What can you do with Hackintosh that you still can't with a Linux distro?
Edit: Possibly a bit late to ask, but I should have asked if you had ever seriously tried Linux and if so what your experiences were like?
I moved to OS X because I want a desktop that actually works. I have several Linux VMs - one per project - which I use mostly from the command line.
At the moment, OS X and iOS are the least annoying desktop and mobile operating systems. Note that I said least annoying. They all suck in different ways and I wouldn't use OS X as a server. I also think Apple has no idea how to do online services; for example I don't use iCloud for anything. Still, the operating systems beat the alternatives.
Only problem is, you have to use OS X for a few months to realize how much invisible polish has been put in. I first bought a MacBook, and it took me a year or more to decide to switch my desktop to a Hackintosh as well.
Notice that I had downloaded these floppies through a 55.6 kbps dialup line (!!) from the Slackware ftp server (!!!)
The great thing about the Slackware distribution was that it was separated in "subsystems" each one being more or less standalone and being able to download and install separately. So there was the "base" subsystem which was on N floppies (I can't remember probably around 6) that contained the Linux kernel, libraries, bash and a couple of other useful utilities which could be downloaded, installed and with this you could start using Linux! And then there were various extra subsystems, for example the "development" subsystem that contained gcc, the "X" subsystem (with the FVWM window manager IIRC) etc. This made it really great to be downloaded through a dialup line.
I can remember various great stories from my installation and configuration process, for example becoming an expert in how disk partitioning works, configuring the modem by giving it AT commands (to dial my ISP's phone I needed to issue the ATX3DT command followed by the number), to make my (ISA) sound card work I needed to boot on windows (95) so that it's IRQ and memory address was configured properly and only then then (cold) reboot on Linux so it would work (!), using autoconfigure/make/gcc to compile stuff (this actually is needed and in 2017), configuring X by editing text files and playing with my monitor resolution and refresh rate etc.
Happy days !
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Sound-HOWTO/x320.html http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lame/LAME/linux-admin-made-easy/inst...
Also the Slackware linux had a nice installation guide:
https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:install
Finally, some configurations were explained in the corresponding man pages of each util.
Luckily I had ethernet and a cable modem - Lynx to the rescue!!! A lot of the linux forums were very 'text' friendly in those days - I dread to think what it would be like nowadays trying to navigate a forum from the cli.
I left slackware about 5 years ago for Xubuntu, mainly because I needed to use my laptop for work and not just having fun tweaking and learning.
The whole "Apt get into it!" just really works for me now. I think the final straw for me was last minute trying to compile a video editing suite (Cinelerra?) on slack, getting frustrated and then finding out it was much quicker for me to nuke the HDD, install Ubuntu Studio and an hour or so later I was happily video editing.
Now nostalgia is knocking at the door so maybe I will make a new partition and see how slackware has developed in the last few years...
Being from that time period myself (18 years old) and installing Slackware as well RedHat (and even Caldera ... anyone remember that?) there was plenty of documentation.
However unlike the parent poster I got a bunch of Linux distributions by either mail ordering or going to conference. In fact I went to Linux conference in Atlanta circa 1997 and meet Linus himself... but more importantly picked up some distribution CDs/disks.
It was the good ole days for sure.
Actually come to think of it, Ubuntu really hit the CD nail on the head with Shipit, those of you with 28.8 modems will know this feeling. I still have my 7.04 CD.
And of course there were computer magazines that offered Linux distros in their CDs!
I use Linux ALL DAY EVERY DAY at work, but IMO the desktop environments still suck, and the Mac is my desktop.
The Linux desktop experience has come a long way since then. Try Ubuntu 16.04.
I assume you're not including Windows Phone in that, because its surely less annoying than either iOS or Android (apart from lack of apps, which I consider to be a blessing in disguise)
Unfortunately I am cursed with a long memory and I keep grudges forever, and I'm old enough to remember the old Microsoft with the patent threats against Linux and the illegal monopoly abuse practices.
Yes, LibreOffice in Ubuntu or Fedora are good enough technically, and there are same problems when exchanging documents with Office for Mac as there are with LibreOffice.
However, deflecting blame works. When exchanging files with someone and something is broken in LO, it is automatically fault of LO. When something is broken in Office for Mac, it is an uh-oh moment, as obviously it is the latest product from the same company, so the effort to resolve the issue is much more constructive.
Another reason is, that both Mail.app and Outlook are usable as Exchange clients (yes, I'm stuck with that, with IMAP disabled there :(). Evolution is a trainwreck. There is a plugin for Thunderbird, but it is a no-go, as it is a yearly subscription. One time price would be fine, but no way I'm going to pay yearly for using Exchange mail in Thunderbird.
This saved my bacon in a similar situation back in the day: http://davmail.sourceforge.net
It's all about Mac OS. It lets me get things done without dealing with silly things.
Let's quickly list what I sorely miss when switching to my Linux machine:
* Multiple monitor support: connect any number of monitors, any time, and have them Just Work. HiDPI or not, doesn't matter. The OS even remembers which of your windows where placed on which monitor at which size, and will do its best to move them when you connect a monitor. No other OS even comes close.
