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Comment by Scubabear68 | Hacker News Reader

It seems a lot of those gripes are about specific apps, or simply not understanding that MacOS does somethings differently.

By contrast I have never been able to use Linux successfully as a desktop OS because there is a dearth of polished commercial apps, and the HW compatibility has always been iffy. MacOS generally works out of the box with the HW, and the apps are generally highly polished.

I caveat the apps as “generally” because there are some turds for sure. iTunes and now Music have always been horrible, and somehow they managed to make Music even worse than iTunes.

Historically Macs do benefit from 3rd party software (see also Alfred), over time the best of it seems to eventually get baked into the OS. I don’t see that as a downside really.

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It's always about specific apps. I need about 10 apps to work on my work machine, and if any of them is fighting the OS it would be enough to degrade the whole experience.

In the olden days it was having a decent unix comand line environment. Windows didn't, osx and linux did, and many of us switched. For others it's a good Adobe suite experience. For others it will be Excel and Office etc.

I totally sympathise with parent and Apple Music starting up every damn time the play button is pressed without a media app already started. That's a button I used to press a lot, and at some point I stopped playing music on the mac altogether.

The move to kill kernel extension nullified a lot of the historical advantage of the mac: many stuff that was changing low level behavior became a lot more unreliable . Having keyboard remappings get stuck or unresponsive for instance is a huge QOL degradation.

Linux's desktop experience also lacks polish in a lot of areas. It's not a talent or expertise issue, it just comes down to lack of resources. You can do a lot of polishing if you say here's 50 million dollars and a staff of 50, have at it.

This x100. I have regularly tried to set up a Linux environment, thinking that there really isn't that much of a barrier to being productive on Linux, but with the lack of polished commercial apps and the hardware quirks I always seem to spend more time finding workarounds than actually working.

I have found more recently that I can get something reasonable (for me) set up, although I'm confident I'll always need a Mac nearby to do some things on.

> the lack of polished commercial apps

I didn't really run into this as an issue at all. Then again, "commercial apps" sounds largely like a relic of the 90's. It has Slack and Teams and Spotify and can run most games thanks to Valve.

Biggest thing I ran into was that MS Word is too buggy to 100% reliably read anything created in alternate programs. I know it's Word and not LibreOffice or anything because it happens between different versions of Word too.

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