Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?

47 pointssurrTurr152 comments

One would think that over the last decades, with a countless number of smart people, there would be a Linux distro on the level of macOS. I am talking about a distro, that you don't have to configure anything for. A distro that handles things like external devices screen recording without weird glitches. A distro that is _worry free_ and that _just works_. Why do you think that is the case? Or am I simply ignorant of the current state of Linux distros?

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My personal experience is that it's been like this for years already. I'm mostly using laptops (Dell XPS at the moment) with some Ubuntu-derived distro with KDE Plasma on top, bluetooth peripherals, external monitor, and external USB-connected drives, and it all just... works.

Other people are reporting less good experiences, of course, so anecdotes aren't worth too much.

I think the real answer is that macOS runs on very specific hardware, and as such it is much easier for Apple to make sure every part works together. Buying a laptop designed for Linux (or even better: a specific distro) would probably be similar to a general macOS experience.

And even then they struggle. macOS has plenty of bugs. It’s nowhere near as stable or reliable as say IOS.

They're pushing too many new features every year and the switch to ARM must have been a huge rewrite on top of that..

Really don't envy the pressure those devs must be under.

90% of new MacOS are in their bundled applications and not in the OS itself.

Arm and x86 is probably a huge pain though.

It used to be.. 10.4-10.6 were amazing. No question better than any Linux desktop at the time.

Therefore it's not a problem of technology, but how to manage broader industry partnership, creating standards. Microsoft did it in its earlier days when there is a limited number of OS competitor. That window of opportunity has passed. Nobody can repeat MS Windows just like nobody can recreate ebay or facebook.

Contrary to the popular illusion, Apple is a hardware company, they've never positioned or good at making general purpose OS. Apple dominated by making hardware and "firmware" that exploits their hardware. A completely different lane of making.

As many are already saying, it pretty much depends on hardware. If you carefully select it, you won't have much issues at all with a distribution like Ubuntu, which actually lists "certified" hardware here:

https://ubuntu.com/certified

I recently installed Ubuntu on a certified Dell Precision and was impressed how smooth that went, even with stuff like full disc encryption, secure boot, docking station support, NVidia Optimus, etc. It's not perfect, but neither is Windows. With a bit of fiddling you'll even get features that are unavailable on Windows (like proper S3 sleep instead of "modern standby", which is driving me absolutely bonkers). Even notoriously problematic stuff like fractional scaling on external monitors really worked well. Installing the NVidia drivers instead of Noveau is trivial, even Dell firmware updates for the docking station can be directly installed from the Ubuntu software center.

So while there surely is a lot to criticize about Ubuntu from a poweruser's perspective (like the snap stuff), I must say that I was pleasantly surprised how much better the experience has become over the years.

It's the same with MacOS. It runs best on carefully selected hardware (i.e., you will have difficulty running MacOS on a Dell)

Entire processor classes ignored, gpus, & now all of Intel will lack support. Not the same really. Even vm acceleration sucks for no real reason.

To people commenting how "well if you install Linux the right way on the right hardware like this here purpose-built laptop, it also 'just works'", what the OP is trying to underline isn't just the technical aspect of the OS booting flawlessly and recognizing its periphery, but also the whole experience that comes after. One special part of this, which is easily overseen, is the fact that Apple has poured hundreds of thousands of man-hours and millions upon millions of dollars into HIG (human interface guidelines) studies, which is something no other vendor has bothered themselves with.

Highjacking your comment to add a functional answer to ops question: because the reward incentives in open source environments are simply not aligned with the required workload. Prove me wrong, go coordinate a deep ux-strategy in git issues, let's see how far you get until you grasp the absurdity of the idea.

You can actually do it (and some projects have managed to do so) but it requires having really good fundraising and admin staff and organizational support. Most people in open source with a couple of random projects on github aren't good at that.

And if you were a capable and well-connected individual who can consistently solve the funding problems, a lot of companies would be lining up to hire you and I doubt you'd be wasting your time with a bunch of volunteers moonlighting on hobby projects.

> One special part of this, which is easily overseen, is the fact that Apple has:

- vertically integrated and sells a very narrow selection of hardware

That's 90% of the "just works". The UX/UI part is the other 90% (yes the math is right)

And to be fair, MacOS is full of weird UX quirks, and sometimes it does not work. But they have the best trackpads, very good usability (and it's not just Cargo Culting) that goes beyond the surface

The limited hardware helps with ACPI/UEFI and most of the general issues around Power/sleeping etc.

>"- vertically integrated and sells a very narrow selection of hardware"

Or maybe this really is just the 10%, as we will both agree that this part is also true for every single Windows PC laptop OEM - Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Acer etc.

That's....not even remotely true.

First of all, they are by definition not vertically integrated, because the same company doesn't create the hardware and the OS.

Second of all, have you actually compared the selection of hardware between Apple and any of these brands? I'll admit it's been a little while since I tried to give someone recommendations on a Windows machine, but the selection is just dizzying, and not in a helpful "here are all the different possible variables you could configure, and here are the possible values for them" way. They have (or, as I said, had) multiple different named lines within each product category, and several models within each line, and then each model has different possible configurations.

And unless you're the kind of person who has already studied the components enough to be able to build your own computer, you're not going to be able to easily tell, "Which of these actually has the most of the things I am looking for?"

Meanwhile, Apple's product lines aren't quite as simple as they once were, but they're still very straightforward. It's generally quite clear what the tradeoffs are when you're comparing between any give pair of devices in their lineup.

>First of all, they are by definition not vertically integrated, because the same company doesn't create the hardware and the OS.

What matters is that they put the combined product through mostly the same testing. While the PC OEMs have only some to say about Windows' direction, they have the same experience picking components and integrating for Windows as Apple has for macOS.

That's still missing the point.

Apple isn't just "picking components and integrating". They make the whole thing from scratch to work together.

> What matters is that they put the combined product through mostly the same testing.

No. Not even close.

You'd be surprised at the level of testing most OEMs do. It is not zero but at the same time it is not at the same level as Apple.

Apple controls the SMC and Firmware/UEFI. Dell, HP, etc buys the one that comes with the board.

Apple "hand picks" most of the components. Few PCs are custom designs, most are OEM designs.

Please stop making this sound like OEM PC laptops are "in the wind" and almost to the point of just getting lucky with the final platform. It's an absurd discrediting of the decades of experience and work going into them.

But that’s a true assessment despite all that’s on paper there’s a lot left to chance in actual use. Will the trackpad use Windows Precision or won’t it?

Will the screen be decent or won’t it? Will the battery life suck or won’t it? There’s numerous quality of life question any Windows will have to ask before even getting to the actual specs of CPU, RAM & GPU.

OP writes:

> I am talking about a distro, that you don't have to configure anything for. A distro that handles things like external devices screen recording without weird glitches.

I don't read this as a plea for better HIG? This is HN, so I'm assuming most of us live in the terminal anyway. I'll never understand why people prefer MacOS for development. From my experience, it is clearly worse in pretty much every respect (package management, container support, configurability, just to mention a few things).

Mostly because we have no viable option.

Most work places want to have one device for all staff. So the IOS team and the Android team and Marketing and API and JS team, all need one common system.

Windows is out for the Rails/Elixir team, and IOS team need Macs. Marketing and Sales teams could live in Windows or Mac's

The only Venn diagram match is Mac. Low powered or high powered, Mac is the answer.

