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I agree, but the problem is that if the MBP can't be considered 'reliable', then none of that really matters.

I've been a happy Mac user for years now, and historically, on the very rare occasion that I had a problem, it was either fixed near immediately, or solved to 'better-than-satisfaction' levels by the geniuses at the store.

My first Touchbar-equipped MBP has been the most problematic computer I've ever owned. The keyboard, despite that I love the short throw and initial feel of it, just stops working sometimes, or sticks, or becomes weirdly responsive. Five times in six months, I've had an update fail to load, with the system complaining that the OS couldn't be detected. Easy to solve for techies, nearly impossible for the average user. Having to carry three dongles is just an inconvenience, but it's very much inconvenient. The touchbar? I don't even want to get into it. The physical power button has failed -- the whole thing is flaky as hell, and I'm forced to choose between a touchbar system that works when it wants, or a tactile ESC key that is a full 1Ghz slower and arbitrarily feature restricted. So on and so forth.

Beyond that, for each of my many complaints, Genius bar appointments are being scheduled weeks out, and have been providing fixes that recur as quickly as the same day I receive the unit back.

They have problems. And while you're right that the next-best product is still way below the quality of even the worst MBP, that hasn't stopped me daydreaming of throwing this thing out the window and replacing it with a Thinkpad. As it stands, I've retired my old Mac Pro and replaced it with Ubuntu 18 on a desktop. With a standard PC and mouse, the UI polish is still very noticeable, but the usability quirks aren't as apparent as trying to run Ubuntu on Mac hardware.

I briefly used windows while installing Ubuntu and it was generally much smoother. If windows can get the Linux subsystem stuff working 100% my guess is that it will start to gain momentum as a developer OS.

Right. We may be in a transition now where Apple has given up on the geek market (except for iOS developers), and Microsoft has realized there's an opportunity. I'm also keeping an eye on the upcoming Linux support in ChromeOS.

> > If windows can get the Linux subsystem stuff working 100%

It has to be a whole lot better than it is now. You know what would be awesome? If I could have something like VirtualBox Seamless mode, but without all of the hassles. I open a control panel, pick from a list of lightweight distros, and the Linux apps appear on the Windows Start panel. I open them from there, and they just open.

The killer would be this: Let me have multiple virtual machines, which I can snapshot, copy, etc, then let me switch between them on the fly. Do this, while letting me keep the same Linux home directory in a way that looks to the guest OS like mapping it as a network drive. (But which is much faster, so I can compile without penalty.)

Come to think of it, a feature set like this could easily fit into MacOS.

> and the Linux apps appear on the Windows Start panel.

GUI's are explicitly not the focus of WSL, and WSL is not VM's - it's running native Linux code on top of the Windows kernel. It is possible to run an X server on your windows and let your Linux gui binaries use that though.

There is a huge difference in UX between what you just described and what I just described.

Fwiw, I recently was forced to use a MBP at work after being full-on Linux for ~20 years. I find OSX to be irritating on a number of levels but coming from the opposite direction.

> My guess is that Linux developers don’t want to do boring stuff like fixing obscure bugs for certain peripherals, and they don’t want to listen to designers to create a polished unified experience.

I think OSX offering a Unix-like experience drew away a lot of open source developers to donate their free time and expertise towards a commercial company like Apple rather than the community. If this had not happened, it's possible the Linux desktop experience may have kept up with the times better.

Decade old coreutils is closer to traditional Unix than Ubuntu. Heck, OSX started with tcsh as the default shell. OSX without the magnanimous gift of Homebrew seems pretty garbage.

Nah. Linux will always have poor ergonomics when it comes to device support simply because of the development culture in Linux, and particularly the Linux kernel culture: support every device under the sun in a way that minimally satisfies every stake holder. That means there are always too many controls and knobs. Device support stops at 80% completion (all the esoteric features working, but poorly integrated) because, theoretically, with all the knobs the end-user has the capability to take it the next 20%, and there's always something new around the corner that needs that 80% support. That's the Linux way and will always be the Linux way.

