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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. I'm making the switch from Linux (which I've been using almost exclusively since 2004) to MacOS, and so far I find a lot of nuisance, and almost nothing that works better. Different, yes. More pro apps available, yes. But inherently better (or just basically in the OS)? Haven't found where yet.

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Best battery life, best trackpad, best HiDPI scaling, best app selection under the UNIXes, ecosystem (Apple's garden is indeed high-walled, but its also very nice)

Oh yeah, and you don't have to be afraid an OS update will make your laptop unbootable. Has happened to me under Ubuntu twice.

> you don't have to be afraid an OS update will make your laptop unbootable.

That's not true. Apple's yearly OS upgrades can and do brick machines. At least with Ubuntu, I'd stand a good chance of diagnosing and fixing the issue.

Also, we are just talking about Ubuntu here and not all Linux distributions. For example, NixOS is a Linux with an entirely different method of managing upgrades.

There are other annoyances though. My current ones are:

- Apple Kerberos does not support MS-KKDCP and multiple factor auth. Services that require Authentication Indicator are simply not available from macOS. Their Ticket Viewer is even more simplistic than in 10.6 timeframe.

- Their IPSec implementation is weird and haven't managed to make it work with Strongswan yet.

> Oh yeah, and you don't have to be afraid an OS update will make your laptop unbootable. Has happened to me under Ubuntu twice.

Just wait, sometimes it happens there too. There's a reason for that recovery partition.

I've been using Macs for almost a decade now, never had something go belly-up that wasn't my own fault. Referring my anecdote, can't say the same about Linux sadly..

My wife's Mac has had numerous issues with updates and upgrades and third party software. In comparison, my NixOS machines update flawlessly, as expected from a stateless OS. But that's also just an anecdote :)

Funny you mention that. On linux i dont have to worry that updates break my development environment. On osx ever major update did.

Perspectives :)

I did it the other way round (desktop Linux for many years and MacOS from 2004) : nothing that works better, really ?

Built into the OS :

Automator (aka Unix pipes for GUI apps)

Preview (doubles as a comprehensive image + PDF editor. Scans your signature from a piece of paper held in front of the webcam)

OS-wide data detectors : hover over a date in any text field, set up a calendar event instantly.

Time Machine : dead simple backups

Notes (now with native Evernote import)

Photos (with easy to use bread & butter editing + ML-based search/cataloguing, not to mention integrated backup+iOS sync)

iMovie

Garageband (+ comprehensive audio/MIDI routing)

Comprehensive cross-device integration with Messages / Facetime / Photos / Continuity

Before anyone replies with a list of supposedly equivalent desktop Linux apps : Apple has never been about the What (ticking boxes in a checklist), more about the How (the overall experience)

I'll admit that quality has suffered under the new 1 year OS release cycle, but in my experience it's still a notch or two above Windows or Linux's best desktop setups.

You cannot make sweeping statements like that. Yes the Mac stuff can be convenient, but in no way is it better than all free alternatives.

For example, despite the shallow learning curve, in our house, time machine was both unreliable and patronising (the time travel UI). For me, I'm using ZFS snapshots for my backup, technically it's more than a notch better than time machine.

Another example would be Notes, Apple have demonstrated over many years that they cannot write reliable bidirectional sync. Unison just works.

> Apple has never been about the What (ticking boxes in a checklist), more about the How (the overall experience)

That's the key issue. If you're starting out, do not like to customize, or have not yet reached your (locally optimal) setup, then I guess Mac is superior.

However, having perfected my setup over the last 12 years, I find the default Mac tools quite limited; e.g.

Time Machine is inferior (except in UI) to Borg, to which I've switched recently from Bup, to which I've switched before from a set of rsync scripts (which are time-machine equivalent, and I had them running long before time machine existed).

I don't make music (so don't care about GarageBand), and I also care about privacy so all the cross-device integration that apple offers goes out the door.

Thunderbird is, for my use case, superior to Apple Mail; Firefox is superior to Safari.

Finder puts junk all over my file system, and the old hacks to stop it (aseptic, and a couple of others) are no longer supported under Sierra.

I like Unity (the v on 14.4 - I think v7) with a few tweaks much better than the Mac doc, though that's a matter of taste.

And I like the transparency of the system. My main laptop ubuntu never breaks, but when I do weird experiments on other hardware, I can actually tell what's going on - if my Mac had trouble booting, it's likely the recovery partition will come useful - but there's basically nothing else I can do.

And the New Oxford American Dictionary.

For years I used WordNet as my dictionary because it was the only electronic dictionary I knew of that was less than 90 years old and didn't put the definition on a web page cluttered with distractions (and because paper dictionaries are too slow and tedious compared to electronic ones).

But over the years it slowly dawned on me that it is not a good dictionary. Then I realized my Mac came with a good electronic dictionary.

(Another former Linux user.)

Same got forced on a mac more than a year ago. I missed many little things and often was annoyed by how much more complicated things can be. But then again i am just used to linux. I am happy i've made the experience.

If you're a laptop user you'll likely notice much better battery life.

My 6 year old thinkpad has a slightly better battery life than my 2015 MBP had in the beginning (and only then)

Not every non mac laptop comes with shitty battery and components ;)

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