Honestly... Package Management is really good for IOS/Rails/Android dev. I personally never use containers at work, and I don't change the configuration on my Mac. Out of the box, it works.

The ios being exclusive to MacOS is an Apple made problem though. So you're paying double in hardware cost because of some decision by Apple that no other platform may compile for ios.

Which is rewarding them for their choice to put you into the situation in the first place. So in a way they're right to do it.

> The ios being exclusive to MacOS is an Apple made problem though. So you're paying double in hardware cost ...

You're right, it is. However knowing that doesn't change it.

I don't believe that you're paying double the hardware cost though. To get a halfway decent non-Apple laptop you need to be paying close to the same price anyway. The current Macs (especially Apple Silicon ones) really are much better quality than virtually (perhaps literally) anything you can get for half their price.

I don't know about double for the hardware.

A new Lenovo cost about 3k, and a new Mac costs about that too.

The Lenovo comes with windows (so rails and elixir dev's can't use it)

Mac didn't decide not to support rails, or lock rails devs out of other OS's.

> This is HN, so I'm assuming most of us live in the terminal anyway. I'll never understand why people prefer MacOS for development.

I've been a developer for over 3 decades, doing multiple languages/ecosystems across the full stack. I code in the evenings too. I'm pretty much a stereotypical geek.

I also do general, consumer, non-techie stuff too.

- If I only did development then yes, Linux is the obvious choice.

- If I only did consumer stuff then Windows is the obvious choice.

- However MacOS has the best combination for both sides of that equation and second place on both aspects is better for me than the combination of first and last place that both Linux and Windows offer.

(I do still maintain a separate laptop with Windows 10 and Linux Mint though).

> HIG (human interface guidelines) studies, which is something no other vendor has bothered themselves with.

Many platforms (including KDE and Gnome) have UI design guidelines. https://usabilitygeek.com/usability-user-experience-user-int... lists some.

Writing a guideline is not quite the same as investing several million in the development and testing of proven-effective design. Back in the day Apple did the right thing and rigorously tested its design hypotheses: there was a specific, fact-based reason behind each important gui design choice beyond “it looks good.”

I say back in the day, because IMO Apple no longer makes purposeful UI design choices. For instance, the iOS browser window-closer in the shrunken-windows view of open tabs, has its close button on the right. Every other close button is on the left. Apple has lost the f’ing plot.

Sun did tons of research on Gnome usability.

Microsoft did tons of research on MS Office, for example to design the ribbon.

I also am not sure having that iOS button on the top right is bad. It’s inconsistent, yes, but when that screen opens, your finger is at the top right of the screen. Putting them in the top right corner moves them closest to your finger. I don’t know whether it is, but Fitt’s law predicts that’s the better choice.

I predict that my left thumb is closest to the top left window, which was the one I was viewing and thus most likely to want to close; and that the two-finger action of tapping the top-right show-mini-windows/topish-left close-window buttons - like it used to be — is a better Fitt. I’m confident that this latest UI change was someone’s busywork. Gotta look like your doing something.

Thx for correction re: Gnome & ribbon.

The Sun research is pretty outdated, that was probably around 20 years ago that happened. I don't think any of it is relevant anymore.

There are still ongoing user studies happening in GNOME and KDE. It's probably not anywhere near as rigorous as at Apple, and I doubt you can easily assign a dollar value to it, but it does happen.

> HIG (human interface guidelines) studies, which is something no other vendor has bothered themselves with.

Let's not forget that Apple's HIG brought us 'column view' in the Finder, where icons actually slide away from your mouse, when you click on them... Or Preview where, if you select 100 PDFs and double click on them, will now open them as 100 separate documents, rather than as 'pages' within a single document, as used to be the case... or Quicktime [and Preview?] where you sometimes move a document with a conventional open/save dialogue but sometimes have to do it through a popup, accessed by clicking the name in the window titlebar.

Yes, OSX is a hundred times more consistent than any Linux distro --which often feel like the UI was designed by several separate teams who never met or compared notes-- but it's not without its own piss-poor design decisions.

Apple has also gone to lengths to make it difficult to run an alternative OS on their hardware. Like the Facetime camera on the 2015+ MacBook. (Fair dues to the person who got that working).

One of my personal laptops is a 2015 MacBook Pro, and the camera driver is the only thing I had to manually screw around with. Everything else worked perfectly in every distro I threw at it.

What was the issue with the webcam? I presume it's not a standard USB video device? Are you sure it's really only about making it harder to run other OSes on the hardware, and not because there was some actual feature gain from whatever the customization is? I know they have put effort into locking things down a lot with the newer models with the T2 chip, and while I don't agree with it it's obvious that there are real, actual security reasons for why they've done this, and not just being cheeky and petty-minded.

"Everything else [but the webcam] worked perfectly in every distro I threw at it" really doesn't rhyme with "gone to lengths to make it difficult to run an alternative OS on their hardware" in my ears. Surely they could've done plenty more than just booby trap the webcam.

I didn't say Apple has gone to extreme lengths. That would cost them a ton for little benefit. They got a 3rd party (Broadcom) to build the webcam and keep the spec a secret. Neither Broadcom nor Apple provide anything that would make it usable in another OS. I know they don't "have to", but I believe that buying a machine makes it mine, and I should be allowed to use it however I want. How many other manufacturers keep basic info a secret, and provide zero support in any alternative OS?

Mac owns the hardware. If you run a hackintosh, you will discover just as many oddities as any Linux distribution does on variant hardware to the spec of a PC or laptop.

Try a Linux in system76 or some purpose built hardware, or the vendor installed Linux on a system.

BTW osx on my m1pro has its oddities with non apple external Thunderbird, displayport, Ethernet..

Why I built sorunme. Linux w/ all of the look & feel of a more usable desktop.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sorunme/files/

Please stop using "it just works", you're not Apple's marketing department. Sure it just works for some people, but Linux distros and Windows also just work for some people. I've had and I've experienced a fair share of Apple WTFs and some stuff I could never get working properly. Computers are hard, "It just works" is a marketing slogan, nothing more.

This was my experience with MacOs for the past two years after decades with windows and Linux. Audio devices disconnecting randomly on updates, needing to configure all kinds of system settings, inability to override the keymap to have the tilde in an ordinary location, device believing it had crashed on every startup, among other things.

I personally don't hear "It just works" so much as I hear "You'll get used to it" these days.

Each OS is crap in many ways.

Im currently a mac user and I can't say I've heard many saying macOS "just works", but it's less hassle to set-up and use day-to-day than Windows, and I don't really find comparing it to Linux is entirely fair. It's like comparing a high end drone with a custom made drone. Both are incredible powerful, but the latter requires more work and you have to mostly maintain it yourself. Linux is fantastic when you've found a configuration which works for you.

Why I’ve made sorunme.. so all my efforts can be enjoyed by others & not just me. People can contribute to my GitHub link for it as well.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sorunme/files/

It really depends on what exactly you're looking for in the "it just works" experience, but since you mention "screen recording" and "external devices" I'll assume that you're specifically asking about the modern gamer-streamer (w/ mic, hardware-based sound control, multiple inputs, ViV, etc...) setup and not a basic-browser-and-mail setup.

Linux, as in "in the desktop environment", has a HUGE (a can't highlight and stress enough the word HUGE) technical debt. It runs on a graphical server that was designed way before GPUs were even a thing (let alone multi-GPU, variable refresh rate monitors, HDPi, HDR, etc...). And because of all the design limitations, X just can't compete with either Windows nor MacOS (in that specific environment setup that you're asking for). It just can't. Period.

