Daily-driving a Mac, one year later
catfox.life
catfox.life
I was also extremely annoyed at the lack of upgradable storage as my needs quickly outgrew the pitiful base storage. I gave up and switched to an older thinkpad that runs Linux natively and I now have 4 times the storage of the MacBook for peanuts and can easily add more for cheap. Slightly slower but feels much faster than macOS due to linux being much lighter.
The idea of using an older Thinkpad with Linux having fewer “speed bumps” than any Mac seems hard to imagine based on my own experience. Guess it depends on what you use a computer for.
I don’t think anyone would argue that Linux is not more customizable or does not give you more options.
Then you have other poor choices to deal with like being the only OS with no support for MTP out of the box, and most mind bogglingly can't even adjust volume of HDMI/DP devices.
I mean that Apple has grown steadily more opinionated about how "their" machines ought to be used, and not in ways that suit me. Every new version of MacOS requires me to struggle through a bunch of new stuff I don't need or want before I can get back to using the machine the way I'm used to. I don't want to create an Apple account, I don't want iCloud backup, I don't want to use an app store, and I can't stand the constant barrage of notifications blinking away in the corner of the screen. I don't want Apple to protect me from running the application I just downloaded a minute ago, and I really don't want Apple to protect me from using applications they haven't approved and cryptographically signed... On it goes. I understand why they think all this stuff matters, but I have different priorities. I don't need Apple to manage my digital life, and I wish they'd stop trying to force me into their groove.
But as soon as I upgraded, everything went away. I remember something weird like I could “pick up” a window and swap workspaces and drop it and it was perfect.
I can only guess that that feature was some emergent property of the implementation and not a design goal because I never really got it back.
Just tried that on Plasma, works perfectly. The ̶f̶u̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ past is now!
I can use either one but I find the older hardware with Manjaro on it more productive for me. I do a bit of .NET dev and Docker / Distrobox stuff but honestly it is mostly office work ( Zoom, MS Teams, presentations, spreadsheets, email, Slack, and the web / cloud ). All the software I use is totally up to date though and, as above, I just run into fewer “speed bumps” on Linux.
To be fair, that suits my wife just fine. She is in Marketing and teaches as a prof. She definitely prefers the Mac experience the newer iMac brings. Then again, she asks me to help her with stuff quite often. So she is certainly running into her share of “speed bumps” too.
My advice to the Ubuntu, Fedora, etc teams: focus ruthlessly on creating a smooth experience for the office/enterprise clientele who mostly use a narrow set of hardware (thinkpads x/t, dell inspirons, etc). Get this to a place where everything just works and lobby partners when it doesn't. Example from two days ago: shared my screen on zoom, clicked to stop screen sharing and the UI on my side didn't update. So another attendee went to share their screen and I couldn't see it - I had to rejoin. Worst still, that happens intermittently.
That said, I'm personally bearish on this ever happening against a much more well funded incumbent that is now producing ground breaking hardware with the M1s, etc.
That said, I use Zoom daily on Manjaro and have not had that happen. It happened to me just last week on my iPhone though.
While I love Airplay, I use Plex to stream media not only to my iPhone and the Apple TV downstairs but also to my Roku, my LG TV, an Amazon Fire stick, and my son’s Android tablet. Even after buying expensive apps, I could never get AirPlay working on the Fire stick or the LG TV ( the places my wife wants to watch ).
There are some cool features like clipboard being shared between my computer and my phone, but e.g. sending a website between the two machines is “half-baked”, as it simply shares a link, which is pretty useless when I want to continue reading the hn thread from the same point I left it on my other device. Opening the same link can be “hacked” into android and kdeconnect just as well, it’s not some difficult thing.
Focus mode and friends are yet again, quite trivial. I can accept that the ipad as an external screen thingy is cooler that these examples, but I don’t have experience with that.
M1 Mac Mini .......... $1099
M1 MacBook Air ....... $1399
M1 iMac ......,....... $1699
M1 Pro Mac Studio .... $1999
M1 Pro MacBook Pro 14" $1999
M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16" $2499
I think 1440p displays work well too, or at least they did back in 2014 when I was using Macs, but I didn't see any for sale when I was shopping for an interim while I wait three months for the Studio Display to ship.
Stay away from an old 2K 1440p at this point. Since Apple removed the old sub pixel rendering, those 1440p panels look too soft anymore. The 4K scaled 1440p looks much sharper than those.
My main use case for the Mac Studio is photography and video editing, so an Apple Studio display is definitely on my wish list.
What would high-cost really be? $5/workday isn’t even high-cost to me if it was a daily coffee bill, but certainly not if it’s your main computing device.
The problem is initial capex: you have to have that amount of money all at once, even if it is cheaper in the long run. Some people do not have access to even credit of that amount, let alone the cash for it.
About my own laptop, given my kind of work (web development Rails, Django, Elixir) I don't see reasons to buy something more recent and faster. On a current project Rails test suite it's slower than a M1 75 s vs 50 s but I can live with that considering that we're not running all tests every time. Typing in an editor is as fast as any computer was in the last 30+ years. I expect to have to replace it either because of missing spare parts or some NVIDIA / Linux kernel incompatibilities in the next years.
As for desktops, I use them for even longer. I still use a first gen PPC Mac Mini as a in-home music streamer. I no longer run Mac OS X on it since there are no security updates.
I don't like Macs these days, but this is 100% true. In my experience, people who buy macs keep them significantly longer, so comparing simply the price tag of Mac vs. PC is very misleading. The correct comparison is "total cost of ownership".
And if they can’t afford comparable PC’s, then Macs are not affordable. There are many affordable non-mac options.
