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by linguae 597 days ago
Why not both? Why can’t we have a good usability experience AND control? In fact, we used to have that via the Mac hardware and software of the 1990s and 2000s, as well as NeXT’s software and hardware.

There was a time when Apple’s hardware was user-serviceable; I fondly remember my 2006 MacBook, with easily-upgradable RAM and storage. I also remember a time when Mac OS X didn’t have notarization and when the App Store didn’t exist. I would gladly use a patched version of Snow Leopard or even Tiger running on my Framework 13 if this were an option and if a modern web browser were available.
1 comments
nextos 597 days ago
NeXT was great and Mac OS X was also nice and had a lovely indie and boutique app ecosystem during the mid-to-late 2000s. Sadly, iOS stole the focus. However, the OP argues Linux usability is bad, which I think is an outdated POV. It really depends on your setup and usecases. For many development usecases, Linux is superior to macOS.

I run NixOS on a plain X11 environment with a browser, an editor and a terminal. It's really boring. For my favorite development stacks, everything works. Flakes make workflow easy to reproduce, and it's also easy to make dramatic setup changes at OS level thanks to declarativeness and immutability.

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hilux 597 days ago
If you're interacting with other humans, or with the consumer internet, you'll run into thousands of situations where my default setup (macOS, Chrome) "just works," and your setup will require some extra effort.

You may be smart enough to figure it out, but most people (even many smart tech people) get tired of these constant battles.

Here's an example from earlier this evening: I was buying a plane ticket from Japan Air Lines. Chrome automagically translates their website from Japanese to English. Other browsers, e.g. Firefox, and even Safari, do not - I checked. Is there a workaround or a fix? I'm sure you could find one, given time and effort. But who wants to constantly deal with these hassles?

Another very common example is communication apps. Or any time you're exchanging data in some proprietary format. Would it be great if no one used proprietary formats? Yes! Is that the world we live in? No. Can I force the rest of the world to adopt open standards, by refusing to communicate with them? No.

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tap-snap-or-nap 597 days ago
The world has moved on from desktop environments to multi-device integration like Watch, Phone, AirTags, Speakers, TV and in that way Linux usability is certainly worse than MacOS.
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ddingus 597 days ago
Oh sort of. That is for sure a thing, but not THE thing.

I would argue people are being tugged in that direction more than it being simply better.

You can bet when people start to get to work building things --all sorts of things, not just software, they find out pretty quickly just how important a simple desktop running on a general purpose computer really is!

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