Most of the more recent Apple criticism seems to be focused on hardware limitations. People tend to like the OS X GUI and experience for the most part. They just don’t like the Apple hardware you’re limited to now that Macs seem to be less and less of a priority for minor updates. The Mac Pro is literally over years old. The Mac Mini is over two. And the iMac is over a year old as well, besides the limitations of the form factor: it’s a limited machine, and I don’t want to use two monitors after falling in love with a 34” curved ultrawide display.

Personally, I came to the same conclusion recently. But I went the Hackintosh route instead of switching to a Linux/dual-booted Windows machine. The latest rMBP’s disappointing hardware and battery life, not to mention the cost premium, made the decision fairly easy for me. That, and I wanted to go back to using a separate desktop and laptop after repeatedly hitting performance bottlenecks with Adobe Lightroom on my previous rMBP. My photography pretty much nixed a Linux option unless I wanted to dual-boot into Windows more often than I’d prefer. There are alternatives like Darktable, but even though Lightroom is a resource pig that needs a diet and a lot of optimization work still, it’s my preferred catalog software that I’m most comfortable in. And when you’re trying to sort through 3-5k+ photos shot over a very busy weekend, comfort is the deciding factor.

As a developer, I have no problem with the popular Linux distros. I’ve worked with Linux servers for years, and I love the approach to package management package management. I’m perfectly comfortable with CLI apps. But when I’m not doing dev work, I don’t want to be saddled by the need to constantly boot into Windows for other tasks.

The Hackintosh route gave me the best of both worlds. Better hardware that I can upgrade on my own terms, my preferred GUI environment, and no need to dual-boot unless I want to game. I had a bit of extra work to deal with in the beginning to get everything working properly (with my Skylake build, proper audio support and the wireless networking card in particular), but it didn’t take much of an effort thanks to a very robust community ([tonymacx86.com]). The only other issue is checking on discussions for new software updates to make sure there aren’t any problems before I go and install them. But that’s not too big a deal, all things considered.

Tl;dr - I guess my point is that we all have our preferred environments and will go to a hell of a lot of trouble to maintain them. Or, if that’s not an option, then to at least get things close to them. Even when that can mean more trouble later on. Using a homebrew port strikes me as a less-than-advantageous approach, but I can imagine why the original author did so.