Ken Thompson is transitioning from macOS to Raspbian
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Former or unhappy macOS users, what kinds of things baked into macOS keep you from getting your work done? I've never had an issue with disabling Gatekeeper or upgrading my kernel extensions and 32-bit apps. I'm sure there's valid points to be made but I'd really like to hear some specifics. Usually cleaning up a fresh install for me just requires just a couple System Settings tweaks, Defaults commands, and brew scripts.
- Homebrew is a stinker, and really hard to automate consistently. Nix with direnv gets close to a "Linux-like" dev experience but Nixpkgs doesn't have enough coverage to make it worthwhile.
- Apple's insistence on using home-grown APIs forces me to be an expert on their tech rather than focusing on my production environment. This is particularly bad with containers and filesystem support, but also felt heavily in areas like GPU and graphics API support. Their courage to remove features is only rivaled by their pride preventing them from adopting industry standards.
- MacOS is just... too bloated now. Memory usage has always been an issue for me, but going back to Big Sur and Ventura last year to port stuff to M1 made me claustrophobic. The UI is cramped and simple gestures like putting on your headphones are bound to launching apps by-default for some reason. Apple's constant advertisements of first-party services rivals that of Windows 8, too.
It's just not worth giving up 50% of my freedom for the last 10% of the desktop experience anymore, in my opinion. Apple has always been free to change MacOS however they like, but it's not my kind of roller-coaster ride now.
- It is hard to automate with brew scripts? I haven't tried any other package managers, but maybe Macports would be easier to automate. What does this have to do with Apple's macOS though? Would you like it if they supported their own package manager for their users?
- I totally understand this, especially when their own APIs are often so poorly documented and behind the latest changes they've brought. I am glad they've refrained from removing their deprecated OpenGL version despite pushing Metal, but that isn't much to celebrate.
- do you really need to port stuff with Rosetta 2 onboard? Regarding bloatware, it is true that there are some baked-in first party apps that you can't delete. But surely you're referring to more than that? Apple usually cuts out old technologies and legacy software before users and developers would prefer, if anything. On the other hand, if I want to run a Windows 98 game on Windows 11, that might be possible OTB. macOS' UI is cramped I agree, quite bubbly and with too many slow and costly animations. I use the more spacious display resolution option because of that, which at least helps somewhat. And on bugs, sure. There are lots of bugs, more in recent years than in past years, and there always will be bugs. I had a very buggy experience with Ubuntu at my last job (still enjoyed it though). I don't know if I would have a smoother more cohesive experience on the right Linux distro but I would love to be surprised. There are ads for their own services, where are those appearing? When you first create your local user account, they push you to sign in and enable iCloud. I have never seen other services advertised except for in their dedicated 1st party apps on launch.
I don't blame you if you're having a bad experience, I like the idea of configuring a distro and DE one time, my way, and having consistency. Rather than chasing design trends and mobile UI elements. I just haven't found enough objective reasons to believe I would have a more powerful, cohesive experience on Linux that makes it easy to get right to work without too much configuration.