[josephg]

> There's a litany of bugs in Apple's software.

Personally, the only problems I've only ever had getting macos to sleep properly has been when I've been running VMs. (Hello docker!)

When doing purely OS-local development (which is all I ever do these days, because I value my sanity) macos works great. (So long as you have a recent mac. New macos + old laptop is awful.)

But as nice as macos is, XCode is an absolute mess. Earlier today I was trying to import a swift package into xcode. The package looked fine, but XCode for some reason was only importing it as a "Folder Reference". Stackoverflow suggested quitting xcode and running "xcodebuild -resolvePackageDependencies", then relaunching xcode. And that fixed it! Why was that necessary? Why couldn't xcode figure that out on its own? What did that even do?? I have no idea. And I hate it.

These days developing in apple's ecosystem feels less like developing in a walled garden and more like developing in a swamp. They're truly lovely developer machines - just so long as you can stay away from xcode.

[howinteresting]

Again, the reason it seems great to you is because developers have papered over so many bugs and other deficiencies. Linux has its own issues but it overall is at a completely different quality level from macOS.

[josephg]

Linux's bugs are just in a different place. Macos's bugs are all deep technical problems that Apple doesn't have enough senior engineers to bother fixing. (Eg the FS watch APIs). Or weird bloaty preinstalled processes that eat up all your CPU when nothing is happening on your computer. Or... anything that the light of XCode touches.

Linux's bugs are things like the fact that every program has a slightly different set of keyboard shortcuts. Is copy Ctrl+C? Or Shift+Ctrl+C? Can I make it Meta+C (like on macos)? Not everywhere! Only some linux applications let you treat the meta- key as a modifier. (Eg intellij doesn't let you do that.)

Smooth scrolling (if you have hardware to support it) works in all native GTK applications. But not Firefox or IntelliJ. Normal mouse scrolling works everywhere, but scroll distance is wildly inconsistent between applications.

On macos I have homebrew. On linux I have apt. And snaps. And flatpak. But I think we're at war with snaps? I'm lost.

My bluetooth keyboard and mouse are both broken on linux. I'm not sure if the problem is my bluetooth chipset driver, or if the devices both have terrible implementations of bluetooth and they didn't bother testing on linux. Either way, I bet they both work fine on macos.

> Linux has its own issues but it overall is at a completely different quality level from macOS.

Its different alright. But its certainly not uniformly better.

[howinteresting]

Meh. Apple's software has silly UX deficiencies on top of the deep technical bugs. You can't even have opposite scrolling directions for mice and touchpads unless you install a third-party app. Some animations are extremely long, and on top of that can't be cancelled, resulting in atrocious UX for power user use cases. Apple no longer does subpixel antialiasing, making text look quite a bit worse than Linux on many screens. Etc.

[andirk]

Thanks for the tip. Hello docker!