> Mac software and app industry has died. Even after notarising apps they show malicious popup to users.
I maintain a handful of open source apps for macOS, and have for years. If I don't pay the $100 Apple tax, macOS will treat those apps as if they're radioactive, and it will trick users into believing the apps are either broken or malicious.
In order to run them, users must know how to change arcane settings and do a magic ritual with the UI, otherwise they just won't open.
If the tables were turned and it was Linux that wouldn't run apps that were not signed and approved by Red Hat without having to jump through arcane hoops first, people would be rightfully pointing out how user and developer hostile it is.
> They killed the industry.
Not only that, they helped usher in the race to the bottom when it comes to the app distribution market. Now everyone expects to spend a dollar or two for an app if they're spending anything at all. They also killed the paid update/upgrade model for apps.
> It's like a community of everyone scamming and mistreating each other instead of working together to improve things.
I was saying this exact thing to a friend of mine who is big into apple products and suggested that you could technically do the things I wanted to do on apple devices.
The general ecosystem between windows/linux/mac is very different. Windows freeware is all packaged and provided on sites last updated in 2002 and look like you'll get a virus despite the site being the defacto source.
Linux software feels a lot more unified(despite n+1 packaging schemes) and feels a lot more like a collective effort where anything is possible.
Mac software wants you to break out your wallet and contribute to the APPL bottom line in order to get some basic custom functionality for some app written by a single developer that will be quietly given up on in a couple years.
> stopped updating my open-source Mac apps because I can't justify the cost of jumping over artificial hurdles Apple puts in place that ensure users can't run the apps they want to use.
hah, that's the exact reason I stopped using os x and went full Linux on my old Mac book air about 8 years ago.
> What bothers me is that I’ve experienced an increasing number of maintainers of supposed cross platform projects simply not care about macOS anymore to the extent that they’re openly hostile towards macOS users.
So blame Apple for it - why do you blame the developers?
Apple wants you to forget that it is the developers that add value to a platform, and yet it charges them for the "privilege" of creating apps for their platform. And then they are openly and increasingly hostile to developers who do not conform to their business model and do not want to pay them or distribute the app through their app store - and thus they keep crippling API after API to make sure that the developers toe their line.
It is because of Apple's hostile attitude to developers that they no longer want to invest (or rather waste) their time on Apple platform.
> It's trillions of hoops for Desktop Linux to get to the consistency and equivalent working state of macOS
Of course it is, nobody should be making MacOS with free software. To get to the equivalent working state of MacOS, we'd have to remove the package manager, add a first-party app store, add in OSCP surveillance/telemetry, remove OpenGL/Vulkan support, remove 32-bit libraries, axe the Nvidia drivers and close all contributions to the kernel. That will always be impossible, it's by design.
> This same panic has been going on since 10.6 with the introduction of the Mac App Store.
And rightfully so! How is this not an obvious trend to you?! It isn't just Apple, it's cell phones and tablets with unlockable bootloaders, Windows S-Mode, Samsung Knox, Firefox extension signing that can't be disabled, and a great many other examples. It's the trend that's alarming, not the specific way macOS is configured right now.
> How do you propose that you would be able to develop software on the Mac if you had to sign your executable every time that you recompiled it?
By paying the Apple tax for a developer license and then just... signing your code every time you compile it? You already have to do this for Firefox extension development if you don't bother to run a dev or unbranded build. Alternatively, just run your (unsigned) compiled code in a VM.
> So what would be the financial motive ...
The financial motive is the glaringly obvious walled garden! It's the vendor's control over the device you purchased!
> Do you really want third party kext to be “free” to crash your entire system?
Obviously not; that is a bad faith interpretation of what I said previously. There are ways to ensure user security that don't remove control of the system from the end user. These options are consistently not chosen, by more or less all the major manufactures. I believe that the motives for such behavior are quite obvious.
>What really puzzles me about Apple fans and it's userbase is that they do not care. They simply do not care at all what's being done to them.
I'm not really an Apple fan, per se, but I do own a macbook and the reason is this: It's not worth my time to switch to Linux. I have a core i7 Thinkpad that I also run Debian+KDE on, and the user experience is much worse, to say nothing of track pad quality and battery life.
