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 very much wish they had one or more peers putting them under pressure to do better, but the (tiny—which is likely part of the problem) set of competitors seem to have other priorities than chasing the particular market that Apple does.
All I run is a browser, text editor and terminal, so functionally it doesn't matter one bit.
Huh, strange.
I install Ubuntu as a daily driver on every system in my house and don't have to do any tinkering outside of customizations I want (which I have more freedom to do).
I mean, I understand there are certain proprietary devices or software that are going to require Windows or MacOS, and that's unfortunate. But the idea that everything is breaking all the time? I just don't see it.
Seriously, its not that hard to say that you prefer MacOS because you like the feel of it. It does a lot of handholding for you, unlike Linux, which makes it way less likely for you to mess something up. You don't have to go the extra lengths to justify it lol.
It doesn't feel charitable to call people sharing their experience "spreading the lie". You're all over this thread talking to people that way. If you're trying to make the case that desktop Linux no longer has this characteristic, this isn't the way to go about it.
If you want to use CUDA as a simple example, you'll have to go through the process of using nvidia proprietary drivers and I'm far from well versed on it but that gives me random warnings and I don't quite get the compatibility between it and Xorg/Wayland or which combo to use and I have on more than one laptop ended up with a system that works but that the desktop randomly freezes requiring a hard reboot.
I still do use Linux Desktop and try various different Debian based or Fedora distros out but you definitely do end up tinkering. I don't use MacOS fwiw.
I’m not a stranger to Linux or the command line. I own, use, configure servers as part of my business, including the dreaded on metal cuda install. In fact, the terminal integration in macOS is one of the biggest things over windows for me.
But, every time I try linux desktop, for the past 20 years, it’s been a horrible time sink and has driven home the point that building a competent and most importantly consistent gui based os is harder than everyone gives it credit for.
I stopped using Linux mint after installing it on my desktop and having the screen saver require a hard reboot -sometimes- when trying to wake.
Obviously if you go into it with the assumption MacOS is correct and the more like MacOS you are, the better, then Linux distros will fail horribly.
People do this with Windows, too. If you go into it expecting Windows-isms you're gonna be very disappointed. And such "isms" aren't actually good at all - usually they suck. But because you already know them, they aren't "isms" anymore, they're now expectations.
If you go back to the very first few times you used MacOS (or OSX at the time), you'll realize there was a lot of shit that surprised you. You adapted, and in some cases have actually come to PREFER functionality that sucks. And now you expect it, and that's the problem.
I thought it was crazy using the butter knife (from the meme) to write serious software. Previously I was a windows admin at a 500 computer site and dealt with Microsoft, debugging issues in their kernel. Throughout this time I’ve also use Linux extensively from Ubuntu when it came with pc mags to raspberry pi home security projects to servers and boxes. I even compiled gentoo one time for fun.
I have enough experience to know the differences between all of the operating systems from ‘95 through to 22.04LTS. No, macOS can’t be beaten for desktop experience, except for gaming which is now starting to come around also.
Happy to die on this hill.
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. :/
When I used early Ubuntus on desktop machines (back when Ubuntu wasn’t terrible—before the PulseAudio fiasco and the following series of bad decisions and failed maneuvers against Red Hat) I usually just stuck with the default of Gnome2. That era’s by far the closest I’ve seen Linux get to Just Working.
[edit] FWIW I do find Void with a very-light window manager pleasant to use, but I don’t want to have to self-serve every little feature these days, so it’s pleasant but impractical for my actual life. Nothing short of a full DE, so just KDE or Gnome, with a batteries-included distro, stands a chance of matching what I’m used to just being there and happening for me without my having to ask for it. Unfortunately, I strongly dislike both of those DEs for different reasons. :-/
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.
A macbook air is miles ahead, unless you confine yourself to old hardware. I moved from thinkpads + arch to mac + brew. The experience is insanely better.
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!
No, even after adjusting the settings, they only apply after you log in. So every time you hit the login screen, you get the default settings again until you log in.
> So...user error?
Yes, of course. And it's well known that the penalty for user error is supposed to be complete failure to boot, especially for people new to a system.
> Now I get it, this is satire for someone complaining about the Linux experience. Good one!
Maybe throw in some constructive ideas rather than empty grandstanding? Is it supposed to be a good thing to not have a list of running apps? Is it normal to have to install extensions to your desktop environment to make it work for common worlflows?
I am not complaining about defaults here, there is just no option in Gnome to get a basic bit of UI working like all other desktop environments have worked for 30 years, including Mac, Windows, KDE, XFCE, and past Gnomes. You have to discover and install 3rd party software to get basic UI. This would be like someone launching a new browser that doesn't support tabs out of the box, and people saying "oh, don't complain, there's an extension someone else made that adds tab support".
And note that I'm specifically criticizing the out of the box experience, not the state you can get your system to: I was specifically responding to a claim that the out of the box experience is "great".
