alt Hacker NewsOpenDarwin was a thing at one point, with mailing lists and other infrastructure hosted by Apple.
That being said, my point isn't that Apple should absolutely focus on making a server OS again. It just saddens me how far behind macOS has fallen as they stopped caring about the fundamentals; back in the day, it would be Linux trailing behind macOS. Nowadays, you can't even have multiple routing tables on the latter, the firewall code was probably last updated in Snow Leopard, and what Apple happily shows off on WWDC is a wrapper around Linux. Something functionally equal can be cobbled up together by anyone sufficiently experienced in minutes, using just Bash, OpenSSH, and QEMU.
I really wish macOS would let me have a similar level of control over applications as Linux with namespaces, without me having to do all the heavy lifting.
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> OpenDarwin was a thing at one point, with mailing lists and other infrastructure hosted by Apple.
"Exploring Darwin and PureDarwin: The Open-Source Foundation of Apple's Operating Systems" - https://machaddr.substack.com/p/exploring-darwin-and-puredar...
> Nowadays, you can't even have multiple routing tables on the latter, the firewall code was probably last updated in Snow Leopard
Apple uses OpenBSD's Packet Filter [1]; I doubt multiple routing tables are a problem. Back in the Snow Leopard days, it was FreeBSD's IPFW, which is also no slouch.
Whatever a firewall can do, PF can do it.
You can also get a nice GUI for PF [2].
[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/index.html
[2]: https://www.murusfirewall.com/murus/