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Yeah, the "community troubleshooting" on MacOS for anything beyond moderately complex is kind of funny, until you're the person trying to get help. Most of the time it involves five people stabbing in the dark with solutions that seem to solve the problem for 20% of the people involved, so its marked as the solution, even though it probably didn't actually solve anything, and those 20% just got lucky because the "solution" required a restart and that's what "fixed it".

I swear, every problem I've Googled, then subsequently ended up on SO or a github issues thread, someone has suggested "raise the open file count limit"; its like the the default "try this and then come back" answer.

When I had a mac for work I always used to chuckle at the inevitable "reinstall OS X" advice from the apple support forums.

>linux is by far the most stable and easiest to manage OS, after you get past the initial learning curve. The main reason is you can actually fix problems. You pretty much know why every single bit of software is there for and how to configure it.

So much this. I used windows for a lot longer than i've used linux. Maybe 10 years using linux exclusively now and 15 years or so with windows before that.

Even now when I fix problems on windows I feel like a wizard tinkering with vaguely mysterious arcane things i'm only mostly sure of the purpose behind.

When I fix things on linux I feel like a mechanic working with a detailed manual and diagram of my system isolating known things and fixing that one a few things I know for sure could be the problem.

For me though, it was when windows corrupted the master boot record on my hard drive. I ended up running linux partitioned across 4 16GB USB sticks I had lying around my house until I bought a new hard drive(I tried for a while to fix my hard drive, nothing I did worked. I'm not actually too sure what was wrong with it in the end.). The fact that not only could I do that, but it was easy and I could see and access everything on my hard drive still. It also ran faster than my windows install had. It was a revelation.

Ever since then i've kind of pictured windows as a massive parasite feeding off your computer, controlling it from within, while you're kinda there from the outside.

> If you have a problem on OSX you just get 500 people telling you to reset your pram, and really you just need to wait for the next osx update. You certainly can't rollback an osx update. Nobody knows whats wrong because nobody has access to the code. Even if you did - each update is millions of lines of code. It is crazy town.

This is definitely true, and even Apple support can't really help you. It seems like they're only trained to troubleshoot the most basic stuff, and won't even do that if you have any "third party software" installed that they can blame.

However, if you try really hard and are lucky, you can sometimes downgrade. I recently had an awful freezing issue with a 2018 MBP that shipped with Sierra and persisted past a logic board replacement. I was eventually able to solve the issue by downgrading to High Sierra, but wasted a huge amount of time blindly troubleshooting and trying to figure out a downgrade procedure that worked.

Apple really needs to invest more in rigorous QA if it wants to continue down the path it's seems to want to follow.

Yep, Apple support forums are absolutely dreadful. Way worse than Windows and way, way worse than Linux. You will find virtually nothing more than well-intentioned fumblers reciting some irrelevant plist tweak that maybe appeared to fix their problem.

Say what you will about Microsoft--the MSDN forums and technical articles have some meat on the bone. People who actually understand, and are paid to understand at a deep level, DCOM, the registry, or whatever, they are out there. You've got the MVP program, super built-out partner channels, etc.

With Apple, my distinct impression is that there do exist people who understand MacOS deeply, but they have zero interest in participating in the support communities, due to the way those communities appear to be built and (not) prioritized by Apple Inc. If there's anything even a little bit like the MS partner network, well, I'll be... really surprised. So all you get is duffers and superstitious folk, and the feedback loop intensifies the problem.

Part of this is no national chains are on MacOS (Walmart, Kroger & ilk are on Suse w/SuperPOS Ace, Costco just switched to Windows using an oddball NCR product), and few megacorps have gotten big on MacOS in a way where they develop IT talent that deeply understands MacOS. Thus, the pool of talent is extremely small, and the ability to self teach (closed source software and all) is really limited.

I'm not sure that Apple support forums can be worse than the blind-leading-the-blind support you'll find on Ubuntu forums.

Problems with your mouse not working? No doubt somebody will suggest adding a random PPA, purging your kernel, and installing one from two years ago.

