> 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.
> I prefer the desktop environment of 'It just works' and 'If it ain't broke don't fix it'. It's called macOS.
Pffft. No it's called XFCE. My Macs are broken way more often by updates and are way less compatible with my hardware than anything else in my house. They really don't just work... They're dead ass not even half as stable as Manjaro.
- 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.
> Linux is more appealing and almost worth it for the speedy file access, but is too time-consuming for me to to commit to.
I hear a variation of this semi-often and I never quite get what that's supposed to mean. Maybe being a full-time Linux user for a decade has made me used to whatever people are complaining about, but I don't think so, people are complaining about having to fix broken HW/SW occasionally, however as someone who:
- Picks Linux-supported hardware specifically, as opposed to a random, generic PC, (something you wouldn't do with macOS either, btw).
- Runs a rolling release distro, so if anything should experience more breakage than the regular Ubuntu LTS/Fedora user.
I can honestly say that my workflow is basically:
-> Turn the laptop on, (or wake from sleep, yes that works well on solid HW)
-> Get my work done
-> Update the system every couple of days, (rolling release updates)
-> Repeat
Now does occasionally some package update their config that I'll have to merge or something like that? Sure, maybe once or twice a year.
When I do have to use macOS for builds, I experience glitches, (like the login bar loading and never finishing), various annoying updates, (& update prompts), apps, (like Duet Display), randomly breaking when you need them, occasional kernel panics, (but more frequent than I ever had on Linux, in fact I had one on Linux maybe once), choppy performance even on a top spec 2016 MBP due to poor thermals, video rendering issues when switchable graphics is enabled etc.
All in all, my macOS experience is actually somewhat worse than on Linux. It's nothing I can't deal with, but it's nowhere near as trouble free as people make it seem.
I honestly think it comes down to things like macOS being more animated by default, having 3D shadows under every window, the dock enlarging the icons as you scroll pass them, your coworkers having a Mac as a status symbol etc. rather than some big technical hurdle.
>If you really need mac software then why not built a far more powerful and cheaper hackintosh
I don't think it should make you mad. Different strokes for different folks.
If I go to a car forum I bet I can find a lot of people who love BMW, and more still who love Mercedes Benz. They'll probably happily argue with each other about who makes the better cars, and why one brand is far superior to the other. And then there's probably also some people who are happy with either car.
For you, there's no software on OS X that doesn't have an equivalent on Linux or Windows. But that might not be true for others (for example, I don't consider GIMP to be 'equivalent' to Photoshop...but you might). Another example - I used to work in live events, and used Mac Pros to drive video rigs. Could I have built a more powerful and cheaper hackintosh? Probably. But I doubt the build quality of what I'd put together would be superior. The cheese-grater Mac Pro could take a beating.
Again, my needs are very different to yours. Please don't get angry on my account!
> A person like you is definitely better off using macOS or Windows.
I'm not necessarily going to disagree with this - I switched from desktop Ubuntu to Mac and have hardly looked back because I really don't miss constantly dicking around with config files playing UI glitch whack-a-mole. Mac UI certainly has its own healthy share of warts - in fact I find it practically unusable without Divvy and Moom, for starters - but on the whole it's polished, functional, aesthetically pleasing, and usually doesn't get in the way of doing work. Those are all very important qualities to me as someone who spends a non-trivial amount of time doing things outside of a terminal.
Just because I'm capable of rolling my own desktop environment doesn't mean I want to or that it's a particularly good use of my time, and I imagine a lot of potential/would-be Linux users probably feel the same way. Being dismissive of that perspective is counterproductive if you believe that the world would be better off with more FOSS usage (as I do).
> Every time I go back to macOS, I get frustrated with the inflexibility of it all. I get that it's a pain to feel like you have to customize everything to get something usable for you
It's great if macOS is what you want, or is close enough to it (which it is for many, many people).
I guess people's problem with Linux is that no amount of knob twiddling ever gets Linux's desktop and window manager close enough to what they want.
Personally, I want macOS to be my window manager, and I want Linux to be my dev environment/command line. I can't twiddle either to be close enough to the other, so I run Ubuntu in Parallels on macOS.
Now if macOS gained the equivalent of Windows Subsystem for Linux, I'd be super happy.
> 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
> Depends on what you’re used to and what your needs are. I can have a Mac in reasonably usable shape in 30-45m, whereas getting Linux configured to my liking (especially under KDE) quickly turns into a multi-hour affair and ends in an unsatisfying state because of all the little things that can’t be the way I like unless I start digging into source code or writing my own desktop bits.
That only works well if macOS is in fact exactly how you like things. Because it's a lot less configurable than KDE and the whole source code thing is not an option at all :)
I agree, if you want a Mac then don't try to make Linux like one because you'll never get close enough.
