Leaving the Apple ecosystem behind
h2x.sh
h2x.sh
I basically went back 5 or 10 years and replaced every "modern" technology solution. I pay now way more than I did with iCloud, but I am back in control. I am more productive.
- Listening to Music takes 3 clicks and just a few seconds Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality
- I can take real photos wiht high quality instead of relying on ever newer iPhone models for thousands of dollars which will always have lesser quality than a mirrorless camera for the same price
- I have fun again discovering bands and artists on Bandcamp instead of mind numbing listening to Apple Music playlists
- Coding via neovim on a terminal and just being on my keyboard navigating not only tmux and co, but also my OS is way more productive and faster
Which of these can I not do on a Mac?
>I realised that my life while using Apple products is controlled by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a raise, rather than by technology people who share the same passion as me. And I wanted to change that.
While this is purely anecdotal, I've observed a higher proportion of "mission oriented" product and even I.T. leads at Apple than at the other brands he adopted in this divorce. (He's not using Framework laptop yet.)
Obviously they are "technology people who share the same passion as me" and are browsing throught HN.
I just see two companies, that want to sell stuff for more than it costs them to produce, but what would I know.
Except they actually are? If you read their dev blogs, it's insane how much love actually goes into building the colour magic that goes into the cameras. Trully decades upon decades of love labour.
Instead at Apple camp they deliberately hinder UX for end-users if it means Apple gets to make some more profit this way.
Which...I guess? Millions (billions) of people use all sorts of stuff. Good for them.
The "I'm leaving [some platform]" posts are always extremely low value pablum for a subset.
- dedicated hardware does a better job than general purpose one (cameras vs. smartphones)
- the smartphone ecosystem (regardless of brand) is becoming more closed, and monitored, every year
- there are enough alternatives out there, even if those mean to give up some "conveniences" we thought we won over the last years (IMHO, most of the perceived "inconveniences" that come from these alternatives are more due to lock-in and dark-patterns from FANG/MS and phone OEMs)
Hardly headline news - a $1,700 camera with >$1,000 lenses is better than a $1,000 phone with a camera attached. If anything the gap is closer than it has ever been. Irrespective, there is litterally nothing stopping someone from having an iPhone and a dedicated camera, or if there is, then I (and practically everyone I know) are breaking some sort of rule somewhere dictated by the overlords at Apple HQ that thy shall not use a camera.
The original assertion was same price, so a $1,000 kit body + lens is better than a $1,000 phone and camera.
Which doesn't change anything about how inane a point it is.
Somehow I've managed to own an SLR alongside every system I've used for the past decade+ (though it sits unused to a much greater degree given how vastly improved modern smartphones are...). I have a Lenovo Windows laptop, a Windows 10 gaming PC, an Intel MBP, an M1 Mac Mini, an iPhone, an iPad, though I've owned a number of Android tablets and smartphones (including every Nexus device) before. Every server system I've deployed in the past decade has been to Linux.
No Apple stormtroopers ever busted down my doors and demanded compliance. Never did I feel the need to wave a flag or commit to a tribe, because why would I? The notion is self-sabotaging.
In a word "integration".
Can you use an ipad as a second screen/wacom cintiq? On mac it is built in. On windows you need extra software and then it is still ducttaped on.
Linux desktop and android phone? Then you can reply to sms, share the clipboard, automute music when receiving a call,... (kdeconnect. MS and Apple have some decent copies). What if you have an iphone instead? Well, bad luck.
All these things might be "minor" or "only by default", but they matter very much to many people.
I think that depends on what you mean by "better job." For example, I have both a Nikon D-800 and an iPhone. The Nikon takes amazing pictures and the iPhone fits in my pocket. Most of the time, the "better job" I want is a camera that fits in my pocket. On occasion, the "better job" I want is a camera that takes amazing pictures.
I would never abandon either my camera or my phone because my "better job" frequently changes.
'I needed windows for some work stuff, so I went onto dell and bought the thing in the middle of the price range.'
Problem is that there are so many different people, and so many of them don't even know how to operate a device that isn't completely pre-prepped for the lowest bar to entry that they can never be as cool. /s
I guess this is the kind of data point that people might use in reinforcing their bias for a choice they are about to make. If you take two brands, platforms, systems etc. and just search for switchers between those you'll find the exact result you'll like.
Going from Debian to Arch? Amazing! Debian sucks for reasons X and Y and Arch is much cooler. But switching from Arch to Debian? Hah, those Arch losers are missing out on A, B and C so they are so uncool! Heck, you can make this even smaller. Using OpenSans as your Font? Boo! Use Fira Code, that makes your code so much better! Pick any microcosmos and you can find migrations in all directions.
But the older I get, the more I find I’m just happier in the Apple ecosystem. I don’t want to fiddle with X11 settings or tons of dot files. I just want to open my computer and hack on the shit that interests me. There’s things about Apple that annoy me, but the same can be said for Android, Windows, any of the free *nixes, etc.
Every platform and ecosystem has trade offs and it’s fine to just use what you want to use. Personally I’ve got Apple laptop, phone and tablet, a Windows desktop for games, several RPis running various Linux distros, and a Proxmox server running VMs for infrastructure and tinkering. None of that makes my farts smell better than anyone else.
… except for those nasty Emacs users of course :P
Most of these seem like pyrric victories to me, as the Apple versions rose to success with all of these as competition by providing a better experience. I certainly wouldn't want to carry a mirrorless camera everywhere, nor deal with Bandcamp.
I can stick my iPhone 7 in my jeans pocket. My Olympus Pen-F (one of the "smaller" mirrorless cameras) with a small prime lens needs a pretty big pocket only some of my larger coats have. Plus it's heavy enough to pull on said coat and make it uncomfortable.
Yeah, image quality is pretty bad on the iPhone compared to the Olympus. But when I go out and about and don't want to have a bulky thing hanging around my neck / forearm or carry an extra bag, the Olympus' image quality is exactly 0. The iPhone beats that hands down, even at night.
Now don't get me wrong, I love my pen-f, and it's an incredible improvement over the DSLR I used to haul around before. But iPhones are getting pretty good for my needs now.
Now I am thankful my dad endured the pain and captured a lot of stuff on the JVC shoulder camera. At least the quality is pretty good even for 80's/90's.
We don't capture events like we used to anyway. No one holds there camera up for more than a minute. So we're left with all these short videos. I like watching the really long stuff my dad shot.
Also, most DSLRs these days have some sort of multi-exposure functionality built-in. Sometimes it's as simple as 'bracketing' (so you get multiple phones you have to merge together in post), but some fancier ones offer HDR functionality in-camera, so nothing to do in post.
At one time, Apple clearly was a better experience.
Now, with features removed and new "privacy and security" features added, I'm not sure they are a great experience. For example, my Macbook reminds me of Windows Vista, except for worse, every time there's a system update and I have to reboot to permission the camera for a web conference.
I've learned to dread OSX updates because instead of adding new useful stuff, it seems like we just move things around, change out the icons and add some more intrusive "touch the fingerprint reader" authentications... plus I have to re-permission half of the apps and hardware just to do my job. Then there's the whole reboot, unlock, install, reboot, re-lock cycle. It's seriously worse than Windows Vista. Anyone remember the I'm a Mac/I'm a PC commercials?
Big Sur performance on older hardware has been a disaster though. Even on a $2500 MBP 15” from 2017. On M1 though it’s excellent.
However big sur runs alright on my 2015 MacBook!
If you're referring to the Kext/DriverKit changeover, this is just false - Kexts still work in Big Sur, they're just trying to slowly shift the ecosystem to DriverKit. Nothing has truly changed there yet.
If you're referring to a broken thing within Kexts/IOKit itself, that would be a pretty severe bug that would get attention within Apple. I feel confident saying this as I've reported bugs like this and they get appropriate priority levels.
Lastly, if you're writing (signed) driver code, you generally have access to resources within Apple to get answers to questions. I'm not even a large company and it was relatively easy to get in touch with those teams - and this stands in contrast to other teams within Apple.
Also, in case this helps:
https://cipherlog.blogspot.com/2020/12/macos-microphonecamer...
To be fair, that also describes Windows. As best I can tell, every release since 7 has primarily focused on renaming and adding indirection to the ways you get to the same old control panels.
And I haven't ever had to reboot to allow a camera. I have several, ranging from a microscope to an SLR that also is my webcam.
I thought this was the UI museum feature where you can time travel back to Windows NT4 one layer of indirection at a time.
For example, you go to the proxy setup, the pac URL location is a tiny text box no matter how big the window, and if you have restrictions on your system you cant view the full address or copy it.
That said, I now carry a mirrorless camera everywhere. The pictures are WAY higher quality and I have more control over the experience and the final output. Don't get a mirrorless if thats not important to you.
when I want to just take a quick selfie, I still have my phone. The iPhone is great at taking pictures but its never going to be a match for a mirrorless wihch has a enormous sized sensor compared to anything you'll get on a phone.
Curious what's wrong with dealing with Bandcamp? They seem just about the best place to buy music online. Majority of the money goes to the actual artist and you have a good choice of formats.
Agreed. Bandcamp does this right by offering V0 compressed MP3s, 320kbps MP3s, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC and I think even Ogg Vorbis.
Bandcamp recommendations and artist/album similarity ratings are top notch, and there are many clients for the platform.
I personally can't use Spotify or Apple Music after taking advantage of Bandcamp.
Bandcamp also only takes a 10% - 15% fee for digital purchases, and 10% of purchases for physical items, which is an incredible deal for artists compared to what they make from streaming services like Apple Music or Spotify.
In fact, I really like their catalog and match algorithm but I always thought apple music being outside of its own fence feels gross.
You can do all of them when you use a Mac, but Apple will do a lot to try to persuade you not to. That means you'll spend a lot of mental energy fighting with Apple's very effective p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶o̶l̶o̶g̶y̶ marketing department, and often you won't win. That's fine. You don't really lose anything, but every so often you'll think to yourself "I listen to the same bands all the time" or "I wish this phone had a bigger camera sensor." and you'll regret putting so much of your life, and money, in Apple's pockets.
I would have hopped by now that integration with dropbox, Sharepoint/Onedrive, Google Drive would have gotten better. But they are mostly barebones.
Granted Google Drive is barebones on nearly every platform.
I'm a big 365 user, and that is by far the best experience so far in terms of fluid use between devices and apps. Especially on windows, where even sharing a file doesn't require a Web browser popup. But oh man the admin side of 365 is overly complex, and easy to see why people use gsuite.
iCloud Sucks and has always sucked. Unless that is you are 100% apple ecosystem. Integration into my onsite server is easy with 365, google, and dropbox. Icloud is super clunky and really thinking about moving the Wife to something other than iCloud.
I will say they have no problem booting up a VM, and everything he is doing can be done in a VM with hardware accelerated graphics. So Full screened feels just like the real thing, as long as you are not playing modern games. Boot into windows for that.
That being said there are Windows Laptops that will give a Macbook Pro a run for the money, but when it comes to the $1k price range the Macbook Air is hard to beat. I like the ARM chips for basic users, but for a Power user the ARM chips are a step backwards. Unless you want to run ARM based Linux. With my many years of raspberry pi use, ARM has gone a long way on the Linux front. But not sure if i'd want to rock that as my main.
At the same time you can do all these things on Windows as well.... Really more of a personal preference. I have limited experience with Linux for Windows Subsystem 2, but it worked damn well when I used it.
Dual booting on any hardware is nuts if you ask me, pick an OS and use VMs. If you really have to have a native OS but hate it so much you wont use it the rest of the time stick it on a different machine.
> Honestly never seen a modern Macbook Pro run linux natively without major compromise.
When I was using Linux as my main OS, I was having this problem with all laptops. Desktops usually had many less issues, but were occasionally less than perfect.
For example, Lenovo, at the time, was hailed to be great for Linux compatibility. Well, for some reason, regardless of the distro I was using, I was more or less given an ultimatum -- I could have a screen with adjustable brightness or a consistent network card driver, but not both. Editing whatever file I found on various forms to "fix" the backlight issue (was permanently stuck at 100% brightness) would inevitably cause some sort issue with where my Internet connection speed would drop from around 1gbps to mbps eventually to kbps the longer laptop was awake.
