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Comment by torstenvl | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how people hate macOS. There are some frustrations (e.g., rapid deprecation of things like GC'd Obj-C or 32-bit apps, code signing and notarization) but they pale in comparison to other platforms (glibc compatibility, $500+ code signing certs for Windows/Android, etc.)

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> I don't understand how people hate macOS

This is hacker news, so presumably we are hackers. I like being able to look into the system I'm running. When I'm seeing a weird network issue, I want to be able to peer into the kernel's tcp stack. When I see an error, I want to be able to add debug statements and understand it.

That's easy to do on linux. There's great tooling. That's hard to do on macOS.

I run websites and services. I like being able to run them locally, to try and reproduce bugs I see on my server. You can't run macOS on a server in a reasonable way, so the only reasonable choice there is linux.

I can understand how someone who doesn't really want to understand the software they use might want to use macOS or windows. On hacker news, I'd expect most people to understand the desire to be able to tinker and understand the system to a greater degree.

> When I'm seeing a weird network issue, I want to be able to peer into the kernel's tcp stack.

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/tree/xnu-8796...

Okay, now compile your kernel with 'CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO=y', load it in qemu, and attach gdb so you can step through the code and reason about it.

The os being compared to here is linux. I fully understand that most devs don’t want to spend significant time customizing their OS to meet their workflow needs, but once you have a linux distro with a custom window manager —- I don’t see how you could reasonably claim the macos experience is comparable.

Nothing could convince me to drop PaperWM.

Same with Material Shell for me. I can no longer live without it.

It is not comparable. But which one is “better” is completely subjective.

Has more to do with privacy in my opinion:

https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-n...

The fact that you can no longer modify the boot volume and disable invasive services is the clincher.

You miss the forest for the trees — fedora also has a version with immutable roots, it is a feature, and is absolutely not meant as anti-privacy, it is there for proper rollbacks and imo it is absolutely superior (with NixOS’s model).

I don't know how it works for Macs, but on Fedora Silverblue you can definitely disable anything you consider to be an "invasive service". Also, if the immutable root comes with software you don't want, you can uninstall it by adding a layer to the root image.

I am no Mac expert, but it is surprisingly flexible contrary to their image as a walled garden. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some magic incantation to turn off many of those “invasive services”.

For what it’s worth, Plasma’s file indexer is much more invasive in terms of running at the wrong times in my experience, so depending on what one mean, Linux also have similar services.

You have. Doesn’t matter what it’s meant for—the result is what’s important. And having to deactivate sip is a big trade off to improve privacy.

If it were privacy-first and read only, that would be another thing entirely. Defaults matter.

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