> Ask any sysadmin who had a fleet of Macbooks during this update cycle: it was a nightmare and a half.
That’s not saying much, everything is always terrible and it was all better under Lion/Snow Leopard/Tiger/OS 8. The 4 computers I had to update did it just fine.
> Brew and Macports both suck. If you use Linux on a daily basis, then you're well familiar with what a good package manager looks like: apt and Pacman are both good examples.
Indeed. From my experience either work great (I use CentOS and OpenSuse daily, alongside macOS). The only bits of software I’ve ever needed which weren’t on Macports were quantum chemistry codes, which I wanted to compile myself anyway to configure them properly and avoid MPI issues. At some point I had to compile GCC myself to track the development branch, but I haven’t had to do that in quite a while now. So yeah, your points are valid, but they still do their job, and you don’t have to rely on them for OS updates, so they cannot compromise stability.
> The ball is in Apple's court then. If they want to brag about being a real Unix system, the least they can do is ship modern Unix tools with their OS. Ironically, MacOS is the least compatible Unix system around.
They haven’t bragged about it in a decade. Besides, if you know UNIX, you realise that this kind of shenanigans is just life, and that there is quite a bit of variance in the specific implementation of user land software. Your problem is not that it is a sub-par UNIX, it’s that it isn’t Linux (which isn’t UNIX). The BSDs also lack most of the GNU tools by default, and so did most other UNIXes when they were still around.
> I mean, the M1 Macbook Air is sitting in my desk as we speak.
That’s fine. I didn’t accuse you of lying, and you are entitled to your preferences. I just pointed out that your arguments were not great, and indeed often heard from people who never really used Macs.
> My guff is well founded, I think: as the most valuable company in the world, Apple has an obligation to provide at least some level of modularity in their ecosystem.
This might be your problem. Whatever their market cap, they don’t really have an obligation to align with your opinions. I understand that you’d like it, but what kind of moral imperative would there be?
> Otherwise, the precedent they set will continue to influence every market we can conceive, until our concept of "ownership" is poisoned to mean a subscription service.
How is this related to their business policy? I strongly dislike their foray into services, but other than that they sell devices, not subscriptions. Your devices are yours, nobody is going to come and take them.
> It's driven by greed, and makes me sick. It always comes at the cost of the user, and the declining greatness of MacOS is a perfect example of how Apple's hunger for money is poisoning their product line.
Right, so you have an ideological problem and that’s why you sound like that. Well, if I can recommend anything, it would be to keep using Thinkpads, they are good devices and Linux is great as well. That way you can completely ignore whatever happens on the Apple side and be happy.
> what kinds of things baked into macOS keep you from getting your work done?
- Homebrew is a stinker, and really hard to automate consistently. Nix with direnv gets close to a "Linux-like" dev experience but Nixpkgs doesn't have enough coverage to make it worthwhile.
- Apple's insistence on using home-grown APIs forces me to be an expert on their tech rather than focusing on my production environment. This is particularly bad with containers and filesystem support, but also felt heavily in areas like GPU and graphics API support. Their courage to remove features is only rivaled by their pride preventing them from adopting industry standards.
- MacOS is just... too bloated now. Memory usage has always been an issue for me, but going back to Big Sur and Ventura last year to port stuff to M1 made me claustrophobic. The UI is cramped and simple gestures like putting on your headphones are bound to launching apps by-default for some reason. Apple's constant advertisements of first-party services rivals that of Windows 8, too.
It's just not worth giving up 50% of my freedom for the last 10% of the desktop experience anymore, in my opinion. Apple has always been free to change MacOS however they like, but it's not my kind of roller-coaster ride now.
> This might be a controversial opinion, but I find developers flocking to macOS really bewildering.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but it is a good platform to work on. A real UNIX underneath, with a great GUI on top. Most things that run on Linux a recompile away from working natively, and still native versions of Office and such.
> This Lima thing
It is a VM to run Linux. How is that a demonstration that the OS is hostile?
