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Comment by seba_dos1 | Hacker News Reader

> but I just don’t have time to a.) tune and configure it to work and have decent battery life with whatever hardware I choose or b.) troubleshoot it when it randomly decides to break itself on update

From my experience, troubleshooting macOS when it randomly decides to break is almost a Windows-like experience - lots of frustration and no sensible help on the internet (unless your problem is so trivial it gets solved by something like NVRAM reset, because this is the best advice you can count on online). I absolutely prefer GNU/Linux where, if something breaks, it's not that hard to get it back to sensible state.

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From about 7 years of troubleshooting mac problems, it's actually worse than Windows problems. First, you find people discussing the problem where everyone claims it doesn't exist and no solutions are found. Then you find the problem and solution for mac os from 2008, and that solution definitely doesn't work, but might also break things worse. Then you decide, it's best to just make sure your headphones aren't on when you start itunes in 2014, because there is a 10% chance of really loud static instead of music (mysteriously fixed in the next major release)

It really is kind of amusing how forum threads with Mac owners asking for help usually have at least a few people that instead of responding to the question take the opportunity to relate how their Mac has been working perfectly for them and never had that problem. I like my Mac and my Windows and my Linux boxen, I'm not a Mac hater, but I only see this on Mac related forums.

Amusing in a "when did we stop playing on grass" kind of way.

I've never really seen it for Windows forums -- everyone, including Windows fans, seems to admit at least Windows gets broken; so it's more hmm, that shouldn't happen, check this log or that log or do this rather time consuming thing (reinstall clean, etc).

For Linux forums, there is a small contingent of this never happens to me on Linux Yggdrasil, so try that. Except instead of a distro that died 20+ years ago and will not be getting updates, they have some other distro nobody has ever heard of and may not be getting updates.

And don't forget one of the most infuriating aspects of Apple community troubleshooting: The group of people questioning the premise of your problem and saying you shouldn't even want to do what you want to do.

Even worse than answers.microsoft.com. Ok, almost. (Let's not be too harsh here.)

I have gotten the same when posting to many technical communities. Sometimes it's a good thing (I've actually agreed in some cases) and sometimes it's awful.

I agree that it's infuriating when it's something reasonable that you're trying to do, but I've experienced this in many tech forums, and programmers have been some of the worst offenders in this category for me in the past, actually.

It's like half the comments on this very thread.

You see it ITT as well!

Don't forget a radar bug ID which you can't see but any bug you file gets closed as a duplicate of it.

I curse this every time I am troubleshooting a Mac problem and someone replies to a forum thread with "reset the PRAM".

For my workstation, no matter the OS, I’m going to revert what I did.

If that doesn’t fix it, I’m going to format and restore with a backup. I have better things to do.

Of course it depends, but I'd say that formatting and restoring from backup takes way longer than fixing an average system hick-up - provided that you have access to meaningful logs, which is where GNU/Linux works pretty well.

Or you can just use a proper linux distro that allows systemwide rollbacks like nixos.

I just realized, wait, windows has had that feature since at least 2000! Is that not standard on linux distros?

But doesn't malware like to hide in there in Windows? I've had it turned off for years on my Windows machines for that reason.

That sounds like a poor strategy over just running Windows Defender or the like

Or, use Darch with Ubuntu (or whatever you want).

https://godarch.com

Oddly enough, with enough history knowledge and resources like Microsoft Windows Internals, I find troubleshooting Windows to be a dream compared to MacOS. If something acts funny on Windows, I have a plethora of free and open source tools to instrument internal systems and audit operating system performance. Meanwhile on MacOS, it seems like any program not provided with the operating system is closed source and costs $100 a year, and when something breaks, I don't even know where to start looking. My wifi is not playing nice with my home wireless router? No clue what the issue is, guess it's time for my twice-weekly reboot

Very much there with you. I run MacOS on my MBP for work. I built a workstation at home and run Ubuntu on it. I decided to upgrade to latest Ubuntu drooling over the GNOME perf improvements and I have a system that wont connect to any network and the settings app won't open and would like to send a crash dump to Canonical :-(

I can afford such problems on my personal desktop, google the issues and spend a part of day fixing some poor QA release bugs, but not on a machine that I use and rely on for $ paying work.

This is why both my work and personal machines only run LTS versions.

I rather use rolling releases. This way the breakage is contained to 5-10 minute fixing sessions once in a few months, instead of a huge whole-day upgrading session every new release.

I haven't experienced whole-day upgrading sessions in a long time. YMMV.

Does that mean you don't have such issues when upgrading from LTS to LTS? No snark. Seriously asking. Are LTS versions generally better in this regard?

Canonical says LTS are for polish and non-LTS are new features: https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

> Interim releases will introduce new capabilities from Canonical and upstream open source projects, they serve as a proving ground for these new capabilities.

Yeah, I've had persistent trouble with LaunchServices and nothing I've found on the net helps. All the suggestions are wild shots in the dark.

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