Mir and Wayland were born precisely to fix this entire mess. Mir never really took off (because of community backlash?), while Wayland is... well... it has been "in progress" for +10 years and it's still not "there". It will get there, eventually, at which point it might be able to offer the "it just works" experience. Or it might not. We'll have to wait and see.

The audio system was already fixed. A few times... We jumped from Jack, OSS and Alsa to PulseAudio and now to PipeWire and things look promising, but PipeWire is also in the progress, so we're not entirely there yet either.

Bottom line is: There can't be a distro that "just works", because we're missing the pieces to assemble such a distro.

> Linux, as in "in the desktop environment", has a HUGE (a can't highlight and stress enough the word HUGE) technical debt.

Well that is what makes defining official Linux Desktop support something of folklore. You can predictably support and target Windows and macOS users all the time with your app working on those systems for it being all taken care for you.

But as for Linux, you will always need to exclude and draw the line somewhere with which distros you want to support. You can't support them all. There will always be that minority of fans of your product, screaming about support for an exotic Linux distro. The developers will just slap UNSUPPORTED and not worth the work.

It is because they can foresee a mountain of issues, maintenance debt, hours of issue tracing and costly CIs to maintain just for the claim of which distros are 'officially' supported.

That's an area where the community has consistently failed. There's clearly desire among companies to rally behind just one distro (in most cases this is Ubuntu, like it or not) and so if the community was thinking ahead, they would be using that as the standard and aiming for compatibility with it. Instead you get a countless number of distros taking pride in how they're not Ubuntu and they carelessly break Ubuntu software for no reason. In some ways Ubuntu is also part of the problem here by taking actions to make it more difficult for the community to engage.

I base my work on Ubuntu Budgie, but I make efforts to support a few popular others for kinto.sh.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sorunme/files/

Wow, do people actually still use sourceforge? I found it to be really clunky and missing features compared to github or gitlab or something.

You don't upload entire 2-5gb iso or vm images to github or gitlab imo. The sorun.me project itself is in fact hosted on github - not sourceforge. Will admit I had no reason to be on sourceforge at all until I was like "Hey.. I need a place to host these images." and I realized that sourceforge is still a thing and perfect for hosting such large images for free.

Of course I could host it myself - but I guess I should just provide links on my actual sorun.me page.

Oh cool, good to know. I never noticed that before.

You can’t really claim that Wayland has been in the works for x and x years, when such a hugely critical piece of the ecosystem needs network effect to strive. And I believe wayland has just recently got the critical mass to become the next X, but not getting it sooner is not due to its lack of technical merit.

The issue is that Wayland isn't a replacement for X. It's become it's own thing entirely, with it's own goals and conflicts with the xorg ideology. On top of that, it doesn't have feature parity with the window server on Windows and certainly doesn't approach the capability of Quartz (and likely never will, judging by it's core values). This puts it in an awkward spot: certain developers are begging users to switch to Wayland despite the fact that it only works with two and a half DEs, while other developers are pledging to never transition their software in the first place. Wayland's own development is constantly taking forwards and backwards steps in ways that are scaring users (like myself) away from using it. This is the part where I'd usually give credit to the developers for not turning it into a GNOME-first utility, but even that's untrue as the only "complete" implementation is Mutter.

At this point I've conceded that I will use x11 until I die. I will write software for x11 until I stop writing software. Yes, it is miserable, but it's never failed me and there has never been any "politics" ruining it. There's no wlroots to fuck around with to get certain basic features working. There's no xWayland to scream at when my software doesn't "just work". The whole thing is so disappointingly ironic that I can't help but ignore it's development.

You will be miserable and waiting forever because what you want is impossible for all practical purposes. Feature parity is a red herring when some newer features just can't be done properly on X. The "xorg ideology" is to basically not have security on anything and to consider GPUs to be an afterthought, as stated by a parent comment. From a user perspective, this situation is untenable and yet will never actually improve because doing so would break the protocol and all the clients. I've spoken to some of the other DE developers and pretty much all of them have said to me the only reason they don't want to move away from X is because they lack the manpower to do it.

Also, the reason there's no "politics" anymore is because most of the developers have moved on to Wayland. There were quite a few flame wars on the X mailing lists back in the day. You can probably blame some of that for the existence of Wayland, which should actually have less politics because multiple groups are no longer fighting for what to put in the one centralized X server. The one area where there was activity, and arguments were popping up again was... you guessed it, Xwayland, but they solved that by bring it into its own release cycle away from the rest.

The “security” of wayland is a bit of an illusion imo. I’ve already seen a user pick it apart awhile ago.

Regardless I don’t what they’re trying to do, but they do need to add in a proper method for granting higher privileges to apps to have more access to Wayland in the same way macOS grants access to Remote Desktop apps.

No, you haven't. I'm fairly certain I know a blog article you're referring to and that article is a load of nonsense. I can debunk any claims you might remember. The security isn't an illusion, it was designed to fix very real and known problems that exist in X11 and likely won't ever get patched out from X11.

At least in GNOME and KDE, there is a proper method for granting higher privileges, that method is the xdg portal API. I don't know where people are getting this idea that the method doesn't exist, it has existed for quite some time now.

> I can debunk any claims you might remember.

Listen, I don't care who you are or what your agenda is, but a line like this just confirms my suspicions that you're trolling. Quit it, please. Your constant bickering with anyone who disagrees with you is undermining the site's values of gratifying intellectual curiosity. It kills fruitful conversations, makes it harder to take your arguments in good faith, and colors your stance as simply contrarianism. I'm going to continue ignoring your comments if this is the basis of your conversation on this site.

My agenda is to explain how this stuff works to stimulate intellectual curiosity. That's literally all there is to it. I've seen a number of wrong claims posted about this in the past, if you can remember any of the claims I'll address them directly and we can have a fruitful conversation about it. If you feel that examining past claims under a critical light is "trolling" and "kills fruitful conversations" then I don't know why you're even bothering to discuss this, please just let me address the claims made by the other commenter. Feel free to ignore me.

Proper security is layered. Wayland is like a steel-framed door, while X is like having a hole for the door. Of course not even the steel door worth anything if you don’t have windows in place, but you can’t even begin to secure your place without a door.

X simply can’t separate different applications inputs and display outputs, unless you go full on nested X servers, while wayland solves this aspect splendidly.

Of course it is only a single step into the correct direction, you still need sandboxing and the like, but just sandboxing wouldn’t have been enough for X.

To add to this, there was a pretty large consensus among X developers probably 10-15 years ago that X was not a viable future direction and it needed to be abandoned. The alternative to Wayland (or Mir, or whatever) is not going back to X, the alternative is do nothing and bitrot sets in and you just don't have a functioning desktop anymore after a while.

I wouldn't even say the network effect matters that much, a huge part of the work has been disentangling the drivers from X. It's not very visible work to userspace developers but it's probably even more important than any work on the window system. The DRM/KMS/GEM subsystem is now widely adopted for kernel drivers, that work took a long time but doing it correctly means userspace is now freed up to implement any windowing system they want without having to deal with the driver mess caused by X.

First of all, building an OS that works for everyone is tremendously hard. Doing so with a community of volunteers without central governance doubly so. Linux needs to support a wide range of hardware out of the box. And hardware is becoming increasingly complex, modern graphics card drivers e.g. rival the Linux kernel in terms of the total number of lines of code. So I'm actually impressed Linux works that well. Apple, on the other hand, builds a proprietary OS that just needs to run on select hardware, and they have full authority over all decisions down to the hardware level.