Partially because Apple's naming is useless, e.g. would you like to buy a macbook air or a macbook air or a macbook air? All very different machines from different years.
In the US, $20 or $30 is negligible to the frivolous expenses of the average household budget. In laptop-buying households, even more so. Let's not confuse misperception of value to affordability.
> About the final point—are Macs really "high cost"?
There are zero low cost macs, while other low cost computers are abundant.
> If a Mac is $2100 instead of $700, that's only a few hundred dollars more per year, or $20-30 a month.
Your concept of what “average people” can afford is very convenient for your argument because you made it up. To most people a product that is $1400 more expensive is considered much, much more expensive. The fact that you have to invent a payment plan to support your argument says a lot.
I like macs, they are nice. But they are high priced and expensive. They can be both worth the extra money while also being too high priced for a huge number of average people.
Are they though? Properly specced PCs have more than decent lives too. The build quality of a Mac or an equivalent-ish ( so not the plastic cheapest possible model ) devicedecent OEM like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus aren't that far off.
I have a fancy-ish Asus with aluminium body that is 7 years old now ( that cost 1/3 the price of a MacBook Pro at the time) which, next to my newly issued MBP, looks decent. Weird clickicking sound from the right button on the touchpad, small screen and thick bezels aside ( all of which are more due to the age than anything else) it still works perfectly.
Thanks for the correction.
They're reasonable for top end buyers, but not as reasonable for consumers, and everyday coders.
Its still fine for most things, if I need to compile something large, I connect to my 64 core build machine. But of course I tend to use my (also fairly old) desktop more than the laptop anyway.
PS: It is a cheap dell 14" inspiron with a 1080P screen, integrated GPU, and its a bulletproof linux machine. Supports S3 standby, and idles at a few watt's. So even with its sorta crummy 3 cell battery (also replaced once) it lasts 8+ hours just browsing the web and running a text editor.
The battery is definitely a bit worn by this point, but I mostly just use it as a desktop, I have a $100 HP from I don't even know when that I use for actual on the go work, it's smaller and lighter and less likely to ruin my life if stolen on the bus. And it's even fast enough to run FreeCAD!
Not FOSS in general, but specifically the Linux desktop ecosystem is very chaotic. There is this rush to get a close-enough adoptation of features from other desktops which in itself adds chaos. I did learn a lot from dealing with the chaos but even when I had free time, practical things like editing government forms or sending a resume in a specific format (converting botches the formatting) made me almost pull my hair out.
Unpopular opinion: Linux desktops needs to be proprietary software friendly. As in accept blob installers that can install desktop applications that work well on any major DE and without consideration for package managers. Paid apps should also be a thing on Linux.
Isn't this already the case? I'm running Spotify and Steam games with no issues here.
While I agree with your greater point that a system that gets out of your way is nice, I always find myself swearing when using Windows and trying to bend macOS to do things the way I want. In the end I just gave up and went back to Linux on a "basic" PC (no Nvidia or multiple GPUs on my laptop).
The two major things I miss are HD streaming on PrimeVideo and Photoshop, both of which work well on Windows and macOS. For the former I bought I firetv stick and for the latter, I dual boot (I only need it occasionally).
It depends on what you are doing I guess. I remember getting frustrated at windows too. Linux is the best at being configurable and controllable from an administrative workload perspective but not from a productivity or entertainment application UX.
Isn't that exactly what appimages are? E.g. download Krita, double click, done.
Also, I thought with mobile people finally realized that "download blobs" is much worse than just installing from stores/repos? Even Windows has winget by now.
On mac, I don't use their appstore, I just get dmg images and get going. Same on windows. On linux, I try to stick to the package manager but man! The moment I touch python I regret not using venv and avoiding any interaction with the system's python almost every time. Or if a distro package lacks some feature because of distro decisions which should have been install time decisions and now I have to build from source and figure out aclocal dev packages,deps,ugh...I accept the pain, part of then package but I won't pretend it feels good.
Which is exactly why distros have very big repos, iOS has exactly one store and so does android (yeah, yeah amazon, fdroid...; few people install these). So that you never, ever have to care about that.
Simple rule of thumb as a consumer: If it is not in the repo/store/steam then it does not exist. Same for iOS or android by the way: If you need to jailbreak/root for an app, for the average user it might as well not exist.
> On mac, I don't use their appstore, I just get dmg images and get going. Same on windows.
Yeah, same for appimages. And you don't use the mac appstore because it currently is much worse than the comparable linux offering. Yet, both apple and MS are clearly pushing in that direction.
> and now I have to build from source and figure out aclocal dev packages,deps,ugh...
Er, no you don't. If the mac .dmg has those same issues you don't do that, if the windows .exe has those same issues you don't do that. You simply say "that sucks" and go on with your life and install the "fixed" one half a year later. In fact for windows software that seems so much more painful (compared to linux) that I would not even attempt it. It is nice that linux is so much better at that, but still as a user you simply don't do that.
Forget all that. I am talking about gary's clipboard manager or something. This is crazy, you can't even install elasticsearch or Mongo without adding a repo!
My whole point was this approach works om servers but on desktops, the use case is different. I want random apps by random people on their random site. Not distro accepted and approved stuff that was digested through layers of bureaucracy and one size fits all crowdpleasing. That is obviously not working.
> Er, no you don't. If the mac .dmg has those same issues you don't do that, if the windows .exe has those same issues you don't do that.
I don't have those issues on mac and windows because the gatekeeping distro maintainers aren't choosing how to build or preconfigure it. It is a direct relationship between I the consumer and the developer. No middle man! No system deps (well.. except on mac with homebrew but not dmg)
To your example, you can download Elasticsearch as an archive from their website [0], unarchive it, and you're off to the races.
