> Such a shame that such essential support for hardware that comes with every Mac apparently needs to be provided by a third party.
Why? The whole point of having a general purpose computer is that you can install stuff. I do prefer to use the bundled facilities in my OS but sometimes third party alternatives are superior.
Except this model is for third parties to provide user products on a solid OS foundation. Apple cripples their OS in multiple ways to make developing for it harder artificially, necessitating third parties to do the work to make the platform usable for developers. That is Apples failure as a platform maker, but they don't get any ire for it because respectively their hardware is good and their phone platform cannot be ignored when developing for mobile.
This is less like choosing which browser you want and more like macOS only supporting USB 1.1 and all USB2/3 drivers being provided by a third party company.
That'd be pretty shameful, were it real. How macOS has handled the whole metal saga has been pretty shameful too.
Ironically it’s usually easier to install and use open source software on macOS than in Windows, since most of it is developed for Linux, and the Mac version of Unix is close enough to make ports easy.
macOS, also the latest version High Sierra, is even certified Unix [0].
Mac has non-standard hardware yes, bespoke software hell yes, but also pretty good standard compliance when it comes to the lower level system interfaces - lower level as in below the various high level frameworks such as the UI toolkit Cocoa.
The Linux Standard Base is a superset of POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface [for Unix]), with some small incompatibilities [1]
Why? The whole point of having a general purpose computer is that you can install stuff. I do prefer to use the bundled facilities in my OS but sometimes third party alternatives are superior.
(The point of a phone is arguably different.)