Regarding "just works" I'm also not sure MacOS is a good example. I'm using both Kubuntu (5 year old Lenovo T460p) and MacOS (brandnew M1 Macbook Pro) every day and I experience more crashes / freezes on the latter. And despite the vast speed advantage of the M1 (one M1 core is almost as fast as my entire Lenovo CPU) KDE often feels much more snappy and responsive. So yeah, modern Linux is pretty damn impressive in my humble opinion.

Wow, lots of disappointing answers.

Easy: Apple hires TEAMS of designers, UX-experts/engineers [...].

The reward incentives in open source environments are not aligned with the required workload. People who seriously compare any modern linux desktop environment to the UX that macOS delivers must be lost in tunnel-vision/confirmation bias, it's not even close.

Also, like some said, as Apple provides their own hardware, they don't have to deliver general solutions.

I think this 100%. The problem with Linux is that it’s not controlled by a single company, there are many components developed by different contributors which have different interests. There is no single gui framework, no design guidelines so even the out-of-the-box software you get with any mainstream distribution doesn’t look cohesive. It simply lacks the polish of macOS.

Hardware wise I think if you use modern (i.e not older than 5 years) and also not just released hardware you are mostly ok. I haven’t had any driver problems, but that’s not to dismiss other peoples’ experience.

Linux is not for consumers, it needs nothing from them.

Android and chrome os (hell, even Darwin if you squint) all demonstrate that taking things away is the path to consumer happiness.

I am a professional user, I don't want a lobotomised system. An airplane cockpit is not like a car dash.

Although you're right about the incentive structure, I have a hard time seeing such a clear difference in UX quality in practice.

I've used OSX for a year after over 20 years of Linux. I really tried to like it, but to me or didn't feel any more polished than modern Linux distros. Just... different. Different flaws, different glitches, different inconsistencies, different trade-offs. shrug

macOS only runs on compatible hardware.

If you buy compatible Linux hardware then Linux "just works" too. It won't work with just random stuff you found in a basement the same way hackintoshes don't "just work" either.

Also, after the trash fire that's M1 Mac external monitor support I'd strongly dispute the "just works" tag for macOS too.

Everything external display I’ve plugged my M1 Mac into has worked well. Monitors of various dimensions and a TV. It’s just-worked for me. What’s the trash for you’re referring to?

Not sure about him, but I notice 2 issues with external monitors:

* Only 2 hardware-rendered displays maximum. I use 3, so the 3rd one has to be software-rendered.

* There's a delay when switching my KVM to the Mac and it emitting a video signal, that's longer than the delay when switching to Linux and activating the same monitors.

> Everything external display I’ve plugged my M1 Mac into has worked well.

Ever tried 1440p? It looks like crap. There's a reason BetterDummy is a thing.

I have a 1440p monitor as my main screen. What am I missing out on?

I have a sample of thousands of machines in my company and there's been a massive regression in external monitor compatibility with switch to Apple GPUs. There are many external monitors that outright don't work via USB-C on M1.

macOS 12.3.1 tried to address some things but it's nowhere near as compatible as Intel Macs.

But I believe you when you say that it works on the exact monitor models you own (it works with my home monitors too). But that's kinda beside the point in these debates.

> macOS only runs on compatible hardware

You’re not even wrong, but fortunately we don’t have to run on bare metal, although we can do that too. Running modern, up-to-date macOS on bare metal x86 is possible. I know because I’ve done it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackintosh

https://khronokernel.github.io/apple/silicon/2021/01/17/QEMU...

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Install-Guide/

https://hackintosh.com/

> Why do you think that is the case?

Good Question. Short answer is here: [0]

The most obvious failure of the Linux Desktop is the sheer alternatives of alternatives madness of not having a simple standard way of creating a sane desktop environment. This is why you have system components not working in an integrated fashion like what you see on macOS.

There are multiple system projects fighting, competing amongst themselves and reinventing the wheel to replace each other in one part of the desktop stack to prove they are the smartest out there rather than have a standard set of components to stick to that does its job well and integrates with other parts of the stack. Not create yet another competing alternative for the sake of it.

This is where the bugs get created and good luck figuring out where the bug is and 'defining' Linux Desktop support. Is it in systemd? Wayland? GNOME? dbus? or maybe it is happening in pulseaudio or was it ALSA? See what I mean? Which distros are affected? Hundreds? or is it 'that' user who has a customized install and tweaked a system component or kernel setting somewhere and it only affects them?

macOS does not have this level of unpredictability in the default install, unlike the hundreds of thousands of Linux distros one has to look at and trace the issue and maintain. That is why macOS, 'just works' on the software level.

The hardware level is a different story where to spoil it; on Macs it still just works. Hence the reason why this ex-Linux user moved to macOS [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30821580

Well because it wouldn’t make sense, you have a bunch of software that is build in a decentralised way without an overlord oversight, you are not bound to a corporation and to shareholder interests, but the main point is that if you aren’t bound to an approval process, an sdk, policies, then it’s hard to create a unified experience like on OSX. My question is that: if there is OS X, if there is windows, why do people want to turn Linux in a bad copy of those? Just use those. If Linux was easy, unified, behind an approval process then it would make no sense for it to exist, if you want Linux to be like OS X, just fucking use OS X

I've installed Artix (Arch based) two years ago in a 4 years old laptop. Just had to install a network program, because I didn't want to configure wifi on the terminal. Everything else, since then... No yay -Syyu has caused any issues.

Additionally, you have to consider that macOS and Linux have different purposes. The later is meant to be used to perform computational work. The former is meant to spy on you. Naturally people who want to spy on you will work very hard for you to not have any barriers - whereas Linux people are more focused on empowering you to make more computational work.

The truth is: there’s simply no substantial interest. If there was, we’d have better FOSS products with regard to usability. Let me intentionally overshoot to make a point:

Developers are the ones building software. In a developers mindset, an interface is some sort of API, not a GUI. To them, it’s also more interesting to solve a technical problem than to build a great GUI.

Designers (especially software and UX designers) are not valued to the same degree as developers/engineers in most organizations, including most FOSS projects. Apple is the only corporation that approached this differently from day one.

My own experience as both a developer and designer show me this to be true. Especially the abrasive and uninterested responses I encountered every single time I was offering to contribute to a design overhaul. The developers did not want to deal with it at all. Imagine how a talented but not highly technical designer would experience this community interaction.

All of the above is simply GUI-related. When it comes to interoperability between different projects, ideas and philosophies all too easily clash. And with no project leader to mediate and/or decide, it oftentimes leads nowhere or even sabotage. To illustrate this, you may want to read about the ongoing ZFS kernel integration saga. And that’s not even GUI-related.

Given the current circumstances, mainstream adoption of any Linux/FOSS desktop will never happen.

I don’t know about your experience, but MacOS doesn’t “just work” either. What about a buggy daemon that read-writes terabytes of data, chrome forgetting gained permissions on I guess version updates, randomly high CPU usage, oh and my favorite, during reboots I get a flickering purple screen, quite reminiscent of Ubuntu etc.

Linux comparatively works in a very very stable and reliable manner. Sure, low-end laptop with low-end hardware will likely cause trouble but it wouldn’t work well with Windows either.

Definitely reflects my experience working at a Mac-only shop that's struggling with the problem of testing on M1 Darwin and deploying to x86 Linux. We've gotten to a point where local development simply isn't worth the hassle...