JetBrains IDEs work the same way, grab a zip, unzip it, and bam, you're good to go. They can even keep themselves up to date on their own. It will also install a shortcut in your DE's menu.
Ditto for Zoom and 1Passowrd, who even support more "exotic" distributions, such as Arch, on top of Snaps and Flatpaks.
While I think that in practice the issues you describe do exist, I think the cause is mainly that Linux is still a second-class citizen and not a priority for vendors to support properly. But hey, at least they try, as opposed to others who don't give a damn at all.
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[0] https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch ; also available as a .deb or .rpm download
Yet we still see discussions like this, where people think packaging is some major roadblock on Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30777172
Heard of Flathub?
On Linux, having gdb launch apps is easy, though debugging running apps needs sudo or tinkering with yama. On macOS, having lldb launch a release-mode app (eg. ls or cat) requires disabling SIP then entering your admin password or Touch ID. And Valgrind doesn't work on Mac.
True, editing government forms on Linux is a pain. Chrome is close to usable, though its formatting is iffy. Though I dread contaminating Windows installations with Adobe's bloatware.
And I've had Arch and Paru break sometimes, rebuilding software and such.
Point in case, my Thinkpad X1 Nano which I was toying with the idea of flipping over to a pure Linux machine recently. Most of its hardware is supported well by Linux (Intel iGPU, Intel networking, etc and no bizarro components like you tend to see in cheaper laptops), but it comes with a display that's best run at 150% or 175% UI scale, which Linux still struggles to get right. Using the latest Fedora as a base so I'm not missing out on newer additions, I tried GNOME and KDE Plasma under both Wayland and X11 as well as Cinnamon under just X11 (since it lacks Wayland support) and none of them handled fractional scaling correctly/optimally across all the apps I need to use.
Meanwhile, Windows 10 and 11 on the same machine handle UI scaling fine, even with apps I wouldn't expect that from.
So to use Linux, I'd need to make a concession somewhere, whether that's with some apps not rendering their UI correctly or by using a laptop that has a "normal" DPI screen and probably the terribly low screen brightness that typically comes with those panels. That concession-making is not fun.
> desktop applications that work well on any major DE and without consideration for package managers
The ability to run proprietary software like that was a goal of the LSB. Everyone abandoned the LSB effort because it was preventing the CADT Model (https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html) from rewriting the stack every 12 months. (Sorry, I am a bit jaded in this regard.)
Even windows vs mac, a mac with less resources than windows performs much better for me and I am so much more productive. On windows everything lags, crashes, freezes when monitors are plugged in, hardware changes, wakes up from sleep and it is horrible at the amount of disk i/o it uses. I constantly have to reboot it else it falls apart. I could go months without rebooting a mac.
slowish when it comes to file operations (so for example it will take eons to delete a node_modules folder, though that is only partially the fault of windows) and has “strange” file locking mechanisms where I will get insanely angry for not allowing me to delete that shitty file n levels deep because some software is using it. Also, not being UNIXy enough, which is the common target of dev tools.
I am currently using OSX for work, but first of all, I have to believe that the kernel is simply behind the linux one in terms of resource management. E.g. intellij can’t import one of the projects because it will choke on Too many open files. I have never ever had to change this kernel param on linux for example.. second, window management is quite bad and that changing desktops must take 0.1ms is really infuriating. Also, I do like their sandboxing (in that they have one at least compared to linux’s complete lack of security) but I would have expected it being able to handle runtime permission changes. Me having to go to settings to allow screen sharing and then restart the app is quite bad.
And finally, linux kernel-wise is much better than these I believe (which is not that surprising that it pretty much runs the internet with huge players investing in this aspect quite heavily). And while I don’t like every aspect of gnome, but the most recent version is buttery smooth, and desktop switching is actually as fast as my gesture is (which is strangely what iphones do best, yet osx’s animation is constant minimum duration..). On supported hardware bluetooth is quite good especially with pipewire, and wayland is a very welcome direction. My only gripe is the lack of security.
I was a big Linux proponent for a while, then Apple won me over with Macs for a time. They did "just work" for my day-to-day(DevOps).
However, last spring, I bought a new personal system for freelance work/side projects, and have been running Ubuntu as my daily driver. Funny enough, it seems like during that same period the my UX on my work-supplied Mac(2019-era MBP) has been steadily declining. I've been dealing with maddening slowdowns and numerous bluetooth issues(with Airpods no less!).
Conversely, I find working on the Ubuntu machine much more enjoyable, and I'm exploring the option of getting a Linux machine supplied by work as well. I'll caveat by saying it took some time to hone in on solid configurations, tweaks, and a good DE/WM(i3wm), but I gotta say Linux is winning me back over.
All that being said, I'm not deluded enough to think Linux(in its current state) is ever going to make inroads with Apple's consumer/pro-sumer userbase. It's still very much an enthusiast option in my mind.
Trust me, you can tweak macOS to your liking, as well. I used to be a Linux lover, but after trying for almost a decade, for my desktop needs, I’ve given up on Linux, and adopted macOS.
macOS is a POSIX environment, and you have almost the whole GNU ecosystem available to you, if you want.
brew install coreutils
For me it's all about workflow. I spend a lot of time in alacritty, vscode, and a browser with bitwarden. I'm covered on every OS with those tools so I've stopped caring about OS all together, I like bits of all of them, and dislike bits of all of them.
Anymore though, instead of a VM, I end up SSHing to a cloud server. Tools that can be run from the server (vscode, rstudio, etc) make this even easier as I can use the same interface from multiple computers.
I used Linux daily for many years, then switched to Mac for 7 years (entirely due to HW/price being better at the time than other options), then back to Linux for the last in couple.
