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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

Can you identify specifically the critical features of OS X that aren't replicable with a reasonable amount of effort on other systems? I've spent considerable time using all 3 major OSes as daily drivers and while each platform has perks, I've never felt a strong commitment to OS X for daily use. I'm curious what many people feel is so crucial about it that they'd consider switching to the massively unstable Hackintosh over a customized Windows or Linux installation (or some hybrid of the two, which is what I run).

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For me at least it's a lot of little things, including but not limited to:

- The plethora of excellent native apps made by indie/small company on macOS. The platform has attracted small time high quality developers as far back as the pre-OS X days and it still does, mostly. Apps like this are considerably more rare on Windows, and while indie is the name of the desktop Linux game, quality and consistency are huge issues there.

- The workflow. macOS is built to deal with lots of loose, oddly sized windows scattered around which is great for how I work, especially when hooked up to a 27" monitor. Windows' window management starts to breaks down if you don't maximize everything and doesn't allow you to manage windows on a per-application basis. Under macOS you can tell your computer, "Close all windows belonging to TextEdit, but don't quit TextEdit", while Windows cannot offer that sort of control. I also really like having a single, fixed global menubar over a smattering of redundant bars attached to individual windows. There's also the key binds built into every native text field and the way the OS additively stacks key shortcuts and all sorts of other little things.

Linux can be customized to be semi-Maclike but getting all the details right is damn near impossible short of writing an entirely new desktop environment, and even then you're eventually going to find your efforts thwarted by some third party app that where for some reason or another the developer has found it necessary to use some oddball UI toolkit or to do otherwise do odd things that don't play nice with your meticulously arranged desktop.

I'm currently dual booting hackintoshed Sierra and Windows 10 on my tower (keeping windows for games) and in the past have exclusively run several Linux distributions with numerous different desktop setups. At the end of the day I'm facing a productivity loss by switching to either of the alternative platforms.

It's a lot of little things that add up.

There are a ton of quality utilities that add up to a nice experience.

cmd is a lot nicer than ctrl to use as a base for keyboard shortcuts and the keyboard shortcuts are generally well integrated into the os.

How the operating system handles events enables a lot of the tweaking apps to work well.

I like the single menu bar at the top of the screen.

It's unix under the hood and it has a terminal as a first class citizen. Finder is pretty weak but what can you do? There are some alternatives to finder and the architecture of osx allows for them to exist without causing a bunch of the mac equivalent of "blue screens of death".

I am sure there are some equivalent utilities for windows and linux but I have some mouse gestures that are system wide that I would be severely disappointed not to have anymore.

In general there is a nice little gui that polishes up whatever little utility thing you feel like doing but didn't know.

I am sure I could move to linux if I really needed to but there would be things that I missed quite a bit.

Edit, a few more:

Cmd left and right arrow to go to the beginning and end of a line is great. emacs bindings by default in text areas is nice to have(I think you can turn vi mode on too if you want).

Parallels to use windows when I need to for engineering programs that need it and have it seamlessly work as a mac app is great.

the hardware is of great quality too. (the mac pro before the trashcan was a thoughtful and modular machine that was a joy to work on)

plugging in monitors just works which is great.

Anything with audio. ASIO on Windows is a mess of exclusive application usage and without it you're looking at latency so bad that I can't real-time monitor and talk at the same time because the echo effect kills me (and it's worse if you want to aggregate multiple audio devices). Linux--there's nothing worthwhile in terms of audio software and JACK is a disaster.

Even if I switch everything else I do to Windows and Linux, and I'm considering it, I'll end up keeping a Mac around for the foreseeable future.

Apart from what the sibling posters said about great indie software:

Linux just doesn't seem to be very trackpad-friendly. There is a messy diaspora of tools that translate fixed gestures into hotkeys, and it doesn't help that Linux distros are transitioning from synaptics to libinput. libinput doesn't even have kinetic scrolling, for example.

It's not just muscle memory - every kind of mouse (traditional, 'gamer', vertical) has given me back pain. I wouldn't have expected that, but this is my #1 reason for staying in the Apple ecosystem.

Spaces, the windows 10 version won't fill that gap for me until I can assign apps to specific spaces so that they always open there, as well as key shortcuts e.g. Ctrl 1 to go to space 1. Also remembering my setup through shutdowns.

Quick look - so useful.

Screenshotting (cmd shift 4, cmd shift space etc) and annotations via preview app. Windows expects me to draw highlight boxes by hand which rapidly looks unprofessional.

Using cmd shift 4 to measure pixels for web design work.

Exposé is nice, not sure if Windows has something like that, I think it does?

Spotlight was a big one for me too but I believe Windows does that justice now with Windows button search.

iMessage on desktop is actually a big deal for me, being that most of my friends and family have apple devices. Being on Windows and wanting to send someone a quick link is frustrating when you're used to having iMessage.

As others have mentioned, it's all the small things. Admittedly I haven't looked at Linux on the desktop for a while so this is mostly based on comparisons with Windows.

macOS is great because it combines a flawless UNIX system (with homebrew, the only package manager I've been satisfied with) and a nice GUI with apps that work/look great by default.

Linux has a massive lack of good apps. Simple things like a decent calendar app on Linux doesn't seem to exist.

Homebrew is a children's toy compared to APT or Portage. There's no argument about general polish or calendar apps in particular though.

It's a trade off. You can have rough edges but community control and 100+ backup plans, or you can have sleek, polished, but at the mercy of next year's soldered RAM and SSD pricing guidelines. I personally love breaking things to figure out how they work, but some people have a job to do and can't deal with distractions.

Homebrew works way better than APT for me at least (I've never tried Portage). APT is definitely a way better option for servers, but at a high cost by sacrificing usability.

>the critical features of OS X that aren't replicable with a reasonable amount of effort on other systems?

the apps

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