[loloquwowndueo]

“Platform A has these features I find convenient therefore I migrated from platform B which doesn’t have them”. That’s all this article is. Platform B might as well have been windows. I’m not sure why everyone is reading it as a dismissal of desktop Linux as a concept. I tried a Mac for a while, found it too restrictive, moved back to Linux on the desktop - doesn’t mean the Mac sucks or anything, just wasn’t right for me.

[gurjeet]

I bet Linux, whatever distro you use, wasn’t right for you to begin with; but you made it yours by tweaking it to your liking.

Trust me, you can tweak macOS to your liking, as well. I used to be a Linux lover, but after trying for almost a decade, for my desktop needs, I’ve given up on Linux, and adopted macOS.

macOS is a POSIX environment, and you have almost the whole GNU ecosystem available to you, if you want.

[yakak]

I tried to use OsX for a few years since I thought it might help with resume soft skills, etc. But nothing is worth the frustration of Apple and their damn semi-GEO-locked mess of a cloud.

Every Linux just works, even with obscure keyboard layouts, and installs security updates or necessities without ever dragging you into some store login drama.

It would be interesting if people really finished a proper Darwin setup that could provide a good POSIX without service dependencies on Apple. But at that point, there are the existing BSDs.

[spacexsucks]

Patently a lie. I have been struggling to make mac os mine for last 6 years with 40hrs/wk on it. Compared to my personal linux where I barely spend 10-12 per week. Just cant. On top SIP filesystem integrity protections just get in the way.

Mac gets int way when programming, video editing, data management, power system.

[sph]

macOS is a great system to watch videos, collect photos, take notes and do casual and very common multimedia tasks. It is excellent and unrivalled at that. But for engineering and power users it becomes more restrictive the more your mastery and requirements increase.

Linux is pretty crap at multimedia. But for computing, tinkering and pushing your hardware to its full capacity it is absolutely the best.

Windows is average, and that's not to disparage it, au contraire. It's decent at multimedia, not as much as macOS and decent at tinkering, but not as much as Linux.

[awilfox]

"Casual" is relative: digiKam choked on my 55K photo library where Lightroom Classic works fine. Adobe XD's only libre competitor that I knew of was Pencil, which died three years ago after Mozilla killed off XUL and they tried to convert to Node/Electron. And don't even get me started on the libre alternatives to InDesign. (Three years and counting since the last stable Scribus, despite nine beta releases.) I wanted so badly to do production work on Linux. I really, really did.

Engineering… depends on your definition. My preferred dev environments, CLion and Qt Creator, work fine on Mac as well. I'll agree that CAD has suffered since Autodesk went insane and FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, and the like work much better on Linux. On the science end, I find OsiriX Lite to be a much better experience than Kradview, and that's assuming you build all the KDE 4 libraries to even make Kradview work at all.

[galangalalgol]

Fedora/rhel/centos and the debian/ubuntu all work just fine for me out of the box. I spend a lot longer configuring firefox on a new machine than the distro. Mac is ok too, but all my muscle memory is off. Same for my wifes phone which is an iphone vs my android.

[senko]

That's an interesting data point but it doesn't generalize.

I used Linux daily for many years, then switched to Mac for 7 years (entirely due to HW/price being better at the time than other options), then back to Linux for the last in couple.

I was happy to leave the Mac ecosystem because it looked to me like the OS was slowly sliding down the drain.

Also, people saying that macOS is POSIX and therefore almost like Linux remind me of people saying having cats is just like having children. At this point I just smile and nod sagely :)

[zibzab]

> but you made it yours by tweaking it to your liking.

Serious question: why do you assume that?

My "tweaking" of a new Ubuntu machine is normally limited to changing the background. I am busy getting work done and don't really want or need to tweak things.

[alphabettsy]

Default keyboard shortcuts were one for me. Cut, Copy and Paste in Terminal for example.

[QuikAccount]

I had to use a Mac for work for a while. You are right you can tweak MacOS to your liking but the difference is Linux distros actively encourage tweaking while Apple actively discourages and tries to get in the way.

[alwillis]

Apple actively discourages and tries to get in the way

This is false.

Apple doesn’t actively discourage anything. Apple put all of options in the operating system for a reason and ships with a Terminal.

The GUI allows regular people to get shit done without requiring them to be experts.