I was happy to leave the Mac ecosystem because it looked to me like the OS was slowly sliding down the drain.
Also, people saying that macOS is POSIX and therefore almost like Linux remind me of people saying having cats is just like having children. At this point I just smile and nod sagely :)
In my case, absolutely not. I'm using Solus (Budgie) on my notebook and that's because it suits me basically OOTB. What I do have though is a headless NixOS server to which I connect with VSCode for a dev environment. But I wouldn't use NixOS on desktop when Solus is a much better choice, best of both world in my opinion.
This is false.
Apple doesn’t actively discourage anything. Apple put all of options in the operating system for a reason and ships with a Terminal.
The GUI allows regular people to get shit done without requiring them to be experts.
Meanwhile, developers, hackers, tinkerers, can tweak to their heart’s content on the things that matter to them while getting the benefits of the Apple ecosystem. It’s never been an either/or.
Editing a config file on Linux isn’t inherently “better” than doing the same on macOS.
You can also always disable SIP and spelunk around if you want to. There's just far less of a hivemind for macOS tinkering and it's not as readily apparent to jump into.
But it does exist.
… though turning a car into a rocket-powered go kart seems like exactly the right analogy for running Linux as a desktop in my mind. Supercharged and able to fly, but not street legal or practical in any way.
As for tweaking, the two major tweaks I depend upon are remapping Caps Lock as Compose (Karabiner lets me do that, along with some stuff I found that lets me use an X11 style XCompose file), and turning off GateKeeper completely (that's one thing I would never tell a naïve user how to do, or even that it is possible).
No claims that macOS is great for everybody, but I'm an experienced Unix user (my first Unix system was V7 on a PDP-11/45), and it works great for me.
[1] The one hack I needed was that you need a workaround to install MIT Scheme on Apple Silicon.
Anyone out there need a research paper on human behaviour related to preference of OS based on formative computing experiences? I'd be fascinated. :)
Every Linux just works, even with obscure keyboard layouts, and installs security updates or necessities without ever dragging you into some store login drama.
It would be interesting if people really finished a proper Darwin setup that could provide a good POSIX without service dependencies on Apple. But at that point, there are the existing BSDs.
Serious question: why do you assume that?
My "tweaking" of a new Ubuntu machine is normally limited to changing the background. I am busy getting work done and don't really want or need to tweak things.
Mac gets int way when programming, video editing, data management, power system.
Linux is pretty crap at multimedia. But for computing, tinkering and pushing your hardware to its full capacity it is absolutely the best.
Windows is average, and that's not to disparage it, au contraire. It's decent at multimedia, not as much as macOS and decent at tinkering, but not as much as Linux.
Engineering… depends on your definition. My preferred dev environments, CLion and Qt Creator, work fine on Mac as well. I'll agree that CAD has suffered since Autodesk went insane and FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, and the like work much better on Linux. On the science end, I find OsiriX Lite to be a much better experience than Kradview, and that's assuming you build all the KDE 4 libraries to even make Kradview work at all.
My thinking was by showing the Mac has all these nice things that make me productive, this can somehow influence and move the needle so Linux devs who follow my blog have datapoints on what they can work on.
Perhaps some enterprising dev has already read it and is working on an answer to AirPlay, or adding rich text to KDE Connect's clipboard plugin. I would love to do it myself if I had the time.
The particular one that bites me over and over with the latest versions of macOS is that USB 2.0/3.0 ports will die on macOS for varied and mysterious reasons with hubs and dongles and the only thing you can do is reboot.
This was such a big problem that it finally forced me off of macOS. I have things that I need to plug into USB-A ports. This failure mode is fairly common, reported, and totally due to Apple. Earlier versions of macOS do NOT exhibit this bug. Unfortunately, newer machines can't use the old OS's because "Apple".
Other laptops do not exhibit this bug with Apple and non-Apple hubs and dongles--presumably because they actually have to ship with USB-A ports so that code path actually gets tested.
And, that, in a nutshell is why I finally took the plunge and switched to Linux for daily driving.
All devices with USB 3.0/2.0 interfaces trigger it on all my computers with new OSs. Keyboards, mice, weird things like hardware debuggers--they all fail whether the hub/dongle is Apple-approved or non-Apple. It will work for anywhere between a couple of minutes to about a half-hour and then stop working until I reboot the machine.
The two Macbooks I kept back on OS version work just fine. Two other 2015 vintage macbooks that were allowed to upgrade exhibit the bug. We cloned from the working 2015 machines to bring the failing ones back online--this is purely a software fault. All versions of USB-C based Macbooks exhibit the bug--even an M1-based Air.
This doesn't hit everybody. But it hits enough, and Apple has shown zero interest in fixing it. This is the company that produced a laptop that plugging into USB-C on the right gave signifcant performance differential from plugging into USB-C on the left, after all.
I'm done. I applaud Apple for the M1 hardware, but I'm leaving the abusive relationship. Laptop/desktop is second-class and will simply get worse with time.
That's Apple's prerogative, but it's time I stopped paying money to accerate my own demise.
But the Apple Maps point felt like a stretch - Google Maps is available everywhere. I don't see much to suggest you'd need it as an app, it works great in the browser with hardware accelerated graphics, which it has had for 10+ years.
When I was "all-in" on the libre ecosystem, I used a ThinkPad for laptop and Talos for desktop. The ThinkPad had just the Intel iGPU that didn't work right in Firefox, and the Talos had blue lines through everything in OSM because "lol x86 monoculture" meant Firefox's Layers didn't work right on Power.
I had graphics acceleration working in raw Mesa, so if there was a native app, it would have Just Worked – probably on both systems.
