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.