but that would fall into the realm of enshitification.
Linux has always been lackluster on the Desktop - fragmented, lacking features, lacking important applications, etc - and MacOS is attached to overpriced mediocrity.
Linux has always been lackluster on the Desktop - fragmented, lacking features, lacking important applications, etc - and MacOS is attached to overpriced mediocrity.
Honestly, I would agree with that 10 years ago but not anymore.
The we-yfication of clients applications and Electron (ironically) did a lot of good here.
These are numbers pulled out of my Hat, but I would say out of my experience that around:
- 90% of proprietary applications around nowadays are just WebApp or Electron Apps that will just run fine under Linux
- 5-7% are old Win32 apps that will just run like a charm under Wine (ironically, sometimes better than under the last windows version)
- 3-5% are the problematic ones. They are often Microsoft applications (Office365, Teams) or Oracle applications.
The most problematic one I do find currently is Office 365 that never runs properly under Wine (probably on purpose).
Even the game situation improved tremendously with the arrival of Proton.
And that's totally expected. Unlike WSL1, where a terrible OS pretends to be a good one, a vastly superior OS should have no issue pretending to be an inferior one.
Perhaps disgust, but Wine is not sentient just yet.
My personal experience with both WSL1 and Cygwin, which offer a Linux-like varnish on top of a Windows environment, is that mapping Linux filesystem semantics on top of NTFS result in a sizeable performance hit.
Not enough to make them unusable, of course, but enough perceive.
When Wine does the same, mapping NTFS semantics on top of ext4, there is no such hit - on the contrary, if feels faster.
I'm not a mac user but calling the M1/M2 macbooks overpriced mediocrity is simply ridiculous and shows how out of touch you are.
* https://www.sonnetstore.com/products/displaylink-dual-displa...
*** https://github.com/dado3212/spaces-renamer
**** https://contexts.co/
It also requires me to be able to install arbitrary software on my Mac, which has not been the case at most employers I've worked for.
.....or I could buy a Windows machine and get that all out of the box.
My work laptop is a Mac. My work workstation is a Linux (Gnome) machine. My personal workstation is a Windows 10 machine (not upgrading until they bring back side taskbar). I own and regularly use a Chromebook. I am familiar with all the major desktop environments and OS X is my least favorite.
M1/M2 are hardware. MacOS is software. As far as operating systems go MacOS is very much mediocre.
The comment he was replying to saids that MacOS is "attached to overpriced mediocrity". It seems pretty clear that is talking about hardware.
-Relatively secure
-Game changing integration with my other Apple products (NOBODY else does this)
-Stays out of my way for the most part
-Runs important commercial software like Office365 natively
-UNIX shell right out of the box
-Homebrew is a decent package manager and easy to install
-Emacs key binds for text entry fields across the entire OS
-It's a little thing, but the animations and sounds make it kind of fun to use
It's a bit inflexible, and the UNIX layer could use some love and modernization, I'll give you that, but once you learn to work within the paradigm, I think it's actually a really good OS.
Oh, and you definitely need to install something like Rectangle to get window snapping, I can't go without that after using it on Windows and Linux, but that's easy enough to fix.
Eh, not really. They do it really well and present it very nicely, but mostly sherlocked and not at all unique. Also, it really stumbles once you throw any non-apple stuff in.
LTspice, Maxima and O365 are horrible on macos.
Edit: as some of the sibling comments are saying, maybe parent was talking about Mac OS itself, not the hardware. Some things in Mac OS leave a lot to be desired IME, e.g. windows tiling (can be solved by installing something like Rectangle but really it should be part of the OS) https://rectangleapp.com/
The desktop Linux environment has never been worse. With Wayland and High DPI, you're kinda forced to use KDE or Gnome to have a smooth experience. Other desktop environments are either bad at Wayland or bad at DPI scaling. But even the two poster children for Linux desktop environments are plagued by issues. Those are always minor or temporary but sometimes breaking something critically. I've had web pages just put KDE into a loop. Always crashing and then restarting. And that was weeks ago. And this happens every time. The install I had before that with gnome made every DPI scales app blurry. This simply does not happen on Windows.
Regqrsing Macs: I don't trust Apple to not do something stupid either but also at least until the 15 inch MacBook air you either lived with 13 inch or you paid a lot more. Need more than one external screen? That's mbp for you. More ports? Mbp. Better GPU? Mbp. And then we really quickly get into a price range where you are comparing the most expensive Windows machines (which actually have some build quality) vs a mid range 14 inch mbp.
I like the arm machines but I'm personally not convinced that anything past the base model is actually worth it. Especially outside of the high CoL areas of the US. Like, if you compare rent payment per week to the cost of the machine, you can totally see why Macs sell so well in US urban centers.
Adobe anything, Autodesk anything, stuff like that... are those still Desktop apps? They aren't on 90% of the desktops out there. Should the 10% be called Workstations?
Perhaps the "important applications" are MS Office? Or some other MS product forced on you by an employer. But that world seems so... archaic.