The Linux desktop moves at incredible pace. The experience I had 2 years ago was more crude than my desktop in 2022.
Sounds like Mac is great for blogging, happy to hear it; as long as I’m doing software development, deployments, etc, I’ll stick with Linux.
I loved my time with macOS but window management was definitely the worst thing about the OS for me.
It's certainly serviceable, Windows feels better to me, Linux is the best: Super+right click to resize windows, and Super+drag to move them around are killer features.
Do you mean that they're locked in-place unless you hold down whatever super is? I use CMD+direction for a segment of the screen on whichever half or third I want, and other hotkeys for corners, and click and drag if I need. Lately I've just not been bothering much, as a lack of tiling hasn't been bothering me so much.
Also: I just punched directions into GNOME Maps and it worked flawlessly and cast my entire desktop to my Shield TV via Chrome browser.
Which bit don’t you understand? macOS is stable with fantastic professional QA and support, and it lets you run more cross-platform ported software than Linux does.
That's a stretch and i find it unlikely, but it's not like we have numbers. However, macOS makes it hard to run random software ( like a utility from GitHub) with their code signing "security" stuff ( working around it is anything but intuitive).
The other way around you have major industry applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, Office, Ableton, AutoCAD, etc.
The only one I can think of that isn't a total niche is SQL Server. Siemens NX dropped Mac support a while ago, but the Linux version is CLI-only. There are some more niche software (PaintShop Pro, A&B, Pro Motion NG) that suggest WINE for Linux users but I don't know how much that counts.
Splitting would make them more interchangeable and stable - crashing one part does not tears the whole stack down.
What is the benefit of putting all the different functionality in one application?
I don't remember how it worked in 9x, but NT used CSRSS.EXE for window management until NT 4 moved GDI into the kernel. DWM handles it in Vista and newer.
Your experience may differ if you're not "all in" on the Apple ecosystem, but using mostly/only Apple devices means that everything integrates, and integrates well. You may recreate a similar experience with Android and KDE (or Windows i guess), but it feels much more "tacked on" than in MacOS where it just works out of the box.
I also mostly use "stock apps" which may or may not improve my experience. Instead of trying to force MacOS to fit my workflow, i fit my workflow to the tools available, and it has rewarded me well.
I still keep a VM with Gnome (Debian 11) running every now and then, but it's mostly just for fun.
This is something that frustrates me, and it's one of the reasons I'll never go "all in" on the Apple ecosystem. It's tantamount to John Deere designing special cupholders in their tractors that cost $150, lest you risk your drink tipping over. I'm not paying more money to a company that actively wants to price me out of new experiences. I think Snow Leopard to Mojave was a really good time to own a Mac; generally speaking, the software and hardware experiences complimented one another. Nowadays, Apple is a hardware company that sells software products, and Tim Cook is doing everything he can to continue driving up the marginal utility they capitalize on. It's an absurd business, I refuse to support it.
TL;DR: Another very happy Apple customer. It seems that they are not looking back at the Linux Desktop.
What can the Linux Desktop ecosystem learn from this?
That you can have the most open source, extensible, low-to-no-cost, powerful operating system, and still lose out to a UI/UX that appeals to and is accessible to someone who doesn't know what an Ubuntu is, never mind how to install it. Apple took it one step further by not only providing this UI/UX to the "what's a driver" crowd, but also to developers.
For developers, they get enough nonsense over the course of their day from npm version conflicts, build failures from compiling on unsupported architecture, and trying to figure out why their k8s pods are crash looping. To then add on more headache from trying to develop and compile with Ubuntu outside of the described use cases? No thanks.
OSX (in most cases) just works: most developer tools provide a dedicated OSX package, you get the UIX benefits inherited from the "what's javascript" customers, and the hardware-software integration makes things consistently smooth.
Unless one of the big linux distros finds the money to make the experience more appealing for the "Java? Like coffee?" userbase, this will continue to be the case.
Usability and functionality trumps ideology.
The Linux world has spent (and is still spending) insane amounts of time & effort on ideological battles such as software freedom or the endless arguments against systemd while commercial OSes put that time towards actual functionality and end up ahead most of the time.
I don't care how "free" your thing is, none of that freedom is useful if I can't use the thing because it just can't do what I need it to do.
Most of people's complaints with Linux are things entirely controlled by 3rd parties like specific software and DRM for crap like Blu-rays and 4K Netflix. Modern DEs like KDE and GNOME are extremely usable and functional.
Yeah, it's unfair, but as a user, I don't care at all whose fault it is. I don't care if Linux developers can't do something about it. If I can't do something using an OS, I'll switch to a different one.
Not all of the reasons OSX still wins out on UIX are based on design/dev/talent, but rather partnerships, and adoption/popularity.
I don’t know why HiDPI support is still so flakey, especially so with multi-monitor setups. Sometimes apps just work, and other times the UI is comically small or oversized. The only *nix adjacent OS I’ve ever seen address this ChromeOS and MacOS.
Sleeping, hibernation, deep snoozing or whatever the term is — I can’t trust a single Linux distro to not drain a laptop battery dry while the lid is closed. I’ve tried all the tricks and there’s always a catch, usually me opening the laptop to a kernel panic, ironically with 1% battery left and the processor underclocked to Celeron speeds.
Lastly and most certainly not least, the trackpad support. “Synaptics” is a synonym for unpleasant, bumbling, and janky. Granted, Windows laptops usually don’t do much better, but these clueless drivers make large trackpads basically unusable. True palm rejection seems to remain illusive, partially fixed with like dead zones, keypress timeouts, and other bandaids. And please don’t bring up Bill Harding. He’s doing his best, but the fact is that one single person carrying this responsibility speaks volumes for how much the community values this experience.
