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Comment by rossvor | Hacker News Reader

Exactly, both informative for MacOS users and those who never used it. MacOS users can quickly scan and think yeah I don't care about this feature, or think huh this is something that could be useful and maybe I should look for a 3rd party app which has this. Those considering switching to MacOS can compare to their existing environment and have a greater picture of what possible pain points to expect.

I would like to see more of posts like this for all Desktop environments. Like things you can do in MacOS but not in default Ubuntu setup.

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This list is personal and far from exhaustive (which is fine). If I quickly scanned looking for things I care about, I'd find very little. However, as a Linux user I could very quickly come up with an equally long list of things that I do care about and that does not overlap much with this one.

I think the larger point is: in Linux, some things are complicated but most things are possible. On Mac and Windows, some things are easier but many things are impossible.

So there's definitely a tradeoff. But since I have to use this tool for the majority of my waking hours in order to make a living, the ROI from taking a bit longer to solve an issue and then having it solved virtually forever makes Linux a better proposition IMHO.

Why do we need a trade off between stability and control?

I'd argue we could have both if not for commercial reasons. Apple deliberately chooses to limit control, Microsoft too.

With all the resources they have, you really think they couldn't give you more control without sacrificing stability?

> Why do we need a trade off between stability and control?

There isn't infinite time and money in the world. Every hour making one feature more stable means an hour not invested in another. Flexibility and control are just additional features. If you want to change the system font, you have to test (and support) a much wider array of things, especially if your UI guidelines are as restrictive as Apple's. Every piece of control you expose to the user increases the engineering cost of writing and maintaining the software.

And frankly, if more people wanted that level of control, this year TRULY would be the year of linux on the desktop. But they don't.

Apple effectively has infinite money, they could make more man-hours

It's not just control. It's control plus stability, as we said.

Control is deliberately withdrawn to preserve the commercial interests of the producer, not because it is technically impossible to add it to stability.

You want stability? Provide a perfect default configuration. You want control? Allow tweaking that configuration in detail for users that are willing to do it.

> On Mac and Windows, some things are easier but many things are impossible.

The obvious caveat is that many things are impossible out of the box. There are plenty of tools available to address a good number of the shortcomings mentioned in the story.

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