* Consistent keybindings (Emacs-style) in all windows and dialogs. Control-a always gets me to the beginning of the line, whether in a text editor or in a file-open dialog box.
* Reasonably consistent keybindings in apps. Can expect Cmd-q to quit every app.
* Flawlessly working suspend/resume on laptops.
* Full-screen any app and it works fine.
* Apps like LaunchBar (I think quicksilver used to be a free alternative).
* Spotlight, which finds everything.
* Ability to remap any key to whatever I want and have it work everywhere.
* Drag & drop everywhere. And if you laugh at this, consider that this is coming from a command-line guy with 25 years experience with computers. The way Mac does drag & drop is faster and more convenient than fiddling with command line. For example, did you know you can drop a file or a directory from anywhere into any file/open dialog box?
* Apps like Simplenote, Bear, Ulysses: excellent tools for specific purposes.
* TextExpander.
* Predictable ubuquitous working clipboard.
For me, switching over to my Ubuntu machine is an exercise in frustration. I can't redefine my keys, there is nothing like TextExpander, multiple monitors just don't work unless stars align just right and you have all the monitors in just the right order at boot time and you better not mix hidpi with normal. Drag and drop is nonexisting. Copy/paste is a free-for-all where each app does things differently and you have multiple clipboards (Ctrl-V vs middle mouse click).
Basically, in order to get things done, I'd much rather work on a Mac.
A side note: to really understand why the Mac is so good, you have to work on it for a while, with someone showing you things (like dragging files into file/open dialogs). People seem to think this is about superficial things like aesthetics, or Adobe software. It's not.
The problem was, they need to put a LOT of polish in to reach OS X levels of usability, and they didn't look like they were doing that, they had some nebulous dreams of making a unified mobile/desktop interface instead.
There isn't anything in particular I'd suggest to them, because they need improvements just about everywhere. Say, is the network manager actually usable these days? When I switched it was easier to just disable it and move along.
And the main elephant in the Linux room right now is systemd. Low level Linux is basically being taken over by an incompetent developer who doesn't understand the Unix philosophy of software design and can't deliver working software anyway. He's the author of the abomination called pulseaudio - back then it was required to uninstall/disable it to have sound again. Now, software written by him is becoming a dependency of almost everything - he is trying to replace all the Linux infrastructure layer with his ideas. Sorry, I see no reason to take a look at Linux on the desktop again.
Systemd in Linux has the same role, as Launchd in macOS. Some aspects of systemd were inspired by launchd and SMF.
Interestingly, it is a good, useful thing that contributes to polished experience when it comes to macOS, but for some reason, when someone does equivalent for Linux, it is suddenly a bad thing, just because it is different than in the past and moves the polish and experience with Linux to a higher level?
Unix philosophy aside, Pottering can't be trusted to provide working software...
If you have such problems, that your machine crashes and loses filesystem data, just redirect it to the syslogd and go on.
Before Ubuntu, if you expected to get a build of a typical popular Windows program/game you would get laughed at. Now it's virtually expected. That's not failure.
systemd is not as much a matter of controversy as people want it to be. If it was, you would see people like Linus rejecting it, but they haven't because it's not a major factor right now.
You've just made one of the errors discussed in http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ .
Really, consistency is something that macOS holds over other desktop operating systems in a lot of ways, and that holds true even for third party apps for the platform. After having used macOS for many years, using other operating systems where most never gave much thought to or saw any value in getting on the same page and following a set of conventions is jarring.
https://www.howtogeek.com/198043/how-to-merge-folders-on-mac...
A dialog pops up with 2 choices: Stop or Replace. Replace will delete everything in the destination folder before copying over the source. If you hold the Option key while drag&dropping, you can get one of multiple different pop-up dialogs, depending on the circumstances... and the results are not very predictable.
We use ubuntu at work and I was VERY worried about this. But autokey is actually good enough. The UI is not quite as slick but the rest of it is a little better. The exception is the little pop up form fill things which are cool but I found I did not really miss. https://github.com/autokey-py3/autokey
I'm describing this experience because it's a common one: it's symptomatic of the "Linux desktop" experience and is the reason why I would much rather use Mac OS. It's not that I can't make things work -- I probably could, but I want to spend my time on other things.
The 2 major issues for me with osX were:
1: Selecting icons to copy. I don't know if this has been fixed, but if you have a file browser window open and you want to click then shift-click to select a range of files, it would always just make a rectangle (graphically) between the 2 click points, not run left to right through the window and select everything in-between, (I don't know if I am explaining this clearly)
To select the range you wanted you would have to either switch to list view or cmd click any files which got left out. I really though it was a bug until I found this forum post https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/shift-doesnt-select-ran... where they defend the behavior.
2: And kind of a silly one, but when you plug in an hdmi monitor, you can only control the volume on the monitor itself. And as with the previous issue, I was surprised at the responses I found in the forums. Complete finger-in-ears-lalalalala "It's better this way, and impossible the way you say even though linux and windows can do it that way"
Anyway, for my personal use case, linux trumps both Windows and Apple, and, in opposition to most comments I see on this thread, I run Win7 and osX in VMs if I need specific software (SketchUp on Win and nothing really on osX, I just have the VM set up in case I need something)
You mentioned this twice, and now I'm intrigued. What exactly do you mean by this?