And yes, I’m aware that these things don’t just happen. I’m just saying what’s wrong. I can only send so many pull requests before giving up and buying a MacBook.
Edit:Two more things. Distros need to pick some better branding. Names like Ubuntu, Pop_OS, Elementary… It’s impossible for regular people to understand these things. And get rid of Tux on the boot screen. A penguin with a gut is unpleasant to look at and makes the whole OS seem like a niche interest for computer nerd tropes of the 90s.
If you do a bit of research you can get a Linux laptop with working sleep and a good trackpad or just buy one from an OEM like System76 if you can't be bothered. You wouldn't expect a good macOS experience on a random $600 HP laptop so why do you expect that from Linux? The fact that so much DOES work is impressive.
The closest thing to a Mac experience on Linux I’ve experienced was a Chromebook Pixel running a chroot, and even that has its own limitations.
Because we are lead to believe that Linux will run on anything. And if it doesn’t, then because it’s open source we can just add support ourselves. One of the main avenues for Linux adoption is predicated on the notion that you can install it on hardware you already own.
But those two notions are wildly unrealistic. Mac provides an outstanding user experience because of the coupling of software and hardware. It’s a lot easier to support a select handful of hardware drivers. And because of that, the system tends to work better as a whole (quality trumps quantity).
“Doing a bit of research” to find a compatible Linux laptop is not something just anyone can do. But anyone can walk into an Apple store (or buy online) and be guaranteed to walk out with a working Mac.
The number of voices working for a “Linux desktop” is staggering and no one has a unifying vision. It has been this way for decades. That’s okay. Linux doesn’t need to “win” the desktop. It just has to be useful for those who decide that they are more productive (or just enjoy) using Linux over something else.
I’d even argue that the most successful user-facing Linux projects were done by a group completely outside of the traditional Linux desktop world: Android and ChromeOS. In both cases, they were driven by a single entity (Google) where they could be opinionated as to what to keep and how things should be designed.
It's funny because that was what happened to me, too. I believe my final set of contributions was an attempt at fixing some low-level thing in Mesa that was causing the entire X server to fail to start with some older Radeon GPU. The Mesa devs themselves were helpful, but the community around them were abusing me to just buy a newer Radeon. In 2020. With the chip shortage and crypto insanity.
> branding
Personally, I think Elementary is a fine name for an OS. I haven't seen Tux on a boot screen in over a decade, but I guess if you compile your own kernel and enable CONFIG_LOGO, you might.
Whether it's Netflix, games, Office/Photoshop, obscure drivers, whatever... I can just run an app and expect it to work, and if it doesn't, it's not my problem. I'll wait a while and someone else will fix it.
I don't have to tweak obscure config files or apply patches or sideload package manager repos.
MacOS, and to a much lesser extent, Windows, mostly stay out of the way and and let my apps and sites take center stage. Linux fails that basic test most of the time, favoring purity of ideology over basic user needs. When I have to jump through hoops to get some trivial device working or an app that takes 3 seconds to install on any other OS, that doesn't say to me "this is a great operating system, I can write my own hack to fix this", it says to me "this still isn't ready, two decades later".
I use Linux at work all the time and it's a great workhorse, but at home, I don't want an operating system whose primary selling point is that it requires even more of my time.
I don't have to tweak obscure config files or apply patches or sideload package manager repos."
I am not sure what you mean.
I have been a linux user for the last 25years and I haven't had to apply any patch manually for the last 15 at the very least, nor looking for obscure drivers.
A config file is the same as an option/settings menu, with the advantage that it is usually much better documented.
Nobody told you that you can watch netflix on Linux as well as running games, use office and powerful photo editing apps as well?
You're very lucky. I've had to apply patches manually for the majority of my Linux experience, to the point where I can literally recite you the package patch contribution instructions for Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, and Arch from memory.
I've had bad drivers melt my dining table when the fan wouldn't kick in and the CPU didn't thermally throttle, during the Ubuntu install process. I've had to manually adjust display settings in the command line because various pieces of the UI couldn't agree with each other (Ubuntu's UI vs Gnome/KDE vs some other stuff), and hi-DPI, > 60 refresh rate, HDR, ultrawide, etc. were all a pain to set up, especially with multiple monitors. And some apps just don't exist for Linux, like the Sonos controller, motherboard firmware upgrade exes, commercial GIS software, Lightroom, etc.
All of that is just plug and play on Windows, and sometimes on Mac. With Linux it's always a multi-hour ordeal, all to end up with a poor ripoff of the Windows 7 UI or whatever Ubuntu's latest experiment is. Just, why?
The command-line is great, but zsh on macOS takes care of those needs 99% of the time. Among high-hassle tools, running WSL on Windows makes for overall less headaches than running a Windows VM or Wine on Linux. In between, Parallels on macOS is that sweet spot of usability and broad compatibility for me personally. There's nothing that I NEED on Linux on the desktop, so I'm happy to set it up on the server side and use something else at home.
Try as I might, every few years I install a few Linux distros to test them out, because people keep swearing they are better and totally ready. I'm sorry, but for an average lazy user like me, they're just not. ChromeOS is as close as any distro has come, and I'd happily install that if it didn't require a 3rd-party repackaging.
My next laptop might be a Chromebook, which is superficially and technically Linux I guess, but minus the regular chaos of the normal Linux ecosystem. I've never just never had a good experience with desktop Linux outside of Android and ChromeOS, sorry. Maybe you're lucky, or maybe I'm unlucky, but it's always been a hassle and never worth it...
Office 365 works well enough on the web, calligra and libreoffice are compatible enough to make it a non issue. You can even upload and work on odf documents on office 365 these days.
