(Two decades on DOS/Windows home series and NT, at least for gaming and sometimes work, twelve years with Linux as my main desktop OS, started on Android for smartphones, before finally giving Apple a fair chance around 2011 or 2012… because I was issued a MacBook at work and was doing dual-platform mobile dev—FWIW I was rooting for BeOS back when it was still a thing, it was great)
MacOS may not even be the best (that's subjective), let alone "by far" the best. How can you make this claim when you haven't used Linux in a decade?
Also it’s on my Steamdeck, so I get a good dose of the usual jank any time I have to use the desktop mode for anything.
IIRC making caps another control anywhere I was logged in—not just in KDE—was weirdly hard, too.
Five or six years ago my Ubuntu tv-attached old desktop forgot how to decrypt the root disk its own installer had encrypted, after an OS upgrade.
My Debian server required manual intervention (busting out my rusty Gentoo chroot grub-installing skills) to install its bootloader. The manual version went the same aa usual and had no problems so no clue WTF the installer was trying to do, but it consistently failed, and this was boring, old business-class Lenovo workstation hardware. That was four or five years ago.
Basically when I try to go back I’m missing lots of features and it’s less stable than what I’m now accustomed to, so end up wasting a bunch of time and regretting it.
MacOS, for all it's faults, can be tamed with little snitch and a slower update cycle, and then you have a relatively solid system. There's still some things to hate, like when I take my airpods out if I accidentally click one of the buttons Apple Music opens (no one wants to use Apple Music, ever). But, that little frustraition pales in comparison to the build your own experience a poweruser in Linux faces on a weekly basis.
This randomly came front of mind last night when I thought, I can't remember the last time something broke on my laptop. It's been literal months since I've had anything weird or unwanted that I've _had_ to deal with. Contrast that to the last time I tried to daily Linux, about 2 years ago when I bought a framework and couldn't even log in due to trackpad issues, sleep / hibernate issues, screen resizing issues, issues issues issues.
I always have at least one Linux machine around that I use primarily, but it's never been reliable. Either Debian or Ubuntu, I always, without fail, have issue with sleep/wake/hibernate and will never bet it'll wake properly when they sleep.
My current Ubuntu desktop with AMD cpu doesn't sleep and has to be manually hibernated.
My HP Dev One laptop with PopOS will fail to wake roughly 1/10 times, requiring a hard reset. Other times it'll fail to sleep and overheat in my backpack. Occasionally, it'll stop recognizing USB peripherals, or the trackpad/keyboard will stop responding to inputs.
I prefer Linux on nearly every front, but having a totally unreliable computing environment makes it a deal-breaker for me.
> "Have you tried $THING"
No I really have grown tired of waking a machine to a blank screen and having to ssh into it to kill gnome or any of the other crap.
My Macs very occasionally freeze on wake too--but that's exceedingly rare compared to the myriad issues with Linux usability.
> That was four or five years ago.
Linux moves way faster than commercial OS IMO.
Reconsider linux. Commercial OS isn't going to 'get better' for IT literate users. :/
Meanwhile my work Mac every so often decides my external monitor just doesn't exist anymore and I have to reboot with it unplugged, then again with it plugged in to get it back.
I remember this sort of thing about 15 years ago, but in the last 8 years of nixos, I've maybe hard rebooted twice. I've also only ever rebooted after an upgrade. otherwise I go months with just sleep/wake. I wonder if you have some interesting hardware...
In modern days, you can daily drive linux without issues. If you were having issues, it was most likely you were doing something wrong, or you were using a company configured laptop that the IT department didn't set up right.
It's great that they translated the UI in that language!
Jokes aside, I use a mix of Windows 10, Windows 11, Linux Mint (have had a few DEB and RPM distros on the desktop too) and macOS. I have to say, that all of them are serviceable.
Windows is sometimes quite annoying to deal with, but has a lot of software for it (the likes of PowerToys, MobaXTerm, WinSCP, System Informer, Handbrake, 7-Zip, HWiNFO64, MiniTool Partition Wizard, MPC-HC, Rufus, ShareX, XSplit VCam, VSeeFace and others). You can do most of the same things in alternative software in other OSes, but there's a huge variety to be found, same as with running most of the games out there natively. The UI feels hit or miss and worse in Windows 11 than in 10 in some regards (no vertical taskbar, for example, need fixes for the context menu etc.), but the OS feels usable.
