[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.