Apple has the benefit of controlling both hw and sw and still manage to mess it up.
Random crashes, slowdowns for long running sessions, crappy UI (eg those labels not checking their checkboxes in Settings), network weirdness (both USB ethernet dongles/hubs and internal WiFi), my USB audio interface picking up garbled audio which requires reselecting audio interface for it to fix itself...
Maybe I am doing something different, but it's even worse than Linux for the most part.
Random things on top of my head :
MacOS doesn't come with candy crush, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify etc. prepopulating your start menu. Phone home telemetry and ads in OS ? Yummy
Dealing with Windows dev environment is always a PITA eventually - unless you're doing stuff where Windows is first class citizen (like games). For backend stuff it's almost implicit that you're running on Linux in prod and macos is well supported because it's fairly similar. On Windows it's always some path issues, stuff randomly breaking between updates, missing/incompatible CLI, etc.
Brew is pretty good. Chocolatey is garbage.
MacOS is fairly visually consistent. Windows regularly has me in Windows XP era screens, reached through 3 inconsistent UX steps developed along the way. Even Linux is better in this regard.
I like Linux when it works. Mac works more often. Windows is just a dumpster fire at this point.
MacOS also has telemetry.
>For backend stuff it's almost implicit that you're running on Linux in prod and macos is well supported because it's fairly similar.
Then Windows would be better than MacOS in this regard because WSL2 is exactly Linux, not just "fairly similar" to Linux.
>stuff randomly breaking between updates
What stuff broke for you between updates? Our entire DS team develops in windows + WSL2 and nothing broke for them in ~5 years. Maybe they know how to use a computer.
Ultimately just use what you like and what makes you productive, no need to crusade for some big corporation. The OS is just a tool for your job, like a hammer.
Now have you tried uninstalling Apple Music ? or found a way to disable it from launching everytime you press the play button on your headset with no media player running ?
In the last few years I've looked at every macos updates with more an more dread of things that will stop working and generic enshitification. Windows stays more "in your face" on the cheap marketing stuff, but it also brought in a lot more improvements than macos did in the last 10 years, so I don't as much difference in experience as in the past.
With so many webtech-apps (Slack, Google calendar...) and non-native UI browsers (Firefox/Chrome), visual consistency is lost anyway, so I stopped caring (the best experience I had was with GNOME in 2.* early HIG/a11y days when I used Epiphany as the web browser) — oh yeah, I use Emacs too, so there's that :)
Still, most common Mac-as-Linux approach with Docker Desktop is an incompatible emulation layer (eg. local UIDs are transformed into root UID on Mac, whereas they are not on Linux, so you get weird permission errors if you develop on Mac and rebuild/redeploy on Linux).
I take that as a feature and is the whole crux of this discussion. I don't need ODBC or many such archaic features but if someday I need to use it, I trust it will be working.
YMMV but my experience is the opposite. Windows is a perfectly usable dev environment. The only time I face issues is when developers don’t choose to use cross platform tools.
> Chocolatey is garbage.
I’ll give you this one, but that’s why anyone serious on Windows is using scoop.
I've been using Macs for a decade, and the only time I had this happen was on corporate laptops with antivirus software installed. Antivirus software are poorly written and they used to have constantly crashing kernel extensions. Apple has been deprecating kernel extensions in recent years, so the situation is improving. But the performance hit caused by antivirus crapware is unfortunately still a thing.
Where do you see MacOS ruining 30 year old binaries?
B2B Windows is the stuff you would see for enterprise buyers with strict IT policies. Your experience will be mostly unchanged from "classic Windows".
Apple also, due to the hardware business, adheres to a release schedule where features must all be consolidated onto single branches (“convergence”), rather than letting individual teams ship incrementally.
> ...the UI with Bing/Ads/telemetrics/etc integration is so crap...