Meanwhile, developers, hackers, tinkerers, can tweak to their heart’s content on the things that matter to them while getting the benefits of the Apple ecosystem. It’s never been an either/or.

Editing a config file on Linux isn’t inherently “better” than doing the same on macOS.

[vincent-manis]

I switched to macOS last year. My software inventory is overwhelmingly free software, and I currently have Emacs, TeX, Audacity, Inkscape, the Gimp, and a dozen or so Scheme and Lisp systems all running just fine [1]. In fact, I have a pretty good reproduction of the Ubuntu system I was running before. I have no complaints.

As for tweaking, the two major tweaks I depend upon are remapping Caps Lock as Compose (Karabiner lets me do that, along with some stuff I found that lets me use an X11 style XCompose file), and turning off GateKeeper completely (that's one thing I would never tell a naïve user how to do, or even that it is possible).

No claims that macOS is great for everybody, but I'm an experienced Unix user (my first Unix system was V7 on a PDP-11/45), and it works great for me.

[1] The one hack I needed was that you need a workaround to install MIT Scheme on Apple Silicon.

[awilfox]

I wonder if that has any influence on it. My first Unix system was Solaris in the 90s, and I never felt the need to tweak it endlessly. Perhaps those who started on Linux and grew accustomed to tweaking everything from the outset find some enjoyment in it that I just don't.

Anyone out there need a research paper on human behaviour related to preference of OS based on formative computing experiences? I'd be fascinated. :)

[Klonoar]

This, yeah.

You can also always disable SIP and spelunk around if you want to. There's just far less of a hivemind for macOS tinkering and it's not as readily apparent to jump into.

But it does exist.

[sph]

The macOS tinkering is like tuning your car engine while trying not to void the warranty, the Linux tinkering is being able to turn your car into a rocket-powered go kart. It's not the same thing.

[awilfox]

You can't really "void the warranty" poking at Mac OS internals, and the built-in recovery partition makes it pretty easy to fix anything you break. Same as booting a BusyBox shell when you break something in Linux.

… though turning a car into a rocket-powered go kart seems like exactly the right analogy for running Linux as a desktop in my mind. Supercharged and able to fly, but not street legal or practical in any way.

[xaduha]

> I bet Linux, whatever distro you use, wasn’t right for you to begin with; but you made it yours by tweaking it to your liking.

In my case, absolutely not. I'm using Solus (Budgie) on my notebook and that's because it suits me basically OOTB. What I do have though is a headless NixOS server to which I connect with VSCode for a dev environment. But I wouldn't use NixOS on desktop when Solus is a much better choice, best of both world in my opinion.

[ricardobeat]

What’s special about Solus? Looking at its website, it looks like any other standard Linux distro.

[QuikAccount]

Not the person you are asking but Solus is just very solid. There is nothing super special about it but it is one of the few distros I have ever used that "just works."

[xaduha]

I thought so too, but every time I tried to move on to something else it didn't last and I always went back to Solus. It's just well put together, a recipe like any other, but with a pinch of love I guess. Something you wouldn't get just by looking at a menu.

[loloquwowndueo]

Well- one of my main gripes was that I had to spend a lot of time and work getting macOS to behave like Linux did - so at some point I decided to stop wasting my time and use the real thing :) so “whatever distro you use, wasn’t right for you to begin with; but you made it yours by tweaking it to your liking.” You’re not entirely wrong but it was far less painful than tweaking macOS. “ you can tweak macOS to your liking” - see above. “ you have almost the whole GNU ecosystem available to you” yeah I tried the whole ports / fink thing and it was too much work vs. the equivalent on any Linux distribution (no extra work at all).

[bastardoperator]

  brew install coreutils

Getting GNU tools on MacOS is super easy and honestly I don't know anyone using ports/fink. All of my development ends up on Linux machines, in rare cases I need something specific to Linux or my production environment, I just connect to a dev machine but for the most part I use MacOS as the primary desktop at work along with everyone else.

For me it's all about workflow. I spend a lot of time in alacritty, vscode, and a browser with bitwarden. I'm covered on every OS with those tools so I've stopped caring about OS all together, I like bits of all of them, and dislike bits of all of them.

[loloquwowndueo]

Is brew included with macOS these days? It wasn’t when I did all this. It’s still one more command to get coreutils installed vs. what’s needed on Linux.