It was an issue I never found a solution to, and the oddest part was that this was never an issue if I booted the OS of a live USB. Only when the OS was installed would the issue arise.
Various laptops I owned / used for work had their own issues with Linux too. I eventually just settled on using Linux in virtual machines / servers and never looked back. So, I definitely agree with your point about VMs.
I'd consider going back, but I really cannot/do not want want to sacrifice too much time getting distracted with making the OS bend to my will when I could use that time to be actually getting things done.
Yes you can hit CTRL + left arrow or right arrow multiple times but... once one gets into a workflow that allows them to hit Super+2, it actually feels like a pain to do something else.
This item is the reason I am leaving the iphone and trying an unlocked/stock android device.
My music collection is a directory tree that I have curated and organized since 1996.
The correct way to deal with this is to move this directory tree onto my phone (either via network transfer or attaching a USB filesystem) and then browse those files with a music player app.
Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible.
Instead, you have to manually build playlists inside of itunes while "importing" your music (and storing two copies of it) and then transfer those playlists (one by one) to the idevice and ... it's just insane.
It is a workflow built for people that impulse buy a track here and there ...
On the contrary, any number of apps support precisely this.
- https://readdle.com/documents (not just music)
- https://www.everappz.com/evermusic
- https://brushedtype.co/doppler/
- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sony-music-center/id724406878 (if you use Sony headphones)
- http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html
- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mrmc-touch/id1062986407
There's no point in listing all of them.
Having ripped some 20,000 CD tracks a couple decades ago, I use several such apps.
As a user of such apps, I'd argue with "correct" though, given Apple Match with iCloud One combo and last year's update supporting high resolution / lossless.
Over time, I have come to use those apps less than Apple Match, which mirrors my rips using tracks from Apple's library where they have them, or uploads mine where they don't, giving me more seamless access across all devices, spoken access from Siri on HomePods, etc. Match was a debacle at launch, is now almost never wrong on even the most obscure tracks.
It supports FLAC obviously but also Opus. For my phone, I've ripped my FLAC files to Opus and can carry my entire music collection wherever I go. I used their import tool to build the same folder structure that I have on my NAS. I have iTunes installed on my Windows machine (no Macs at home) but I try to avoid it if at all possible.
There's a growing trend these days of making every single player app into spyware, and it's sad. I won't use reader apps or player apps that read or play local files that are going to transmit my activity off device for no reason that benefits me.
This is not completely true. You can store your iTunes collection wherever you like, organized however you like. You don't have to duplicate anything, although it's true that the default is for it to "import" it.
You can also create an "all my music" playlist which you can sync with the iDevice.
I used to have this setup with my music collection on Google Drive (because it didn't fit on my MBP's internal drive) and synced some of it to my iPhone. It worked well enough. The issue was more that all the music couldn't fit on the phone, so I had to pick and choose anyway.
The real gotcha is that iTunes didn't support flac, so I had to convert everything to m4a.
Yes, but then how do you deal with that enormous "all my music" playlist once it is in the iDevice ?
You can't browse by directory. You can't organize or display based on filename. So I guess I could parse all of the collection and transpose the artist/title/album out of the filename into mp3 metadata and then I would have a ... 30,000 track playlist ?
Again, all of this makes perfect sense if you're impulse buying a track here and a track there and if there is some way to move that "collection" to a new device every 2-3 years.
It's just not for me.
In my case, I organize it by artist / album / track number - track title; or by compilations. I then search for the album or the artist. I never have just random single tracks, so a directory is an album, which I have in Apple Music.
But I guess that you can't have any kind of organization you want, which is something that folders could give you.
> So I guess I could parse all of the collection and transpose the artist/title/album out of the filename into mp3 metadata and then I would have a ... 30,000 track playlist ?
Well, in the case of a meticulously managed collection, I'd expect the files to have correct metadata. Again, if this isn't the case, and you rely on file name / location, yeah, you're gonna have a bad time.
Just for the record, I've never bought any track off iTunes. All my music is ripped from CDs.
WAV files don't have metadata like mp3 files (typically) do.
I'm not saying I copy the uncompressed wav collection to my phone (~700 GB) but I am saying that my original metadata schema has all of the metadata in the filename:
Last, First - AlbumName - 01 - SongName - 3m25s.mp3
... and yes I could parse and reencode all of these populating their mp3 tags with these fields but, man ... what a load of work just because iTunes can sort by 50 different attributes just not filename:
https://www.tech-recipes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/itun...
... just look at all of those fine grained, fancy ways to sort by ... but the most basic attribute of all the filename is missing.
That’s a screenshot from a decade-old iTunes. And it includes the option to sort by name.
I’ve just checked with the most recent version of Apple Music, and the wav filename appears in the title field and you can sort by it.
I feel it's my civic duty here to repeat: they do, in fact they even support ID3 tags, but it's up to the software developer as to whether they support them or not.
WAV tagging has grown in support in the past few years, but yeah, iTunes certainly doesn't support them.
It is so bad that it makes me wonder who at Apple thought any of it was a good idea. Its not even 'bad from a certain perspective' bad but totally FUBAR.
I simply stopped trying to use my phone for playing music and it is the #1 reason why my partner wants to move away from iOS
No, it is not impossible. It is very easy at least as Linux user.
There is a project for that, called as iFuse https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse
It basically allows you to mount the Media chroot filesystem and the app specific sandboxed filesystems without a jailbreak.
I believe VOX Music Player allows you to upload your music without using iTunes - although it is using their cloud sync instead. Flacbox also seems to let you download and play local files from Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, SMB servers, DLNA servers, ...
It doesn't seem "totally impossible"?
Or you can use one of the many other apps others linked to if you really want to stick to the whole filesystem thing.
I quickly got away from trying to organize stuff in the file system when I got my Personal Jukebox 100 (PJB100) - literally the first hard drive based MP3 player out there in the mid 90's. It heavily relied on MP3 tags so I developed tag discipline early on - and never looked back. Tags are WAY more flexible than folder structures. I couldn't care less how files are stored in the file system.
This conversation always amuses me - we don't complain the computer tracks all the parts of our files in a directory while we have no control over the layout of the files on disk - mainly because that's a level of minutiae better left to automation. For me it's a similar things with my music files. As long as my tag information is accurate (and since it's the first thing I do when I add something to my collection, it is) I can manage my music collection however I want irrespective of where the file is.
But then, my metadata's in pretty good shape, so it barely even matters how my music files are stored. One big flat directory, carefully named folders, not that important.
To be fair, I guess I did have to convert the Flac to m4a. Drag to converter program, convert a ton in one go, drag those into iTunes. So that's one more step.
Shouldn't take more than an afternoon of a reasonably proficient developer's time. I agree that it's not great that you should need to do this kind of thing, but it's less effort than switching to android ;)
iTunes uploads it to Apple's cloud, since I'm paying for iTunes Match; my iPhone and iPads pull it down. It is very easy to search for a single album on the iOS players; they also make it very easy to find your most recent acquisitions, with an automatically-populated "Recently Added" playlist.
~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music looks almost exactly like the directory structure you're probably meticulously maintaining by hand (lots of Artist Name/Album Name/01 Track Name.m4a), but adding new stuff to it is a simple matter of dropping a directory full of properly-tagged files onto iTunes. Then I delete the original files after iTunes has copied it into its directory.
It breaks down if 90% of your collection is a bunch of badly-tagged files you downloaded off of KazAa, but if your collection is a mix of stuff you ripped from CDs back in the nineties and made sure were tagged properly, and stuff you've bought that the musician/store tagged properly, it works pretty much seamlessly. Except for this one weird glitch where sometimes iTunes on my Mac decides that I have both the copy of a track I bought off of the Apple store, and one in the cloud, and thus plays every song off an album twice. I've kinda quit buying stuff from Apple because of this; I'll go to Bandcamp first.
What is the attraction of meticulously maintaining a directory structure that a computer can very, very easily maintain based on the metadata stored in the files? Why are you so married to explicitly browsing a duplicate of this filesystem on other player devices?
You apparently didn't read the article properly. The author's major grouse is how he recognized slowly that Apple is very controlling about the user experience on its devices and how this is a huge limitation to do anything else "outside" of Apple's "thinking" of how a software or hardware should be used. And how Apple's product manager's have lost sight of what really adds value to the user experience, and their software and hardware choices of new Apple devices are now more dictated by their own greed / ambitions.
From the very examples you cited, the author's emphasis thus was on:
> ... but I am back in control. I am more productive.
> Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality ...
> I can take real photos wiht high quality ...
> I have fun again discovering bands and artists on Bandcamp instead of mind numbing listening to Apple Music playlists
> ... but also my OS is way more productive and faster
So it's not just about what you can or cannot do on a Mac, but how the author has found a better way to do all this outside of Apple's limiting ecosystem, keeping in line with his new beliefs that Apple no longer cares about users like him. And I fully agree with him and share the exact feeling (I feel Apple says a "F*k you" to me everytime I want to maximise a Finder or Safari window because the "Apple way" is that you are only supposed to make them fullscreen or vertically maximise ...)
Apple music and Bandcamp are essentially the same thing, I personally use Spotify and I don't have to listen to "mind numbing" music. You can choose to let the applications play music for you, or you can choose your own music.
Spotify 10 years ago was exactly how I discovered old/new bands and artists that were not mainstream.
I don't see this persons logic in that regard at all.
Spotify to my knowledge and experience has an enormous amount of older music. Enough to make it the main source of music for my parents. I think this guy needs to realise that they don't need to listen to the curated playlists...
I don't think that is confusing at all, just a matter of degree between leaving all services of apple or additionally leaving their OS as well.
"Hey Siri, shuffle <playlist name>" - no clicks involved.
As for wired/wireless headphones. I wasn't aware that running Arch was a requirement for using Wired headphones, but then again, i moved to wireless headphones a decade or so ago, and have changed my habits to allow me to charge them while i sleep, as well as checking the product specifications for any headphones i buy to see if they actually match my expected usage pattern. But then again, i'm weird.
There's FLStudio (or Bitwig, or Reaper) to match Apple's Logic, 1Password (or Bitlocker from what I hear) to match Google's passwords.google.com, and Backblaze+others to match Time Machine
Sure 'switching to apple' is a choice, but only one of many. Personally I am tired of using tech designed for and by managers and SWE's gunning for promotion and not personal empowerment or passion for personal computing
Besides, everyone needs to ditch Chrome. Firefox could use the love
Suffice to say I think all of the software in your list is pretty great and I chose what I chose for reasons that are wholly mine!
Windows/Android can be considered a natural pair, Microsoft seem to think so. Personally use Linux/Android pair, and I've been vaguely considering switching to an iphone to avoid Google.
It should be used in concert with an offsite backup service like Backblaze.
File history is for all your files, but it is amazing at it. You can roll back to a particular version from particular date
Can you link to a step by step on this - I think this would help a lot of folks.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/is-your-stuff-backed-up-recov...
Check out his YouTube videos as well, for a more visual walk-through.
Plenty arguments against Logic, but these three are not in the same league.
For other workflows, Reaper and Logic can do things that are essentially impossible in Live/Bitwig/FL Studio.
There's no best DAW for everyone, only best-DAW-for-the-workflow-you're-using-today. Sometimes that's Logic, sometimes it's not.
Not in live: logic's environment (you could do this in an M4L object, but not live itself)
Being able to buy a new Mac and make it into an exact copy of the old Mac by using time machine is amazing - I’ve done it a few times over the years, and it still impresses me every time. Plus I have time machine backups from 2011 which I occasionally browse to see what my kids were up to then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2478567#2478608
Apparently Dropbox notices they already have that file, and instead of you uploading it they just make it appear in your account.
ISO files are included in that filter list, among other files like VMs and such. Seems like a massive exclusion net to cast when claiming everything is backed up.
Removing these exclusions is very easy and obvious.
You are a different target market, always check for silly normie settings
One of the sad ironies of my life is that once I switched to macOS and could’ve avoided all the annoyances and instabilities I’ve had with audio on Windows, I just never felt like making music again. Life is like that sometimes. :)
For everyone else, sure, there might be 100 people in the world that will actually audit their open source password managers. But that isn't exactly moving the rest of the industry forward (be it from the engineering perspective or the user perspective).
