right now clearly isn't working. I don't trust Apple to write or maintain a long-lived successor, I demand third-party alternatives I can maintain myself. Give me more options for writing and delivering software, or else I am going to continue ignoring MacOS as a build target for the foreseeable future.
True. However I can (and have multiple times) migrate from machine to machine without needing to reinstall everything.
My work MacBook was pulled from an original Air from something like 2015, to a 2017 Pro and currently my 2019 Pro.
So I’ve got apps installed on my Mac that have been installed damn near 10 years ago.
Ditto my home 2015 Pro was later on migrated to a M1 Air. Hell, I’ve still some 32 Bit Steam games that still somehow run on my Air (least Steam tells me they’re 32 bit).
We could play this game ad-infinitum, each finding a level of supposed “openness” but the basic facts are that neither Windows, nor MacOS are truly open.
If you want open, then Linux is always going to be in the answer somewhere. Not MS Windows. And not Apple MacOS.
