> The only issue I have with Linux is the quality of the hardware. Mac hardware is incredible. I have mac's still running from decades ago and used heavily.
There doesn't seem to a contradiction there. I knew people who preferred Linux on Apple hardware. They were very happy with it.
> Apple solves small, annoying problems, and does so without friction. Things just work.
This. I’ve tried Android a couple of times over the years, and every time there’s just little quirks and problems that drive me back to iOS.
Same with Linux on a laptop. I actually prefer Linux as a dev environment, but I’ve never been able to get the same laptop experience as I can with a Mac. The quality of the touchpad, keyboard (the butterfly keys being the lone exception), display, weight, and form factor just can’t be touched.
> If it wasn't for the Mac OS, I wouldn't even bother considering their lineup anymore.
Years ago, when I exclusively used Linux even on my local machines, I used to buy Apple computers and replace the OS with Linux. Because they used to build the best damn computers (specially laptops) out there. They were way ahead of the competition.
It’s sad that now we just have to put up with Apple hardware because of software integration, etc. . If I wanted to run Linux or Windows, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to look somewhere else.
> The biggest appeal of Apple is their wonderful hardware.
To you. To others (like me) the biggest appeal was the only even vaguely usable & consistent OS, supported by nice hardware. Now they have replaced the nice hardware with thin-and-light toys with fake keyboards, we're in a bind.
> It seems to me that a Hackintosh is the worst of both worlds. If you spend that much time hacking around the hardware anyways, why not use Linux ?
Quite, I agree. I don't want to futz with either hardware or software, so have gone for a Windows laptop. Windows is profoundly horrible, but it does work for me without having to mess around. We really have reached the point in 2018 where there literally are no good options. Just least-worst for the task at hand.
> 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.
> Every company I've worked at for the last 10 years has developed exclusively on macOS.
Counter-anecdote: I have had a Linux computer on my desktop for over the last twenty years, have used Linux primarily for maybe the last eleven, and exclusively for the last eight.
I do not get the near-religious love for Apple products. Pre-OS X, they really were wonderful, best in class without a doubt. I kinda get the attraction back in the early 2000s, when Linux could still be a chore and Macs were a decent choice to get a computer which had a shell and ran real software. But now? They are just not for me. I want to own my own computer, write my own software and control my own destiny.
> I think that comparing the operating systems of today based on how they worked 20 years ago is a bit of a stretch.
My family, friends & colleagues all use Apple computers & phones, so I believe that I've had pretty good exposure to them. There are a few things which macOS does better (system-wide copy/paste is clearly one), but overall I stand by what I wrote. Linux is great, and I don't thinking I'm missing anything by avoid Windows & macOS.
I like apple hardware, but their OS is fucking atrocious. In the year 2024 it still doesn't have a native volume mixer, or any kind of sensible window management shortcuts. Half the things on it have to be fixed with paid software. Complete joke of an OS, if it were up to me I'd stick a linux distro on top of the hardware and be happy
> Even if you think Linux isn't better, it can't be worse!
It could be! The truth is complicated. I’ve been using a ryzen desktop running mint for the last year and I just got a M1 pro. I love both of these machines and I still don’t know which I want to be using as a daily driver. (Well, now mint is set up how I like).
These macos bugs are real - and they feel like amateur hour junk. As well as the memory leak I’m also running into a bug on my M1 where WindowServer idles at 100% cpu after I’ve been using my computer for awhile. I have no idea what it’s doing or what causes it, but the only way to fix it is a reboot. (Or kill -9 the process, which logs me out and closes all my programs anyway).
But Linux’s bugs are different. I haven’t rebooted my Linux machine in ages. But on linux I’m annoyed by other things. Lots of programs have broken smooth scrolling. Keyboard shortcuts for moving the cursor around are inconsistent. I can’t use the Meta key in intellij as a modifier for some reason - so I can’t use my muscle memory shortcuts (and the ctrl+shift+C is awful as a copy shortcut in xterm!). I use a trackpad on my desktop and the sensitivity is way off - so i get misclicks all the time. App distribution is a mess - flatpak, snap, apt, custom dpkgs and manual make / make install? All of the above? I accidentally ended up with 2 copies of discord installed and didn’t know which one was “right”.
