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Comment by alphanullmeric | Hacker News Reader

Lots of respect for the asahi project. Soon you can run what is subjectively the best operating system on the objectively best built laptops.

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Yes, as soon as NixOS will have native support - I will be buying an apple laptop. The Asahi people are doing a fantastic job.

I doubt it will ever have native support. NixOS doesn't do native support. For what it's worth I'm running NixOS on an M2 Max MPB using https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon.

Plus one on this repo! It’s a solid experience, I run NixOS on my M2 Macbook Air.

you already have the best operating system on it - the one it came with.

Until you want to tile 3 windows on the same workspace, which Apple couldn’t fathom someone doing. Meanwhile gnome looks astronomically better with a bit of theming and has nicer animations and window control and resizing behaviour. Must be embarrassing to be even less intuitive than Linux.

Why are you comparing default behavior of macOS with Linux after “a bit of theming”. You can easily install a tiling window manager on macOS if that’s your thing.

I don’t mean a window manager, I mean just snapping 3 windows together is impossible on macOS. Theming doesn’t change that.

Check out Yabai WM if you still have a macOS laptop

Rectangle. Free. Customizable to your hearts content.

Installing a tiling WM on macOS (in this case, Yabai) requires disabling system integrity protection. I tried Yabai for a while without disabling SIP (since I can't on my work machine) and it just did not work well. Not the fault of Yabai I'm sure, but there's still a ton of tinkering and tweaking you need to do to get Yabai really working correctly.

Does Linux have System Integrity Protection?

I use Yabai on my Macs without SIP enabled. Here’s a list of the features that absolutely require SIP to be disabled: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/issues/1863

But you don’t need to disable SIP just for tiling. I find it works extremely well.

> there's still a ton of tinkering and tweaking you need to do to get Yabai really working correctly

This is pretty much true of basically every tiling window manager on Linux, too.

For me, using Nix-Darwin for MacOS and NixOS has drastically simplified my tiling window manager setup after initially doing the work to figure out my ideal config.

> nicer animations

Pointless comment: I can't help but feel that the nicest animations are no animations. I think it's just that each time I see animations I try to imagine what Star Trek would look like if each tap on an LCARS panel took 300ms to do something.

On Gnome if I disable animations and apply https://github.com/bdaase/remove-alt-tab-delay I find the experience to be very good.

My open-and-acknowledged but not fixed Apple feedback items for very basic issues would disagree with that. (Apple 1st party software crashing on startup, settings search just not working at all, smartcard auth randomly failing, ...)

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