Because all Linux distros are just an amalgamation of thousands of programs and libraries, each with their own aims and pulling in different directions?

That Linux distributions work as well as they do is a miracle in itself, I think. Comparing them with the massively vertically integrated software and hardware package built by the richest company on earth is unfair. Notice that whenever anyone has attempted to subsume different parts of the Linux stack (systemd, etc) into one project, the wider community hasn't really gone along with it without being dragged kicking and screaming, and some times it has led to further fragmentation. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing too, I feel the chaotic evolution,-not-design character of the ecosystem gives us a computing environment that has a better chance of staying free of whatever the clergy of the alternative cathedral model would choose to do, especially when sponsored by amoral corporations.

So, I don't know what you would like to hear. Does Linux "just work" (whatever this marketing aphorism means?). I think it does, for me. My Dell XPS laptop running an Ubuntu LTS for work, a relatively expensive custom-built desktop rig running Debian Testing at home, and my medium-sized server for my personal projects running Debian Stable on AWS have run without any issues for more than a couple of years. Would I trade these for a massively expensive pretty aluminium box running a closed-source system that will take me several months to master as much as I have Linux (and really can never really, properly, understand due to it's closed nature) just to save me probably a couple of hours a year fixing minor issues on my Linux boxes? Probably not.

I dunno, I'm forced to use Mac OS and I find it a pain in the ass. You might think it "just works" and you "don't have to configure it" but there's a ton of stuff I'd like to be able to configure, but can't.

Recently, I wanted to connect multiple VPNs (work, different data centers) and selectively resolve DNS queries / route traffic, but it doesn't seem possible without a lot of work.

I'm not crazy on the app-switcher's behaviour. I'd like to be able to cycle between all windows on all monitors, not "apps", or "windows from one app" or whatever. I need to install 3rd party software for window tiling. (In fairness, Rectangle is perfect). I hate the lack of decent Gnu binaries (but again, homebrew fixes that).

I hate finder. I want to browse to "/Users/raffraffraff/.config" and end up googling to find the arcane key combo to unhide them. Also, why the hell can't I just click on the path and type the path I want?

For years I've been using Xubuntu with plank (dock) at the bottom and an xfce panel at the top. Haven't had a crash in years. All hardware works. If something isn't too my liking I can change it if I wish. That's a feature, not a flaw.

> Also, why the hell can't I just click on the path and type the path I want?

Dunno about that but you can command-key to get a filepath dialog. Splat-G(oto), iirc.

Recently I needed to reorder my network devices priority & I yarned for macOS over Linux in that moment. I don’t have to Google how to change network priority on a Mac.. it’s literally drag & drop.. vs Linux requiring the CLI.

MacOS is owned by private comapny and hence run like a centralized dictatorship. Whereas Linux is FOSS, so largely decentralized without anyone coordinating the efforts in order to provide a nice, unified experience (Ubuntu is trying to do that, but they don't have nearly enough money).

Apple is a publicly owned company with shareholders.

I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't (my wording was poor).

The closest you will get is probably openSUSE, which has "YaST", a graphical tool to configure almost everything you will ever need, eliminating 99% of the reason to open a terminal.

https://yast.opensuse.org

They also have "PackMan", probably the largest single repository of third party software available to any distro, which eliminates the need to add third party repos for all but the most obscure software.

But, Apple still has one advantage. They make the hardware, and the software. You're always going to have a very variable experience when the two are made separately.

Not many ux savy people in OSS and there is no single vision being implemented. It's a bunch of people with different ideas trying to agree with each other.

I would say the main problem is that people are mostly Devs and they care more about implementing "this one thing" for themselves instead of thinking about users. It makes sense, it's OSS, you can't expect people to work for free.

KDE somehow gets a lot of things right functionally but the design of the default theme contains very basic mistakes (eg. padding) and several interactions are cumbersome and seems to be there solely to justify tech work that someone wanted (eg. activities widgets and panels on the desktop). I think the pinnacle was KDE 3.

Gnome 2 actually got a lot of things right but was very low on features. They threw away a lot of it with Gnome 3.

That said, I find Mac OS to be pretty bad, UX wise, I generally install Arch Linux + KDE on my Mac devices.

In terms of functionality, if you have supported HW you won't have many problems. Distro take a bunch of terrible decision for political reasons (eg. adopting pulseaudio and systemd as standards) and those are generally the things that will hurt you - but that won't be that much worse compared to your typical Mac OS upgrade (eg. removing python2 in Monterey - who the f approved that?).

I wish there was a company developing a paid OS that works with a custom UI, I would definitely pay for that. Maybe one for the system76 people or similar.

For me, Fedora has worked pretty well.

It helps to run on less than bleeding edge hardware for which the drivers are mature. Also, while you still can, to disable Wayland in favour of Xorg.

With that done, on the typical 5 year old laptop, you tend to get (no guarantee, but in my experience) flawless suspend/resume, decent battery life/thermal management, wifi, bluetooth (with the very latest Fedora 35 and Pipewire, bluetooth headphones finally work reliably with all audio profiles), the custom buttons on the keyboard, performant WebGL and so on.

That being said, nothing is perfect. For example you still can't drag a window halfway across between the laptop's screen and an external HiDPI display and expect it to scale so that the two halves are the same size. And some recent gadgets may only "sort of" work. Example, a USB audio dongle (for headphone jack-less smartphones) from the dollar store. Works but only exposes three volume levels: Off, medium and crazy loud. But what do you expect, if the open source drivers all need to be updated by volunteers after the gadget is already out there, use gadgets that are more mature.

What does work is that the resulting machine will be stable. So much so that you can leave it with your 80 year old mom, who lives 8 hours' drive away, and expect less trouble than with a Windows machine (we don't have Apple products).

Apple owns the hardware and MS managed to get HW vendors to adjust everything to Windows.

IMHO, owning the Hardware or agreeing on one existing HW among devs is a good approach. These come to mind:

Dell XPS notebooks, which specifically support Ubuntu or

https://system76.com/ They build or assemble hardware specifically for their Linux distribution Pop! OS

No personal experience with neither, but a colleague uses XPS with OpenSuse and talks about a seamstress experience.

It is entirely dependent on hardware (much like MacOS). There are "zero configuration" distros like Fedora that work fine for these purposes. However, most distros don't really serve that niche; the Linux community is full of people who like to have their cake and eat it too. The idea of running Windows software and games on a Linux kernel like it's native software, the allure of tweaking things endlessly to your liking to iron out every complaint of your OS, the idea of building your own workflow instead of conforming to the presets that someone else uses... these are the things that long-time Linux users value. Accordingly, people make OSes to fill that void. It's obviously not for everyone, though; I know a lot of people who love the idea of free software, but balk at the idea of spending a couple hours writing a config for your desktop to get it juuuuuust right. I can't knock them, but if you're enamored with pedestrian OSes, then you're going to inevitably feel failed by Linux at every corner. It's not trying to be MacOS, and when it does... glares at GNOME ...the results don't usually "just work", or behave like a Mac for that matter.

Ubuntu on Lenovo laptops have been just that many years. I've used 3 different X1 carbon laptops with ubuntu for many years now. Worry free, no tinkering. Just works.

I love X1 carbon, I'm addicted to it :)

This is a superficial ask, & laced with barbs. Linux does "just work", without "configuring anything", for many window managers, and it's rarely laced with bugs.