I'm a parent and I'm not a software developer in my professional life, which means every minute spent figuring out why Linux won't do $thing properly is a minute not spent on more important things.
The opportunity cost of using free software is just too high for my use case.
There's absolutely no way to make Linux work the same way as macOS, simply because they do things differently by design. If you try, you're going to waste countless hours, have a horrible time, and at the most only make Linux slightly resemble macOS in terms of the experience.
I actually find that in terms of UX, Linux is a lot more similar to Windows than it is to macOS.
For me, what I missed of macOS when I tried out Linux was the easy shortcuts, easy access to special characters (accented letters, etc. without the compose key), the focus on drag-and-drop to do things, the quality of the look & feel of most apps, and most importantly the consistency that macOS has. There is of course no way to make all Linux developers stick to the exact same guidelines, but I had a feeling on Linux that every time I installed an app, I had to relearn a lot of things. Shortcuts and other conventions are always the same on macOS, on Linux they change alongside many interface elements, down to the windows controls.
In general though, I had a better time when I embraced how Linux does things, rather than try to recreate my macOS workflow.
Ultimately, I have no interest in wasting hours and hours configuring and fixing things up, just so that I have freedom with the software on my computer. I don't like many decisions that Apple has taken lately, and don't especially like how expensive and outdated their hardware is, but my hourly rate is pretty good, and with the money I make from gained (or not lost) productivity because things just work I can buy not one, but probably 10 MacBook Pros, and save myself a lot of frustration. I can then have freedom not from using open source software, but because I'm done working and I can go grab a beer with my friends or girlfriend instead of staying home configuring X.org.
> 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
> It's not that installing Linux is a hassle. I just love a lot of the apps I can run on my Mac.
I think that's a huge X factor a lot of the latest discussions are missing. People LOVE MacOS apps. They're beautiful. They work well. They're typically fast. They're user friendly. Windows and Linux apps are none of those things. In my experience, Mac users don't mind paying for Mac apps because they tend to be of high quality. Windows and Linux users won't pay for apps unless they absolutely have to because the quality of the available apps varies so much.
> you can publish macOS software without paying $99 year.
Can you point to straightforward apple instructions for doing so?
I publish an open source project used in classrooms, mostly used by my own students but also others. Despite strong and principled objections, which I hung on to for years, I have simply given up and now pay the fee. I'd love to not have apple be the gatekeeper. But they are. Every release, every update, every summer when I go to fix a few bugs, the restrictions get tighter and tighter, and old workarounds stop working.
I work entirely on Linux and Win10, but I maintain a mac laptop and pay the $99/yr out of pocket just to keep this project alive. I've spent tens of days trying to find a way around either of these requirements, but it's just too difficult (for me, or for my students, or for others wanting to try my software).
>I would enjoy macOS if it subscribed to open source ideals, but then it wouldn't be Apple right
Yes, and what's more troubling, I think it also wouldn't be macOS.
macOS can be more open, but it can't "subscribe to open source ideals" (and even less so the "bazaar model") without stopping being macOS.
It offers something else, and some of it could be replicated in FOSS (e.g. Gnome has copied tons of those, as have certain distros), but part of it stems from it being walled, and curated.
And it's not cut and dry which parts are the latter ones.
E.g. I think that "deprecating things" the way Apple does and no FOSS would dare do (due to inertia and community-driven nature) makes macOS able to adopt new stuff faster, and adopt it more wholly (e.g. with no leftover apps with 10 layers of old GUIs like in Windows).
Similarly the "my way or the highway" from Apple helps keep the platform focused (as opposed to all the FOSS hoopla, X vs Wayland, KDE vs Gnome vs XFCE etc, systemd vs init, and tons of other minituae and duplication of effort). We'd still be discussing Metal in FOSS land (well, we have 10 years of moving from X to Wayland and it's still going on). In macOS it's a done deal.
(That's irrelevant of whether that new stuff is better or worse, btw. It can be either - but it can be either faster, and more uniformly. That's a quality FOSS lacks, and which I appreciate over customizability).
