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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

Everything up to macOS itself is top notch. Trackpad, keyboard, display, CPU - all best in class. What isn't best in class is good enough. macOS the desktop part... let's keep it polite and call it a matter of preference (it sucks)

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Agreed. When I was using Apple laptops as daily drivers I always got the questions why I was replacing the OS with Linux. Fact of the matter was that (at least for me) it was a much stabler environment to work with, less crashing, less unexpected feature failures, etc.

Its funny how the reality distortion works for MacOS, people really look very incredulous when you tell them that Linux on Mac works better for you than MacOS on Mac :-)

I’m not sure when your experience dates to, or what kind of dev you were working, but I’ve had the exact opposite: on MacBooks for ~15 years, range of dev (full stack on a few stacks down to large footprint performance critical golang), VM’s etc. In all that time I can count the number of full on crashes (kernel panics) on healthy hardware on one hand. macOS has been supremely stable in my experience.

I always wonder what people are doing where their computer crashes all the time. I've been using Macs since the G4 days and have rarely had any crashes. But, the same is true for Windows for many years when I was a developer for Windows software. Linux is probably where I've had the most crashes b/c it lets you shoot yourself in the foot - which I did many times while learning linux in the 90s-00s.

I run arch linux on my ancient macbook pro 2011. The reason I installed this flavor of linux was to disable a faulty gpu, and the guidance I found was using this distro. This mac has been my all-day-every-day workhorse ever since. And as for linux, with i3 window manager it is fantastic. It runs all the latest things I need for programming and it runs them fast. I almost never boot into mac at all anymore.

People might look at you incredulously because their experience isn't mirroring yours. For instance, I honestly do not recall the last time macOS crashed on me. It does what I want it to do 99% of the time without getting in my way. But.. that's my experience. Linux on Mac might work better for YOU, don't presume that is the same for everyone else.

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