Linux does the core engineering work right but often falls down in frontend UX. (Its definitely getting better these days though). Apple makes nice UX but their core engineering is remarkably buggy. Apple please - I know you think the market wants a new OS every year with new features. You don’t need a new font every year to compete with cheap plastic x86 laptops. Please slow down and fix your shit.
> But the rest of the system is not. I want I computer that I can use in the way that I want, with the software that I want, and not a computer that must be used as Apple wants, and limits you in using an hardware that you bought.
You can't run a lot of software on linux, you can run less of it compared to windows and osx. All hardware is limited, all the x86 laptops have soldered CPUs, there is no such thing as unlimited hardware.
>Also from an hardware standpoint Mac are overpriced machines, with insufficient I/O that forces you to bring a bag of adapters with yourself and components that are all soldered on the motherboard, impossible to upgrade.
M1 is not overpriced for its benefits, the x86 stuff I agree with though and fuck their keyboards. No more Jony Ive, so ports are back!
>The reason why I use Linux is that I can do whatever I want on my computer, I don't have to have signed applications, annoying prompts to tell me that the software is not Apple approved (till there are the prompts and Apple doesn't decide to forbid all unsigned software as on iOS), and similar.
The problem I have with this is that its not that you can do whatever, you MUST do it and use a lot of time in configuration. I find the root prompt just as annoying in linux. I just want a working environment, not a bunch of software that asks me to set every preference.
> Recently I’ve just found myself disenchanted with Apple in a way similar to how I felt maybe twelve years earlier with Microsoft, when I switched to Linux the first time.
This is exactly why I've been switching back to Linux everywhere, including laptops. Apple has done a pretty good job recreating the modern Windows experience.
> While you may find it creaking, myself and many other people find the experience of using Apple software far better than any competing systems. I wouldn't work somewhere that asked me to use Windows. For me, and maybe I'm overly aesthetically sensitive, it would make my day to day life much worse.
I agree: Windows is just embarrassingly bad. Fortunately, there is another …
I've been using desktop Linux for almost twenty years, and it is in my experience superior to the Mac. It gets out of my way and lets me get my work done. It has multiple tiling window managers. It is the native environment for the best tools. It is truly free, both in terms of liberty and price. It runs on commodity hardware. It's fast. And, IMHO, it can be pretty too.
> I guess I’m wondering what metric singles this one out as being best?
Apple have probably decided that it is the best because it has the best hardware that is running OSX. I think they consider any other OS inferior, no matter what hardware it is running on.
- Hidpi support is spotty (its getting better but still a bit spotty)
- Smooth scrolling in applications is inconsistent at best
- The keyboard shortcuts for moving the text cursor around are inconsistent between programs
- Hardware support is much more of a crap shoot. Linux has a harder job than macos in trying to support every combination of janky hardware out there. But as a user, I don't really care. I just know that if I buy a mac, the OS will work perfectly with the hardware on offer. That isn't true on linux.
- Lots of useful software isn't available on linux. Eg, I love Monodraw, but thats macos only.
- App distribution on Linux is a mess. Apt? RPM? Snap? Flatpack? Etc etc. I have 2 copies of discord installed for some reason, and I have no idea what the difference is between them.
Etcetera..
Linux gives you the choice and freedom to spend an unlimited number of hours customizing everything. With linux I'm in complete control and I love that. On macos, things usually just work out of the box. I love that too.
No OS is perfect. There's tradeoffs with everything. If you don't understand other people's preferences, that doesn't make you right. It makes you ignorant.
>you use what they give you, how they give it to you, using their workflows, barely customizing anything. Apple products are supposed to be revered the world over as the pinnacle of design, used by artists, engineers, professionals, and creators. Why do I feel like there are training wheels on a machine I use for productivity?
Gosh, this is exactly how I felt in a similar situation. Really hit the nail on the head.
I've used Linux for a long time, and for a while I was kindly forced to use a Mac (got a Linux laptop last week). It was a painful experience that took a heavy toll on my productivity.
My impression is that Mac has so many idiossincrasies that fans just assume are "intuitive" while they're really not - they've just been used to it for a long time. Personally I hated, hated the usability. Can't stress it enough, it absolutely sucked. Never again!
Also the benefits compared to non-Macs are diminishing over time. You can get great hardware and battery life with system76 for instance.
I'm halfway in between, Apple makes the best hardware, Linux is the best OS. If you want the best of everything, it takes some work.
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