In this case, (almost) perfect is the enemy of good.
Unless you have spoken to all managers and SWEs I doubt you can make such a blanket statement about the immense workforces at Microsoft, Google and Apple.
Sure, one could argue that Microsoft is profit-driven, Google might be marketshare-driven and Apple might be UX-driven, and all of those could be true (or at least true for a major subset of both the engineers and the targeted user group). But it would be a guess at best and not helpful to your personal situation or anyone else's.
Personal computing is a box under your desk or in your pocket beefy and smart enough to solve your problems without checking in with daddy warbucks and the mothership.
Nearly everything about modern cloud computing is the opposite... it disempowers individuals and creates an unhealthy relationship with things that are out of the users control. How many peoples' livelihoods have been messed up because FANG decided to lock them out for some reason or another? How many articles have been posted to HN and elsewhere begging for a FANG employee to come along and fix their problem because there is no other option?
The server in my closet or at my datacenter isn't going to lock me out because I pissed off Google.
In practice, I am continually having to disable cloud-related features (worded that I need them in the most patronizing way possible) every time Windows updates
In practice, common knowledge on desktop computing is atrophying because of an increasingly acute lack of knowledgeable users on the internet. As more and more of the young users who grew up in this gilded cage enter a level of expertise, their advice pollutes forums with cloud-backed solutions and knowledge of 'the old ways' becomes harder and harder to find.
Because it lets people - such as my older relatives - who wouldn't use a desktop and would have problems setting up and configuring one - especially for an "advanced" use case such as setting up your own private cloud.
As a computer instructor back home in west Africa, before smartphones I had students (especially older ones) who struggled with even using a mouse or keyboard. I've never had to teach a single one of them how to use their smartphone (at least for things like browsing the internet, taking and editing photos, making notes, etc). Providing things like photo editing on-device, without having to download and figure out a program like photoshop (or image magic for example) is a non-starter. Now they can edit, filter, share, make home movies- all without needing any help.
>> Where is the passion for 'personal computing' when nearly everything personal about it is delegated to the cloud?
I don't know what you mean by passion, but these people love their phones and the things it lets them do, with an intuitive UI (as well as a transferable one between Android and iOS, since they're about the same feature wise at the moment)
>> Personal computing is a box under your desk or in your pocket beefy and smart enough to solve your problems
This is ONE version of personal computing, and tbh an option only available to us "hackers".
>> without checking in with daddy warbucks and the mothership.
You don't need to check in. My country has crappy bandwidth and of course it's impossible to do things like pay for iCloud or gdrive without credit cards, so most use the phone without backups, and they're fine.
>> Nearly everything about modern cloud computing is the opposite... it disempowers individuals and creates an unhealthy relationship with things that are out of the users control.
How is allowing my students, older relatives, etc - who wouldn't be able to use a laptop or desktop machine - to go online and talk to their children abroad using apps like whatsapp - disempowering? I understand your point - I miss the days when we had computers to mess around with and learn Linux and coding on. Most of us on here came up that way, compared to kids now who don't have to see the underlying OS or tinker with it - they can just play Fortnite and watch YouTube.
But most people aren't interested in these things, or even care about machine models, OS versions etc. They buy phones because they want to communicate online and talk to their friends and family. That's it.
Before whatsapp the only way I could talk to my family was through international calls, which are prohibitively expensive, so they would happen about once a month. Once they got on whatsapp though we moved to being able to talk, share videos and pics of things happening at home, every single day. In addition a large part of getting rid of our dictator was people being able to use apps like whatsapp to share the latest information, even as he cracked down and only allowed propaganda to be published even in private newspapers.
This is a net positive however you look at it - it has brought far more people (especially in poorer countries) into the digital age. I find that very empowering in the sense of putting tools in the hands of more people, including barely literate ones (my country has something like a 40% illiteracy level rate) who use things like whatsapp voice notes to communicate.
>> How many peoples' livelihoods have been messed up because FANG decided to lock them out for some reason or another?
This is true but not really related to your larger point about computing devices and how they are being used now.
>> The server in my closet or at my datacenter isn't going to lock me out because I pissed off Google.
This really doesn't happen that much often considering we're talking billions of users.
We are on a "hacker" site where most people are skilled "tech people" so of course when things break for them they write blog posts and comments and we get to see and argue over those. Most people using these devices don't know or care about any of this, and have gmail accounts going back a decade that they've used without any issues.
In summary your version of computing (which is similar to mine) just isn't the universal version. I always find joy whenever I go back home and find taxi drivers using their phones to play music, people using YouTube to check instructional videos and post their own etc. When my grandmother died my uncle gathered all the photos, videos, etc that we have of her as a family on whatsapp, and made a nice video tribute of her life to share with us. Gathering the photos and videos took longer than making the movie itself, which was a few taps, and it was a very powerful moment emotionally esp for us family members outside the country. We were able to participate in remembering her life together in a way that international phone calls and a complex (to my uncle) photo editing app on a PC under a desk would ever have let us.
I find this very empowering, and it makes me happy how far we've come and how many more people we have brought across the digital divide. Let's not be myopic because those of us on here have the technical knowledge to disdain and even dump these platforms.
And keep in mind that American / Western users' use cases are very different from the farmer who can only afford a cheap android phone, being able to come online finally to check on crop prices so they won't get cheated, send pictures of their crops to prospective buyers, and even do things like checking the weather.
It's the tyranny of the "minimum viable user" [1]. By making information systems that are safe enough for your students or their grandparents to use, the companies have to take away the customizability, configurability and assorted "sharp edges" that make those systems useful for more advanced users. I say "have to" deliberately, because the counterargument of, "Why can't they make both," never seems to describe a real world system.
Whether its Windows, MacOS or heck even Gnome3, the more an information system attempts to cater to the needs of novice users, the worse it becomes at catering to the needs of advanced users. And the terrifying reality is that inexperienced users outnumber us hackers by two orders of magnitude (or more).
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
Some points to back up my contention:
- Microsoft does not allow the Windows serf to uninstall Edge on Windows 10.
- Microsoft is hostile to the idea of allowing a Windows serf to self-sign their own TPM.
- Microsoft does not allow the Windows serf to inspect the code that arbitrates their computing.
- Microsoft does not offer the Windows serf any ability to inspect, reject, or roll-back "updates."
Understanding these harms helps my personap situation by enabling me to make informed decisions about avoiding serfdom to Microsoft and their legion of cog-like engineers, which is definitely to my benefit. Microsoft engineers actualize the harmful policy of "Windows users deserve less;" therefore, the sniveling SWEs at Microsoft deserve less.
Part of that less which I shall forever withhold is my money and my endorsement of their basic capacity to ethical computing. Microsoft engineers are simply not respectable with regards to any ideals of user empowerment they may pretend to hold.
BB complements TM for me; it's super useful to have a local versioned backup that's updated every time I dock my laptop with the desk, and is also invisibly supplemented by a versioned backup of changes I've made that the OS maintains on unused space on the laptop's drive. Works even if I'm sitting at a cafe with all the radios turned off to get maximum life out of the battery.
Backblaze? Backblaze is there for in case my house burns down and I leave with nothing but the clothes on my back.
It feels like everything is overflowing with mediocrity, and there's no hope of it ever changing. I often have an idea for improving something that I see as being extremely shitty and perfect for improving/innovating, but there is no possible way for me to turn it into a successful product/business because the monopolists wouldn't allow it.
For example, why is the app store experience that same boring crap it has always been? Why can't that be fun, with like user profiles, Amazon-style reviews, Steam-style community features, social media-style feeds so you can sub to a developer, TikTok-style feeds of promo videos to discover new apps/games, etc. There's so much to explore there, but it's never going to happen because Apple doesn't allow it, and Apple themselves isn't going to do it because they're a monopoly and they have no incentive to (same goes for Google).
What are the chances that our government will wake up and do something about this limp noodle we call a tech industry? Or that some startup will "disrupt" these monopolists with something better and resist the multi-billion-dollar acquisition offers (backed by anti-competitive threats).
This makes me want to grab my old thinkpad and disappear into the woods. I'll become a hermit, using only my own+libre software and only returning to civilization when I need to replace the battery pack.
I’d definitely think that about the Apple Store if they introduced some of the features that you suggested — that’s part of the problem. What one person considers an obvious innovation another person considers yet another newfangled UI design.
Similar to the other comment, I read that with sheer horror. I specifically don't want to spend a lot of time in any app store. I want to find quality apps I'm looking for, download them and leave.
Apple Store already has star ratings, user reviews, and links to publisher web sites. I don't use any of the social/community features of Steam, and I can't stand the amount of review-stacking that happens in Steam and Amazon.
The one area that Steam is useful is their discovery stream where Steam will show you more games that they think you might like — the catch being that if you like one RTS game, Steam will show you lots of RTS games and never show you Mass Effect, Torchlight, KSP, or Dad Dating Sim.
As to why Apple doesn't have a discovery stream, just look at Steam's problematic system and you'll understand: Apple doesn't have it because they haven't figured out how to do it in a way that makes sense and will help people discover apps that they'll enjoy.
There the Apple Store suffers is in discoverability: in some cases I've been looking for a specific app and the thing I'm looking for comes "under the fold" because a dozen other apps have paid to get higher rankings for that search term.
I do not want TikTok-style feeds of promotional material clogging up my App Store. I want to get in there, find the thing I want, then get out. I do not spend my life looking for inspiration from apps in the store.
iOS and MacOS both have endless UI changes as well.
If you need a low cost vendor neutral DAW, Reaper is the way to go. I'm a semi-professional musician, and well compensated software architecture consultant, so cost is not a factor in my software purchases for music, but when I want a linear-paradigm DAW, it's Reaper. That product is dope and the company is awesome.
For what it's worth: if anybody else is facing the same conundrum, choose an OS-agnostic DAW like Reaper, Renoise or Bitwig, then it doesn't matter what OS you're on.
Running Affintiy Designer under Windows 10 VM is non issue.
OS-agnostic path is the only long-term way of working.
Now under Linux I use Resolve, BitWig and Reaper, Blender, Inkscape, Krita, Emacs and I feel confident that no corporation will dictate my workflow in the endless pursuit for world domination.
The reality is that we are living in some form of economic stagnation, worldwide changes are ahead and people will be poorer, this will drive Apples vision for 1000 dollars + smartphones and overpriced computers out of place. I have converted my business to ARCH and in the process saved a ton of money (previously dedicated to buy Apple Silicon). Now this money will be spend on my engineers not on some half-assed marketing plan from company out of touch.
The only software that kept me inside Apple Ecosystem was Sketch. Since pandemic started for good or bad Figma is taking Sketch market-share, I don't like SaaS for design paradigm, but we adapt to clients requirements not to our own taste. I used Inkscape for interface design long before Macromedia Fireworks to offer a specific solution. So I am set for the future.:)
> I realised that my life while using Apple products is > controlled by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a > raise, rather than by technology people who share the same > passion as me
Mainly because I feel exactly the opposite. I don’t find Windows, Linux or x86 technologically exiting anymore.Apple makes (IMO of course) the most technologically exciting CPUs, their GPUs are a breath of fresh air, I love their approach to UI, APIs and OS security.
In fact, I feel like my freedom is more practically restricted on Linux, with its' general hostility agains distributing compiled code.
If this tread is showing reality of the level of critical thinking by the tech educated people, we are living in 1984 in full swing.
Attacking the author for sharing personal decisions which have factual data, disregarding arguments with personal "ease of use" points. Just totally out of touch and reality.
And when I think that most of these people are producing the software solutions of today - OMG.
I hate how closed-off a lot of their ecosystem can be, and the obvious "I prefer open source" that every engineer says, but I do honestly (and sadly) think that macOS is the least-bad *desktop OS out there right now.
I'm not a graphics programmer, but whenever I've gotten the itch, I've always gotten huge headaches trying to get Vulkan to work, and had basically no issues at all using Metal.
