Today's macs are better than ever, and Windows keeps getting worse.
I picked up a macbook air m1 refurbished from apple to see what the fuss is about. It's a great machine. If not for that Debian would be primary OS, as it has been for the past ~15 years. I have one mac and a bunch of thinkpads running linux and/or BSD.
It’s just a question of whether it’s good enough for you or not. And honestly, for laptops, the answer so far is probably still "not". Thunderbolt not working is kind of a deal killer, for example.
https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
Gotta say the other day I was thinking about the Mac Pro and even at only 192GB of memory, 20P/4E with some Optane SSDs and some flash behind it would absolutely tear through postgres workloads, I bet.
Everyone is dumping on Mac Pro for regressing on memory capacity (after spending the last 2 years dumping on the "$50k mac" and comparing it against Threadripper builds that top out at 256GB), and asking why Mac Pro instead of Studio. Since Asahi doesn't support Thunderbolt yet, you can't use enclosures on Studio. Mac Pro is the only option for a PCIe card that Apple won't sign a driver kext for (NVIDIA cards, for example - and they do have an aarch64 driver thanks to the Tegra family!).
NVIDIA glomming onto Asahi and giving it formal support instead of going their own way with L4T/Jetson Linux would be an interesting course of events. It is, after all, just ARM64/AArch64 under the hood.
I haven't used windows in ages so not going to comment on that. The only thing that appeals to me is that it now does linux better than it used to. But the one thing it had going for it back in the day (games) is now something that Linux does as well via Steam. Which, is why I have a cheap laptop running Manjaro and Steam for some casual gaming. Works great. But the hardware is not great.
Microsoft (aside from its niche Surface lineup) is mostly dependent on OEMs for laptops. Apple builds its own hardware and they do a very good job. Other laptops exist but they tend to be compromises on battery, screen quality, performance, touchpads, etc. Most vendors get at least a few of those wrong. Almost all of them ship with mediocre synaptics touchpads. Quite a few insist on bundling screens with unimpressive resolutions, contrast, etc. The cheap Manjaro laptop I have is guilty of pretty much all of that. Mediocrity is the norm for windows laptops. And invariably the nicer ones are close in price to what Apple charges.
There are a few premium laptops of course. But even those tend to be compromises. E.g. Lenovo, which some people seem to like and recommend, comes with this weird nipple thing and a cheapo synaptics touchpad with actual physical buttons. Just horrible. Which is probably why most Lenovo users I've seen seem to use a wireless mouse. Neither the nipple thing nor the touchpad is really usable as an input device, apparently. The screens on those things are also not quite what I'm used to (less color, contrast and pixels, wrong aspect ratio). So, if I'm going to spend lots of money, that's not what I'd buy.
I might put Asahi Linux on a mac at some point though. I don't think I'd miss OS X that much.
I switched from from Macs to Microsoft Surfaces when they first came out and found them to be significantly more stable.
I can't deny that new Macbooks might be the best hardware you can get, but I'm still going with a Framework running Linux for my next portable.
The last time I used macOS professionally, I also experienced what I'd consider poor stability there, so maybe I'll feel differently after more time. But so far, after several weeks, it seems obvious to me that my new work MBP is much more stable than the Windows laptop they gave me a year ago.
Yes it made quite a bit of news and drama, but it's all fixed.
With all that said Apple does have a premium product that generally "just works", is more power efficient, and has (on average) a longer life cycle than a PC.
Both my work-issued 2019 16” and my personal 2023 16” have excellent keyboards.
Long 3 and a half years that I didn’t even feel at all because I’ve never even touched a butterfly keyboard MacBook. My previous personal MacBook was a mid-2015 15”.
(FWIW I use a mechanical keyboard with mine when at my desk, but I don't, like, hate life when I'm away from my desk and have to use the built-in keyboard, even if it's for a whole week. It's fine. I don't even really think about it.)
This is nowhere near the truth. Only ads present in a default MacOS install are in the App Store, for apps. Windows has all sorts of ads in the start menu itself.
WSL is a buggy mess with a lot of serious problems. It's nice enough for Linux dabblers but anyone else will eventually run into some combination of the memory leaks, data loss, fundamental incapabilities (e.g., no hardware passthrough), inconsistent install process, showstopping window management bugs for the graphical components, random breakage in the CLI interop interface, text encoding problems in the WSL CLI, hangups related to systemd support, lack of a proper service management layer OOTB, etc.
WSL has different install requirements for Windows 10 and Windows 11. On Windows 10, it requires a special Windows Optional Component to be enabled, which is a change that requires local admin rights. On Windows 11, WSL can be installed from the Microsoft Store with no need to set up the Windows Optional Component. Shortly after that version of WSL for Windows 11 went live in the Microsoft Store, Microsoft removed the hooks in their installer which enabled that Optional Component in the case it was disabled— on all versions of Windows. So on systems where end users have limited or no admin rights, Windows 10 users cannot install WSL, but Windows 11 users can. On systems which use whitelists for specific installers and processes to be able to elevate privileges, installing WSL on Windows 10 broke because the whitelisted process no longer attempts to set up WSL's dependencies. My organization was bitten by this.
Like with other aspects of WSL, the deeper your engagement is the more bugs and quirks are revealed.
> many need to step outside and realize that Windows has made great strides since Windows 8.
Never ran Windows 8, thankfully. All I know having returned to Windows for a year for the sake of a job is that it is much worse than it was the last time I used it. I'm sorry to hear that Windows 8 so lowered your expectations. It must have been pretty bad.
> Acting like the entire OS is now adware is just complete nonsense.
I'm way more interested in setting realistic expectations about WSL for fellow Linux users than the overall value of Windows, which is probably already a settled question for most of us. But this statement strikes me as pretty funny. 'Complete nonsense' is a pretty strong phrase. If you ever figure out what makes something 'truly adware', send a tip to the lexicographers, because I've just checked 3 dictionaries and Windows qualifies as adware by all 3 definitions they had! :P
More seriously: Windows is definitely different from a lot of adware in that advertising isn't the only revenue strategy for Windows, and Microsoft also sees Windows fulfilling other purposes for them than selling ad space. But generally, 'adware' doesn't mean much more than 'annoying software which shows me ads I don't want to see'. How can you argue that Windows is not that for many, many people?