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…
Yes? Why would people recommend it as an alternative otherwise?
I used MacOS for 5 years, left after Mojave and came back when an employer made me support MacOS. The current software experience on Mac is genuinely insufferable. Advertisements in your news, notifications begging you to try Safari, zero support for common and Open Source filesystems, constantly broken software packaging, zero useful APIs (what am I supposed to do with Metal???) and a $99/year tax to compensate for the displeasure of supporting developers. You really want to argue Apple cares about you?
As a software developer, what pushed me over the edge was Docker. It runs absolutely terrible on MacOS, consumes resources/battery and makes your CPU hot as satan's taint. Native development is a nightmare on MacOS and you just have to settle with that if you want to defend it as your home. Don't even get me started on how bad Brew is.
> 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.
If your peripheral manufacturer can't support USB class compliance, they do not deserve money in the first place. I produce music on Linux and haven't ever had a MIDI device or DAC fail to register. It's a standard that even Apple isn't "courageous" enough to reject.
Thanks for saying this. I own an M2 Max Macbook, which is my very first Macbook, and I tried Docker the other day only to find it was literally unplayable.
I then recalled running Docker forever ago on a much shittier Windows laptop and it was sort of a breeze? I was confused as to why I couldn't have the same experience now.
Thanks to you, at least I know this is unlikely to be a case of PEBKAC
I hear that “Docker Desktop” is especially bad on MacOS, but I’ve used docker almost as long as it’s existed and still haven’t used that (I don’t really even know what the point of it is?) so dunno about that part.
It was using 40% of its battery while “sleeping” over night, and even at full charge wouldn’t get me through a light work day on battery—not even close. Straight back to the battery-anxiety I hadn’t felt since back when I used Windows and Linux on laptops years and years ago. Plus the touchpad is still ass (sorry, never got any good at aiming with the track point, even though I used an IBM Thinkpad for years and years)
Luckily this place will issue a MacBook if you ask nicely. My god, that was a rough few weeks.
I couldn't agree more. And yet, Linux manages to be worse, since the "at least I can just hibernate" backup plan doesn't even work properly.