I like having 4k in the living room and I have a chromecast for that but I'd rather not have my gf and kids play 4k content while I am working at home and they all have 1080p or lower laptop screen anyway. You don't miss retina if you never used it.
As for the rest of your experience, I guess it comes from poor buying skills. You don't buy a Dell to run MacOS on it. I purchase my laptops and hardware with linux compatibility in mind.
Saying Linux UI is a poor windows 7 ripoff is a lie. I am actually one of the - usually silent - happy gnome 3 user and I think it is a superior desktop UI to anything Microsoft and Apple have produced so far. You get a very focused window without any distraction from unneeded icons and information everywhere and everything can be piloted quickly with the keyboard but also work flawlessly with a touch screen in tablet mode when I flip my Lenovo Yoga.
This line of thinking baffles me. I should put up with subpar text-rendering and pixelated fonts and widgets because that's how we did things before?
> I guess it comes from poor buying skills.
I purposefully went out of my way to buy a Radeon that was explicitly supported by amdgpu.ko. I poured over driver code to see which USB Wi-Fi would work best. I gave up on 4K back in 2017 because neither Qt nor Gtk were "ready" for High-DPI and bought a 1080p panel instead.
None of this changes the fact that I had to patch things all the time because of bugs. Not hardware bugs, but software bugs. Thread safety bugs. GConf bugs. I found and fixed a bug in systemd because they had the GUID wrong for automatic root mount on IA-64. Firefox was doing swizzling wrong causing window tearing on some GPUs. I even fixed a damn bug in the Rust libc crate related to ioctl(3).
The reason your experience is so good is because people find these bugs and fix them. Like I used to do before I left the community, partially due to this mindset that if the user has a problem the user must be the problem.
My fonts are fine thank you, and look much better than on the windows 10 that was provided to me initially by my employer.
Now let's take an example. My employer sent me 2 1080p external displays for work. What would Retina on my laptop provide if I don't benefit from it on my external displays? Yes sometimes it is better not experiencing better/nicer technology if you can't afford or if your emplyer can't afford to equip all your devices with it. Otherwise you just get frustrated.
I am not saying you should go back to CRTs and vintage techs. You like it or not, the market and world is not yet ready to provide affordable retina/4K/5K monitor/displays with decent refresh speed and latency in all sizes at prices anyone can afford.
> The reason your experience is so good is because people find these bugs and fix them.
Are you saying other OSes / apps ecosystems are bugfree? They are not. And the bug aren't necessarily fixed earlier than on free software.
For instance, Windows has been virtually unusable in a non US/english only context for decades and they have never cared fixing the default keyboard layouts.
On linux I don't have to memorize arbitrary ALT + 3 digits numbers to type common, daily used letters in my language, I just compose them easily from the default keys.
I can name countless of people swearing every day because their app has bug, eratic behavior, crashes, all OS and software license included.
Maybe LibreOffice and GIMP are enough for you. They are not for me, especially in professional contexts where 90% similarity isn't the same as actually compatible, especially when I collaborate with other users and designers. And I actually appreciate the Creative Cloud subscription pricing, which is great for occasional users like me who can sub for a while and then cancel without having to spend thousands of dollars at a time. Software have network effects too, and I don't produce documents and graphics for my own gratification, but to satisfy team and client needs, and telling them "Oh, but it looks fine in LibreOffice, you need to use a real document standard and not some proprietary format" is not really an option. Maybe if you're Stallman and get to dictate the terms. I'm not. I need software that works with what other people use, and software that I can use to get jobs with employers that pay me in dollars and not ideals.
Maybe you don't care about anything but 1080p 16:9 displays. That's fine, but there are others who do. Whether for spreadsheets or vectors or photos, sometimes more pixels are better, and definitely having plug and play support for things like monitor brightness are nice too. It's fine if you don't care about any of that. You don't get to tell me what I care about. Shrug.
As for poor buying skills, eh, I'm perfectly happy running Linux on my phone and servers, Windows on my desktop, macOS on my laptop, and iOS on the iPad. And guess what, I don't even know or care what architecture my microwave runs on. I just don't feel the need to install Linux on everything. Each device has their specialty, whether that's cooking food or playing games or mobile apps or web dev or GIS.
I'm glad you like your Linux UI. I tried Ubuntu on a Yoga 2 a few years ago but didn't like it. To each their own, eh?
I was just mentionning that the days of patching and recompiling kernel and drivers to have a usable computer are long gone.
I am not sure why everybody always mention Gimp as the only photo editing tool that work on linux. There are many other tools in the graphic edition/illustration and video production, including some proprietary ones.
TBH, I have no idea how Ubuntu default desktop UI was a few years ago. I vaguely know they tried going with their own ideas with Unity, a desktop that was loosely based on gnome but without using gnome shell.
Tastes are not universal anyway and I don't understand how you can stand a windows desktop if you are fine with a mac laptop. When I was given back a new laptop with windows on it by my employer, I tried to get used to it and like it. The font rendering is terrible, the ergonomic is bad, the virtual workspace aren't as seamless and quick to use, the software installation process is shitty, even with linux inspired tools such as chocolatey, making containers and virtual machines work with the cisco vpn was a major PITA and involved having powershell scripts being triggered in scheduled tasks by log events to get anything working. I reinstalled Fedora and was up to speed in a few minutes.
As you said, to each their own.
Latest example: I can't install a proprietary driver for certain hardware. The problem isn't just the fact that there isn't a driver available, it's that the infrastructure (ABI or API) to make such a driver is not there for ideological reasons.
Software freedom should also be the freedom to decide whether I'd like to give up said freedom if needed.
It's no different on Mac or Windows. You can't slap a 3090 into a Mac Pro and expect macOS to do anything with it because there's no drivers nor can you do anything with an Asterisk PBX card on Windows.
