[rednafi]

I loathe macOS but stick with it mostly for the hardware. I use a beefed-up 16-inch M3 Max for work and a baseline 15-inch MacBook Air for writing and OSS work.

I love the Air’s hardware and wouldn’t trade it for anything. Before switching to Mac, I was running a maxed-out 16-inch Dell XPS and enjoyed using Ubuntu and Pop!_OS on it. But the hardware just wasn’t there—the trackpad felt cheap, and the keyboard would creak. There were just too many small issues for such an expensive device.

Otherwise, macOS is bloated, slow, and has horrible window management. I also prefer GNU tooling over BSD, and having to install everything separately is an extra hassle. Plus, it’s getting more restrictive over the years, which I’m not a fan of.

[sweeter]

I have an M1 mac with Asahi Linux and Hyprland, and I just love it. Its sleek and powerful but has the freedoms of Linux and I hate that MacOS feels like playing in a padded room. Like wth is up with Finder? Its awful. But if I ever need photoshop or w/e, I just boot into the Mac partition and call it a day.

[jazzyjackson]

Yes I’m really impressed with how nicely the installer works and able to choose on boot. Brings me back to my boot camp days of triple wielding. Maybe someday now that windows is on arm…

I think I read a blog of theirs to the effect that the apple developers clearly made a choice to leave the opening in the secure boot chain to allow for a separate partition to install, giving them a hat tip, it would have been easy to lock out alternate OSes (Windows secure boot with bitlocker does) but Apple lets you have it both ways.

I word of warning for others - I did manage to fubar my install when I wanted to undo it, I didn’t pay enough attention and deleted a partition I wasn’t meant to and got in a boot loop. Following recovery to reinstall macOS worked fine, just had to blow away my macOS partition, so, you know, back it up if you don’t want to lose it :)

[takoid]

I need a Windows laptop for work but really appreciate the exceptional build quality of my MacBook Air. I had a ThinkPad, but it creaked and didn’t feel nearly as solid. Are there any Windows laptops that come close to MacBook-level hardware quality?

[lhamil64]

When my work laptop got an upgrade recently, I received a Dell Precision 5690 and it seems pretty MacBook-like, like they tried to clone a MBP. Granted, I haven't ever owned a modern MacBook so maybe it's not quite as high quality but it's definitely sleeker than my old ThinkPad. The one thing that's very non-Mac is the power adapter. It's a brick, and while it's USB-C, they used a non-standard voltage/wattage so it's unclear if/how well third party adapters would work.

[rednafi]

Unfortunately, in my experience, no. XPS is close but it has too many tiny little issues for a 3 grand device.

[__rito__]

I reay like the Asus TUF series in this regard. Except battery life and weight of course.

[beretguy]

> appreciate the exceptional build quality of my MacBook Air

Wait until your battery dies.

[__MatrixMan__]

> has horrible window management

I keep thinking I'll get used to it, but it's been years and every day I hate it a little more.

My escape is to maximize a terminal on a large monitor and use https://zellij.dev/ as my "window manager"

[mtillman]

Many years ago Apple added twitter support at the OS level. At that moment, they chose to become an ad network instead of a technology company. The hardware is very nice of course and just like you it’s the only reason I stay.

[commandersaki]

Huh, what are you on about? I've never seen anything Twitter in macOS/OSX and I've been using it since 2002.

Edit: Looks like there was twitter integration in OSX 10.8/10.9 according to ChatGPT and eventually removed in 10.14.

[al_borland]

The other advantage I see to macOS is commercial app support. Like it or not, it can be a fact of life for many. Photoshop users don’t want to use GIMP.

While Electron has made Linux on the desktop much more viable in this respect, there is are some key apps that macOS has where Linux is lacking.

And of course there is also working between mobile and desktop, which macOS/iOS seem to do best. Part of me longs for the days when this wasn’t a concern, but this is a big thing these days and makes running Linux on my main computer a problem.

[tap-snap-or-nap]

A lot of free software have a huge learning curve but the payoff long term is always much more than sticking with commercial software which gets nerfed and eventually subscription model with few feature additions and many subtractions.

[rufus_foreman]

>> Photoshop users don’t want to use GIMP

GIMP users don't want to use Photoshop.

[dismalaf]

> Photoshop users don’t want to use GIMP.

