[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.