> docker running in a virtual machine
This hasn’t much to do with the OS. OTOH if you want Linux containers, then I don’t see how you can avoid using a VM somewhere.
> Apple being actively hostile with the default coreutils requiring you to layer multiple third party tools just to get a modern version of awk and grep.
The versions of the GNU tools are ancient because they are pre-GPLv3. The BSD tools are more up to date. In any case, you can just do what you’d do on Linux and use a package manager.
> I Just recently I learned you can't add more swap ( creating a swap file and adding it ). That seems incredible to me.
What is the use case for this? The OS just adds some swap by himself, no need to mess around
> Because it gives techies the *nix environment they want, with the software and hardware support no one will give them on Linux.
The UNIX experience on the Mac is pretty shitty. Ancient versions of all the tooling. Command-line utils have that weird BSD well-water flavor. No package management. Funny Docker quirks.
The hardware used to be pretty nice, but honestly I'm still having trouble forgiving them for getting rid of the physical ESC key and turning volume control into a two-step routine on the TouchBar.
Honestly if I'm doing server-side development, I much prefer using my ThinkPad (Ubuntu) over my MacBook. About the only thing I miss is the far superior touchpad on the Macbook. That's it.
> In the past, MacTeX team had a problem with a particular OS release (when SIP was released and enabled) and, I was in the middle of my Ph.D. At that time, had no time to wait for problems to resolve. I got VMWare, installed Linux, tuned my LaTeX environment and never looked back.
I feel for you; the middle of writing up a PhD is about the worst time to have this type of technical issues. I remember being afraid of any update back then.
> Didn't play with Macports TBH. I don't think I'm going to use it but, will take a look to it.
To me, Macports is the closest to a sane package manager like on FreeBSD or most linuxes. There is practically no learning curve if you’ve already used one. But yeah, it’s not flashy or cool like Homebrew and it wants to use the system software as rarely as possible so it will reinstall zlib etc. I think the trade off is acceptable because then everything is more stable and predictable as the exact libraries used are known and tested, and won’t be broken by an update.
> Another thing is, I don't customize/change my terminals much. When you manage 1000+ servers with a team, customizing each terminal to your liking is not feasible so, I can work pretty fast with stock bash or anything. I'm old school and don't like flashy console setups anyway. :D
Yeah. In terms of looks, have simple settings to see at a glance if I am on my local computer, a workstation over the LAN, or a cluster somewhere else (I like clean terminals). I have one git repo with settings files and zsh modules though. So I spent quite some time fine tuning everything, and all the computers I use behave the same, whether they run macOS or any Linux distro (or even Cygwin, actually).
> - macOS is fundamentally the same as it was 10 years ago, just with some relatively minor changes to the design. I'm pretty confident they're not going to move the dock to the top and force a new window toolkit on me that most existing software can't use.
I don't know anything about macOS but that is an interesting point. I actually use Linux because of its stability. It is a deeply conservative operating system that tries its hardest to never break existing software. I recently booted up an old Netbook running Linux that is surely much more than a decade old now and hasn't seen any update and I still felt right at home.
Sure the Linux ecosystem has seen a bit of changes but most of them are opt in and can be avoided. If you were on Ubuntu you got experimented on quite a bit but thank god nobody is forced to use Ubuntu.
In contrast I am not even able to use a modern Windows system productively these days. The last version I used was Windows XP and it does not seem to have improved for the better UI wise to say the least.
> in my experience apple software is flat out inferior and OSX is the worst
It is almost absurdly bad. The only OS that still hangs, freezes, and crashes regularly. It is like Windows 98 quality wise and seems to get worse instead of better.
The whole UX is also insane. Every feature is hidden behind some obscure keyboard shortcut that you have to google or you just get used to working with this useless toy os.
The terminal is garbage. Everything is slooooow as fk (typing, mouse, etc).
It is shocking that the internet industry has standardized on working on this garbage when they run Linux on their servers and would be far better off developing on the software they actually use.
