Maybe they already have, depending on what you need. Settings >> General >> Sharing provides lots of options. "Remote Login" is SSH and SFTP, and last time I used it, "File Sharing" was SMB. "Screen Sharing" and "Remote Management" seem useful, too. I assume that "Media Sharing" is supposed to allow iTunes on your network to see media files, although I've never used it and the information on the dialog is limited.
Yes, but getting it to work requires that you both:
(a) disable FileVault, and
(b) enable automatic login
One option is to automatically log in to an account which has very little access, and have everything sensitive on an encrypted disk/partition, and to use a separate keychain for any credentials you want to protect.
I don't like the idea of enabling automatic login on any machine, so I keep FileVault on and just accept that any rebooted Macs will need physical access on restart.
If it's possible somehow to get screen-sharing access (or even SSH) without automatic login after a reboot, I'm sure lots of users would love to know how.
Linux support. MacOS is a desktop first gui based operating system. Linux on the other hand is a server first cli/terminal based operating system. Everything server related is designed to on linux first and foremost and may or may not incidentally also run on MacOS.
macOS is explicitly designed to not be a server, and the consumer hardware it runs on is also designed that way. Apple even discontinued the Server tools that you could buy on the App Store that used to be called Mac OS X Server.
If you want to run Linux server apps, you should run Linux. Because Apple hardware and macOS isn't giving you any advantages over a generic piece of hardware running a Linux distribution. The hardware costs more and is less upgradable than off-the-shelf hardware.
Servers should not run desktop environments because they are a waste of resources and widen the attack surface due to having more components installed and running.
And even if you want a desktop environment for your Linux server, Linux most certainly has a wide selection of mature stable desktop environments.
If you need to do development work or just achieve the goal of running Linux applications on a Mac, that can be easily done via virtual machines, containers, etc.
If they work on a BSD they should work okay on macOS. (Not because macOS is exactly like FreeBSD, just that it means the project has been tested cross-platform.)
This isn't the market for MacMinis though. Why are people on this forum so bad at understanding market segmentation? Apple made an incredible desktop machine that happens to work pretty damn well as a server if you poke around.
This machine is for people at home to for editing video. It's great in the field for production where it goes from pelican case to hotel desk to folding table to pelican case to cargo hold to storage.
Have you ever thought that maybe people understand "market segmentation", but at the same time, they'd like to know how broad a range of computing options one would have on these general purpose computers, with price tags in the many-hundreds to thousands range?
Sure, but to complain that a Mac, which, come on, at this point is a known quantity for 20 years, doesn't run Linux is just looking to complain. If you want more options there's endless x86 choices, and if you want ARM then demand better from other manufacturers as well. Apple showed its possible, why doesn't Dell come out with something comparable? I'm not a fanboy, I run systems of all stripes, but Macs aren't designed to be servers (even though they operate perfectly well as one) and people need to stop complaining that they aren't.
In the past, Apple sold at least four generations of the Mac mini that included models literally branded as server models. Continued interest in using more recent models as servers is quite reasonable.
I run full multiple Ubuntu desktop VMs on Parallels on a M1 MacBook Air. You can use Docker for server installs, sure, but QEMU also works great on Macs and with Rosetta you can even get pretty damn close to native x86 execution speeds.
they run through virtualization which is clunky to interface with across boundaries and introduces overhead. I also don't think it has any hardware acceleration for things that would benefit from using the gpu.
MacOS has built-in file sharing via SMB. It also has built-in VNC for graphically administering the server, built-in ssh/sftp, built-in rsync for backup, etc. etc.
I see thank you. I dream to setup something like iCloud but with open source software and hosted at home :) Not sure if there is anything like that out there.
MacOS would need syncookies to be a viable tcp server on public IPs, IMHO, but MacOS pulled FreeBSD's TCP stack a couple months before syncookies were added, and they never rebased or otherwise added syncookies later.
I haven't looked into if they pulled any scalability updates over the years, but I kind of assume they haven't, and the stack would have a lot of lock contention if you had more than say 10,000 tcp sockets.
Given that, if I were Apple compatible, I might run a mini as a LAN server, but my home servers provide services for the LAN as well as some public services (of limited value and usefulness, but still public).
Is this something that you can fix by putting the server behind Cloudflare? I assume most "home server" users would do that (or a similar service provided by Apple if they go down that route).
What I look for is, 128GB RAM minimum, decent number of PCIe lanes because I want two fast NVMe drives, a HBA card ( though this I guess could be external ), two network ports minimum, ZFS, sane terminal, native support for containers and VMs. Native support for UPS interfacing, native support for backup of containers and VMs. And lastly a community of other users doing the same.
