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by twmiller 1533 days ago
I have a hard time taking anyone seriously when they drop something like this: "MacOS felt a kind of dumb, and does so ever since" ... I mean...MacOS is just *nix these days and has been for 20+ years. I jump back and forth between it and linux pretty much all day long and I see nothing that indicates that macOS is any dumber than linux.
2 comments

I used to be in that camp until I actually used a Macbook. For some reason I was convinced that it wasn't "real" Unix, unlike Linux.

It was a naive perspective.

It's definitely more locked down, less open than something like Linux or BSD and less developer-friendly (signed software, etc.), which takes away from the Linux/Unix hacker ethos IMO.

I respect that Apple makes good quality hardware, but I wish there was an equivalent that was more developer-friendly. System76 is almost that but not quite.

on the commandline it's a decent unix, sure, but no proprietary unix can measure up with linux nowadays.

they all suffered from lack of packagemanagement and old versions of commandline tools. you almost always had to manually install better tools like GNU.

i did use a macbook for some time, but the only reason i managed was that most of my work is on remote servers, so most of the terminals on my mac were running linux anyways. yet, when i switched back to a linux machine as my main workstation i just immediately felt better, and didn't miss the mac at all. and now when i use the mac i really just want to go back to linux.

I ran Linux for a decade full time, and I feel like the latest version of Gnome are actually very good, but sadly the lack of software support is what keeps me on macOS, particularly for media. FinalCut Pro is, in my opinion, a much better video editing suite than Lightworks (the best editor I'm aware of on Linux), and there really isn't anything even comparable to ToonBoom on Linux [1].

The media scene on Linux is definitely improving (Blender and Lightworks and Krita have gotten good) but I think it still has awhile before I'm fully able to abandon my Mac setup. Honestly I just wish Darling would improve [2] enough to where I could just run everything I care about within Linux.

[1] I actually did google and apparently there is an OpenToonz Snap package, so I could be wrong on this. I'll need to play with it.

[2] No judgement to the Darling team, I realize it's a difficult project.

It never came with a standardized package manager, and many user tools are ancient. Newer versions won't let you turn off telemetry services because they are started in a read-only boot volume. It's pretty but pretty dumb at times.