Linux Mint and other Linux distros are pretty much ideal for software development, hands down. Most tools work, the resource usage is great, there's a huge knowledgebase on how to do things out there, it's quite customizable and can be used on servers, desktop computers or even an old low spec laptop alike. I personally settled on Cinnamon, but XFCE was very usable and someone might prefer GNOME or KDE (there were even attempts at reviving the old Unity desktop from Ubuntu, that one might have gotten hate when it was the main option, but actually had its nice bits too). Gaming is hit or miss with Proton (many games will run but definitely not all, also forget about playing anything with invasive anti-cheat solutions), sometimes you also won't be able to get some productivity software running, if it's developed only with Windows in mind, Wine isn't a silver bullet but it's nice that it exists.
My M1 MacBook as an overall computer feels like it has great build quality despite the overpriced hardware. I'm mentioning that, because it's very well integrated with the hardware and I haven't had any weirdness due to that yet, like the touchpad on a laptop stopping working after a fresh Fedora install, or needing to compile Wi-Fi drivers from a GitHub repo for it to work at all, or Windows looking at the RAM available in a laptop and deciding that it wants most of it for itself and to slow everything down to a crawl. In macOS, the desktop also feels polished, is reasonably customizable, though sometimes is a bit jarring compared to both Windows and Linux distros, as are the things surrounding it (everything from the keyboard layout, to how managing open programs works, also connecting to an external 1080p monitor is a miserable experience because it doesn't fit within their own hardware ecosystem either). Development is doable, unless you go for the 8 GB version because you need the OS for a project and can't afford anything more, gaming feels way more limited than on Linux distros, but nothing feels particularly broken either.
Neither is ideal, neither is horrible. They're all somewhere in the middle, doing more or less well when it comes to particular aspects.
Bit offtopic but since you nudged it:
The oldest Polish localization of MacOS was done by a private company that insisted on using more "appropriate linguistically" terms that have roots in the 70s Polish IT. Tho, some people claimed it was just an attempt to separate Apple's system from Microsoft's even more dramatically. And for example instead of "icon" - "ikona" that translation introduced "stamp - "znaczek"; "edit" menu item - "edycja" (sometimes "edytuj", depending on program) was "change" - "zmiana", "folder" that stayed as it is become "teczka", "briefcase". The most prominent example is the "cancel" translation, which elsewhere become "anuluj" but the team opted for "abandon", "cease" - "poniechaj", tho some argue it should be "desist" - "zaniechaj".
The first official Leopard translation followed let's say, the 'industry standard', tho "desktop" still is being called there "biurko" while Linux and Windows uses term "pulpit" which is more close to "dashboard".
The discourse that happen around "cancel" translation is still bring up on few occasions, as an example of trying to preserve origins of that old IT glossary and also of being nonconformistic to the ridiculous levels for some weird personal reasons.
Echoes of that translation can be seen in the Polish KDE localization - there's one contributor who insists for using these rather obscure and weird terms: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404286 and since there's no official community nor team (to my knowledge), that translation gets approved and makes KDE looking weird for someone coming from Windows
At least it's not as bad as Ubuntu, which allowed me with a simple warning to install Nvidia drivers without a full system update, which broke the system so badly it couldn't even boot anymore, o an otherwise newly installed setup.
And Debian is horrible too, it doesn't even have a task bar of any kind (you are forced to Alt tab to switch apps, or even see which other apps are running), unless you go hunting for some extensions someone made.
All of these can be made to work decently, but calling it a good out of the box experience is laughable.
A default setting you don't like and have to adjust? How horrible.
>At least it's not as bad as Ubuntu, which allowed me with a simple warning to install Nvidia drivers without a full system update
So...user error?
>And Debian is horrible too, it doesn't even have a task bar of any kind (you are forced to Alt tab to switch apps, or even see which other apps are running)
Now I get it, this is satire for someone complaining about the Linux experience. Good one!
There are literally thousands of possible combinations of accessibility features alone, that are vastly more difficult to impossible to access. Or simply don’t exist in any form. Once you add in all the default apps and functions of Mac OS, there’s likely millions of possible combinations that would take a fortune in time and effort and knowledge to replicate maybe a quarter of, on a hypothetical laptop installed with Linux.
Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years.