There are two other ways: the Microsoft way which is to invest billions sustaining an OS and commercial developer ecosystem that does marginally better in terms of working well out-of-the-box. And the BSD[1], Apple, Chrome[2] way, which is to focus on specific hardware and specific use cases and outright reject everything else.

Pick your poison.

[1] BSD is a broad brush. NetBSD and OpenBSD are more focused than FreeBSD, which sits somewhere between those two and Linux. NetBSD is more developer focused (always emphasizing the perfect APIs and frameworks) while OpenBSD focuses on functionality, both server-side and client-side. AFAIU, if you buy one of the laptops favored by OpenBSD developers things will work very well out-of-the-box. The downside is that because of lack of manpower if they can't do it well they won't do it at all (e.g. the previous lack of 802.11n Wifi support for many years).

[2] Obviously it is possible and viable for a vendor to complete that last 20% that Linux leaves unresolved, at least if they very narrowly focus their efforts. But Google is for the most part the only such success; there have been (and will be) many other attempts that will drown in the endless complexity and churn of the Linux ecosystem.

When I read stuff like this, I'm reminded why, despite working professionally with Linux on average 5 days a week for over 15 years, my home machines run Windows 10 and OSX.

The tragedy of the "Linux on the desktop" coming-revolution-that-never-arrived is most obvious on the laptop environment. The user community, at least when one googles solutions to problems, seems to fall either in the "completely clueless" or the "elite expert who's skeptical of people" categories. It's excruciating to look things up, and 'fixing it yourself' is no longer possible for me given time constraints. Time is money, much more so as you get older.

I'm a sysadmin/sys engineer and not a software architect, but is it possible that a software project that's essentially defining an entire GUI system that apps would have to follow would ITSELF require human centralization at the developer level? It seems what makes OSX's UI so clean is that specific people made specific rules that everyone has to follow.

That's odd. I recently prepared an xps15 with Ubuntu 18.04 for one of my engineers moving from a Mac.

I don't recall having to tweak the touchpad in any way. I did need to install the correct nvidia driver and use nvidia-prime to default to the Intel video card for best battery life.

I moved to an xps15 over a year ago and am really pleased with the transition. 17.04 and up have just worked for the most part.

The occasional issues that arise usually take deep technical understanding to solve, but that's a price I don't mind paying to have an underlying set of tools and libraries based on Linux.

Yep. My partner has had Windows laptops where the hardware is just junk too. I had my previous Macbook Pro for 7 years and just upgraded the internals. The Touch Pad is still today unmatched on that thing (except by my new macbook pro) and the hardware was always top notch in terms of its integration with the OS. In my niche field of audio programming Mac is basically required as most commerical software is released to be used by live musicians who also use Mac. Can you guess why? Superior audio drivers with minimal latency. To get something comparable on windows you have to use an external audio interface which is fine, but on windows is generally more buggy. Mac definitely still has the strangehold for audio on 'just works'.

I decided to try switching to a linux laptop (x1 carbon) recently for many of the same reasons listed in OP's article. Though my employer maintains a reasonably well polished flavor of debian, so I haven't had to deal with the slew of driver-related annoyances that usually come with trying to run linux on a laptop. So far so good.

+ keyboard is great

+ after getting used to the trackpoint, I like it

+ matte screen

+ working in a dev environment that matches your production environment is presumably useful, particularly when working with docker.

+ first class package manager

+ noticeably lighter

- UI isn't as slick. maybe one day I'll try a WM. i3 or something.

- occasional driver issues

Minor nitpick:

You're probably already using a WM (unless you're in tty all the time). Gnome, KDE, MATE are all WM (and more).

The Pixelbook with Crostini (for full Linux support) solves some of these problems. I have one and love it, having switched from a Mac. The Crostini Linux support is way way better than I expected.

