In article <s2jft8$1ugo$1@gioia.aioe.org>,
Robert Peirce <bob@peirce-family.com> writes:
> I'm still running Mojave. I haven't updated because I have an important
> app that hasn't been converted yet. However, that is coming and it got
> me thinking. With all the changes Apple is making, not only with the OS
> but also the M1 chip, are they still supporting Unix tools? I have an
> awful lot of personal software that relies on these.
>
> Many years ago AT&T had a Unix for Windows tool set that I used but it
> was never as clean as I would have liked and I didn't really like
> Windows. The main reason I switched to NeXT and then to Apple years ago
> was,for the GUI and the Unix Tools. Now I really like Apple products
> but the tools are critical.

More freeware for macOS from macports, homebrew, and fink. Some are
precompiled, some you have to have XCode installed so that the package
can build itself.

Alternatives to UWIN (sometimes written as U/Win), what you were referring
to, include cygwin and on recent Windows 10, WSL and even WSL 2. WSL (1) does
a bit what the others do and provides a Linux-like environment without
actually using a Linux kernel. WSL 2 (requires quite new version of Windows,
not sure if that's made it to mainstream yet or still beta releases) actually
runs a Linux VM with a minimalist version of the Windows hypervisor facility.
Multiple distros are available that will run under WSL or WSL 2. Ubuntu for
example does not use systemd on there, which means there are some things you
can't do. WSL 2 will shut down some time after the last of its windows the
user has open is closed. WSL (1) stores files directly in the Windows filesystem,
in a per-user private directory, and those files should not be modified
by native Windows programs, since WSL (like SFU before it) makes some odd
uses of attributes etc to store Unix/Linux file attributes, and a native
Windows program might mess that up. WSL (1) can also access regular Windows
files, and that's ok going back and forth. WSL 2 has a disk image file and
is using an actual Linux filesystem, but uses something like 9P protocol to
make that available to Windows; so either can modify those files safely,
although they're only available while the VM is running.

Note: I always preferred some Unix/Linux to Windows, and that still
holds. So I prefer a Mac to Windows (although sometimes the amount of
black magic on a Mac, by which I mean undocumented Mach or other
kernel interfaces, daemon programs, etc, kind of gets on my nerves; if
one has read most of the docs, it IMO _should_ be possible to
understand how a user-space program does what it does, but what I call
black magic stands in the way of that). I'm just saying that there are
ways other than UWIN to make Windows suck less in terms of providing
access to Unix tools.