It just demonstrates the cult mindset and horrible lack of real technical proficiency in the industry.
> The UNIX experience on the Mac is pretty shitty. Ancient versions of all the tooling. Command-line utils have that weird BSD well-water flavor. No package management. Funny Docker quirks.
Very, very true. And Homebrew is actively becoming worse now. A few years back, Homebrew was great - now using it feels like using some weird underground software stack that exists only because Apple hasn't come around to nixing it yet.
> These issues notwithstanding, the total user experience of owning a Mac laptop is far superior to any Linux or Windows machine I've tried, at least in the past 3 years or so.
That.
I don't love Apple. They're a corporation, so at best our interests temporarily align. Loving them would be absurd. I really really want them to have strong competitors. I'd love to be back on an open source OS full-time, like I was for many years.
Unfortunately, they're so far ahead of the competition, that they screw up, sometimes even in a few ways at the same time, and people come out saying "LOL and Apple fanboys won't switch to Linux even now", and that's true... but it's because I'd be trading a few problems for a few score problems.
I ran Linux on laptops and desktops for about a decade, as my main computers. Ubuntu near the end, Gentoo for about five years, Mandrake really early on, a little time with Fedora somewhere in there, a sprinkling of Debian. I still try it out every year or two! I wish it weren't, but it's still much, much worse, and in the best case slows me down and gets in my way more than a "bad" Apple machine with a "bad" version of an OS X / MacOS, barring actual faulty hardware.
> I know that in the past 15 years lots of tech-savvy people have opted for Apple products because "they're still UNIX under the hood, and unlike Linux they just work out of the box". But being Unix-like DOES NOT mean to be developer-friendly! Apple is still an opaque developer-unfriendly company even if it provides you with a native bash!
That was true over 10 years ago (was certainly a big factor for me), but i'm not so sure it is for most people anymore. I remember back when I bought macs (more than 11 years ago now) they used to proudly advertise their "UNIX" certification and tout the BSD/Mach origins, I think this is when most of the original OS team was still there.
But today it seems to be one of the most neglected aspects of the system. Each time one of my colleagues with a mac tries to run one of my considerate bsd/gnu friendly scripts I discover most of their userland has not actually been updated in 10 years. I end up getting them to install brew and replacing every binary used in the script... and yet bizarrely things like ZSH suddenly pop up as the new default shell.
> I should have just bought a Mac a decade earlier.
I switched to Macs nearly 20 years ago from Windows and have been mostly very satisfied. But a recent upgrade from Mohave to Monterey has changed my opinion. It deleted all directories at the root level that the system didn't know about, including my backup (which I had to recover from Backblaze B2), deleted emacs, protected all the system directories to the point where, if you build things in weird system directories, forget it - it's impossible.
Maybe all this protection is good and necessary for the average user, but for me, it has turned my regular development laptop into a web client and I had to back off to an older Mac for development. Apple shoves more and more rules and restrictions down its users' throats, along with shiny baubles I don't care about, and I'm kinda over it.
Kernel integration and a virtualized filesystem that isn't bottlenecked by APFS. Docker is excruciating on Darwin systems.
> What are you talking about exactly?
Apple makes hundreds of weird concessions that are non-standard on UNIX-like machines. Booting up a machine with zsh and pico as your defaults is not a normal experience for most sysadmins, nevermind the laundry-list of MacOS quirks that make it a pain to maintain. For personal use, I don't think I'd ever go back to fixing Mac-exclusive issues in my free time.
> no _real_ support for video games
Besides Resident Evil and No Man's Sky (this generation's Tomb Raider and Monument Valley), nobody writes video games for Metal unless Apple pays them to.
For a while, MacOS had a working DirectX translation stack for Windows games, too. Not since Catalina though.
> - uniform, comprehensive, robust package management, including for the system software
macOS uses Software Update to manage system packages, and AppStore to manage that world, and for everything else, MacPorts (if you care about your system homebrew is not an option).