I still haven't seen an answer to my use of AirPlay, either. Apparently Chrome can do this to a Chromecast, but… If I'm already giving my data to a horrible monopolistic company, I'd rather give it to the one that at least pretends to care about user privacy as a feature (Apple), rather than considering user privacy a bug (Google).
KDE has a lot of little nits, too, and it wore on me. Some of the ones I can think of are:
* When KWin crashed, the title bar font went from 12pt to 18pt. I could not fix this unless I ran some specific dbus command in Konsole and then immediately ran `kwin_x11 --replace` afterwards.
* Kickoff doesn't let you click "Applications" to go back to the beginning. I suggested it twice and even tried to implement it myself but they have layered everything so deep in QML I was lost. Apparently, they have redesigned the launcher again in 5.21, which released after I was gone, and now it looks like a bad copy of Windows 10 instead of being somewhat decent. Fabulous!
* KRunner took about four seconds to respond to input, even on a 16 CPU (Talos II) system.
There are plenty of things I loved about KDE too: Kate is amazing, Konsole is a fantastic terminal emulator, and I still use Tellico to this day – I even contributed the Homebrew formula so others can enjoy it on Mac OS. But the experience of using it as a full DE was just not all there for me.
While i haven't had any issues with LibreOffice created or edited .docx, last week i discovered Pages tries to force you to use their proprietary format ( which of course nobody supports). If you open a .docx with Pages, make an edit and save it, it wants to save in .pages. You have to export it to .docx.
That's the kind of user hostile bullshit that rarely makes it to Linux-first software, and when it does ( e.g. GNOME disallowing desktop icons or snaps auto-updating) there are alternatives. If Apple don't want you to do something, you're out of luck. Best case scenario someone has made a (usually paid) app that implements a workaround (like Karabiner for basic key combination remappings).
If the option to export was missing, that would be user-hostile IMO. Same with your example of GNOME disallowing desktop icons – the feature is missing, not just something you have to enable.
The worst thing about mac for me is how the things are named, it is very often that I want to find some option and it's just named differently than I'd expect
The problems with the Linux Desktop ecosystem are not tech problems but human problems. Everybody tries to be the smartest person in the room and push their own pet projects on everybody else via tools, distros, etc. All it does is dilute the ecosystem and erode the experience. I have no idea how to fix this- it's a result of the freedom.
Sweating every detail of a graphical computer is expensive. This cost can be mitigated somewhat by controlling the hardware design. The money to do this comes from people paying for things.
However, that doesn't stop a group of people from the first group from breaking away and creating their own stack. It's been attempted many times before (etoile, elementary, and in fact kde/gnome started out this way), but they never gain sufficient momentum and crash back into obscurity (etoile, elementary) or mainstream compromises (kde, gnome).
Fundamentally the problem is lack of alignment between all the different people working on the Linux desktop. Nobody is in charge promoting a single vision and herding all the cats to achieve it, and nobody ever will be, because the Linux community won't accept it.
That leads to fragmentation, and because there are so many moving parts that aren't developed in alignment, users need to tinker with their desktops to get the outcomes they want.
The problem is, some people seem to think Linux on the desktop can become popular with the general public despite the fragmentation and tinkering needed to make it work. That's not going to happen. The Linux community cannot have it both ways: fragmentation and success on the desktop are incompatible.
For a while, it seemed possible that Ubuntu would overcome that contradiction by offering a curated Linux desktop for normal people that would become so widespread it would end up being the de facto Linux desktop, and anything else would be a special flavor for people who really wanted to tinker. But that hasn't really panned out, and a lot of the opposition to Ubuntu comes from within the Linux community.
Maybe people are different (as I usually note when I say that I hate the 'close lid for sleep' on laptops and go out of my way to disable that) :P
I continued to use Linux at work. I recently set up a home firewall with OpenBSD and have an itch to assemble a desktop exclusively for *BSD and Linux. If only hardware prices were not so high...
I find this a funny point, as Things is one of the apps that has a near-direct clone[0] on Linux. It also costs $49.99 less than Things!
Things pays attention to the tiniest detail in every single aspect, and it really shows that it's natively written for each of it's platforms, not some quick and cheap Electron crap.
I've paid for Things on 4 platform and I'm very happy about it. I have no qualms paying for good software like that, I just hope these people make more software for me to use.
Almost to a comedic extent, Planner does copy a lot of the touches that Things has. For example, dragging the plus icon in the corner to a folder will create a new task there, much like Things. Each section of checkboxes also gets a tiny status indicator, and everything in it is drag-and-droppable. I understand your skepticism, but this really is a complete ripoff of Things in a glorious way. If nothing else, you can't deny the fact that it's more bang-for-your-buck being free and whatnot.
Also, the commit comments on this project are total WTF.
If you're adverse to taking things for free, you're always welcome to donate to the lead maintainer. Nobody is forcing you to take stuff for free, but conversely, arguing that something must be lower quality because you didn't spend more money on it isn't a very compelling argument either. Sounds like the same argument all those proprietary UNIX vendors made before... well, they became irrelevant.
> Also, the commit comments on this project are total WTF.
Man, imagine if you could look inside the VCS for Things... Who knows what kind of dragons lurk in there.
Looks like it is missing deadline support, otherwise you are right that it is almost a comedic clone of Things: https://github.com/alainm23/planner/issues/888
As for deadlines, my strategy was to simply put tasks on the day they were due, since they would be aggregated in lists regardless of when they were dated. However, I can't deny it's missing the feature.
Just build an x86_64 desktop like a normal person. You'll even be able to add storage to it as you need, something you can't do on macOS.