[Endama]

I feel like Apple is making similar mistakes that Microsoft made a few decades back, its walled garden has become so ubiquitous that they assume that there isn't any trimming that needs to be done. Specifically,Macs are basically the only FreeBSD-based machine with a consumer-friendly interface (ironically this may no longer be true once Windows gets first-party linux support).

However, issues like these make me resentful that my day-to-day is dependent on OSX. I hope that some other competitor really steps into the currently (admittedly slim) hole in the market that is growing between professional users and the average Macbook user.

EDIT: corrected my mistake about linux!

[nothrabannosir]

> Macs are basically the only Linux-based machine with a consumer-friendly interface …

Someone will point this out sooner or later, so I might as well do it ;)

Macs are neither Linux, nor the only. Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD. Linux machines usually come with GNU tools, and BSD have their own set, with subtle differences causing no end of confusion for the up and coming developers :) sed, grep, ls, etc. All slightly different interfaces (this is why brew offers a package to install the GNU version of all those tools, iirc “gnuutils” ?). The kernel itself is completely different, of course.

Android, however, would fit that description quite well.

[jolux]

it's "brew install coreutils" these days :)

[lozf]

Similarly, `bsdutils` exists for Linux.

[Rapzid]

Macs aren't Linux based, they are BSD based and that's not even being pedantic.

[glup]

OP probably meant POSIX-compliant

[zeveb]

You really ought to give real Linux (or a non-macOS BSD) a try: it's remarkably friendly, and customisable. We're professionals; we need to adapt our tools to ourselves, and Linux affords one some very tempting capabilities for just that.

As an example, I use a tiling window manager; I have the same theme used by my WM, my console & my editor; my entire computing interface is as minimal and distraction-free as possible. I simply couldn't get it this clean on anything other than Linux or BSD.

[komali2]

Which window manager? Been thinking of leaving gnome+all the everything it comes with behind.

[zeveb]

I like StumpWM. It's a tiling window manager, which I've come to consider vital (I'll never go back to overlapping windows if I can help it). It's also written in Common Lisp, which is a powerful dynamic programming language. I like that I can easily extend my window manager on the fly (I've even been thinking of implementing a terminal within StumpWM, so I can get rid of my current terminal).

It's a little annoying that a lot of stuff assumes GNOME or KDE, but I'm able to get by.

I've heard good things about i3, dwm & exwm. The latter is written in elisp, of all things!

[mort96]

KDE Plasma is generally really solid in my opinion. I installed kubuntu-desktop on my xubuntu install yesterday, and it both looks pretty good and works really well. The whole KDE stack, with kwin instead of mutter and Qt instead of GTK, also feels a bit better engineered to me than the Gnome side of things.

Or, if you're feeling adventurous, i3wm is really nice. That's what I run on my laptop, which is my main programming computer, and I would never again consider running a floating window manager instead of a tiling one for programming.

[foldr]

>Macs are basically the only Linux-based machine [...]

Macs aren't Linux-based.