This attitude is mainstream accepted bullying. This belief in adequacy is always given the benefit of a doubt, we let the doubt & deficiency monster in, & expect nothing from it.

There's only one actual specific complaint- about screen recording, which I've seen be very good iut of the box. The rest is unconfirmable slander, is weakly expressed strongly held biases about how great and awesome macos is & how everything needs to be like that.

The cultural snubbing of Linux is such an undertold story. So many cultural forces tear at this project, & bemoan it. The support & maintenance burden is vast, yet so much does get done. But this winning hearts & minds campaign- no matter how many happy & joyous users their are, of all stripes & varieties, all it takes is a couple posts like this one, & everyone will register inadequacy & insufficiency. Even though many of our lived experiences dont match up to complaints, disbelief reigns.

If you think about it, Microsoft and Apple have considerable advantage when it comes to peripherals and bug fixing. With peripherals they have decades of experience working with vendors who are enticed to support them - I walked through the halls at building 27 (which was Windows engineering before I lived in Redmond in 1997) and the halls were decorated floor to ceiling with hardware peripheral boxes everywhere. That would have been Windows 95 or NT or something like that. Multiply that experience 25 years forward and you have a rough idea how much depth and breadth you'd get across every person, peripheral, and PC involved. No Linux vendor is close. Now consider the situation for bug resolution: you have dramatically narrower focus when you consider the source, tools, and binaries. Linux has numerous breadth and depth across kernel, hardware, peripherals, toolchains, and so on. There's really no one outside canonical and redhat and IBM driving that commercially. Compare to Apple or Microsoft who can afford to fund development across vendors for decades with no impact to their bottom line. If you wanted to have something approaching macos or windows, it's simple: reduce the features and focus on a single distro running a single desktop environment running on a single hardware environment. Fix those bugs and those bugs only. Ship! That's pretty much what you've got here minus the funding (AFAIK): https://pop.system76.com/ Outside that, I'd vote for Garuda Sway, Manjaro Sway, or maybe Regolith Linux since I believe that Sway will eventually win the Linux Desktop war once people realize form follows function and those three have a headstart with the last having an easy port given i3 and ubuntu. I believe arch is a better base so I'd pick either of the arch-based distros, but garuda is ahead of manjaro given it's keybindings being ahead by a year or so.

If you have the right hardware, most Linux distros "just work" out of the box. I've deliberately bought Dell XPS machines for work because of this.

But I've also been helping older neighbours and friends gain or maintain connectivity by installing Linux for them on other hardware, and my experience has been that the "just works" label applies in most cases.

Worst case there will be a single module that requires an additional hardware-specific package, most commonly the wireless card. The problem many moves to Linux encounter is that the device being migrating is the only device on hand apart from a phone, so when the newly migrated machine won't connect to the internet there's no way of easily identifying and downloading the driver or extension needed.

I have migrated laptops which have multiple pain points, and it can be problematic. But, so far, I've not encountered a device where Linux won't "just work" once these initial pain points have been mitigated with the appropriate driver or package.

Ubuntu has just worked for me for a long time, though I always have to do some tweaks to get it exactly how I like it (Mac keyboard layout, Quake-style terminal, etc.) I've recently installed Cinnamon (Mint's desktop) on it and I really like it better than any other Linux desktop I've tried so far. The only thing I ever really have issues with is Bluetooth stuff and sometimes sleep/hibernation issues.

I think Neal Stephenson's analogy still mostly holds true: Windows is a suburban minivan, MacOS is a Lambo with the hood welded shut, Linux is a tank that can also fly but the instrument panel is correspondingly tricky.

On the other hand... ChromeOS and Android are, by and large, slightly tweaked Linux, and they "just work" for millions of people, so I guess it comes down to what you're willing to put up with as a trade for simplicity.

I feel that this kind of stuff is always a matter of what OS you are used to. When I need to use MacOS there are numerous things that I find hopelessly broken, because I am used to them working differently on Linux. And I'm sure the same will happen to Mac people trying to use Linux.

It depends what you want to do. If you avoid poorly supported hardware Linux has just worked for at least 10 years. However, if you buy random rather new hardware and expect it to support docking stations, Bluetooth, WiFi, multiple screens of different resolutions, great power saving, wireless modems etc. chances are that some feature(s) will be problematic. There has been no volunteer creating support for all of this, especially if it has not been sold very widely (yet). And most companies supporting Linux development either run servers or their specific embedded solution.

Myself I have used Linux as daily driver for at least 15 years. The more I avoid extra fancy hardware the happier I get. Saves the planet (well, at least my tiny share of it), my time and my nerves.

Google does just that (Android and Chrome OS). *NIX hardware vendors used to do just that for Unix. Silicon Graphics and Sun for example.

What you need is large hardware vendor (like Apple or Google) that takes Linux and really polishes the userland, UI, hardware drivers and curates and integrates all software. All drivers work for their hardware and UX as well for select number of devices. If the software is free, you need hardware sales because all that is expensive and tedious work.

It takes large teams to pull that off. Even big companies like Dell or Leonovo don't see enough profit to do that. They put in some money and resources but not enough to go the last mile. Small Linux companies like System76 don't have resources.

The truce is, it's because you defined it as so, for a lot of people, macOS doesn't "just works".

I use linux on most of my computers that doesn't do GUI/gaming, and Windows on the others, macOS doesn't work in any of the cases for me.

There are hardware and software reasons.

In the case of macOS, the company developing it only have to worry about a limited set of possible hardware devices, that they are even designed by them, or tightly approved what components have them on (like sound or wifi chipsets). In the case of Windows, the manufacturers of the devices, usually not Microsoft, are the ones that should make the drivers for their own components, knowing all of internals, and of course, the makers of the computers/laptops being sure that everything works well. And in those cases, usually the OS is already installed by the time it reaches the consumer. But in the case of Linux, you have independent developers trying to reverse engineer, figure out how to interact using sometimes incomplete or outdated specs, and the mix and match of devices in a model of computer may not be all covered. And you have to install linux on it.

Unless, like with Windows and MacOS, you buy a computer designed for and builtin around Linux with it preinstalled, where everything "just works" (depending on how serious about it is the manufacturer, at least).

Regarding software, instead of an homogeneous set of core libraries, rules of user interaction, ways to interact between core applications and so on, you have independently developed applications, frameworks, versions, redesigns and so on, it gives you far more choices, more ways to mix and match the components to make a solution for you, but it may not be consistent, not the same development rate, and you may hit some compatibility issues between versions. Distributions do some work around this, at least for their core apps, but you have too much options, and the applications may not be aware of others or meant to be run in just one distribution and way to do things.

Also, the traditional profile of the user used to be more technically minded one, so the design of a lot of components allow more fine tuning and configuration, at the cost of the usability of having just a few ways to behave. But that mix and match leaves space for misbehaving too. There had been some developments to avoid i.e. libraries conflicts, like snaps, but consistency and interaction between apps and frameworks of different developers may not be always perfect.

Give Linux Mint Cinnamon a try. I'm a macOS lover, but at work I've used Mint exclusively since 2016 and I think it's pretty darned alright - it's definitely not macOS, but it really is alright.

I noticed that on specific laptops, over the years Ubuntu and other large distributions work better Out-of-the-box, especially if it's a popular device with laptops.

For instance my couple years old Thinkpad yoga had some wifi issues in the beginning, but it got better later. There were also some very specific configuration issues, but the defaults got better over the years.