Your webserver can't write to htdocs/temp? No problem "chmod -R 777" will fix that.

Civilized people use Debian, Arch, CentOS, and--rarely--Fedora ;)

>> but they have zero interest in participating in the support

It doesn't help that if you post any kind of technical instruction or information to the Apple site that doesn't involve a "Go to system preferences and uncheck this box", Apple will delete under the reason "this coiuld amage another users Mac"

The worst part about Apple Support is that Apple will delete threads that may indicate a problem with their hardware.

Those usually have useful information, even if that information is simply that it's a hardware issue that cannot be resolved by you.

In my opinion this is great for professionals, but it's also the reason why the year of the Linux desktop (™) will never come. I recently had to configure a raspberry to drive a display 24/7 and the simple task of keeping the display from blanking already was a greater deal than it should be. This is true across a lot of options that are simple checkboxes in Windows/Mac (In Linux you need to install the right tool or desktop environment. Not something end users are expected to do really.

> This is true across a lot of options that are simple checkboxes in Windows/Mac (In Linux you need to install the right tool or desktop environment.

It's a simple checkbox if that checkbox exists. But that's true on Linux as well.

If it doesn't exist, with macOS at best there is an obscure plist file you can edit and at worst it's hard-coded in some binary you don't have the source for. With Windows it will almost always have some registry setting controlling it, but you can't plausibly claim that to be the user-friendly option.

Moreover, "install a different desktop environment" sounds like a big deal until you realize that is just a checkbox in the package manager.

Except when you tick that box you have to live with all the leftover packages you don't remember installing, but they're still there taking up space.

I hope NixOS will save us here.

Do you actually notice that in the age of 1TB+ hard drives?

I haven't been a part of the community for 3-4 years, but whenever someone had a question or issue with Ruby on the Mac, severeal very knowledgeable people were always quick to point out the issue's cause and a fix, workaround, or explaination of why it was that way.

Now, random, "Why did my mac start/stop doing x", I'll give you that. Especially on a site like Macrumors forums or Apple's useless support site.

I know I would come off as a contrarian but I cannot echo your experience. My experience with Linux and BSD translated quite well to macOS. I've been using all these OS's to varied degrees for over 20 years now (eek just realized it) I don't find macOS's problems to troubleshoot and resolve to be any different from Linux or BSD. Just my $0.02.

Recently built a machine and had some setup issues and was quite dumbfounded by the lack of community support on windows. 90% of search results aren't relevant, and the rest are dead ends. Realized it was the result of ms acting as a source-of-truth.

This is meaningless without specifying the distribution.

> linux is by far the most stable and easiest to manage OS

Nice April fools.

Anecdotally, this is true for me. My Arch machine runs for months with no issues. My XPS running 10 blue screens once every several weeks, and generally has issues after running too long.

To be fair it could be due to the general buggy-ness of the TB16 Thunderbolt dock.

Yeah of course, different people will have different experiences. Mine was being never able to make wifi work, random destruction of the GUI when I plugged an external monitor, difficulty to install and configure eastern languages IME, sound issues, etc. That was a very instructive period as undergraduate in informatics, but I got tired after a while to constantly fix my system instead of getting things done. Still using it as a server OS, where it shines.

I've jumped from Debian 7 to Debian 9 without issue, and the Gnome Software Center makes installing apps a point and click process (reminds me of Click N Run from Linspire...).

There are notable fit and finish issues with other distros, but from what I've seen the Debian package maintainers consistently make decisions to protect the package archive from breakage, whether that be holding back a FreeCiv point release over a buggy UI element, or stripping out non-free parts of Chromium that upstream bundles.

It depends what distribution you're running (and what time we're talking about, ten years ago was a different situation), but if you're on a mainstream long-term release like Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse and so on, it's pretty smooth nowadays, on average at least.

Yes, there's still the 1-2% of roughness around the edges, but as OP pointed out, on linux you can actually fix stuff. It is definitely not an "april fools" worthy statement. Linux is really stable these days.

I run Debian stable. Absolutely rock solid and boring.