XNU is developed under the Apple Public Source License 2.0, which allows only limited modification of the code by a licensee. XNU was originally developed by the American computer and software company NeXT, which was purchased by Apple in 1997. The Linux kernel was developed by Linus Torvalds, and it’s distributed under GPLv2. The kernel at the heart of macOS is called XNU, an acronym for X is Not Unix. To start with, Linux is just an operating system kernel, while macOS is a complete operating system that comes bundled with a large number of applications. What Are the Differences Between macOS and Linux? To help you decide if macOS is really the best choice for you, we picked the top 5 best Linux distributions for Mac users in 2020.
What these people often don’t know is that many Linux distributions look and feel just like macOS but run on any computer.
There are many people out there who purchase Apple’s expensive hardware just to get their hands on macOS.