Also, people were making github repos with a one-click "fix a lot of stuff" scripts. So I guess if you have a specific device, it can get better. Like framework laptops, popular thinkpads, those dell laptops etc

Well, personally *my distro* (custom NixOS, just a small set of configs and an oneliner to build the custom iso) just work OOB, OSX for me do not work at all, certainly not with the default setup.

It's empty, it completely miss tools I use, and makes automated deploy of them not much easier, so...

IMVHO "just work" means: "i know a certain environment and I'm lost outside it so I ask why others are not equal" like you go to another country and ask why people there talk another language, differently written and so hard to use (for you, of course)...

Open source projects are often engineer-driven, and as such they lack the product management and UX design investments that companies like Apple put in to make their products "just work".

I could bake things in a little bit more but meh, it is scripted and people can easily contribute to it or not. I think I created something every bit as good as macOS more or less, I still need to fix the script to fully setup gesture support though. That is about the only thing lacking from my perspective.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sorunme/

I use Fedora with Gnome 42 and it "just works" for me.

I think the lesson to be learned here is: "Just works" means different things to different people. The condescending replies, which seem to accuse the OP of not using the right distro, or not using "the good Linux hardware", are all by people for whom Linux does "just work" (for them). Personally, I don't think that Linux "just works", but again, that's based on the factors that I care about.

Why is macOS so stable? Because macOS developers only have to concentrate on making macOS work well on one type of computer.

Windows and Linux distributions have a much harder task because they have to work on every PC, which means some features are simply missing or don't work because they don't know the exact hardware on which their PC will run, for example hibernation in Linux still doesn't work correctly because every computer works differently.

I've been running Debian on my desktops, laptops (testing/unstable) and servers (stable) for more than 2 decades. It "just works" for me.

The same works for me but on the company laptop I use Debian Sid and on server testing, on desktop I use gentoo, and everything just works

I bought a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu it works fine out of the box, no issues in the last 3 months.

I also have a macbook Pro because my workplace forced me to. I had several problems with gpg, docker, Bluetooth, etc.. the list can go on as much as you like tbh. You can google this if you don't believe me. Not sure why people is under the spell of "MBPs just work" unless they use it as a stone it doesn't.

Been running Linux (Fedora) as my primary OS for well over a decade. My experience is that it has been in the "Just Works" category for at least 8+ years. Although the last 5 have been particularly good in terms of UI polish and quality of life enhancements. Combine that with the underlying power and flexibility that Linux provides and it's hard to beat.

Sometimes people get irritated because it seems like I over engineer my laptop. I can't get the damned HDMI working or maybe resolution is not proper. I pity myself and feel guilt that I'm wasting somebody's time. Point is, it's a candy shop when it comes to Linux, you make what you want. For me its okay to debug again and again.

It’s not just the Linux distro itself, but firmware and hardware integration as well.

The blame for this lies with PC hardware manufacturers, and their least-effort approach to integration (which also affects Windows to a lesser degree). The degree of laziness (partly driven by low-margin, tight-deadline project timelines) can make one’s head spin.

Apple simply executes better / different.

It's said that streaming using macOS is just to slow, streamers on twitch use or switch to Windows to get a good experience. So it seems like it doesn't "just work"!

If you care about details, you always need to fine-tune. There is no "not changing any settings" for serious work. :)

I have been using Linux Mint MATE for roughly 10 years now. BECAUSE IT JUST WORKS on both my desktop and laptop.

If you're thoroughly familiar with MacOS, you may have to invest a little time in 'Unlearning MacOS' before you can come to speed with any other OS, Windows included.

"Just works" is too easy when you write the software and manufacture the hardware it will run on. Linux distros face the challenge of hardware compatibility. You can't even compare a heavily modfied BSD kernel with a modern day distro and say it "just works".

I install Ubuntu on all sorts of hardware, and it just works.

I have more issues with Apple OS’s. Latest example: Hotspot from iPone to iPad frequently drops and needs reconnection, Zoom volume is too low and I can’t fix it, privacy buttons are randomly enabled after disabled, etc.

Using Linux Mint for 8+ years on a lot of different laptops and 4 desktops.

Everything "just works".

Same here. Linux Mint for 6+ years. Everything just works.

Totally agree. It is optimally functional, even on older Mac HW that Apple has since abandoned, like my 2011 iMac.

I don't know what "external devices screen recording" is, but Ubuntu has offered me a worry-free, everything-just-works experience for many years. In fact I prefer it to macOS for its convenience.

You can buy Linux PCs that "just work", see e.g. System76, Dell, etc.

"Works"

Linux in Dell does not always work with all their own docking stations. The effort half-assed at best.

Apple stuff also doesn't always work, see multiple external monitor fiasco.

MacOS just doesn't work at all with touchscreens, on Thinkpads, or on Raspberry Pi's.

Homebrew exists because MacOS doesn't just work very well with a vast array of free and open source software.

Most distros just work on ThinkPads.

There is a piece missing. Apple controls its product end-to-end, including HW. If a linux distro would specify a default HW for which the distro is optimized, then they could be at the same level that IOS.

I use the normal Ubuntu distribution for about 15 years now. Nothing else. I had not to change any config files in forever and every device i owned worked out of the box. So shrug

macOS doesn't "just work", it works on computers specifically made for it. There are lots of computers made for Linux and they all "just work".

Fedora and Ubuntu are quite turnkey ready, for what I recall.

How about a system76 laptop, with their POP_OS? The operating system designed for a specific hardware, should "just work".

Unlike macOS, Fedora just works. I had to switch over when the pain with macOS and it's HW got too much.

I have never seen a macOS installation that "just works", and troubleshooting was insane. Even as recently as a few days ago I was trying to make it use the correct sample rate for USB sound card and failed. In my personal experience, GNU/Linux is much closer to be worry free and when things break (as they always do no matter the OS) it's usually much easier to figure out what's wrong and fix it there.

These days, you want to use someone that's based on ostree - so either:

- https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/

- https://endlessos.com/ (based on Debian)

system76 is what you are looking for.

They select the hardware and have created a line of linux-first laptop (and also desktops and servers). They just work. Not only this, but they are also very repair-friendly. Perf are very good too.

"am I simply ignorant of the current state of Linux distros?"

You knew the correct answer

That’s comparing Apples on an Apple tree to oranges on any tree on the planet…

Linux mint just works for me

There is, I am using a Slimbook with their Ubuntu. Just works.

Because some of us still want to run 32-bit applications.

I think Ubuntu achieved just works at 18.

because distros are trying to build things that work over and over again, instead of improving what exists.

There's many factors to this, some of which are:

1. Branding. Unlike MacOS/Windows, there is no ONE Linux, you have Linux "Distributions". So the brand is split between different entities with different goals and mentalities. The most known, and defaulted to, outside of hardcore Linux enthusiasts being Canonical's Ubuntu. As you can see from the name, it sounds quirky, but alien, hard to embed into people's minds. Others don't do well here either: Fedora Red Hat Linux, Manjaro Linux, OpenSUSE, Elementary, whatever, none of these are relatable, they're just exotic names. Solution: to have a "default" Linux, just Linux, no other names. When you search for Linux on Google you should get the first result to be "Linux" the "default" distribution, with a big download button for the ISO to install, with the default experience, without having to think about what other words surrounding it mean. Just like MacOS and Just like Windows, you should have a proper default. Not saying other distributions shouldn't exist, but they should be an afterthought for the average user.

