[bscphil]

Upgrades bricking hardware seems to be a common failure mode for macOS. For example Big Sur bricked a bunch of 2013 and 2014 MBPs: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/macos-big-sur-update-br...

I was affected by this and like many users the problem was fixed after replacing the I/O board. In my case, I did it myself using a $10 part from Ebay since the machine was well out of warranty at that point.

[miles]

From comments #736 and #747 attached to the forum post you kindly shared, it sounds like simply disconnecting and reconnecting the I/O board may be sufficient (found those comments linked in #831):

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-big-sur-update-br...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-big-sur-update-br...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-big-sur-update-br...

[fifteen1506]

And this is why there will never be a Year of the Linux Desktop -- no-one wants to have to depend on forum posts to fix these kind of issues.

/troll

[coldtea]

Why the "/troll"? You're 100% right non-ironically: the problem being that on Linux the need to consult forum posts to fix these kind of issues is way more frequent than in macOS.

[bscphil]

By the standard of "do you ever need to consult forum posts to solve a problem", sure, Linux is worse than macOS. By the standard of "do you ever need to consult forum posts to fix hardware that has apparently been bricked by a software update", macOS seems to be considerably worse. At least, that's my experience. I've never had hardware damaged by Linux, which I've run almost exclusively. On the other hand the one Apple device I've ever owned got bricked by their software update.

I can't say I've heard of that happening to people on Linux at all other than maybe early days of Xorg. Damage (reversible or otherwise) to hardware is extraordinarily rare on Linux, I can only think of it happening during the very early days of EFI and only under very specific conditions.

[cesarb]

> I've never had hardware damaged by Linux, which I've run almost exclusively. [...] I can't say I've heard of that happening to people on Linux at all other than maybe early days of Xorg.

There was that LG CD-ROM drive which treated a CD-RW command (which it should ignore or reject since it's not a CD-RW drive) as a firmware upload command. When a newer Linux kernel started using that command, these drives got bricked (source: https://lwn.net/Articles/55537/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20041204072839/http://www.mandra...).

[gpm]

More recently there was "rm -rf /" wiping efivars and bricking some motherboards with shitty uefi implementations thanks to systemd mounting efivars rw by default (and shitty motherboard firmware). The kernel "fixed" this by mounting unknown efivars as (mostly) immutable.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/UEFI-rm-root-directory

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/efivarfs....

[umanwizard]

> macOS seems to be considerably worse

Most users will just take their machine in to the Apple Store when this kind of thing happens, rather than try to fix it themselves.

[bscphil]

Sure, but that's when they get told "you need to replace the logic board, that'll be $500 since it's out of warranty". That's not a theoretical problem either, people were literally told to do this back when the Big Sur brick happened to my model (2014 MBP). Eventually users figured out on their own that you could just replace the I/O board (not the mainboard / "logic board"). Apparently (going by that forum thread) disconnecting and then reconnecting the I/O board fixes it as well for some people (I don't remember whether I tested this), but this isn't something that Apple happily figured out and did for everyone who walked into one of their stores. We had to fix it ourselves.

[m45t3r]

Sure, doesn't make this any less inconvenient though. I would much prefer to finish whatever I want to finish today (even if I spend a few hours trying to fix an issue) than wait whatever amount of days waiting until my hardware is fixed.

[jonhohle]

This is anecdotal, but my last “corporate job” was the closest to thing to shrink-wrapped software, even though it was a SaaS. Every release was meticulously documented. Any public facing UI or API change was approved the appropriate teams.

This is similar to macOS, Windows, or even FreeBSD releases. I haven’t seen any Linux distribution that has such comprehensively coordinated releases. Between systemd and the Linux kernel, I’m not sure it would be possible.

Many distros have good documentation, but, in my experience, far too often the bulk of it is in out of date wikis or forums. Perhaps this is out of date thinking and I’ve missed the train in the past 10 years.

As a counterpoint, OpenWRT has been good, but their main “product”, imho, is LuCI. Lower level issues often require vendor specific forums.

[fsflover]

On Linux it's as rare as on MacOS, if you buy preinstalled.

[coldtea]

As long as you don't do anything with it on your own.

[kelnos]

So essentially, the situation you'd have if you'd bought a Mac?

If we want to compare apples to apples, then we compare:

Mac with macOS updates installed regularly, and only those provided by Apple. Non-Apple apps get dropped in /Applications like they should be. If there's an installer that asks for root access, you might get boned.

Linux preinstalled with OS updates installed regularly, and only those provided by the vendor. Apps that don't come with the OS's package manager should be installed somewhere under $HOME, and never installed systemwide as root.

Sure, if you have a Mac and disable SIP (or whatever it's called nowadays) and start mucking around with files in /System or whatever, because you want to install some mod that does something cool, you might have a bad time. Same as if you decide that screwing around in /lib on a Linux machine is a good idea.

But if we actually compare these two apples, I suspect the Linux one would have fewer problems.

[Wowfunhappy]

This issue in GP is unrelated to Linux, it happens on single-boot macOS.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

That's the point, I think - Linux gets derided because people say it just breaks at random and you have to wade through forums to find arcane incantations to fix it, either implying or outright stating that their favorite proprietary OS would never just blow up in your face and force you to resort to exotic troubleshooting steps. So when macos, the poster child for "user friendly", proceeds to brick the machine and require elaborate rituals to fix, it invites a certain level of snark from users pointing out that the high and mighty proprietary OSs might be just as bad as Linux after all.

Of course, whether that's valid is at minimum a question of actual frequency of problems and relative impact and effort to fix, but from a perspective of optics and emotions I understand the reaction.

[m45t3r]

I concur, the amount of times I had to Google dozens of minutes for issues happening in my work-issued Macbook Pro, and never finding answers because things are supposed to "just work" is maddening.

For one example on top of my head, sometimes I can't adjust the brightness of the monitor in the Macbook using the Notification Center (it is grayed out), but if I open the "Settings -> Displays" I can do it. Never found a solution for it after searching for a while, so I just gave up.

Or the fact that I can't enable retina or font smoothing in my 1440p monitor, so the fonts looks ugly (I got used eventually, but they still looks worse than Windows or Linux in the same monitor). I used a workaround in the past using "Better Display" to create a 4k framebuffer that was downscaled to 1440p, but this was so slow and also prone of other issues so eventually I just got used to the ugly fonts.

Another one: I have a TouchBar Macbook (again, this is a work-issued laptop), but I just want it to work as a normal keyboard: show the Function keys, if I press Fn show the shortcuts. Yep, doesn't work: while you can do this, pressing Fn while pressing some of the shortcuts in the TouchBar doesn't work. This is especially infuriating because one of the shortcuts that doesn't work is the brightness one. Go back to the first issue and you can see why this drive me mad sometimes.