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Comment by tyteen4a03 | Hacker News Reader

The only reason I'm staying with macOS is because it is the only UNIX distribution that doesn't look downright ugly. (Sorry Linux, none of your distros match up to Apple's offering)

I've had lots of teething issues with High Sierra (especially with APFS) and I certainly don't like the new butterfly keyboard in the new MacBook Pros. But on the other hand, they've got the best gesture controls. With Windows 10 you can go far with precision touchpads, but I have yet to use it enough to say whether I like it or not. Screenshot shortcuts (Cmd+Shift+4) is another thing I use on a daily basis that's still not in Windows 10.

When my 2014 MacBook Pro is due for replacement, Windows might be a contender. But that's probably a few more years down the road (hopefully).

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Since Apple has given up on keeping what really matters for a Unix, its tools, up to date the amount of time you have to spend installing the latest version of things like Bash is actually higher for OSX than Windows these days.

I am aware that at least one of the reasons for Apple to ship stone-age versions of everything from Emacs to GCC is that they hate GPL3. But the reasons don't matter when the latest version of their operating system is unable to run modern software without installing a set of packages that more or less replaces all of the Unix tools. When you have to do that, it doesn't really matter if you install those tools on top of Windows or OSX.

As for myself I find Windows to be absolutely unusable and I was using Linux up until around 2002 when I switched h to the Mac. Lately however, Apple's utter disregard for technical users that prefer the Unix experience has made me switch back to Linux, and while Linux has issues of its own, at least everything works out of the box without having to deal with an entire separate ecosystem of packages on top of what is provided by the operating system itself.

Homebrew works for me. It's unfortunate how behind Apple's toolchain is, but I interact with its GUI more than the terminal.

It worked for me as well, but it was a constant hassle.

Once I realised that I barely used any Mac-specific software anymore, the choice to move back to Linux was easy.

Just use zsh instead of bash, it's superior anyways.

It is, and I use it. But my post was about more than just a single tool.

> Sorry Linux, none of your distros match up to Apple's offering

Out of curiosity, which ones have you tried?

Not an author of comment, but was using different distros few years ago: Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Elementary OS, Slackware. I also tried out different graphical environments: Unity, Gnome, XFCE, Pantheon, etc.

When I bought MacBook Pro, my first feeling was that this is how Linux should be done for the end users. The only concern I still have is non-intuitive keyboard shortcuts (Windows and Linux have much more intuitive ones or I've just got used to them more).

As a developer I'm happy with MacBook Pro. It just causes less headaches for me and I feel more productive. Linux always requires random tweaks here and there, googling solutions to get the idea how to make my touchpad properly work in particular distro, fix random issues after updates, understand why it consumes so much battery life and why my laptop's brightness keyboard button doesn't work properly despite of installed driver, etc. This is my main concern with Linux and why I don't like it as a user.

I think Linux is becoming better these days and probably not all the issues I've mentioned are relevant. But I'm not sure that UX is as smooth as in OS X.

When I started using Macs (about 7 years ago? was it that long?) it provided a nice balance between good GUI (not excellent, Finder is woefully bad for any power user scenario and there are other problems, but reasonable) and full-power (even if slightly weird) Unix underneath. I could use - especially when homebrew got good - practically any tool I want as a command-line power-user without giving up on reasonable UI.

However, lately it looks like Apple got this disease where they just break random stuff and change things around just because they want to do something new. I am afraid Macbooks are not the best home for developer/power user that they used to be. And the fact each new model comes with completely different ports and power connections borders on trolling. And their closed-garden "no upgrades for you" hardware approach is getting very old very fast.

Looks like Apple has their product design canon firmly aimed at their foot and is yelling "fire!".

GNOME 2/3, Unity, Cinnamon, ElementaryOS (briefly), Xfce, whatever CentOS 7 is shipping. Also KDE (but not Plasma).

Use Lightshot for screenshots. Even better than native Mac screenshot tool.

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