Edit: Of course 99% of these combinations are irrelevant to any particular individual, but they are all relevant to at least a few small groups.
Linux promoters don’t seem to understand that alienating a few thousand users each time is a big deal if that alienation process happens thousands of times…
The hardware is amazing though and no other OS can predictably wake the laptop when opening the lid and not wake it when it's closed, which is kinda a deal breaker for a laptop, so I still use it. Not particularly excited about it, would prefer a Linux laptop if it could sleep reliably. (Seen pictures of a framework laptop with a kernel panic after wake, and I was seriously considering getting one.)
if you’re the kinda guy who sees it as user hostile, I’d wager it’s because you refuse to learn the macOS/gnome paradigm and demand things to be how they were on your windows pc 30 years ago.
what os/dwm do u use
I'm talking about the gimped OS underneath the eye candy:
- docker sucks compared to native Linux (obviously) and WSL2 (less obvious)
- I have to install BetterDisplay (props to the dev btw, great tool) just to make my perfectly good 25x16 144Hz monitor not look like shit
- I have to install a tool to invert my mouse scroll wheel
- I have to install a tool to manage windows in a sane way (sequoia only just started to know how to do that but it's a looong way ahead)
- I have to install a tool to have multiple things in the clipboard
- Sequoia broke the system firewall and it's still not fixed in 15.0.1 (my mac is enterprise issued and it has all the fancy security apps you've all heard about)
I ran out of time to keep going, these are what I'm running into daily. Fortunately there are tools, but every major macOS release breaks some of them.
I hope you understand that when you say this, its pretty easy to see that you are solely in the ideological camp of liking Apple, not a rational one.
That's an incredibly low bar. Windows 95 is cohesive and stable as compared to Windows.
> It’s beautifully designed compared to KDE
It's beautiful. Designed? I don't know about that. In my experience, it takes significantly less clicks, swipes, or keypresses to perform action in KDE as opposed to pretty much everything.
I consider that good desktop design, because these are tools. Less work = better tool.
> It’s most similar to gnome
Yeah, and Gnome is awful IMO. Some things just can't be done without installing extensions. The workflow is very "my way or the highway". Seemingly simple actions require submenus of submenus. The UI design isn't dense enough, so a bunch of info is just missing.
> refuse to learn the macOS/gnome paradigm
The difference here is I can easily replicate what macOS and gnome have going in KDE. Because KDE is flexible, and those aren't. Why would I though, when I can instead abuse KDE for efficiency gains in workflows? I'd much rather do that.
You can do it in Linux with scripts. I had it on my old laptop when I had Manjaro on it. Basically disable any action on script close, then write a custom service that listens for an event and puts the computer to sleep. Only thing is you have to press the power button to wake it, but it worked well.
In general, I have been using work issues Macs, and I tend to agree - they are pure shit. I wouldn't even call them good hardware. People seem to forget how mac thought it was a good idea to make the esc button a virtual one on the touchbar. I had 3 work replacements, first one fried chip due to an "incompatible" usbc hub, the other 2 started swelling batteries. In every single case, I ended up losing a small amount of work I haven't backed up (like a shell script), since you can't replace the hard drives.
Currently on the latest iteration of MBP 14 inch, the hardware seems good so far. Battery life claims are overrated - with slack, bunch of browser tabs and VSCode I get max 4 hours, but to be fair, this is the lightest laptop that Ive had that can do that (I used to have a much larger Thinkpad that could do CAD for 4 hours on battery)
This is code words for "Im emotionally invested into my choice for non logical reasons and its very hard for me to admit I have made the wrong choice".
It’s a choice between hamburgers that are 30-50% shit, and one that’s 10% shit. Every single one has way too much shit in it. All of them deserve loud, angry complaints about the amount of shit they contain. But if I must eat a hamburger…
And my guess is that your "operate as the should" is probably some very personal opinions about how an OS should function based on your personal workflow, that you assume should be the defacto standard.
But for the sake of the argument, lets just assume that your standard is actually optimal from an efficiency standpoint. In that case, the argument to make in case of Mac would be this: Out of the box, Macs are closer to optimal, but technically Linux is is better because you can customize it to be exactly optimal.
One difficult bit, though, is interoperability. Even absent monopolist BS (and there’s plenty of that) it makes the OS market tend toward winner-take-all.