> - GNU coreutils and related utilities (sed, grep, find, etc.)
macOS has a userland... you seriously can't find /usr/bin/sed in macOS? Seriously?
> - good filesystems
uh, if you actually think ext4 is any good, then I guess you just don't care about massive data loss. wtLf??!?
> - 'root is root'; no policy or other bullshit restricting what root can do by default
Always good to have unrestricted access to root for all those necessary privilege escalations. Security policy just gets in the way. Who has time to activate this and authenticate that?
> - lots of featureful, performant terminal emulators (to the point that the DE default is almost always fine)
You do realize that every single beloved terminal emulator you use on Linux most likely also runs on macOS, right?
> - some choice w/r/t desktop experience
omg. You are not required to run quartz. You can run X11 if you really want, and you can even run gnome or xfce, any window manager you want in macOS. Oh, but what you mean is because you don't know how then it can't be done.
> - popular apps don't just entirely stop working between OS releases
Because you're not aware of Linux breaking applications between releases, I guess it doesn't happen, and because upgrading system software the moment it is released is the new, state of the art sysadmin philosophy.
> - pretty much everything is discoverable and configurable if you're determined
kind of an empty observation, because this is true of all things
Stick with Linux, please. The less you know, the better off everyone else is.
> everyone in the development & support team uses Mac (except this one guy who insisted in Linux),
> certainly a pain to just keep it updated.
> Linux and it's a lot of pain to setup.
If you're not using Linux, how are you justifying these claims?
> certainly a pain to just keep it updated.
Excluding the boot time for both, MacOS takes between 15 and 45min to update. Linux is a few seconds. I suspect that the only OS that has a more ridiculous update process than MacOS is Gentoo.
> The Mac has long been the best unix workstation on the market. It is solid, generally stable (although that's been slipping), and certainly has by far the best window manager. It has nice consumer apps for when you need them and is a solid, if not always up to date, unix. The hardware is generally great.
I was on that same line of thinking until some time ago when my old macbook pro died, and I ended up again on Linux, on a thinkpad. I'm currently running Manjaro (plasma + i3), and tbh, the Mac's window manager is awful once you get used to the power of i3. Dev experience (for anything but Mac/iOS apps) is probably better on Linux, too...
If you haven't used Linux in a while (as was my case), I can highly recommend it.
> I switched to MacOS because it's fundamentally BSD with a nice/ well integrated GUI. Almost all of the good OSS I love is supported nearly perfectly.
This is the reason I initially started using macOS more than a decade ago.
However, I've been told that I'm the wrong kind of user by Apple fans whenever I criticize Apple for transforming macOS from a pretty Unix into a locked-down App Store appliance.
The BSD parts of macOS are getting old and crufty, and are being locked out and overridden by Apple's proprietary and significantly-undocumented layer. For an example of this, check out how networking is done on modern macOS versus how networking is done on a BSD or Linux.
> Perhaps I'm a bit jaded after running into too much bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in the 90s and 00s
Linux has gotten much better, and the problems of the 90s and 00s have vanished for my use case.
These days, at least to me, Linux is the pretty Unix that just works that macOS used to be.
> linux updates too frequently for my tastes...an artifact of its dispersed development.
Do you even notice how often Mach is updating in OSX? Does it show up anywhere? If you use Linux and you use it as a tool and not as a playground, you should not care what kernel you are running, besides checking device compatibility. Most users should be running an Ubuntu LTS and only upgrading every two years, and that should be fine for most people.
> t's not what you pay, it's what it costs.
And my counterargument is using Apple products means you are putting blind faith in Apples proprietary software to work in your interests. We already know Windows is backdoored and wire tapped systemically, and Apple is usually a bit better by open sourcing their plumbing, but iOS and the Lion app store should be a tangible warning on how Apple is trying to take you out of the your computer equation. Software freedom is about owning your hardware, and it seems Apple is trying pretty hard to go against that.
> Using MacOS on it feels like I have a ferrari with square wheels.
Indeed macOS is the weakest part when working on Apple Silicon.