But any time you are emulating one complex low level API with another, there are likely performance penalties. Not to mention you are raising the complexity of the software stack and adding more surface area for bugs.
It would be better if there was an open source low level graphics API that every OS could support in addition to their own proprietary APIs focused on ease of use.
Funny enough, that would be Vulkan, right?
Note that WebGPU has been heavily inspired by Metal (AFAIK), and it uses translation layers on top of a number of APIs (whatever is available on the system). And it's not limited to browsers, despite what its name might suggest.
So it seems like your best bet to try something Metal-like that works across platforms.
- TBDR with user-programmable persistent GPU caches allow you to do some really cool things smartly, drastically cutting down the amount of work and memory fetched - GPUs are trivially exposed as what they are: machines with very wide SIMD ALUs - resource binding graphs with full support for pointers and indirection; resource bindings that can be created and populated on the GPU - sparse resources that actually work and are performant (nobody uses them on mainstream GPUs because they are apparently slow as f** there) - etc.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/22/ios-15-how-to-move-safari-ad...
I already cannot fathom how we dealt with the URL bar at the top of these big phones for so long. It's been a long time since a major UI change in some popular software actually made me happy, let alone this ecstatic. I'm usually one to complain about unnecessary change (like Firefox's recent UI refresh)
It's not at the bottom, but within the content viewport. Browsers need a dedicated "safe space" for notifications and symbols like a lock for HTTPS. A floating address bar over the content of the website could easily be faked using HTML/CSS/JS and abused for phishing.
Sure, put it at the bottom, but not as a floating pill over the content.
Nobody said Apple's security is perfect. People's views are simply biased because when Apple's much tighter security is breached, of course it will make headlines everywhere. Windows and Android have far more malware, but you won't see headlines about it every single day.
Either way, unless you're a journalist, politician or some other high-value target, you're pretty unlikely to be targeted by exploits like the NSO one. But if you don't care about jailbreaking, you can still update your device to give yourself peace of mind.
That has changed massively recently, my sense is rough parity currently (on a clean android phone).
Payouts are still a lot higher per point marketshare for iOS though, so maybe still harder to develop.
Android is about $30K per point market share and iOS is around $130K per point market share (4x more).
For example, it's not that Exchange / Outlook are HARDER to get an RCE on that makes the payout so high for those, it's because they have a LOT more usage than something like postfix etc.
Instead some things that have every day practical relevance for me:
- read-only mounted system volume that prevents me from doing stupid mistakes and accidentally sudo rm important files - application certificates - all executables being code-signed to prevent tampering - built in zero-knowledge password manager with automatic synchronization across all my devices - full hardware insulation for DMA devices on Apple Silicon
What are you talking about? You have nothing to hide? You are so addicted to Apples "solution" that as a tech savvy professional you cannot "countermeasure" against.
Practical? What is practical in knowing that your trusted computing device is easy target? Did you not understand that "power of association" with high-profile target by false positive will ruin your life forever? And this "automated" processes will be "included" in all commercially viable OS's.
IDK but sticking with FOSS and practical knowledge looks like better solution than trusting "whatever magical <Big Corporation> tech. But who am I to question the Apple fetishists of current day. After all in the past I was in this camp. So be happy with whatever "rationalization" you come up with. Everything is fine and dandy, the Big Apple is taking care of you.
Because of availability of control surface, absent in Windows and macOS and most importantly the Kernel access. Yep, there are security problems in any os, but to compare custom build Gentoo with your beloved Apple toy, please grow up:) Your argument is funny and nonfactual.
To trust that a company witch publicly cooperates with oppressive governments and creates on device scanning software , breaching all "privacy" promises, helping with your security is absurd.
I have used exclusively Apple computers since early 2000s, and can pinpoint the moment in which all that I loved ended.
The moment when the iPhone was born.
Since then fighting with Apple telemetry was "business as usual", the existence of Little Snitch is all the proof that you need.
Pretty sure it was before the millennium when computers became cheap while the value of repair skills increased, it was no longer cost effective then to have the old malfunctioning computer of any make repaired. I expect you mean that you want to repair it yourself, but if you are skilled enough to do that, your time is valuable, so it hasn't been worth your time for at least two decades to spend even 10 hours a year repairing a machine more than about 3 years old. And AppleCare is worth the cost of extended warranty, so you don't have to repair it.
> Apple Music can't even play FLAC files
That's just that software. VLC runs on Apple Silicon, so you don't need to use Apple Music, but if you did and want to play FLAC files, you'd need to transcode them to ALAC, Apple Lossless (or mp3 or aac for lossy). You could build and script ffmpeg to transcode all your FLAC files to ALAC in one CLI command, because lossless is lossless. I'm kind of curious just how fast Apple Silicon will do that... seconds I bet, because it takes only a couple minutes for my Core2Duo to transcode a full-length album of FLAC to ALAC.
The median hourly income in the United States is $20/hr. Buying a new computer every three years is certainly going to cost you more than $200 a year, unless you buy extremely cheaply. And that's leaving out the massive environmental externalities of not repairing older equipment rather than throwing it away. Also leaves out the fact that most people have free time that they can not trivially trade for more working hours.
Furthermore, 10 hours a year seems ludicrous. Apple bricked my MBP with the Big Sur update (along with many other people's laptops, it was a bit of a scandal). I repaired the rather infamously not-repair-friendly Apple device in about half an hour with a part I bought on Ebay for less than $10.
> I expect you mean that you want to repair it yourself, but if you are skilled enough to do that, your time is valuable, so it hasn't been worth your time for at least two decades to spend even 10 hours a year repairing a machine more than about 3 years old.
So your claim about the cost of onsite repair is completely irrelevant. We're talking about the cost of repairing something yourself, which you very frequently can do, even when you're working with something as unrepairable as a Macbook.
I replaced the battery in my X1 Carbon using a screwdriver in about 15 minutes. No significant downtime or hassle.
> You could build and script ffmpeg to transcode all your FLAC files to ALAC
Hardly "Just Works" though is it? I might as well stay on Linux...
If you run linux, sooner or later you're going to want compile software from sources. Building software on linux is hardly if any different than building software on any other *NIX platform. Developers and package managers have made the process easy. So whatever your pleasure, please indulge.
Which would suggest that Apple's glued-in batteries are a bad idea? Whatever one chooses to call the process of changing a battery, this is unnecessarily difficult with Apple hardware.
For how much more would you siphon money into basically empty stores, to see it as having gone "100%" of the way?
Which is even more damning of Microsoft / Google management.
The sunk cost fallacy is not really about what the venture would actually do. One could be said to have fallen prey to it even if they double down and the venture eventually succeeds.
What's important is that at the time of the decision (a) the path doesn't seem to be working, and (b) they think "but I've spend too much to quit now".
This is more likely when one assumes it can still has a chance to succeed, than if they assume it will inevitably result in failure. Nobody that assumes inevitable failure would decide to continue.
All I know is at this point Microsoft had two options: continue investing into creating an alternative to Apple, or cancel their plans and sit back and let the Office/Azure revenue flow in.
Maybe it was a long shot, maybe they decided the size of Apple's customer base divided by two was not enough to satiate them, but whatever the case, they signaled that they do not have the talent/gumption/appetite for risk to pull it off. But if any company did have the opportunity to go for it, I would think Microsoft (and Google) with their income stream would have been in position to do it.
Both companies seem to dip their toes, but never follow through.
I would have liked to see it succeed if only for there to be more competition.
It also had a great 'copy and paste' feature
This hits hard
The prerequisite of being a "large tech company" to pull it off is already a huge barrier to entry.
As for the barrier, it is in the software and app ecosystem.
My point with the software is that most software people use to create software/apps is increasingly created with web technologies / electron apps, so the native app ecosystem on a desktop machine is increasingly weakening as a moat.
- Unix-like, developing on Windows is pure torture
- Don't waste my time with configurations, drivers and other crap, I want a machine that I can be productive with out of the box. Take my money if you have to, but I don't want to edit Xorg.conf ever again.
You can talk about polish all day, but no machine that doesn't satisfy both is even close to appealing for a majority of developers in my experience.
You are right about the native app ecosystem being less of a blocker, but that's in line with my point.
If they need a photo manager, in my experience the most common application need after a web browser, then Digikam really cannot be beat.
I am a full time Linux user. And I'll probably support anyone who wants to try it until the day I die. I absolutely love it. But we still can't enjoy some of the simplest use cases without screwing around with configs and in some cases, writing scripts that listen to DBus or udev.... So every time I hear someone say, "just use Linux" I think... nah, just buy a Chromebook (and - yeah, use Linux). If your needs are any more than that, Linux might not be for you.
Sadly, this is now true for Macs as well. Were by "not work" I mean: not finding/not supporting the proper resolution and/or refresh rate for the display.
I never succeeded. I just use the Macbook with only the built-in display now.
> writing scripts that listen to DBus or udev
Exactly. Not to mention the preceding step of spending 30 minutes in forums to find someone else who has had this problem on a system with exactly the same motherboard so you don't try the things that didn't work for them.
I'm still 100% Linux on the server, headless Linux doesn't have nearly the warts as GUI Linux.
In the context of the original comment, though, this does narrow down the market that can be addressed by a company running the Next/Apple playbook.
It seems vastly cheaper to solve these issues than to start a new company to produce its own hardware and OS.
If you did start such a company and prove there was a market, then you're making a bet that Canonical (or KDE devs) won't put you out of business.
> Want to use bluetooth? It might work.
Sounds like the problem of installing Linux on a hardware designed for Windows. All those things work flawlessly on my Purism Librem 15, which came with preinstalled Linux. (Ok, I did not try Bluetooth, but saw reports that it works.)
Here is one. Randomly, based on no relevant input from me or changes in the laptop's state, my network connection dropped and the Network Manager UI was telling me no network adaptor could be detected.
Some fumbling around in the Terminal (including various reboots not solving the issue), and managed to enable the wireless adaptor which apparently could be detected and connect to my network, though at the same time the UI was telling me in no uncertain terms that no wireless adaptor was connected to my laptop.
Then later, again randomly, based on no relevant input from me or changes in the laptop's state, the UI agrees there is a wireless adaptor connected after all. This is on a machine currently in near-factory state with certified compatible Ubuntu preinstalled.
I share this example because one can at least comprehend why random monitors or graphics cards or what not do not cooperate without fiddling, can comprehend certain apps failing and crashing, can comprehend other unusual bugs. The UI thinking and acting like there is not a network card for no reason whatsoever, on the other hand, is completely illegible to even competent users.
Someone needs to just commercialise a proprietary and at least initially closed version of Linux (so as to to turn a profit) with good design principles in mind and deal with lawsuits and license issues later. There is plenty of money in it.
If you wanted to create a new platform, your best option would be to go the other way and make an OS that was “just electron” and ran all the electron apps in the world faster and better than anything else. Unsurprisingly Google has tried this with Chromebooks, but their track record on consumer product development is so poor that perhaps they just didn’t execute well and someone else could pull it off.
Another challenge is that if you did that you gain wide software compatibility but you lose any obvious differentiator. The likely way to win would be if you could make a laptop that was “just as good at running web apps as your Mac, with just as much battery life and just as nice hardware” but somehow cost under $400 or so.
I actually wouldn’t be surprised if we see that coming out of Chinese OEMs in the next decade.
Screens are the most expensive things on a laptop, mobile and tablet.
So you are not going to get a good screen
'Next/Apple' isn't a quick playbook - it's an over 30 year R&D effort to create a hugely complex software and hardware business, and it spent about $100 billion in R&D to get its products where they are today (at the absolute cutting edge of technology). Writing your own modern OS and building/manufacturing good hardware to compete with this is difficult enough, and then you have the even bigger challenge of getting all the major software vendors to support your new platform.
But isn't this much, much easier if you just piggyback on the Apple hardware ?
I always expected this to happen.
Circa 2008 or 2009 I thought that any day now there would be a linux distribution built specifically foe one single Apple laptop. No hardware issues, no gremlins, no moving targets - you would have a (very) fixed hardware target and optimize just for that. Then I, as a user, could just go to the Apple store and buy a nice shiny device and install MBAlinux on it and call it a day.