[bastardoperator]

Nope. Yeah, well, I don't have to configure anything on MacOS when I plug in three 4k USB-C monitors. Now what? =]

[smoldesu]

Me neither? Pretty much every major distro (anything using GNOME or KDE) will extend your display just fine.

[mbreese]

Anytime I “need” a more Linux environment (development, etc), I would default to spinning up a Linux VM or Docker container. Like you, I think it’s easier to just use the real thing. Also, I don’t like to install too much with brew, etc as I like to keep my primary computer as stock as possible. I still worry about library conflicts. This way, I have a better UI for non-dev work, but I still get the full *nix command line experience when I want it.

Anymore though, instead of a VM, I end up SSHing to a cloud server. Tools that can be run from the server (vscode, rstudio, etc) make this even easier as I can use the same interface from multiple computers.

[ricardobeat]

Homebrew is a much more reliable package manager than macports. Trying to make OSX into Linux might have been the problem there, it’s just a little different in many aspects. What kind of tools did you miss?

[smoldesu]

If I have to spend my time tweaking an operating system to my liking, it's going to be the one that's cheaper and has less lock-in.

[awilfox]

This was a follow-on article to my first one, where I spoke about the deep issues I saw in the Linux ecosystem after running a distro for three years.

My thinking was by showing the Mac has all these nice things that make me productive, this can somehow influence and move the needle so Linux devs who follow my blog have datapoints on what they can work on.

Perhaps some enterprising dev has already read it and is working on an answer to AirPlay, or adding rich text to KDE Connect's clipboard plugin. I would love to do it myself if I had the time.

[bsder]

One thing I would point out is that macOS has some serious bugs that, if you hit them, you have no hope and no option if Apple doesn't care.

The particular one that bites me over and over with the latest versions of macOS is that USB 2.0/3.0 ports will die on macOS for varied and mysterious reasons with hubs and dongles and the only thing you can do is reboot.

This was such a big problem that it finally forced me off of macOS. I have things that I need to plug into USB-A ports. This failure mode is fairly common, reported, and totally due to Apple. Earlier versions of macOS do NOT exhibit this bug. Unfortunately, newer machines can't use the old OS's because "Apple".

Other laptops do not exhibit this bug with Apple and non-Apple hubs and dongles--presumably because they actually have to ship with USB-A ports so that code path actually gets tested.

And, that, in a nutshell is why I finally took the plunge and switched to Linux for daily driving.

[awilfox]

That's interesting. I have multiple Apple and non-Apple C-to-A adaptors, and one even has a five port hub attached to it. I haven't had any issues on Monterey, but my main use case for them is external disks and a Blu-Ray drive, so perhaps I'm just not using it hard enough to trigger it. Does your issue happen with any device, or specific ones?

[bsder]

> Does your issue happen with any device, or specific ones?

All devices with USB 3.0/2.0 interfaces trigger it on all my computers with new OSs. Keyboards, mice, weird things like hardware debuggers--they all fail whether the hub/dongle is Apple-approved or non-Apple. It will work for anywhere between a couple of minutes to about a half-hour and then stop working until I reboot the machine.

The two Macbooks I kept back on OS version work just fine. Two other 2015 vintage macbooks that were allowed to upgrade exhibit the bug. We cloned from the working 2015 machines to bring the failing ones back online--this is purely a software fault. All versions of USB-C based Macbooks exhibit the bug--even an M1-based Air.

This doesn't hit everybody. But it hits enough, and Apple has shown zero interest in fixing it. This is the company that produced a laptop that plugging into USB-C on the right gave signifcant performance differential from plugging into USB-C on the left, after all.

I'm done. I applaud Apple for the M1 hardware, but I'm leaving the abusive relationship. Laptop/desktop is second-class and will simply get worse with time.

That's Apple's prerogative, but it's time I stopped paying money to accerate my own demise.

[FireBeyond]

Display Stream Compression, which worked perfectly on Catalina, has been broken for Intel Macs ever since Big Sur Beta 1 to this day. Completely and entirely non-functioning. I went from 4K HDR @ 144Hz to SDR @ 95Hz, HDR @ 60. Hundreds of reports, bugs filed, multiple monitors, multiple GPUs. Zero interest.