Sure it’s quite pretty but it stumbles over itself with terrible quality of life features. macOS looks modern but feels around ten years behind other desktops now.
Apple love to talk about how professionals and power users can get so much work done with the amazing Apple Silicon but ignore the fact window management is garbage. The UI still frequently stutters/judders when just resizing a window. There is no true virtual desktop management. Etc.
I do love macOS but Windows and Linux desktop environments are evolving much faster with excellent quality of life and productivity improvements that macOS badly needs but Apple ignore or worse over engineer other “solutions” such as Stage Manager.
Honestly who at Apple signed off on Stage Manager before basic window snapping?!
Does nobody at Apple have an ultrawide monitor? macOS is painful to work with on anything not 16:9 (or :10).
> why not built a far more powerful and cheaper hackintosh
Because I have better things to do with my time than assemble a poor substitute for a cohesive just-works experience.
> what software is there for mac OS that there is a not an equivalent to for linux or windows
As a developer, most of the exact same software I use every day on OS X runs on Linux just fine. And yet, Linux doesn't provide me with a good user experience, and it doesn't just work[1].
But fundamentally, you are just mad because other people like something you don't. Dwell on that for a while.
[1] If you're going to try and argue with me about how great Ubuntu or Mint or whatever else are these days, let me save you the time: You're wrong, and there is absolutely nothing at all that you can say that will convince me otherwise, because I do use them, but they continue to fail me as primary desktops. Your words conflict with reality, and more words won't change that.
That’s not saying much, everything is always terrible and it was all better under Lion/Snow Leopard/Tiger/OS 8. The 4 computers I had to update did it just fine.
> Brew and Macports both suck. If you use Linux on a daily basis, then you're well familiar with what a good package manager looks like: apt and Pacman are both good examples.
Indeed. From my experience either work great (I use CentOS and OpenSuse daily, alongside macOS). The only bits of software I’ve ever needed which weren’t on Macports were quantum chemistry codes, which I wanted to compile myself anyway to configure them properly and avoid MPI issues. At some point I had to compile GCC myself to track the development branch, but I haven’t had to do that in quite a while now. So yeah, your points are valid, but they still do their job, and you don’t have to rely on them for OS updates, so they cannot compromise stability.
> The ball is in Apple's court then. If they want to brag about being a real Unix system, the least they can do is ship modern Unix tools with their OS. Ironically, MacOS is the least compatible Unix system around.
They haven’t bragged about it in a decade. Besides, if you know UNIX, you realise that this kind of shenanigans is just life, and that there is quite a bit of variance in the specific implementation of user land software. Your problem is not that it is a sub-par UNIX, it’s that it isn’t Linux (which isn’t UNIX). The BSDs also lack most of the GNU tools by default, and so did most other UNIXes when they were still around.
> I mean, the M1 Macbook Air is sitting in my desk as we speak.
That’s fine. I didn’t accuse you of lying, and you are entitled to your preferences. I just pointed out that your arguments were not great, and indeed often heard from people who never really used Macs.
> My guff is well founded, I think: as the most valuable company in the world, Apple has an obligation to provide at least some level of modularity in their ecosystem.
This might be your problem. Whatever their market cap, they don’t really have an obligation to align with your opinions. I understand that you’d like it, but what kind of moral imperative would there be?
> Otherwise, the precedent they set will continue to influence every market we can conceive, until our concept of "ownership" is poisoned to mean a subscription service.
How is this related to their business policy? I strongly dislike their foray into services, but other than that they sell devices, not subscriptions. Your devices are yours, nobody is going to come and take them.
> It's driven by greed, and makes me sick. It always comes at the cost of the user, and the declining greatness of MacOS is a perfect example of how Apple's hunger for money is poisoning their product line.
Right, so you have an ideological problem and that’s why you sound like that. Well, if I can recommend anything, it would be to keep using Thinkpads, they are good devices and Linux is great as well. That way you can completely ignore whatever happens on the Apple side and be happy.
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