Similarly drag a folder into a Save dialog and it will switch to that folder.
Drag a file onto the "Open..." button on a web page to skip the open dialog entirely.
Drag a file into Terminal to paste that full path into the terminal...
And the far decried HFS+ file system had a feature I hope they will maintain in APFS. When you moved or renamed a file around, most of the time even third party app managed to figure out the new location of the file when seeking for it instead of just displaying a broken path dialog.
And this replacement only occurred if the resource was not present at the search path. Meaning that moving and replacing by a similarly named file result in similar file being used, while moving result in suggesting new location.
Don't know what's the behavior is as of today, and maybe by now Linux also provide this reliably, but first time I've seen this was even pre OSX I believe. And maybe there is a simple trick, but it looked like black magic for the 20 years me.
That was the case (and created a huge debate) back in the old Carbon vs Cocoa days
Infamous tech note 2034: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2014/10/08/the-source-of-technote-20...
Get to the Open dialog, activate App A, click-hold on the little file icon next to the file name on the top bar of App A and drag it onto the Open dialog over at B. Suddenly, the dialog has the appropriate file selected, wherever it happens to reside on your file system. Magic!
Edit: literally everyone beat me to it.
Personally I prefer MacOS over Linux because it just works from the UX point of view and I can run Linux on it pretty easily with Vagrant.
That said, I have 4 hard drives, with 3 OS's in my main computer. So, I can boot into whatever, depending on my needs.
1: Lightroom/Photoshop. I'm a hobbyist photographer, and the tools just aren't as good in Linux. Gimp, Darktable etc are interesting, but they just aren't up to par yet with Adobe's offerings. And basically everyone in photography seems to be using Lightroom + Photoshop.
2: iMessage - being able to have my SMS and iMessage messages on the desktop (and synced back and forth from my iphone) is just way too useful every single day. Yes there are apps that provide similar functionality, but the beauty of iMessage is that nobody has to use an app. They just send texts like normal. Maybe there is a solution to this that works in Linux but I haven't seen it.
There rest might do it for the heck of it too, slick UX & benefit of doing ML/DL from one single OS & machine instead of context switching between Linux machine & a macOS based laptop for the above reason.
I've tried using it more. I recall using Ubuntu full time for about 2 months a couple of years ago.
But I'm a designer and use various CAD apps which are mostly available in Windows, some in MacOS and none in Ubuntu. I also recall breaking a lot of things when tinkering with Ubuntu.
So while I constantly have this drive to try Linux and open-source workflow I just never manage to make it work. I break things too easily and many trivial tasks are too much of an "hassle" (like getting proper CUDA support to use in Blender) meaning the chances of breaking things while tinkering is higher.
It's slightly amusing to me that by far and away the best terminal emulator that I've ever encountered is OSX-only, and it's embedded in my workflow enough that it would be a real pain to do without. I was going to note that FinalTerm inspired some of those features but was now dead, but going by [1] it appears it may be resurrected.
I'm pretty happy with my my laptop that has the high end mac book stats (besides the display) and costs less than 50% of it.
I run Xubuntu on it and it basically has everything I need, but XCode.
- Apps that I've grown used to that are macOS only like 1Password, Photoshop, and Quiver - Integration with iMessage - I really enjoy being able to send messages from my laptop - Avoiding weird edge cases where shit just doesn't plain work on Linux. I have a lot of issues with a HiDPI display on Linux that I don't ever have to deal with on Mac.
I know Linux is about configurability, and that's why I'm running Elementary OS at home, but these are the reasons why I would consider a Hackintosh now.
Some may have equivalents (but I'm sure nothing as polished) or will run under Wine but I have bad experiences with both.
There are also workflows that take advantage of macOS features (e.g. location service) that wouldn't work on Linux I guess.
I used Visual C++ long ago, in a past life when I used to develop on Windows, and it was pretty good. Played around with more recent versions of it (2010 - 2015) and boy has it gone downhill! Very slow and clunky compared to what I remember.
Replace "git" with every other package....
Linux is so amateur hour with all plainly stupid decisions, I'd rather pay good money for proper unix.
Git today in many ways could be seen as fundamental component of many tools. Many packaging and build tools use it to fetch data. (like homebrew, plugin systems for many text editors etc.)
Also, the git version of your distribution IS relevant because other packages depend on it. For example, on my Ubuntu system the git package is a dependency of over 170 other packages. If you could install a newer version, a lot of these other packages might break.
The recommended way of installing git on macOS is via Apples git variant by installing Xcode which also requires root privileges btw.
I do believe that Linux-based desktop OSs should separate base system from user software, kind of like *BSDs have been doing; actually, I'd really distros to embrace something like homebrew, where packages are installed per-user
You're kidding me, right? https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/log/trunk?h...
There's sometimes weeks before node is updated.
Updating PostgreSQL from 9.6.1 to 9.6.2 took 4 months.
And right now .net core build is failing on my archlinux test server.
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If you want latest - use macOS with brew