I'm very curious, as someone who is a hobby photographer and takes photos on both a phone and a decent mirrorless camera... What normal person needs Photoshop and what's the use case? Like, the phone and camera both do a good job of creating jpegs, both can adjust lighting, colour, highlights, etc..., and there's specific apps for adjusting lighting of photos. I can't say I've ever wanted to do intricate photo editing as a non-pro, even as a hobbyist.

Do normal people actually use Photoshop? Am I missing something in my life?

[al_borland]

If you’re looking to point, shoot, and share with the phone camera, and keep your mirrorless stuff true to life, you probably don’t need Photoshop. If you’re looking to create things that didn’t exist before, or bend reality, that’s where Photoshop would come in.

My dad is a big into photography and while he does his management and RAW processing in Lightroom, he still uses Photoshop here and there. He’s been enjoying playing with their AI image generation to change up scenes, replace skies, etc. Even without the AI, it can be good for tweaking things in the image to your liking, like removing a random person from the background of your vacation photo. Depending on what you’re looking to do, this can either be easy or take incredible skill.

Myself, I have a bit of an obsession with desktop wallpapers, and will often make my own or tweak ones I find to my liking. At different points in my life, going back 25 years, I’d use it for various things in school, work, or socially online. Not because it was required, but because I enjoyed it and could make things that didn’t exist.

These days I use Affinity’s suite instead of Adobe, so I don’t have to pay a subscription. Apple recently acquired Pixelmator, which I also used for a while, so I’m interested to see what comes of that.

[robenkleene]

The technical answer is layers and destructive edits, you could probably summarize this as compositing (i.e., combining different images together). I don't think there's necessarily even a correlation between pro vs. non-pro (I'm not remotely a pro, but run into limitations of the Lightroom-approach to editing [which is what you're talking about, editing that can't do destructive edits or non-adjustment layers] quickly). I think what it correlates with is whether you want to quickly edit lots of photos (Lightroom) or deeply edit a single photo without limitations (Photoshop).

[bobajeff]

Linux actually has some commercial apps available. Though I'm not sure how they compare to their Mac and Windows versions. Yes some apps aren't available but that's true of Mac as well, though to a lesser extent.

[nipperkinfeet]

I recently tried MacOS after a couple of years of not using it. The windows management hasn't gotten any better. It is just so horrible. The Dock still does not allow you to click on the icon of the application to minimize it.

[reacharavindh]

This. I’ve worked with Linux on servers for more than 10 years. I know my way around. I’d love to use it on my laptop, but the hardware/firmware just isn’t there compared to a minimal MacOS. I feel that MacOS is bloated with features I don’t need or want. However, As a laptop with a kick-ass CPU, fast memory, fast(albeit limited and expensive) storage, high DPI display, solid battery capacity and importantly working “sleep and wake up” feature upon closing the lid and opening it, Apple has earned their money.

I could tune my way into making Linux do many of those things, but even in 2025, that feels like an exercise of putting lipstick on a pig.

So, I’ve made my peace and settled on a minimal MacOS on MacBook Air as the client, and do majority of my dev/admin work on a beefy Linux server that I can ssh into with ease. Play to each OS’s strengths..

[jazzyjackson]

Asahi Linux has come a long way. I think the only finicky thing I dealt with was Bluetooth audio so switched to a USB DAC which works fine, and they don’t have hdmi over usbc working yet, but the hardware hdmi port works fine. (edit: just realized they are not up to m3 yet, just m1/2)

Besides that the fedora gnome desktop has won me over, I was able to install everything I wanted from the software app (logseq, gnucash, thunderbird, filezilla), stable as a cow

A couple of QoL wins against macOS (besides coming with a package manager {even windows has winget now!} and, you know, being free): they’ve combined the functionality of Spotlight with Mission Control/alt tab, just tap cmd and switch apps or search for app/file/setting. I cannot reacclimate to having two different shortcuts on Mac now. Drag window to the side for split screen or top for full screen works fine. The other is small: when I mouseover the volume slider in the taskbar I can scroll to control it. Mac does not, have to click and drag. Call it a finishing touch.

I liked it so much I slapped an SSD into a 2014 Intel Mac mini (can you believe we had gigabit and usb3 over 10 years ago?) and put fedora workstation on that too. Truly the year of the Linux desktop (for me anyway).

EDIT: oh yea! Only other annoyance is Signal doesn’t work on either! Electron builds fail for aarch64 (not asahi’s fault) and even on x86-fedora it throws up warnings that it doesn’t know what secure keychain to use, would I like to store database plaintext? Uh, no! I’ll just go back to email ffs