[MichaelZuo]

Have you ever tried to compare something like Ubuntu or RHEL on a per feature per function basis with Mac OS?

There are literally thousands of possible combinations of accessibility features alone, that are vastly more difficult to impossible to access. Or simply don’t exist in any form. Once you add in all the default apps and functions of Mac OS, there’s likely millions of possible combinations that would take a fortune in time and effort and knowledge to replicate maybe a quarter of, on a hypothetical laptop installed with Linux.

Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years.

Edit: Of course 99% of these combinations are irrelevant to any particular individual, but they are all relevant to at least a few small groups.

Linux promoters don’t seem to understand that alienating a few thousand users each time is a big deal if that alienation process happens thousands of times…

[talldayo]

> Have you ever tried to compare something like Ubuntu or RHEL on a per feature per function basis with Mac OS?

Yes? Why would people recommend it as an alternative otherwise?

I used MacOS for 5 years, left after Mojave and came back when an employer made me support MacOS. The current software experience on Mac is genuinely insufferable. Advertisements in your news, notifications begging you to try Safari, zero support for common and Open Source filesystems, constantly broken software packaging, zero useful APIs (what am I supposed to do with Metal???) and a $99/year tax to compensate for the displeasure of supporting developers. You really want to argue Apple cares about you?

As a software developer, what pushed me over the edge was Docker. It runs absolutely terrible on MacOS, consumes resources/battery and makes your CPU hot as satan's taint. Native development is a nightmare on MacOS and you just have to settle with that if you want to defend it as your home. Don't even get me started on how bad Brew is.

> Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years.

If your peripheral manufacturer can't support USB class compliance, they do not deserve money in the first place. I produce music on Linux and haven't ever had a MIDI device or DAC fail to register. It's a standard that even Apple isn't "courageous" enough to reject.

[airstrike]

> As a software developer, what pushed me over the edge was Docker. It runs absolutely terrible on MacOS, consumes resources/battery and makes your CPU hot as satan's taint.

Thanks for saying this. I own an M2 Max Macbook, which is my very first Macbook, and I tried Docker the other day only to find it was literally unplayable.

I then recalled running Docker forever ago on a much shittier Windows laptop and it was sort of a breeze? I was confused as to why I couldn't have the same experience now.

Thanks to you, at least I know this is unlikely to be a case of PEBKAC

[westtan]

Many developers do encounter similar problems when using macOS, especially when developing and running tools like Docker. macOS's resource management and performance issues are often frustrating, especially when you need to do a lot of development work. In fact, you can use other tools instead of Docker instead of Linux. As far as I know, [Servbay](https://servbay.com) does a much better job than Docker on Mac.

[vundercind]

Yeah Docker’s non-native and runs under a virtualized Linux everywhere but… on Linux, so that’s a little rough. I’ve found some of the alternative VM hosts for that to be a ton faster and more power efficient, as they make better use of MacOS’ built-in virtualization system, but YMMV. I’ve also found that Apple’s lead on power management is so great that I can be using a power-sucking thing like Docker and still come out ahead, which is really lame :-/

I hear that “Docker Desktop” is especially bad on MacOS, but I’ve used docker almost as long as it’s existed and still haven’t used that (I don’t really even know what the point of it is?) so dunno about that part.