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I've been a nix guy since 1983. Worked for a major nix player, wrote end user application software on the platform, built chip design software on the platform, wrote device drivers for all kinds of hardware, system admin for years and years, etc. etc. I'm not some newb who just fell off the truck.

In many way *nix is still stuck in 1983 because it's a craftsman's platform, which is why there 10,000 distros, oops 10,001, no 10,002, oh 10,003, ugh! Linux is great on servers, because all servers require craftsman for the care and feeding, and Linux is so much better than Windows in that regard.

I gave up my Linux machines because I'm no longer interested in being my own sys admin. Frankly I was done being my own sys admin back in the 90's but I felt the need to keep my propeller spinning, and stay true to my geek roots.

In 2008 I bought a Mac Pro 8 core machine, and that's still kicking, my son uses it for Machine Learning as part of his graduate program, and it's just as fast now as when I first bought it. It was left behind with the last OS upgrade, but it will work just fine for another 4 or 5 years on the old OS.

In 2009 I still had a Linux laptop, but it was painful back then. With SnowLeopard it became easier to create an maintain a Hackintosh then it was to manage a Linux laptop I was off Linux for good.

For a hobbyist(craftsman) Linux is great, for a server that needs craftsman, Linux is great, for a consumer, buy a Mac.

I went to a mix of Windows/macOS instead, but can fully relate to your story, as I had an UNIX zealot phase during my university years, and have been the UNIX/Windows porting guy at several projects.

My reason for giving up was reaching the conclusion that Linux distributions would never replicate the expectations of an Amiga/BeOS like experience for those that care about multimedia.

And most server admin is moving to an “immutable infra” model where the Linux box is a container worker node that is disposable. Life’s too short to be sysadmining.

This is anecdotal. My own anecdote is that we've had far more trouble with my wife's MacBook than my NixOS ThinkPad which just works, even after upgrades.

The Linux experience depends on the distribution, software and hardware you choose. You need to choose carefully.

> you need to choose carefully.

So here’s the interesting part; can you recommend a distro that is universally the right choice for dev work?

If yes, please tell - I’d love to know!

If the answer is “well it depends a lot on your needs” that’s kinda the point of MacOS right? The fact that making the right distro choice requires serious thought is already problematic (hypothetically)

You do have a point, with Mac the choices have been made for you. I guess the most mac-like distro is probably Ubuntu. If you pick the LTS, you might even have a smoother ride than the macOS yearly updates.

> I've spent zero days, zero hours, zero minutes, and zero seconds fiddling with setting anything up in macOSX over the last 15 years.

I have to say that I 100% do not believe this statement.

You mean you you've never used any wireless connections to your machine? You've never had to set up backups or change audio settings? You've never had to deal with setting up one thing in 15 years? Since when did OSX gain the ability to read minds?

His claim is he did it 15 years ago, and never had to touch anything else since. Definitely a stretch, but quite believable. Just a few days ago I had to figure out how to reinstall Nvidia driver after Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 upgrade. And the damn thing still shows my primary screen panned whenever I log off/log back on.

I was glad to return to Windows when the Linux-specific issue was solved.

Isn't this YOUR problem you are using an infamously unsupported hardware with Linux? The problems would be same if you use Hackintosh on unsupported hardware too.

Somehow I need my GPGPU and there are currently no good alternatives.

I've got a stock Ubuntu 18.04 install at work. Sometimes, but not always, it hangs for three minutes or so trying to run fsck on my UEFI partition. Other times, I'm at the login screen within a minute of turning it on.

When it hangs, it finally exits with an error message saying it couldn't mount /boot/efi. Once I log in I can see that /boot/efi is mounted fine.

A bunch of my applications hang all the time for reasons I couldn't figure out. Turns out they were trying to communicate with my Gnome keychain over D-Bus, but they were in a separate D-Bus session so they just sent their D-Bus message and then waited for however long until they gave up. No idea at what point this started happening or why, but I never did figure out how to fix it (other than disabling those apps from being able to store passwords securely).

If I used the Intel drivers for my Intel GPU I got extreme stuttering and tearing, which only went away when I uninstalled the Intel drivers entirely so that it would use the "correct" drivers.