My main desktop is an old 2008 Mac Pro tower that is still going strong. However I've recently been developing on an old(5+ year out of warranty corporate) Dell desktop and laptop running Mint. Because it basically supports nothing I use on my desktop, it's completely distraction free. When I want a gaming experience, I jump on my Windows rig. I agree on all your points though, the MacOS environment is what Linux desktop wishes, and should be. It won't ever reach that level. Until Apple figures out what they ultimately want to do with professionals, I'll continue using 5-10+ year old hardware until it just dies.

> It won't ever reach that level.

A bold claim! I can't be certain either way but Linux has gotten so much better in terms of usability in the last 4-5 years for newer users.

Both my parents and in-laws had issues with Windows, they are up and away on Ubuntu for the last year and I've never had to solve any issues for them with it.

My colleagues that use Macs cling to the old ideas that second monitors, hibernation, gestures, compatibility is poor on Linux whilst ignoring the same issues they have with more recent version of OSX (wifi dropping, failure to sleep).

If Linux Distros can keep improving I think they'll have a small shot but I wouldn't go far as to say that shot is impossible.

You just can`t compare linux desktop on laptops with macbooks.. just can`t.

It is a bold claim but I agree. I used a Linux desktop for 10 years after ditching Windows but I was often fighting with it. After that I used a Mac for the last 10 years and things are generally smoother. Linux is pretty good these days but there are problems that prevent it from being great and I suspect it will always lag behind a bit. I think most of the problems stem from inferior drivers.

If you've been on OSX for the last 10 years then indeed Linux was very different. Whilst I won't attempt to argue you should swap or anything, I've found modern distros are pretty much plug and go when it comes to wifi/multiple monitors/graphics (things that used to be a real pain).

Whilst macOS is pretty polished for many thing it still has some pretty big usability issues itself particularly with regard to keyboard shortcuts.

Case in point Split View; it doesn't have _any_ keyboard short cuts. In Gnome 3 you can snap a window to either side with Super-Left or Super-right. Shift-Super-<arrow> will move it to another monitor.

You can't do anything like that on macOS without installing third party software like Better Touch Tool (which you have to pay for).

Whilst you do need third party software for this, it is not the case that one need pay for it. Spectacle [1] is free of charge. I have personally used it for years.

[1]: https://www.spectacleapp.com/

Thank you, I'll definitely give that a good look.

I still don't get why Apple didn't even consider keyboard based users whilst developing Split View. It's like the silly full screen animation you have to wait for every time or having to use the mouse to get a spelling suggestion because there's no keyboard shortcut for that either.

user here for +3y. Great app (i never touch the full native full screen mode with that app)

I find that Linux really shines on a workstation/desktop with a regular mouse and keyboard. MacOS shines in laptop format, but that is where most of the UI/UX benefits end.

I have an older XPS 13, one that came with Windows 8, and putting Ubuntu on it absolutely saved its life. The touchpad driver on Windows was _terrible_ and sleep/hibernate didn't work consistently. I pretty much abandoned it, until one day I decided to try out Ubuntu 16 on it. Suddenly the touchpad was astoundingly accurate and felt on par with my MacBook Pro. I truly love that laptop now.

I thought about upgrading it to 18, but I think I'll just ride it out. It's perfect as-is.

I have noticed the Bluetooth problem as well in Ubuntu 18.04 with some new Bluetooth headphones I got... very annoying.

I think what bugs me about bluetooth on Ubuntu the most is that it forgets its state on reboot. Turn it off, reboot and it's back on.

I agree. After using OSX for about a decade, then Ubuntu for about 18 months, I now use Windows 10 with an Ubuntu VM running inside. It's currently the best of all worlds IMO.

I think ultimately Chromebooks with Crostini may emerge as the ultimate dev boxes.

> Unfortunately Mac is still miles ahead of Linux on usability

That's like saying a sandwich is ahead of a box of air in preventing starvation. We already know.