They're possibly something like a dosdude patcher or modified bootloader to run an OS like Catalina on it.
Yeah, I get it, people love their Mac's... but the company that produces them actively undermines your ability to continue using perfectly good hardware past what they feel is "profitable". This leads to huge efforts to hack/reverse the updaters, or alter newer OS versions to trick them into installing, etc.
I'd personally jump over to some system that doesn't hate it's users nearly as much. But, that's just me.
I made the switch a year ago after having reached my breaking point with Windows and it still was a massive pain and daily loss of performance. For comparison, I also rooted my Android phone and installed LineageOS without google services which crippled it significantly and it still wasn't as much as a pain to do as using Linux on my workstation.
People often say (not talking about you, just something I see on HN often) that it's easy nowadays and anyone can use it but it's not been my experience and I think it's the very attitude that keeps it from being a commonplace OS for the consumer market. I keep a list in a file I call "linux sins" but without having to look at it you can figure out the problem by just googling any benign problem someone might encounter on their OS and checking the answers. Do the answers start with "Click there" or "Open your terminal"? I don't see the situation changing since people who develop for linux generally refuse to acknowledge the problem.
Although, I feel the specific issues you raise are less of a problem on a desktop-focused distro like Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Those distros really focus on a complete desktop experience, and really try to never require a user to drop into a shell to get anything done. So, perhaps it's a case of people using the "wrong" distro for their needs?
Here's the first line from my "linux sins" file as an example: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1151283/disable-nautilus-cac... If you copy a large file to a USB drive on either Ubuntu or Mint the progress bar goes to 100% instantly and closes and the actual transfer of the file is done in the background without the knowledge of the user. And the answer is "It's your fault, just try to eject the drive until it works."
And even beyond the OS, the whole software ecosystem is broken. It's impossible to find simple, working UIs for the most basic pieces of software, everything goes through the commandline.
It's just how device writes work, and is why Windows users have been told for years to select their device -> Eject instead of just yanking the USB drive out when Windows says 100%.
So, not exactly a fair criticism in my opinion, but your overall point stands - Linux can be rough around the edges for some use cases.
The poster of the question explicitly states that this behavior does not happen on Windows using the same hardware. And indeed, Windows doesn't cache as aggressively as Linux does (which is one of several reasons why Linux tends to have better disk performance and less risk of disk fragmentation), so no, by design, this issue is more pronounced on Linux.
The actual reason why Windows users are told to explicitly eject instead of just yanking the device is because there are various background processes that might be writing to the device (particularly relevant if you're using SpeedBoost or whatever it's called), not because of file copy progress bars being entirely unaware of the OS' caching mechanisms.
And, I say this with no ill-will toward you, I'm not trying to be antagonistic but you're having the same response as all linux users I encounter online. You're denying the problem even exists, saying it's not fair and it might be rough for some use cases? This is transferring a file to a USB stick, this is a very basic use case, and the UI is broken and the UX is dogshit (excuse my french). If we can't admit there is a problem we're never going to get around to fixing it.
I also have a 2005 car that still runs - should I get rid of it because the company that made it stopped providing any kind of support for it long time ago? Or you know....keep using it because it works?
It just seems like wasted effort, since the company all this supports really has made it clear they do not want you to have this ability, and can at any moment make future updates break everything all over again, leading to a new effort to reverse engineer the changes.
I feel the same way about computers - like, who gives a damn what apple thinks. I have a laptop that is still going because people keep making it compatible. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Very few non-classic and/or popular cars receive massive aftermarket support for all parts - often the aftermarket supports parts that are in common with a lot of vehicles or are vehicle-agnostic (such as belts, etc), and in some cases you're plain SOL (try replacing an airbag on a 1993 Dodge Caravan, for example - all you can find are OEM used ones pulled from junkers).
I think your comparison would be more apt if, say, Ford disabled all vehicles that were 10 years + 1 day old. While Apple isn't disabling your OS, they leave you exposed without security patches, etc... - making it approximately the same.
How long do we have to wait for the early Teslas to be considered "classics", because they're doing worse than this already...
"Self driving? No, that was only licensed to the original purchaser, you need to pay us $8000 now because we just remote disabled it when we worked out you bought this Roadster second hand. Hope that helps, have a nice day - Elon"
However, in this case, the tweak I needed to do to the mac pro was so trivial as to be (essentially) cost-free. No need to alter the installer, etc.
It pleases me to be (re)using this machine for over 12 years now - especially given what a triumph of workstation design these mac pros were ...
I've also used FreeBSD on (non-Apple) laptops in the past. It actually worked ok, I even had wireless working (this is very hardware dependent though, and things may have gotten worse over the years for all I know).
Based on the rest of your profile I think you might enjoy switching that workstation away from OS X to FreeBSD. Of course, it means some tinkering and looking for new tools to replace the ones you use now, but the tinkering is half the fun... :)
Since I'm (excluding Win10 for gaming when I rarely have time) exclusively a Linux user I get to use the old hardware for other purposes at the end until it finally becomes either useless or lets out the magic smoke (as my 2004 R50e Thinkpad finally did - man I miss those keyboards, so much better than the T470P (which itself is excellent)).
It paid of just recently, I had 2012 Vostro 3750 kicking around and when schools went into lockdown with a quick wipe and Fedora install it made a perfectly serviceable machine for my step-son to do his remote learning on - there was an irony in running MS Teams on Linux on a machine that wouldn't have been able to run current generation Windows 10 and Teams anywhere near as comfortably.
It started life with Windows 7 (Win7 was like a month old at the time) and was subsequently upgraded to Windows 8, then Windows 8.1, then finally Windows 10 (and all it's "feature" updates) until it was retired. It ran slower than a new system, but fit my needs perfectly.
If Microsoft had arbitrarily decided I wasn't allowed to run Windows 10 on that hardware, it's very likely I would have installed Linux or BSD - after all, the hardware was a non-trivial investment and discarding it purely to please some company really rubs me the wrong way.
So, I guess I can sort of understand why people jump through these hoops... although personally I would just move onto some other OS that doesn't undermine my ability to operate my personal computer.
Anyways, similar story: I'm not about to put up with Microsoft telling me my machine is too old to us; that just promotes e-waste.
You download an ISO, put it on a USB key or burn it to a CD, and install it like you would Windows10 or any other OS.
If only it was that easy all the time.
I have an old laptop (2017) that I wasn't for anything else, using so I tried putting Linux on it. Nope. I went through five distributions before I found one that would finally work. And then, it was not really useable.
The whole reason people use MacOS is because they know what to expect. Linux is still a crapshoot.