Then there's snaps. I install stuff and sometimes it's a package, and sometimes it's a snap. If it's a snap, everything turns into a giant mess. I had Firefox saving its downloads to Skype's workspace for some reason, multiple Firefox profiles on my system in various places, multiple versions of Firefox running when snapd downloaded a new version and symlinked it to be the default, two copies of Telegram for some reason and no obvious way to tell which was which, a snap and non-snap version of things because the Store installed the snap but another package depended on the apt package, and so on.

I installed my system on btrfs because "it's like a decade old now, it should be fine right?" and within a month my filesystem had been completely corrupted and I had to reinstall entirely (though I managed to salvage most of my home directory at least).

This is all stuff I'm willing to tolerate to some extent, but I can't think of a single thing that Linux offers me that makes it worth all this hassle. At my last job, I happily used a MacBook for nine straight years, and I never lost an entire day of productivity just because suddenly my system won't boot, or dealt with graphical glitches in every app because the driver for my video card isn't the right driver for my video card, or lost data because one of the default options for installation filesystem is unstable and unreliable.

I've never had to do much of anything to "tweak" MacOS unless I wanted to; on Ubuntu, I have to do it almost every day to get something working well (or at all).

So I'm gonna go ahead and say that yeah, MacOS isn't even remotely dead, and it's certainly not going to lose to Linux any time soon.

>You mean you you've never used any wireless connections to your machine? You've never had to set up backups or change audio settings? You've never had to deal with setting up one thing in 15 years? Since when did OSX gain the ability to read minds?

You seem to confuse using the machine with setting up.

Connecting a wireless connection (picking the SSID, entering the password, etc) is not "setting up". It's merely regularly using the computer.

The setting up we'd rather avoid, and that the parent talks about, would be tinkering to get your wifi chip working with your OS -- which you get the "pleasure" to do on Linux...

Thank you for providing all these perfect examples:

> You mean you you've never used any wireless connections to your machine?

Yes: I clicked on the network, typed the password, and it worked, always. If the machine already has seen the network, i don't even have to click, it just connects. If one of my machines (e.g. my iphone) has seen the network, the network and its credentials are stored on iCloud, so my laptop and my tablet can just connect to it. I never had to google how this works, never had to install anything to make this work, never had to change any configuration file to make this work, etc.. Same for VPNs, VNCs, corporate networks, network drives, etc.

> You've never had to set up backups or change audio settings?

Yes, I clicked on enable backups, clicked on the box that enables daily back ups, clicked on the drive where I wanted to store them, and it worked, always.

I can restore, browse, partially restore, backups with one click using time machine. I never had to google how this works. It always worked.

> change audio settings?

Yes, I clicked on the audio button, and volume worked, muting worked, all 4 sound outputs worked, always worked, etc.

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On linux, over the last 15 years, i have googled at least for days to do _each_ of these things for customers:

- can't connect to a particular wlan, corporate wlan, etc. needed new drivers, upgrade kernel, change some etc config to enable something, etc. Same for network drives, cloud drives, SMB, ...

- sound, damn sound: sound cards not being detected (hell on my lenovo yoga an update to 19.04 Ubuntu pushed a kernel patch that broke my sound cards driver: no sound card detected, still not fixed on Ubuntu 20.04 5 months later - no sound in the times of corona and web meetings - great!), alsamixer, etc files, pulse audio, .... I have had to google a lot about each of these things, and fiddle a lot over the last 15 years, on dozens of machines, for dozens of users, for hours.

- backups, on Linux, have fun. I've set backups for ext4, zfs, and btrfs. ALWAYS had to google for hours. Every time I had to restore a backup, had to google for hours. Some times restoring did not work. Some times backups did not work. Encrypted backups do not work out of the box (Apple's full-disk encryption is enabled by default - but enabling it and having work with everything is just 1 click - on Linux full-disk encryption is a mess).

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So no, I never had to set up anything on MacOS X in the last 15 years. The things were in the obvious place, and I just used them, and they just worked. No need to even google how to do the thing, or what to install to get it done, or configure the install, or read bug reports to work around issues, nothing. They just damn worked, as they should.

Its 2020, and setting things for companies using Linux is my day job. These people would all save a ton of money by just using macs or windows machines. The amount of time their employees waste on setting up and maintaining their machines instead of doing their actual work is astonishing.

What if you want to type without accidentally hitting your cartoonishly-large trackpad? Or if you want to type without a key accidentally registering twice because someone decided that thin keys were better?