> If you are a software developer, you have no excuse not buying a Linux compatible machine and using it as your daily driver.
False. I've tried it and it doesn't compare to OS X. Also this SOOOO rich in a thread about Nvidia (which SUCKS on linux). You think you are in driver hell on Mac? Oh boy, strap yourself in.
> Im nearly completely free of Apples ecosystem, thank god.
Enjoy your "freedom", I'll enjoy getting real work done without futzing with something that "Pretty much works (tm)" but has some kind of gotcha. I'm sure the developers here at my work who use a Linux desktop would tell you "It's great, I love it" but somehow I'm the lone developer who doesn't have display manager crashes, complete rebuilds needed, and graphics driver hell. Yeah, I think I'll stick to my "imprisonment".
> If you still have passion and time for this - cool, most people don't want to spend their days on this.
Just adding another counterpoint to "MacOs is awsome", anecdotal one, because we don't have any other.
My wife (she is not a hacker, just a computer science teacher) hates macos, she preferred Linux.
She used the system I setup for her, and I left it alone. She loved it.
MacOS is created for average Joe that just browses web and has no clue about anything else (like filesystem, directories). Example: Finder, that thingy can't show you full paths. If you try to get to your home directory to get some files you have to jump hoops.
I'm astonished that it is pushed as a developer OS, "because you have 'Linux' there". Sorry, that poor choice of basic utilities (some time ago bash there was ages old), that everyone has to use brew to get anything useful there.
Hardware is nice, but OS, is something that you just overwrite while installing Linux.
> The problem is I get Ubuntu working and then I still have to deal with fucking Unity.
I solve that by using neither Ubuntu nor Unity:-)
> OSX works out of the box with the hardware, and the OS is just a much more pleasant desktop experience while being a good enough OS to get work done (vs windows being more difficult).
But macOS is only pleasant if impeding your workflow doesn't affect your pleasure.
Yes, certainly, trying to use one of the major desktop environments as a replacement for macOS may be worse (although I'm personally unconvinced: GNOME & Unity don't cause me pain like using a Mac, but I'm sure I could get used to the latter). But try using a tiling WM, with a good terminal emulator, an editor & a browser.
After having spent, maybe, two weeks total effort customising my environment, I have something which is a much more pleasant computing experience that either macOS or Windows. My computer gets out of my way when I need it to; it's an extension of my brain; it's a tool, not a toy I'm constantly playing with.
Frankly, the desktop metaphor was probably a mistake in the long run, and choosing to ape the desktop metaphor was probably a mistake for free software. We should have focused on the next advance, not tried to reproduce an advance, but this time with fewer resources and more folks pulling in different directions.
GUIs are great, but draggable windows really aren't so much. GUI elements are great, but being forced to mouse around for any action really isn't so much. Curated software can provide a great ride, but it's not so great when you need to get off the rails and explore new territory.
> I find developers flocking to macOS really bewildering. As a developer, why do you want to fight your operating system to get basic things done?
Haha! (I assume that was sarcasm. If not, you might want to look at the voluminous writings of humans who have had trouble getting standard modern laptop functionality working on linux, suspend to disk, battery life, hi res screens etc etc. Not you -- I mean mere mortals who don't want to change their OS's swap configuration)
> A hackintosh takes away the only advantage macOS has over Linux, in my opinion.
I'm a massive Linux user (it's on everything, I don't own a Mac) but you can't run Creative Suite on Linux you can on a Hackintosh as well as all the other Mac native applications.
It's easy to fall into the trap that "my use case is the only use case" and that's not true. If I was a .Net developer I'd be on Windows, if I was an iOS developer I'd be on a Mac.
perf, case sensitive file systems, non stupid alt-tab behaviour, strace, pstack, gdb (these don't seem to work without sacrificing animals), gnome-shell (better than finder by a long way, imo).
I've got a mac. I don't install programs except for things through brew. It's basically shitty linux with outlook.
> 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.
> 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.
> Frankly, I can't see any reason for the Hackintosh middle ground other than people who can't cope without the OS but can't afford the hardware.
I have several Mac laptops that cost more than most desktops (from apple or otherwise) but use a hackintosh desktop. Price isn't the issue, Apple simply doesn't make a desktop Mac with the specs I want, specifically there is no Mac with a desktop class GPU. You can choose between an iMac with a mobile GPU or a Mac Pro with a compute optimized GPU, I don't need nor want either. If Apple made a desktop with a desktop class GPU, I'd buy it.
> The software is little more than a neutered and compromised version of BSD that lets you part way into a walled garden (cue It's a trap! meme).
It's the best user experience available on a POSIX compliant OS. I used linux as my only OS for 6-7 years, I will never go back to fighting to get basic functionality to work.
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.
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