I really don't understand why this never happened. Further, in many ways it seems that the opposite of this happened - installing linux/FreeBSD is weirdly painful on Apple laptops which is unexpected since we all know what is inside of them and the installed base is huge.
So I would suggest that you could, indeed, build a hardware/software ecosystem - just let Apple build the hardware part ...
Sure, it's easier, but then I'm not sure what the point is or what makes it one of the biggest opportunities of our time.
I also understand why it never happened - there is already a unix-based OS which is designed with perfect compatibility with the Apple Hardware called OSX! I'm not sure what the advantage to a consumer would be for replacing OSX with linux - other than the fact that it gives consumers choice - but of course providing a distro that only operates on a specific Mac is then limiting hardware choice so it doesn't really solve that in some respects.
And if it's just for developers, then wouldn't developers want some choice of hardware, good support for tooling, the ability to test native apps without virtualisation e.t.c.
IMO I suspect the Venn-diagram of developers who:
* want a Mac but don't want OSX
* don't mind that they can't upgrade their hardware
* are willing to run some totally-new operating system
* Accept that it will initially lack the support of the runtimes they use, and some software, and won't be able to develop certain types of software because of this.
* Accept that if they wish to continue using the OS for their next laptop they will be fully locked-in to a single hardware model.
is pretty vanishingly small.
Lets take Ubuntu as an example. Today you can get Ubuntu laptops that will work out of the box. Is that true tomorrow? Absolutely not. The next distro version will break something in the hardware. I have been burned by this twice now. At then end of the day the Apple premium is not really a premium. It ensures that they continue to support their legacy hardware for years. The people who bash the premium as some sort of "idiot tax" are actually valuing the software that runs on the machine at 0$. There are too many people in this world that don't understand how much effort it takes to create and maintain good reliable software. You see it on the app store where people can't fathom spending 99 cents and you see it in the bashing of Apple devices.
Lets assume that your hardware works beautifully with the current version. Then you actually look at the apps shipped with the distro. They are poorly made and do not form a cohesive OS. You are forced to hunt for other open source equivalents to basic stuff like "paint". Have you tried using the calculator or notepad equivalents? They suck compared the simple and easy to use Windows and Mac equivalents. This is something even Windows gets right. It comes from the fact that Canonical does not have the resources to build each app around a unified design and UX principle so they farm it out to the "open source community".
Finally, why do each distro version seem to break something on the same hardware year after year? There seems to be a serious lack of regression testing on these distros. For 10+ years I have witnessed how one version of Ubuntu breaks some stuff, fixes others and then the next version fixes some stuff but breaks previous working items. Then it gets worse, the subsequent version breaks previously fixed stuff again! I am forced to QA the entire OS every time a new release comes out and hope I don't miss something(which I always do)!
I did try and use Linux full time but the UI drove me up the wall so I’m back comfortable in macOS but my dev work flies on that Linux box.
Isn't it a bit on the nose that you accuse Linux of failing at the one thing that Windows is notoriously bad at, UX cohesion?
More seriously -- Linux reflects a different mentality and way of doing things. It is not for everyone. Downloading the software you want is the expected way to do things. I have no idea whether Ubuntu ships a "paint" replacement, but regardless, Pinta or Paint.NET are like three clicks away, thanks to the software repository approach.
Linux is more or less for people who want to experiment and configure things their own way, and make software that solves their own problems in the way that they want those problems solved. Creating a single, opinionated, out-of-the-box working desktop experience with perfect hardware compatibility with whatever bullshit proprietary-blob using silicon is out there is (a) hard, and (b) not what most Linux-using developers are interested in.
The people who use Linux largely recognize that yes, it is a compromise, but also that using Windows or macOS also represents a compromise. Having used Linux for nearly 15 years now myself, I can say confidently that the trade-offs for me weigh heavily in favor of Linux.
Yeah you can criticize Windows for trying to update their designs with Metro and the like but in reality, all the old apps that worked cohesively are still there even today. Ubuntu and the Gnome or KDE based distros never had this to begin with. Just multiple flavors of the same cruddy base applications since all the distro are using the same apps anyway.
>More seriously -- Linux reflects a different mentality and way of doing things. It is not for everyone. Downloading the software you want is the expected way to do things. I have no idea whether Ubuntu ships a "paint" replacement, but regardless, Pinta or Paint.NET are like three clicks away, thanks to the software repository approach.
Yeah thats fine but that unfortunately makes it a non-starter if you are looking for a direct replacement for macOS or Windows.
Yes Paint.NET/Pinta/GIMP are always trotted out when I post this example. Pinta has been an unstable mess every time I have installed it. Plus "paint" is a near-instant loading app that is several MB in size whereas Pinta is installing loads of supporting libraries because it is a more complex application. Your telling me that in 2021 they can't just ship a simple app to allow a user to just jump in and use to resize images or add some text to basic images? This hinders the usability of the system when I can't just quickly do a simple task and move on! It is as if the developers of this distros have never understood how a regular user uses a PC.
>The people who use Linux largely recognize that yes, it is a compromise, but also that using Windows or macOS also represents a compromise. Having used Linux for nearly 15 years now myself, I can say confidently that the trade-offs for me weigh heavily in favor of Linux.
The only thing that is a given is that any comment bashing Linux will ultimately attract someone like you that tries to twist and turn my words to justify it. I've seen it for 10+ years now without fail so i'll leave it at that.
Its a shame because I have looked at the messy bug tracker for Ubuntu and have tried to fix issues but then I stop and realize what is the point when it breaks again in some subsequent version of the distro. I wish someone would just dump a bunch of money, hire former Windows/Mac devs and properly build a lot of the supporting components of some distro, then all the other distros can roll up those better apps and then we have at least something that can be called adequate in 2021.
The only thing that's a given is that any post that proclaims the relative merits of Linux versus alternative operating systems will immediately attract posts like yours bashing it, so shrug.
> I wish someone would just dump a bunch of money, hire former Windows/Mac devs and properly build a lot of the supporting components of some distro, then all the other distros can roll up those better apps and then we have at least something that can be called adequate in 2021
My point is not that you're wrong to feel this way, but rather that you should recognize that "adequate" is ultimately subjective. Adequate for whom? Adequate how?
The Linux ecosystem is largely designed by and for people who are willing to tinker, willing to customize, who want to design software that scratches their own itches, and who aren't looking for a perfect out-of-the-box experience from a distro. A handful of people want to bring about "the year of Linux on the desktop", but they're a minority and even for them the interest is usually secondary to their own use of Linux.
There's no "twisting your words" required here. What you want is a near-perfect out of the box Linux experience. What most Linux users want is ... something else. My point is simply that that's okay. Linux doesn't have to be for everyone. Your problems with it are not everyone's problems with it. In particular,
> that unfortunately makes it a non-starter if you are looking for a direct replacement for macOS or Windows.
Most Linux users don't want a direct replacement for macOS or Windows. Maybe there's a class of "theoretical Linux switchers" out there who would switch and would be the majority of Linux users if they did, but they are not, at present, the majority of the people using and working on Linux.
What Linux provides me with is (a) a well-integrated package manager containing fully free/libre software, (b) a comprehensible system (where I can understand fully how each part works), and (c) a modifiable system (where I can change how the system operates to the extent I want). Having a perfect replacement of the MS Paint application is not even on my radar. But that said:
> Plus "paint" is a near-instant loading app that is several MB in size whereas Pinta is installing loads of supporting libraries because it is a more complex application.
Maybe you're exaggerating, but on my system Pinta has an installed size of only 2.88 MiB and has only two direct dependencies. Maybe you're thinking of the fact that it's written in Mono (the C# runtime), but that's a shared installation with all other Mono applications. It's equivalent to Windows shipping with the .NET runtime or UWP.
I only ever need a laptop when traveling, I have a big desktop setup at home. I plan to take my Steam Deck traveling with a portable monitor and keyboard.
Apple doesn’t prioritize lack of binary blobs. The EFI firmware is all proprietary. All their Wi-Fi have been switched to Broadcom.
They do weird non-standard things to the Thunderbolt controller, e.g., you have to lie to the firmware and claim to be macOS in order for it not to disable the Thunderbolt controller.
Newer MacBooks hide a bunch of hardware behind the proprietary T2, and whatever embedded OS runs the Touch Bar.
MacBooks are not ideologically pure, and sunk efforts to get an OS working on other machines are often wasted on MacBooks because Apple does things in bizarrely different ways.
Would that be even legal? I mean selling a commercial OS that would be marketed to install as a replacement OS on the most locked, most proprietary hardware on the market?
The problem with this is which developers? People who write embedded systems? Web developers? People who write custom Windows applications?
Any given developer subset is likely to find this hypothetical new developer computer to be either too complex to use or not differentiated enough from Windows or MacOs (or ChromeOS).
> Most of the software we use to create software are electron apps
This is not true for most people whose primary employment is writing software, or working on software teams. Most people who get paid to write code work primarily in either the Java or .NET ecosystems and use something like Eclipse, IntelliJ, or Visual Studio. (Many more are using niche-specific tools in a captive platform like Oracle, SalesForce, SAP, etc.) If the new platform doesn't have 100.0% binary compatibility with legacy tools written for Windows and/or MacOS, its addressable market shrinks substantially.
VSCode is not the entire stack needed to build Windows desktop applications. There are tens or hundreds of thousands of developers who build applications for the Windows desktop. I'm not (for the most part) a .NET dev, but my current understanding is that only Visual Studio running on Windows is a first-class citizen with the ability to access all parts of the dev stack. The Windows dev stack doesn't need to move away from native Windows applications any more than does Xcode need to move away from MacOS.
It's critical to have a great developer story yes, but to make a stellar platform that needs to be balanced with a great user story, and that means developers might not always get everything they want down to the letter.
Why would that be an opportunity though?
It would be a low margin niche, with a small market segment, of which most would stick with Apple/Lenovo/Dell.
And physical hardware kill switches? This almost seems too good to be true.
It will not (yet) replace your iPhone, although you can get pretty far on your own if you don't mind SSHing into such a device and messing with stuff on your own.
Most developers I know are happy with their mac or windows spyware, or their rough edges linux rig.
I'd be interested to know what "we" means in this sentence.
Do you mean your team?
Or developers in general?
If the latter, I am not sure what industry you work in, but I very much doubt the majority of developers operate in the environment you describe.
If it was focused on developers, it would by definition not be re-running the Apple playbook. Developers are much too small a market to justify that level of investment.
maybe.
it would be amazing to build systems that are are so beautiful that they inspire people like berners-lee and carmack to do their things.
The general point is that “just switched” narratives like this paint an incomplete picture because one big benefit of, say, iCloud photos is that I pay a monthly fee then I never have to think about it. Not so rsync.
I certainly didn't have to sacrifice much of anything by moving from Windows 8 (the best one) to Ubuntu and Manjaro.
I've even moved old people to Ubuntu back in the gnome 2 days. Worked great
The biggest thing I missed was the Macbook trackpad. The Dell XPS's trackpad is janky by comparison.
That said, I won't be confident in recommending this setup until I've been through another year or so of upgrade cycles.
Just to offer up a real-world counter-example, I once ran into a syncing issue with iCloud Photos where my family members stopped receiving any new photos that I posted to a shared album. I tried a few different things to get it to sync properly again, like logging out and back into icloud on my device, etc. It was basically impossible to debug because the whole syncing process is completely opaque to the user in Apple Photos. After about a month I was very nearly on the verge of ditching iCloud for photo sharing completely, and then one day it started working again just as mysteriously as it stopped.
I agree with your broader point that iCloud generally requires less effort to set up and manage than rsync. But in this particular case I would have really loved to be running rsync, because I could have easily debugged it.
This is exactly how I feel.
Way too much software is being developed in the Resume Driven Development these days.
Touch Bar is a prime example of this. It solves a nonexisting problem in an imperfect way. It's a mere copycat from Optimus Keyboard, except that in Optimus each individual key was still a physical key.
The same goes for the vast majority of the web 2.0 front end frameworks, which reduce user experience, but add to the resume of people who implement all of that nonsense. The new versions of Slashdot and Reddit are prime examples — slower, less usable and accessible, but, hey, all the newest frameworks and buzzwords!