2. Evangelism. You don't see people queuing for days in front of a Linux store to buy the latest Linux laptop on release day like you have for Apple and Microsoft products because there is no evangelism, no virtue signaling towards consumer vanity surrounding Linux. And I think there should be if you want normal consumers to show desire; mainly because the "competition" is doing it. Instead Linux markets itself towards the other end of the spectrum: bulky, hardcore, geeky, non fashionable by choice, and this hurts general public interest.

3. Corporate. There are features missing from Linux that corporate environments require, either with good reason or only to tick a checkbox, but nevertheless the reason doesn't matter, as long as they require it, Linux should provide them. The list includes: TMP full disk encryption. Active Directory setup with UI tools, reliable screen sharing and recording, system user for administrators to log in remotely, users wiht different privileges to install tools for normal users, antivirus and VPN support for different vendors, a way to push updates and manage certificates, passwords, disk encryption remotely, with UI tools for each. This is not an exhaustive list but just things for which I was denied a Linux laptop in the past at different workplaces. While there has been some improvement here and there, there hasn't actually been a unified, across the board solution for these that is usable by sysadmins in corporate environments, which are not programmers, so they want UI tools to manage these, and ideally the same tools across any distribution, so they don't have to learn a new tool every time they want to do their work.

4. Desktop Environments. Just like with the branding, there must be only ONE default. I don't really care which, or even if my preferred one gets thrown out and my most hated one becomes the winner, as long as there will be only ONE. This is very important, I would even say the most important point. Without stability, comfort, and harmony in this area there will never be an environment of desktop apps available for consumers to enjoy and use for their work. And desktop apps is what normal consumers expect from their OS.

continuing in a comment...

...continuing here:

5. Slow Update Cycles. This is about hardware support; in recent years there have been rare cases in my experience where some new hardware was not supported on Linux quickly enough (let's say either on launch day or withing a few months of launch). But this is only if you look at the latest kernel version. Distributions don't run the latest by default, and many don't even provide a way to install a Linux with the latest kernel shortly after it's available. So you might be stuck at installing the OS because the live USB uses an older kernel incompatible with your hardware and halts at a text prompt. It only takes one annoyed person, with a new toy that he wants to try out, to blast Linux since Ubuntu did not install on his new laptop, and the whole ecosystem gets a bad reputation in his social cycle. Speaking of which...

6. UX/UI. Normal, every day consumers don't like text and beeps. They don't want to see it on the screen when the computer is booting, nor want to run commands in a terminal, nor want to edit configuration files. They want slick UIs that look good, spinners and animations that make it look like the device is from the future, not walls of texts and beeps. But for Linux, it seems like people don't want to refine the system with such things. This to me seems like a cultural problem that Linux has.

7. Leadership. There is no one person with authority around the entire ecosystem, that can force a direction change. You have the Kernel team that do their own thing, the distributions which focus on their stuff, the desktop environments doing whatever they please. This creates a great ecosystem for experts that know what they're doing and can piece things together. But common consumers are not like that. Their main focus is to feel good about themselves and the things they use, and a leader that can make choices for them on things they don't care to understand is part of this. So far there has been no such charismatic individual to penetrate the mind of consumers and address their needs since there is no way for such an individual to influence the direction of all the Linux ecosystem members. When Steve Jobs said a thing, it got done. When Bill Gates said a thing, it got done. But when Linus says something, maybe someone takes note, no pressure though... So the things people care about don't really get implemented, as everybody works on whatever they want in the Linux world. A great things for experts but a bad thing for everyday consumers.

By “just works” if you mean seamless installation, boot and device recognition, it has to do with the wide range of hardware Linux has to support with less investment per piece of hardware. But for a decade or more it has been doable to get similar experience if you can buy specific hardware (like building your desktop or buying a prev gen Thinkpad) and pick a widely used distro. Of course, I have to say the out of box experience of Apple products might be the highest bar for general purpose computing there is at the moment.

… But if you are including daily casual and professional use, in my experience macOS has been considerably buggier than Linux. Upgrade to M1 caused sooo many headaches with the software I use, but even before this macOS has been getting buggier and buggier every month. Not a single week goes by without having issues with

- Apps like Chrome and Slack bugging out. They can’t find my camera and mic devices, their UI rendering gets corrupted with weird green matrix like artifacts, crashes…

- Bluetooth headphones made by Apple (Beats Flex) keep disconnecting every 15 seconds in a loop (fine with iphone, broken with Pro Max macbook). One day it almost deafened me because somehow Zoom was able to boost volume 10x beyond system maximum, caused me ear pain for more than a day.

- Good luck trying to set up a multi user system with Homebrew and stuff. Everything expects admin access, and even with two admin users you constantly have to fix permissions and switch users to install software. Did I mention everything you try to install and use wants admin access? You get bombarded by admin login prompts as even the most useless piece of software tries to auto-update itself multiple times every week, and sometimes breaking more than itself as it overwrites the wrong folder because of some buggy install script.

- Docker runs like crap. I thought it was bad on my Intel MacBook, I but it is horrible on M1. Surprise surprise, intel emulation is slower no matter how much people claim emulated intel on m1 is faster.

Funny thing is, after upgrading to M1 my main speed gain has not been because of faster hardware, and instead it was moving more work to EC2 instances in the cloud due to not being able to do my work on M1. I might as well “upgraded” to a chromebook.

- Every macOS upgrade breaks apps I rely on, from utilities installed by homebrew to Emacs or chat apps.

- Every time I plug in a screen, or a usb hub with peripherals, the whole thing goes nuts. I then have to start a dance where I spend five minutes turning devices on and off, unplugging cables just to get all of my monitor, keyboard, mouse, mic and cam working at the same time. It often drops at least one of them every time I get back to my desk. Restarts usually fix it (never had to restart a computer so much to fix issues).

- Many "magic" things that "just work" such as Handoff, wireless connection between macbook and iphone, some icloud features are only working 50% of the time. When it doesn't, there's no path to troubleshooting, maybe if you restart your computer, log out of icloud and back in or something it will get fixed.

I can keep going, but overall I am appalled by all the paper cuts of this supposedly premium hardware and software that cost an arm and a leg.

Ubuntu entered the chat

I have so many issues with standby, power control and dedicated graphics on 20.04 on my ThinkPad... it's not yet comparable. getting there, but not yet.

It definitely depends on the hardware. It works pretty well if not too new and if old, it is mostly perfect. I get a lot of older laptops from friends in my town and first thing I do is installing Ubuntu to see if how well it works. Usually, it is perfect or almost perfect but these are 3+ year laptops usually without discrete GPU’s.

If you claim that macOS "just works", then you have never insenely used it.

Manjaro also just works. If I didn't have arch running I'd be using that. Arch isn't perfect but pretty close on the desktop. And since you don't want to deal with setup and configuration, Manjaro handles that out of the box.

You are simply ignorant.

MacOS doesn't "just work" if you install it on non-Apple hardware. Most of the time it won't even boot. Nuff said.

Hackintoshes are definitely flakier but mostly due to breaking changes in OpenCore or your boot method, which you want to keep patched so you don’t have issues with macOS updates. If your environment and threat level allow it, you could simply not update once you get a stable config, and just image the entire boot drive. As long as your UEFI config doesn’t get corrupted, you’re fine. I’m sure that could be saved as well through rEFInd or similar tools.

Once you’ve assembled this house of cards, it’s fairly stable, I assure you. Just don’t look at it sideways. :P

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