> I'd also make the argument that it's a good way to describe the setup of basically any macOS power user, with their inevitable collection of brittle, mostly proprietary, solo dev apps they use to hack basic functionality back into Apple's anemic OS offering.
Respectfully, this seems like a really out-of-touch perspective.
The software I use for Mac is a melange of open source and proprietary. I basically just use whatever is the least painful; sometimes that's open source, sometimes it's proprietary. Virtually every piece of software I use is high quality, and Mac doesn't really encumber my ability to use best-in-class software.
Linux desktop software is by far more brittle--it has to play nicely across a dizzying array of systems all while using crumby, buggy GUI toolkits from the 90s. Basic things like hidpi, webcam, (good) touchpad support are very unlikely to work out of the box if at all. Further still, support for popular apps can be really hit-or-miss on Linux. Not sure what the state of the world is, but for a good long time Spotify wasn't available on Linux. Yeah, I get that Spotify is proprietary and thus evil, but I don't really care about ideology, I want to be able to listen to my music without jumping through hoops (I would work around the limitation by using the web interface, but it was buggier and clearly a second-class citizen).
Like, I would love to be a Linux desktop user, and I often find myself daydreaming about how to build a Linux desktop platform that doesn't suck--it's not like I'm a MacOS partisan or anything. It's just that today, MacOS is wayyyy better than the Linux desktop. Linux can get there, but we really need to get rid of a bunch of cruft and build on a saner foundation (frankly, we should just use web APIs for building apps--something like ChromeOS but without the restrictions on what a program can do).
> You have to buy- and install third party applications from developers that you do not know or trust, and that is just to fix some of the most basic issues.
That's one of the biggest jokes on the Mac, indeed.
On Windows it's not much different besides one detail: You also need a shitload of tools and gadgets only to make basic things usable. But at least those tools are mostly free (like in beer) or even OpenSource. On the Mac instead you have to pay ridiculous amounts of money only to get some basic options (like for example, I think it was ~30 bucks, only to be able to configure the acceleration of the mouse cursor).
The usability on the Mac is very broken, but people knowing how to "milk" other people created a whole market for laughable expensive apps out of it only to fix the most annoying things. That's just sooo ridiculous! I personally have no clue why people are buying this kind of stuff. It's like they want to be treated like -peep-. Imho the "jokes" about Stockholm syndrome victims are no jokes any more. That's bitter reality.
> a half-decent Linux distro has a lot better usability
Has not been my experience with either Arch/kde or Ubuntu at all, but to each their own. They have their own strengths but usability isn't one of them IMO.
> the whole app ecosystem is a shock, where it's normal that basic tools (like FTP Client) cost 50EUR or come crippled (Like FileZilla). It's a horrible feeling coming from OSS world.
OSS versions of tools like FTP clients exist in the macOS world as well[0]. Theres a small but high quality ecosystem of independant mac software thats been around for a long time.
> With all the attention being paid to macOS these days, there's enough mods and addon's that I don't miss Linux so much on my laptop.
One problem that I have is all that all those mods and add-ons are out there, but there's a real mindset that "everything must be an app" and a pursuant mindset that "might as well charge for it". I don't mind paying for a complicated app, but there are certain basic features that used to be served by the freeware model on Macs that just aren't any more, and my impression is that things are heading ever more in that direction. (As well as in the direction of subscriptions over app purchases, which are right out for me for basic utility needs.)
You mentioned Rectangle.app and Hammerspoon, which are both open source. Do you have any good recommendations for where to look for other high-quality open-source mods and add-ons for macOS?
I maintain a handful of open source apps for macOS, and have for years. If I don't pay the $100 Apple tax, macOS will treat those apps as if they're radioactive, and it will trick users into believing the apps are either broken or malicious.
In order to run them, users must know how to change arcane settings and do a magic ritual with the UI, otherwise they just won't open.
If the tables were turned and it was Linux that wouldn't run apps that were not signed and approved by Red Hat without having to jump through arcane hoops first, people would be rightfully pointing out how user and developer hostile it is.
> They killed the industry.
Not only that, they helped usher in the race to the bottom when it comes to the app distribution market. Now everyone expects to spend a dollar or two for an app if they're spending anything at all. They also killed the paid update/upgrade model for apps.
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