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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Macbook hardware is great, but you could not pay me any amount to daily-drive a recent version of MacOS. Big Sur was like the Windows 8 moment for MacOS, and it just compounded on the limitations that Apple had been building up to. Even if I couldn't have my "nice things" in Linux like KDE and VS Code, I'd still be using it simply on the basis that it behaves how I expect.

Apple has burned me too many times for me to feel comfortable paying them again. I much prefer choosing my hardware and software as opposed to suffering through whatever Apple says is right for me. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

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What particularly did you get screwed by with Big Sur?

The only problem I had was with a Qt app that would not run on it and that turned out to be a problem with Qt rather than macOS.

Coming from Mojave, I was really disappointed by the Playmobil design philosophy and limitations on executable linking. Also something must have changed internally, because post-Big-Sur Nix installers have the most ass-backwards way of working around APFS. Making a comfortable dev environment on MacOS leaves my machine feeling like it's bursting at the seams...

I'm sure it's a great tool for creatives who want to loathe Windows with the rest of us, but for development MacOS has become more of a hindrance than a help. Even WSL2 feels nicer to use than baremetal Darwin deployment.

What limitations with executable linking have you found? I couldn’t find anything specific and didn’t run into any issues myself.

All my 32-bit plugins broke in Ableton Live, and Proton stopped working when I tried Catalina. Without my music toolkit, games or preferred programming environment, MacOS doesn't really have much left for me these days.

That’s not really an executable linking issue. That’s the OS dropping support for 32-bit code in general from Catalina onwards.

And it was no doubt done to ease the transition to ARM… it means no need to implement 32-bit support in Rosetta.

Rosetta does support executing 32-but code in alternate code segments created in a 64-bit process, used by CodeWeavers’ Crossover: https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2020/11/18/okay-im-o...

This post here has a section on the reasons to drop 32-bit

https://pilky.me/apples-technology-transitions/

But essentially storage and memory savings, maintainability savings and some issues with the ObjC runtime.

I assume part of the issue too is being able to enable pointer authentication, which afaik uses the higher end bits to store data, and being able to do that allows them to secure the OS better. So 32-bit support likely was a security risk factor as a result too.

Same for me, I can't imagine myself doing any meaningful work on MacOS. It gets too much in the way and the user interface is distracting and slow.

> Macbook hardware is great

Then install Linux on the Macbook? Two setups ago I was running this config and it was pretty great.

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