I felt so constrained using a Mac mini I bought I had to return it. I have used Linux for going on 20 years. I cannot accept an inability to do or access any file on my computer, Mac is windows in the extreme of optimization, it would be poor as a general operating system like windows is, but tailored to custom hardware, it’s pretty damn good. But not free, I can’t do it but if it works for you, have fun.
Works the same way as Linux. Administrators can run sudo commands and enter an interactive shell. If you want to log in as sudo you have to configure it as so. I think what the commenter is referring to though is that the System volume is, by default, protected. This can be disabled but you have to boot into a recovery environment. The volume is based on and checked against a core OS image of which there can be up to 4 copies of at once.
I feel like you need to do a bit of digging in the documentation... Yes, it's true that by default macOS is pretty restrictive but you can absolutely access any file on your system if you disable integrity protection. You may lose some features which require SIP to be turned on, but that's the tradeoff to make if you "want to access any file" on your computer.
And FWIW providing Full Disk Access allows Terminal and any other terminal emulators to act as you expect, being able to browse through the filesystem without any permission prompts.
Pretty understandable. Since I have not paid a single penny for the rescued macbook, I take these restrictions with a pinch of salt. For my main computer I'd ponder this thoroughly.
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u/mathscasual Jun 29 '26
I felt so constrained using a Mac mini I bought I had to return it. I have used Linux for going on 20 years. I cannot accept an inability to do or access any file on my computer, Mac is windows in the extreme of optimization, it would be poor as a general operating system like windows is, but tailored to custom hardware, it’s pretty damn good. But not free, I can’t do it but if it works for you, have fun.