[Jean-Philipe]

> This is why I became a Mac user.

Heard this from so many people. We have the latest (2017-2018) MBP at work and every single one has serious keyboard problems. Other than that, I have had crashes and random reboots when on battery, with a black screen error message, sound issues (solved by turning volume down, switching outputs back and forth, or rebooting) wifi problems (solved by switching off bluetooth). And don't get me started on the touch bar. From Mac fans I usually get answers like "you're pressing the touch bar wrong, you need to wait longer"... I'm also missing a decent software management. brew is miles away from apt.

So, for me switching to Mac didn't work out. And the new keyboard is a complete dealbreaker for me. I may still get an older mac with a decent keyboard and put Linux on it.

[ohithereyou]

>brew is miles away from apt.

brew is also miles away from what it used to be. They have recently changed their philosophy about building from source and software support compiled into their built bottles. Did you know that neither mpv or mplayer bottles ship with libdvdread support?

Building mplayer from source fails due to an error building libavcodec against x264. For some reason, the x264 version is not being correctly picked up in the Homebrew build process so it is trying to use a deprecated x264 API that has been built, which is causing it to fail however building the same software outside of Homebrew (same source tarball that Homebrew downloaded) builds just fine with libdvdread and x264 in ffmpeg support.

I'd report it further but the time last someone asked about it they were basically told to fuck off. Their rules for avoiding burnout state the following which really summarizes their recent change in policy:

> 1. Use Homebrew

>Maintainers of Homebrew should be using it regularly[...]

>3. Prioritise Maintainers Over Users

>It's important to be user-focused but ultimately, as long as you follow #1 above, Homebrew's minimum number of users will be the number of maintainers. However, if Homebrew has no maintainers it will quickly become useless to all users and the project will die. As a result, no user complaint, behaviour or need takes priority over the burnout of maintainers. If users do not like the direction of the project, the easiest way to influence it is to make significant, high-quality code contributions and become a maintainer.

Yet proposing a patch for this gets met with "create your own tap and stop bothering us". I'd love to help you, guys, if you weren't gigantic pricks about it!

[alexcabrera]

> Did you know that neither mpv or mplayer bottles ship with libdvdread support?

Maybe because Apple doesn't ship a computer with a DVD drive and hasn't for ~5 years?

[ohithereyou]

Their formula does not disable libdvdread support, but their build from source process fails to detect it if it is otherwise installed. A build from the vanilla source tarball picks it up just fine. So this is not a "Homebrew decided to disable this option", it seems to be a "Homebrew's build process actively avoids searching for other installed software even when the authors of that underlying software enable support by default".

[akvadrako]

That's the way it should be, obviously.

[jaabe]

The touchbar is crap, and being a Danish programmer hitting those {} keys really sucks on a mac keyboard.

Everything else has been miles better than Linux though. I mean, when I left fedora 21 for a Mac I had close to a hundred scripts for modifications to make it tolerable. On my Mac I have 0.

[craigsmansion]

If I understand you correctly, over the course of 15 years of upgrades on Linux you ended up with almost a hundred scripts to make your DE on Fedora "tolerable", but then you bought a mac and everything has been perfect from the beginning even in between updates with zero regressions in usability for you personally?

If so, good for you, but that doesn't make a non "one size fits all" approach "bullshit".

[jaabe]

I agree, configuration was just part of the “bullshit”.

I had to manually disable the dedicated graphics card in my laptop or it would get ridiculously hot while idle. This is probably not an issue if you buy a laptop with preinstalled Linux.

I do a lot of presentations. Getting Linux to work with various projectors wasn’t great. Maybe that’s better in 2019, but it’s never been an issue with my Mac. The lack of ports have, but buying a converter solves that.

Updates broke my software and I had to spend a lot of time sorting it out. A more stable Linux distro might have been better.

My external displays never really worked without problems.

Having used a MacBook trackpad makes it really hard to use non-MacBook trackpads.

It’s a range of stuff like that.

I’m sure you could get Linux to be better, even for me, but I don’t want to use a single second on making it happen. I did when I was younger, that’s why I turned to Linux in the first place. I’ve spent my time building gentoo, but the older I get the more I want things to work out of the box so I can spend my time on other things.

[smichel17]

It may or may not apply to your scenario since I don't know what your scripts were for, but in my experience as a long time Fedora user, the distro improved in a big way around the 24-26 era.

[svrtknst]

It's been roughly 10 years since I programmed on a Macbook (Leopard represent), and I did that on a Swedish keyboard so things might be wildly different, but I really really liked mac keyboards for braces and brackets.

Windows requires thumb acrobatics and Alt gr, whereas Macs used shift and option to modify "increasingly".

[stevehawk]

I'm a recent switcher. I got a Mac mini and installed my own 32GB RAM kit after delivery. I wish it played nicer with my Alienware 34" monitor (i dont know which side is to blame) but I know I don't miss Linux.