I think that anything to do with music and transferring files to your iPad or iPhone is an utter mess on the Mac. The entire iTunes project was an utter mess and breaking that up and fixing it is going to take a long time.
I was also taken back by some of the new restrictions on the Application directory with Big Sur but it appears that they aren't as bad as I initially thought and mostly seem to apply to apps that the OS installs.
I think it is great that the author outgrew his machine. They started out as a new developer and now they have brought their skills up to the point that they require a new OS to allow them to maximise their potential. That is an awesome story.
Apple has had to ride a fine line between being a lifestyle device and a computer and I think that there are times when they totally mess it up and lock out things they don't need to. Other times they seem to get it right.
Like a lot of people here I really wish Apple would stop trying to organize my music but I also realise that a large number of people younger than me don't even own music any more.
The number of use cases for these devices is huge and it is natural that the hardware can't be everything to everyone. It used to be the case but so many more people use computers and use them for a wide variety of things that those days are far behind us.
What I was trying to say is that while I might have a lot of ripped CDs and music on my devices it seems as if there is a growing number of people that just subscribe to services and forgo owning any music at all
Now with the success Apple has had with the M1 chips, and how they seem to be fixing their keyboard issues, I would definitely consider buying a MacBook Pro if the new models look compelling.
I guess my point here is that being fully committed to the "Apple Ecosystem" isn’t as big a deal as some people make it out to be. You don’t have to be all-in or all-out on Apple. It’s something to consider when making a purchasing decision, but at the end of the day you should just buy the thing that works best for your needs and budget, regardless of who makes it.
They definitely have not “fixed” the keyboard.
Still, I'm glad people are getting out of closed ecosystems.
Looking at those rock-solid Debian servers just wishing I could have the desktop experience of a 15 year old PowerBook to go with them...
In the end I just resigned and I'm using Linux in VirtualBox. Far from ideal but also much better than WSL2.
It's the boring option, but there's a lot of customization options and they've never broken anything I use.
The Pantheon desktop from elementary, on the other hand, is far closer to "sane defaults" in my mind and seems to be much less buggy.
I got my fix of this with KDE, namely with Kubuntu 20.04.
The "everything is a web/Electron app" trend has pretty much ensured that your "productivity" effect is pretty much only in your head now.
I would never stay at a Ritz Carlton and pay $1000 a night when I could stay at the motel down the road for $100.
I'm not waited on hand and foot, I have to do everything myself, but its done the way I like it, and I've saved myslef $900 as well.
I think if anything, this post illustrates that no matter how many people you pay to do it, there's no "objectively better" workflow for everyone, and preferences will always be individual
When I try to convince people to use *nix OSes or FOSS tools generally, my one and only argument is the value of having control, or, perhaps more saliently, not being controlled by the company that makes your tools. If that doesn't persuade you, then just use whatever you like best. Your preferences are your own, and no amount of supposed expertise or practiced snobbishness can make your preferences override mine, or vice versa.
That said, I've never turned iCloud on, all my photos are on my phone or my computer, all my iTunes music is downloaded to my machine, free to take with me. (I also still buy physical CDs.) I don't sync anything.
The only place this isn't true is the Apple TV videos I've bought. Don't know where they are, but I don't really care to be honest. If Apple didn't know about my rental habits, Blockbuster would. What difference does it make.
I have enough dusty DVDs in my drawer that I don't think I'd miss if they suddenly vanished, I'm not that tied to the content I've purchased on Apple either. I know what I'm getting in to when I do it, and it's OK with me.
The other aspect would be the apps I've got from the App Store. If I were move off of iOS those wouldn't be coming with me anyway, so...no drama there.
And why do I not use iCloud? Not because of any big brother eyeball on me. I don't use it the same reason I don't use a Smart TV, or a "smart home", or anything else. It's just one more thing designed to make my life easier that simply won't. As soon as it messes up (and it WILL mess up, catastrophically, and at the worst time. Everyone has stories), whatever value its added will be washed away.
As I like to say, I love programming, but I hate computers. I hate messing with them, configuring them, tweaking them, googling for arcane stuff. I never want to hear the word "driver" ever again if I can avoid it.
My Macs and Apple stuff, that I use, pretty much "just works". I keep my profile as thin and light as possible. The printer works, on all my machines and devices! Hallelujah! Air Drop works! I can serve videos from my Mac to the my Apple TV. +1!
So, whatever control Apple has over me, I think the boot on my neck might instead just be a flip flop, and I can get up whenever I want.
I love messing around with my Linux laptops (and Chromebook with Linux container support), but for my main digital life, the integrations of Apple Watch + iPhone + iPad + MacBook Pro are the best option for me.
I would like to see a wider ecosystem and I keep hoping that Microsoft keeps improving the Windows experience and Linux distress keep improving.
EDIT: I am also a fan of Google, with some restrictions: I turn off all data collection settings except for music and YouTube for 30 days, and GCP for forever. PRIVACY IS POWER: you put yourself in a better position vs. corporations (and governments) if you take sensible privacy precautions.
Personally, I like to save media I consume, and increasingly this is contrary to the business models of media companies. It's good that Apple lets you take your photos elsewhere, but I don't want them to have access to what's on my device, and the reality of Apple's ecosystem is that they have root on and internet-connected access to your devices, at least the smartphones.
Personally, I like using tools that I can rely on staying the same. If software I use to make things I want to make changes, I can go back and get a previous version. I can go fork it and change it if I desire. With proprietary tools, you take the risk that a change will be made and you won't like it. You take the risk that they'll decide to move to a subscription model and deny you use of a tool you've already bought unless you start paying the company on a schedule, as Adobe users have experienced recently. If these possibilities have never affected you and don't bother you, by all means, use the tools and services you like
- Scanning each binary on macOS just makes working on the terminal -- and just being a dev in general! -- have much more friction that it needs to. I don't care if it's about my security. While my iMac Pro is "sleeping" the logs show it's actually waking up each 2 to 5 minutes; surely they can passively scan some binaries then and leave me alone after that! The whole process just becomes sluggish. I've lately worked on a Linux laptop with a Ryzen 5500U CPU which is nowhere near the power of my iMac Pro's CPU and it was still times faster for most of my development workflow. (Obviously you can't magically make Rust compilation faster on a mobile CPU but literally everything else was faster.)
- Control over photos and music. Yeah, Apple got a bit too creepy for me there. I have a ton of photos, memes, erotic photography, nature walpapers etc. and the Photos app can be much better. But alas, it isn't. At one point I'll just install PhotoSync and start backing up all my iCloud photos to my NAS. And then install a better gallery on my phone and laptop and just be done with it. Same for music. The whole thing is just tailored towards the copyright industry. One day I'll not be able to play whatever music I actually pay sub for and that's when I'll leave, in the meantime I am backing up any and all photos and music I have.
- I'll agree with OP that with time most of Apple's software became less featureful though but still, alternatives to a lot of software do exist. One thing I gradually got tired of is having to pony up cash for literally everything. Even good music players cost money.
If Apple wants to deploy a new update that scans all your files for anything they deem undesirable, or bundles ads, or add backdoors... they can, knowing the cost of most users to switch is too high so they will tolerate it. Don't think they won't aid spying if the USG asks them extra nice.
Apple has totally sold control of their hardware in China to the Chinese government with full knowledge it will be used to help with genocide, all to maintain doing business there.
They will do whatever is the most profitable regardless of if it is aligned with your interests or not.
I only rely on open source software and best effort open hardware/firmware because freedom to me means no lock-in. No one can force me to take a software, firmware, or hardware update I don't want. My reliance on tech is highly flexible.
In my quest to become a more capable engineer it was worth the extra effort to learn how computers work well enough to make them do exactly what I want with whatever software, firmware, or hardware I want for both my personal and work life.
I built a career on those skills.
Wouldn't need to purchase new hardware and "fundamentally overhaul your technical life" to the exact same extent in order to switch to the Apple system?
Until Apple decides to use some dark-patterns to make you activate iCloud in a moment of inattentiveness. At that point, your own CDs and other data might be wiped from your computer, as has already happened to people.
Next, how many iPhone Apps would I lose access to, and never be able to run on my new phone?
The fact is for most people there are many, many more apps they actually want to run in the App Store than there are available for the libre platforms. Unless you’re a developer and write all your own software, the fact is you’re controlled by the people who are programmers, whether they work for Apple or any platform. They decide what your choices are.
What matters to customers is the range of options they actually have, and Apple gives them a lot more choice, more of which are relevant to them, by a huge margin.
If Linux can work for you - especially in your office - you are a privileged minority.
With MacOS, I get the underlying UNIX subsystem - and the ability to use commercial software, to boot.
Even Windows has WSL nowadays.
And you can downvote me - you can disagree with me - but deep down; you know nothing you can say is going to change the fact that - for example - I rely on Apple’s Logic Pro X; and have a decade and a half of Logic files.
It would take an immeasurable amount of effort to somehow extract the MIDI and audio data from those files, and somehow convert them into Ardour files.
I would lose EQ and compressor settings - and - even then, the plugins I use - iZotope and Native Instruments software, in particular - wouldn’t work.
That’s just one simple example - and there’s one of those for almost anyone.
The larger one is the corporate/enterprise situation, where proprietary applications are often hanging on by a thread with the office ecosystem as-is, and - no - they will not convert these applications over to Linux.
They won’t update those applications to start.
Linux is great, it’s awesome that it exists, and it can work for a very small minority of people.
It's indeed true that many times you don't have a say over what software or even OS you have to use for your work. For a lot of us the software devs we do have the choice -- but even then we naturally converge to macOS or Linux due to less friction and more productivity.
And yep, entrenching is basically the name of the game for most orgs. They are deathly scared of change. Linux will not change that. It changes the game for the professionals, not the companies (and even that is not 100% true; they still use Linux servers for almost everything).
And of course Apple is still a moving target. I'm not going back to a x86 toaster of a laptop with 5 hrs of battery life, when i can have one which stays cool for 11. Signs point to them ditching the touchbar too.
[0] https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...
[1] Disclosures / context:
- I have an X1 carbon for work
- I vastly prefer my M1 Macbook Pro
- I miss i3wm, i used to run it on laptop and desktop in college, on Arch.
For me, BetterTouchTool is a godsend though, i can use the trackpad to 'grab' and 'resize' windows without hunting for the little <-> thing that's for some reason 0.5 pixels wide :D. BTT implements all of Windows' snappy edges and corners and whatnot.
I use Raycast (https://www.raycast.com/) as a cmd+space replacement and it's great and quick too
MacOS is strangely more customizable than a lot of things
Let's see... it lets you change accent colors, which puts it just ahead of my toaster but behind my car's infotainment dashboard in terms of customization. So you're not wrong, unless you're specifically talking about the context of operating systems.
Some apps I like
- Better Touch Tool https://folivora.ai/
- MTMR https://mtmr.app/ (admittedly hate the touchbar but hey at least i can tweak it)
- iTerm is def the best terminal app experience
- the builtin trackpad is by far the best of any OS (esp boosted by BTT), but for plugged in mice i use https://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/
- there are a large handful of automation oriented apps which way outperform windows and IMO beat linux in terms of usability but not in terms of customizability. Often though, the solution you can whip up in a couple hours is better than the one you (didn't) whip up in 2 weeks https://thesweetbits.com/best-mac-automation-apps/
- thanks to superior graphics APIs on mac you can get nice polish on lots of interesting apps (eg https://slidepad.app/). Often you just can't get that on linux because nobody has the time. The selection just doesn't exist.
I admit I don't care much about total time on battery though. I'm a dev and I need the full performance so never tinkered with power profiles and such. To me it's "100% the CPU power at all times or get out".
Just an anecdote.
My issue is, the alternatives are just not as high quality. I looked at ditching my iPhone 12 for a Pixel 4 or a Samsung, and maybe getting the Samsung watch (which I hear can do blood pressure now?). But I've read so many bad reviews. Sadly, one of the biggest things that keeps me on Apple right now is iMessage. We have plenty of Apple products in the household, so I'd never ditch them totally.
