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Comment by BadOakOx | Hacker News Reader

But is it faster? And does it actually work?

I might be unlucky, but I can't count on my two hands how many times did my 2019 MacBook Pro become unresponsive (and occasionally it restarted itself... After being unresponsive for 10 minutes). It's a work laptop and there is some admin software on it (afaik), so that might influence my experience... But after a year of use, I still sometimes feel the need to defenestrate it...

My favorite bit is that after a restart sometimes it gives me a screen where I can't change the keyboard layout.. and I can't type my password because of the special characters I use. So, I just restart again and hope I get a login screen with the keyboard layout change possible. (And yes I have changed the default layout multiple times, but it always switches back to some other default)

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I hate my work-provided MacBook SO. MUCH. I begged them to give me a ThinkPad with Linux instead, and it's been a litany of problems in the three months I've been using it. I did all my dev work on MacBooks between 2007-2013, but my experience this year has completely vindicated my decision to ditch the Mac at home and at work back then.

I see people in this thread complaining that Linux distros are unreliable, but my Linux machines don't do things like beachball for 20s at a time or have complete audio system crashes requiring reboot twice a week. (Always right before a videoconference! I missed fifteen minutes of a call last week scrambling to fetch another device because the audio subsystem died and the Mac decided it had to install updates for a half hour when it rebooted.)

It's not uncommon to see uptimes on my ThinkPads measured in months. The Mac? At least it boots fast. I have to restart it once or twice a week.

Reliability aside -- and I realize that everyone values ergonomic factors differently -- Linux is just a better choice in every regard for me and the kind of work that I do. Interactive performance is much better, the docker-based workflows everyone's using are so much faster when they're native, and there's no mismatch between Darwin's BSD userland and the Ubuntu/CentOS you're probably using in prod.

All I can say is that my experience on macOS is completely different from yours. Invasive MDM software from employers not withstanding, I’ve never had major beachball problems that have persisted for days, I’ve never even hated the bad keyboards that much.

I’ve been using Macs since 1984. They’re not perfect, but throughout that time, they have demonstrated over and over again that they are the least horrible hardware/os platform that I have used. Some years are better, but all years have been better on macOS than any other hardware platform I have experience with.

Either a defective unit or the admin software doing something wrong. I've had many personal and work provided MacBook air/pros and never faced anything of this Actually the biggest issue I've had has been related to the terrible keyboards they used to put in the 2018~2020 models

My partner also works in tech. Between the two of us, and between home and work, we've bought or used probably 25-30 of these over the years. I gave her an M1 air this holiday season! We've had pros, airs, and iMacs in four or five different colors occupying our living spaces for fifteen or twenty years now. We've used them for work and for play, for software development and video editing and graphic design and media consumption.

My verdict is: the hardware is usually GREAT but MacOS isn't. It bothered me when I quit the platform ages ago, and it is still bothering me now: little I care about has changed or improved. New annoyances though!

In aggregate I'd say I've spent ca. 15 hours staring at the beachball. Intrusive admin software has been a problem in the past for sure -- especially at Google -- but I've bought dozens of these for home use as well. Either 90% of their units are defective or we're using our computers very differently.

Terrible keyboards are another thing entirely, Lenovo went through a bout of that with the X1. My gripes about Macs are almost entirely about OSX performance/reliability and command-line habitability: version over version, it almost never improves. For my workflows

If you are unable to successfully log in after two boots, you get booted into a password recovery mode that has options including "My keyboard works but I am unable to enter my password", and on the reset options, makes mention of being careful about the characters you choose...

... so a bit more commonplace than "defective unit" or "admin software".

You want to try one of the new ARM based ones. The experience is completely different.

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