But besides that, I bought a Pixel 5a for testing of android apps. While the experience is majorly improved over my last android experience...it just feels wrong. Animations are not consistent across apps. Swipe actions sometimes follow your finger, sometimes they don't. I thought widgets would be better...but wow are they ugly out of the box. Yes I am aware you can customize everything, but I really don't want to spend hours figuring all that out when I can just have sane defaults. I feel like looking at screenshots you can say that android and iOS are very similar, but that leaves out the most important part of a touch only device - the interactions with content on screen.
Worth having a shitter phone just to have the feature of not being on the family thread.
I did use an Android phone around 2010 (Nexus One) and it was "just okay". This was pre-iMessage. Now it really is annoying to have someone make the chat "go green". "So and so liked your message". I've seen people set up iMessage gateways just to get around this... but it's just not ideal.
Widgets were a big selling point in the earlier days of the Android vs iOS debate, but Google has really left them to rot over the years. Now that iOS has them, it seems like Google might be finally giving them attention again? At the very least, they're getting redesigns, but I don't know if I've heard anything about them addressing the more technical reasons of why they feel so outdated compared to the rest of the platform.
I used to send and receive text messages all the time on Linux. I use email, but it works fine.
Copy / Paste across devices, handoff of documents, synchronization of files that actually works and won't get stuck for weeks updating a file.
As for iCloud, one thing that Google/Microsoft/etc don't get is family sharing. We share a 2TB iCloud plan across the family, and while the plan is tied to my credit card, the data is not "mine". If i die tomorrow my credit card dies with me, and presumably so does my iCloud subscription, but all my family needs to do is start paying for another plan, and their data "magically" transfers from my icloud subscription to theirs.
The Apple ecosystem is not without flaws though. Personally i would love for TimeMachine (or 3rd party tools) to be able to backup iCloud storage without having to synchronize data locally first. I keep a Mac Mini for the purpose, which also acts as a content cache for iCloud storage, meaning most file access from our house is done at "LAN speed", but i would love to simply click a setting on my macbook and it would "magically" include that content in the backup.
Nope. I just installed Ubuntu 20.04 and within a few days I was messing with xrandr commands to get the HDMI resolution set to anything but 800x600.
Linux will never be good on the desktop. Not because there are too many cooks in the kitchen, but because there's too many biochemists in the commune.
Latest one is the M1 air and it's almost perfect. It never gets hot, it never gets noisy, performance is superb, battery life amazing.
Really hoping a similar ARM based linux machine comes out that can beat it, but for the time being I'd find it difficult to switch away from my Air!
I was looking forward to Qualcomm's ARM Dev kit for Windows, but it hasn't released yet outside of what seems to be some listings on chinese websites for bulk orders of 100+ units.
It really sucks that my Pinebook Pro is still the best I can get as far as ARM linux laptops go that are easy to use and try different distros on.
It also has a few issues that are unsolvable without some redesigning on pine64's part. The main issue being heat from the SoC causing the charging circuit to shut off. Under a heavy load you can watch the battery go down while its plugged in. My battery is starting to die after 8 months (voltage drops enough to cause a hard shutoff around 60%). I'm not sure if the issues are related but I'm simply going to pull out the battery and connect the internal wiring for running purely from the wall bypassing the battery. Some argue that the 3A power inputs just aren't enough for the draw the pinebook pro can pull off especially if you start overclocking (2ghz on the big, 1.8ghz on the little cores is totally possible). Personally I left everything stock.
As a daily driver I really can't recommend it unless you live in terminal and don't need to do a whole lot of web browsing. Video streaming (twitch/youtube) + Fast stream chatrooms bring that poor rockchip to its knees even at 480 to 720p.
The Pinebook Pro gets a lot of love from the community but it is a very very niche device for a particular kind of enthusiast.
For that someone should've been outputting consumer devices for 12-15 years.
(And believe me, it's a huge cognitive dissonance to convince yourself out of using the iMac Pro as much as you can...)
Look, if it doesn't work for you anymore, alright. Move to Linux. Most of us the devs will eventually move to it anyway I think, since Apple just doesn't care about dev ergonomics -- especially with scanning each binary you run; try working under Linux for a week and you'll say to yourself "gosh, computers can be FAST!" -- but truthfully, many employers don't care about our ergonomics as well and they are OK with the lost productivity of waiting for tools to just... run, you know.
I agree Apple Music is a train wreck though, that's a fact.
In any case, I wish people learned to just make two small lists with pros and cons and be done with it. Using language like the quote in the start:
> I realised that my life while using Apple products is controlled by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a raise, rather than by technology people who share the same passion as me. And I wanted to change that.
...is true to an extent but it gives you exactly zero things that are actually and visibly wrong. (Obviously this is an exaggeration, e.g. they mention subscription model vs. paying for stuff once which is valid, but my overall point is about things that are technical, not business-level.)
So, good for him I suppose but the article could have been written in a much more compelling and factual manner.
You do realize you can disable a healthy chunk of this stuff, right? A dev might not want it, but end users (non-technical, as much as this term annoys me) benefit from it.
Disable SIP (recovery mode dance) and disable GateKeeper (spctl) and you're off to a decent start.
They even document it, it's not hidden: https://help.apple.com/xcode/mac/10.2/index.html?localePath=...
Plus I am very scared when it comes to Mac security. I am pretty sure that to this day their mitigation strategy is "almost nobody is writing viruses for Mac anyway". :D I will not risk disabling SIP especially with programs like Chrome on my Mac.
The sad part is that they _can_ make it work better and be faster but they don't want to. That's why in a few years time my iMac Pro is simply going to be the most expensive day-to-day desktop machine in a 1km radius and I'll use a cheap Ryzen laptop (or expensive Threadripper workstation) for actual work.
The very existence of SIP/Notarization/a bug bounty program/etc indicates their stance is otherwise. ;P
I recall CS grad school 10 years ago as being a sea of Macbooks…
This aside, in the dorm Macs were maybe 10-20% with a healthy amount of mac hating.
This is not true in Europe and Asia.
Updates break something so often that I wonder if it somehow is sponsored by other OS developers to make them look good.
But you must have some strange workflows going - I've been on arch fulltime for 3 years now, and my one breakage was that dash-to-dock didn't play nicely with a new version of gnome.
Frankly - it's a far better experience than the 16inch macbook pro my work issued me - that has problems with fans, problems with lag during zoom calls, problems with accelerated rendering in chrome, issues with wifi and bluetooth connections. I literally call it my crapbook it's so bad.
Right now my sound is broken and it stayed broken even after an update and reboot (That you have to reboot so often is something else that bothers me. Rebooting a Linux/Unix machine feels so wrong).
Your MacBook problems sound like hardware problems. That's not something I would expect from any decent laptop these days.
Compared to the hell that was upgrading Ubuntu versions every couple of years, I'll take Arch's way any day.
I've been running it for 3 years on 4 machines and I've had far less breakage from updates than with my Windows or Mac machines.
Arch lets me engage with the open-source community directly and get fixes to issues faster than more curated OSes like Ubuntu. I have access to more diagnostic information and tools that what Windows provides. And privacy and freedom isn't compromised like on MacOS.
Also, it's gotten really good for games. It plays pretty much everything I've wanted to play, from Stellaris, Cyberpunk 2077, and Humankind.
So, sometimes opinions need updates.
I've been running Arch (Endeavor w/KDE now) as a desktop for probably 7 years and I just use my device. I get updates that break small things in KDE, or give me major screen tearing in Firefox once in awhile, but nothing that "breaks so often". It's pretty good and solid in 2021...
- OS: Arch Linux
- Window Manager: Sway
- Backups: rsync.net
- Mail: migadu.com
- Coding sr.ht
- Private servers: kimsufi.com
- Music: bandcamp.com
- Headphones: Grado SR325 X
- Camera: Fujuifilm X-T4
Fastmail has contributed a huge amount to the open source community, also include Calendar support (Migadu does not) and has a fantastic web interface (where Migadu is extremely lacking).
I'm fairly sure that Migadu also supports caldav, although I don't think there's any UI for it on the web. I think there's pretty much an expectation that most people using Migadu are bringing their own clients rather than using the web one anyways.
If I really wanted a different web UI I could still just run my own and sync using IMAP.
Their service is excellent and cheap. I highly recommend them.
I've been using Posteo for years, and I have also been very happy with their service.
And yes, the convenience is great, until 1) you stop paying, 2) they go out of business, or 3) you are interested in music they don't have licenses to.
As contentous as the relationships are between spotify-alike services and the music rightsholders, I don't believe that they are a very good long term investment. I almost expect to see the music space to move towards where the TV space is now - each publisher running their own streaming service.
But I see the value now. I also think that Arch/Sway/Wayland is stable enough to be usable for serious work. In fact, I don't think I can get back to macOS anytime soon. Every time I use Windows/mac I feel that the operating system is getting on the way.
But there is a small price to pay: Custom configuration. My setup consists of Sway, Vivaldi, Skype, and Alacritty (tmux). I have three screens (and found Linux to be more stable in supporting that than macOS); two are terminals/tmux and one is the browser. I have a small program launcher (dmenu) and a custom clipboard logger. That's all there is to my setup. Everything else is noise. Once you get used to that, you can't go back.
I also have Skype, OpenSnitch, Eaton Power management, Docker (with a Bitcoin node and bunch of other ), around 90-100 open tabs in Vivaldi, encrypted hard-drive, automatic backups to a NAS/mounted volumes, and multiple tmux sessions open. I only restart my PC for updates, and it has been constantly running for close to a year now. I don't remember ever coming to bug that requires a restart. I had some issues with browsers before, but I can kill them and start again. The environment is so lag-free that it's ridiculous. I switch tabs, programs, terminals, sessions, etc... with a 0 human-noticeable lag. That's impossible to achieve in macOS or Windows. (at least in Windows with the same machine).
There is some truth to Apple's engineering being directed by product managers who want raises - which (given that Apple is a large company) would generally require directing it toward Apple's bottom line and promoting Apple's goods and services.
At the same time there are a number of smart people at Apple, in both product management and engineering, who work there in order to advance good design, ease of use, reliability, privacy, and the development of computing technology that benefits and empowers its users - and not just the company that sells it.
Moreover, pretty much everyone at Apple knows that you don't create transformative products by bean counting and risk aversion.
But if you want something built by and for a community of technical enthusiasts, hobbyists, researchers, and hackers/tinkerers, open source software and disaggregated systems may be a superior ecosystem for you, and that's a good thing because a vibrant enthusiast and free/open software and hardware community provides many benefits to the world.
FWIW, I've used iPhones for 11 years, I've had a bunch of iPads for media use on-the-go and kids, and I even have a macbook pro that my employer provided (a very nice $3,000 monitor riser)
But most of my home machines are Windows 10. I've lived in the MS ecosystem since the DOS 3 era and that's where I feel most at home. Using macOS is a frustrating experience for me, it feels like a toy environment (though I'm sure some folks feel the same about Windows if they've grown up in the mac world).
That said, I've been toying with Linux every now and then; I've got a couple of Raspberry Pis in the house that I self-manage (for things like pi-hole, nas, vpn tunnel, etc.), I've been using WSL2 and Docker on my PCs and even have an older laptop running Arch that I sometimes poke at. I regret not getting more serious into Linux before; it's difficult to switch now, but I don't like where MS is taking Windows (funneling everyone into their Bing / ADs with Edge being pushed aggressively and search / news being shoved more and more deeply into the OS) so I'll have to begrudgingly leave my place of comfort in search of lost freedom.
Even their installer is actually a live environment where you can do whatever you like, and you also have the "Install Manjaro" button on your desktop. A ready and working desktop environment for you to do stuff in while the OS is installing. A rarely well-polished Linux experience.
I agree macOS feels like a toy. I use it full time for 2.5 years now and I still can't shake this feeling. Both on Windows (ever since 98 and all the way to 10) and several Linux GUI flavours I used, I could make keybinds for literally anything and everything and basically optimize my machine for super productivity. With macOS that's either not easy or requires buying several software packages to do.
But how are you are more productive?
In what ways did the revised toolset improve productive output?
What are you producing and how do these tools compare to each other?
To me, the 'more productive' argument is a bit of strawman.
Totally cool to change toolsets and all though :-)
The thing that cemented that for me recently was how Apple now insists on notarization for all applications, even command line applications. My current company uses old versions of lots of open source applications, and MacOS constantly freaks out about them.
Time to move to Linux full time.
> doesn't do photoshop
> doesn't create music
> doesn't use specialized domain specific software such as CAD etc
> doesn't play modern games
> doesn‘t need to interact with people using ms office files
ok sure, you can entirely rely on linux if you want to code in the terminal, play some mp3s and store some jpgs.
but the presented use cases exclude vast groups of people
When it comes to hardware, Apple is a few years ahead, however. Battery life and screen technology are quality-of-life factors, especially for people who often work away from home and without an external monitor.
That, and the accessories. Going from AirPods Pro to wired headphones would be a major inconvenience as I have an active lifestyle -- even my linux box supports bluetooth headphones, and it's nice to be able to get up from the computer without taking them off.
Give it a decade or so...
The android users at my day job are extremely vocal about hating Apple, yet the people using Apple devices mostly mind their own business.
Perhaps it's an ego thing? Like maybe they can't afford Apple devices for their whole family so they buy Android and hate on Apple instead.
Im still using a 2015 macbook pro because I want my hdmi port and usb ports. I have a backup in case this one dies. Over time the computer has not slowed down at all.
I use android because the iphone system does weird things that I cant be bothered to figure out. For example we have icloud turned off everywhere, but icloud still manages to fill up and send messages. The iphone periodically requires authentication with a device I dont have on me (e.g. an ios device that I dont have in my possession). Text messages still get echoed to multiple devices meaning my kids and wife see each others' texts.
It is also still missing features that I need. The dialer still cant use T9. The calendar cant change the default snooze for 2 minutes before an event. It also wont keep reminding you if you dont kill the snooze.
My home desktop uses windows because it runs blue iris which manages my security cameras.
Linux doesn't even have a decent modern email app. The best option there is Thunderbird, which is quite good but not really on-par with the offerings on Mac. Apps like Sparrow, Mimestream, Spark etc have no Linux equivalent. Mimestream is my choice due to its deep Gmail integration.
And this is just email.
Primary example is hidpi support. My laptop has a 1440p screen and I use a 1080p external one. And then sometimes I disconnect it and go into a meeting room or something to work without an external display.
I set 200% scaling for laptop screen when I'm at the desk and 150% when I'm out and about.
Simple usecase, but I've never managed to make it work properly and consistently. It's been like that for the last 3 years. I just keep coming back to Windows where it works perfectly.
Wayland keeps getting better, but some important apps don't support it yet. For example there IS a build of VSCode that works on Wayland, but it freezes up if you move the window between displays with scaling on.
And then there is KDE wayland session, that still loves to crash if you pull out the second screen DP cable "wrong".
Linux is not there yet, and honestly, I'm not sure if it will ever be. It might me destined to forever play catch-up with the "big-tech" OSes.
On top of that, how do you even beat the level of vertical integration that Apple has with M1 chips and MacOS?
My phone has been an iPhone since 3GS.
Just looking at the apps I use on my mac, the only "Apple" apps are Messages (along with a bunch of others like Zoom and LINE and Telegram and Skype and Whatsapp for different groups/work) and Photos.
I use Office 365 for Mac and OneDrive because it has a free 1TB as part of the sub.
I was backing up using Time Machine to an SMB box running Ubuntu, but Time Machine with APFS over SMB is painfully slow and unreliable. I went and bought Arq and it replaced my back up needs. If/When I need to bring up a new machine, I'll use Apple's stuff to do that.
I've also got the following:
* Macports: Has all of the OSS/CLI tools, libraries etc. Better than homebrew because it doesn't do stupid tricks with /usr/local and root privileges and works with the Apple frameworks cleanly
* Office 365: Needed for work purposes, I use OneDrive with Arq as a remote backup location.
* Firefox: Never seen the need to use any other browser
* Thunderbird: Happy enough as a mail client, use fastmail as my mail server.
* iTerm2: Awesome terminal that integrates with tmux and other stuff
MacOS free utilities I use:
* Karabiner-Elements: Allows me to map my EU ISO WASD keyboard
* Rectangle: Gives me keyboard window placement/sizing
* Stats: Menu bar widgets for CPU/Network etc
Along the way I've bought various MacOS utilities:
* Pathfinder: Replacement for Finder that has more features
* Bartender: Keeps my menu bar clean of unnecessary widgets unless they are doing something "interesting"
* Dash: Awesome documentation tool
The first few years it was actually some work - compiled my own custom kernels, installed a lot of extra software I needed from source. But over the years that became less and less necessary. Kernels just work, all software I need is already packaged.
These days I just install Fedora (in my case, I assume Arch, Ubuntu, etc would have the same results) on my Desktops/Laptops and it just works.
Now, for work I still happily use a MacBook, but that Laptop is not mine anyway; I am aware and do not mind that my employer and Apple control it for me.
Similarly my private phone is an unlocked Pixel and my workphone is an iPhone.
Leaving the Insert Big Tech ecosystem behind
The deal is that capital is very cheap for Insert Big Tech and the cost of customer acquisition is so easy. So at some point, the economies of scale and subsequent monetization can only be reversed by intentionally moving to smaller providers or making informed choices on supporting other businesses.
IMO - This is not a convenience factor for most people, but for those willing to embrace it, it will open up your way - and compensate many software companies very well.
But I don’t know if I fully buy the argument here. Mac OS is a scriptable environment and nothing even requires you to have an iCloud account or use all the Apple ecosystem stuff on a MacBook. My work laptop is a MacBook and I still use only open source stuff on it, which I script for greater productivity, and it feels very efficient.
You don't need special permission, or a hacked computer, to do the things the non-apple way.
I moved to Linux 7 years ago from MacOS (and windows before that). As I get older, my patience wanes for dealing with the, half-baked house-of-cards teetering on collapse, Linux ecosystem. I just want something that works better, and took a different direction than the modern versions of Windows or MacOS.
I should have learnt Vi.
(And for the record, I like Apples better, and tried to emulate them on Windows for a while but It was never quite right)
I’ve seen very few releases on Bandcamp that weren’t already present in Apple Music/Spotify/Tidal etc.
The author could’ve done this even within the Apple ecosystem. The vast majority of photographers use iPhones too, but manage their DSLR/mirrorless photos with iPhoto too.
That said, there's a trope displayed in this post that's getting especially old to me on HN, and that's the: "POs/PMs ruin everything (or are useless), and all they care about is getting a raise or promotion.. not the technology (or the users, or the product)."
I find the tribalism baked into this oft-repeated viewpoint super annoying. And I believe the author, and others parroting these ideas.. are projecting a viewpoint all over the place without much substance.
And I think it's actually harmful to organizations and teams working effectively together. So maybe we should look a little deeper and leave the engineers-are-better-than-everyone-else bigotry out of it.
- development on linux is superior. docker works faster. the number of packages available on linux. for devops tooling cli, linux is still first class citizen, bit higher than macos.
- tiling windows manager is hella better than those available on macos (yabai, amethyst, etc..)
- the hardware is cheaper, and even more powerful (for the same price).
-
I'm able to run two external monitors, plus the internal display, on my work 2017 15" MBP and my personal 2017 13" MBP. The 13" MBP is running Big Sur, but work hasn't approved that for the 15" one yet.
Big Sur has given me no issues with the multi-monitor setup.
pacman -S hunspellIn my case; time wasted is money lost and with no money made means affordability becomes a problem.
The best OS platform ecosystem I use is the one that not only saves time, but also saves me spending money whilst continuing to make me the most money.
This actually turns out to be a decent setup. My Mac handles Zoom and a handful of other things that are fickle with hardware, and my VM is where my work happens.
Cute idea.
If you check my posts here I started being vocal about my personal Apple problems, before this I happily browsed here on HN (2008) and did not express my thoughts, mainly because here I have learned so much and witnessed startups becoming well established businesses. But something clicked after Mac Pro was released, a computer delayed for so long, that to solve my business problems I had to build several Hackintoshes.
I hoped that this time Apple will be focused on professional audience, without any tricks but no. Wheels and 1000 buck monitor stands? WTF. And the pricing. OMG. Clearly this was a message: You wanted professional computer, you will pay the premium to stay in the Ecosystem.
Fast forward to 2021. CSAM on the macOS, but trust us we will make it better?
No way Apple. No f-ng way. This is my property, my data is my property. I don't care what shenanigans your lawyers are buried in the EULA, and what is "publicly responsible thing". You create user technology. Users have full responsibility how they will use it by law. Can you imagine your kitchen knife to check what meat you trying to cut with it?
Because this will be the logical "tech" direction. Let's check you washing machines for illegal content. What about your Apple Car?
What about your iOS security? Pegasus/NSO, what about big bounties for security researchers, richest company of the world did not have enough to invest in effective Red Teams? GTFO.
So this was the "final straw" for me. Now my company runs ARCH on old Apple hardware and all the money that I have saved to participate in Apple's Arm transition will go towards solutions with maximum professional control and privacy.
Instead of Mac Pro I plan to have this thing: https://bit.ly/3zxlkBS.
Instead of buying Apple's iSpy devices I will run old Pixel with Graphene OS or dumb flip phone.
There are a lot of tech savvy pros that don't care. I know. They have not lived in Apple land and still thinking that "easy way" is the right way.
That the ecosystem gives more than it takes away. That may be if they participate in this monopoly they will find a small or big business success. Apple has you, by the balls. UX from hell painted with good intentions and lack of responsibility.
I on other hand will never run my data on something that is not FOSS. And will invest my money in adequate hardware solutions.
And when time comes to give some "consumer" advice I will be honest to my customers and friends. A small contribution, previously reserved for Apple hardware and software. Not anymore.:)
I personally never had a problem with Macbooks, and surprised he just didn't work in a VM. I do 90% of my daily work in a VM on my Macbook, either running Arch or Debian. Everything just works. But I can not stand with apple's choice of moving to ARM for a power user.
My Next Machine will run windows as the base OS. I'll test out their Linux for Windows Subsystem, but most likely just boot up the same VMware VM's i've been using for a long time. Between Snapshots and backups to both my onsite server and my Personal Sharepoint, I never have an issue.
Spotify for music though, it just works and easy to push music around my home.
In what way?
Google Photos is a third-party app, and it syncs photos a few magnitudes faster than Apple Photos.
I never know in which state Apple Photos are at any given moment: is it syncing? is it stuck? why?
Okay, I'll bite, because that's amusing(I find that interacting with anything Android is consistently a torture) and I don't use Apple devices so I have no idea what you could be thinking of. How is iOS stuff becoming more like Android, and how is it better than whatever it did before?
Android simply does most thing UI better. The pull down menu and notifications, the app drawer, the home screens, the settings menu layouts, etc. Sure there are some iOS UI elements that are done better, such as gestures. But really iOS shines more under the hood.
Every year iOS keeps getting more and more Android features. App Library, Pull Down menus, more customizable home screens with widgets. There are so many things Android was doing years before iOS it is crazy. Maybe oneday Apple will fix the crappy settings menu and finally make the pulldown window a full copy of android with quick settings at the top.
Using iOS is consistently more of a Torture to use than Android any day of the week.
I almost spat out my coffee reading this. Android is horribly inconsistent, apps targeting different API levels get different default themes and UI elements, many built-in UI controls are ugly (which is why not many developers seem to stick with them) and the whole thing is made worse by manufacturers who can't leave good alone and "skin" their own launchers and equivalents to the default built-in apps. Scrolling behaviour on Android still sucks, putting everything behind "hamburger menus" is not intuitive and quite often apps just lack basic gestures. The gestures that are implemented don't even provide particularly good feedback — the little bouncy arrow thing when sliding in from the left to "go back" is awful and nowhere near as good of a visual cue as sliding-over is (like iOS does).
That's not to say that iOS design is perfect — it isn't by any stretch. It's a damn sight more consistent and predictable though and much easier to explain to non-technical users.
The notification system alone is leaps and bounds better. The fact that you can use uBlock Origin on Android also makes the UI far more pleasant.