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Comment by talldayo | Hacker News Reader

It's funny, I'm the same way for Macs. Why would I buy a computer that launches Apple Music by default when I plug in my headphones? Why does my taskbar ship with services I'll never use pinned to the bottom? Why does Safari send me little reminder notifications that it's still installed? It all feels so gaudy and anti-productive that I end up spending more time setting up Macs then I do setting up Linux. When I have to go use a Mac it's like getting assigned to a Siberian labor camp.

Nowadays desktop Linux is pretty good, to the point that Valve uses it as the backbone for their gaming handheld. Fractional scaling is upstreamed in Qt and GTK, Pipewire is the default for Bluetooth now alongside 320kbps codecs (including AAC), and GNOME and KDE are both now stable enough on Wayland to daily-drive. I think your complaints would have been valid 10 years ago, but the hodge-podge x11 desktops are in the rearview mirror for most users.

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> Why would I buy a computer that launches Apple Music by default when I plug in my headphones?

Agreed, but there is a decent enough workaround.

https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes

It's been a few years since the last time I daily drove a Linux desktop. What is the least trouble, yet "power tool" distro and setup people use nowadays?

Or: what do you use?

Fedora is a good choice. It's recent, stable and just about as simple as running Windows or MacOS. They also offer Silverblue, which is a more experimental Fedora-based distro that has more modern quality-of-life changes. I'd recommend normal Fedora for the average Windows expat, and Silverblue for the developers that want to make their system messy without messing things up.

I use NixOS, these days. It shares a lot of similarities with Silverblue, except it relies on the Nix package manager instead of the RPM one. It's not "the least trouble" by a long-shot, but it has a lot of great built-in tooling that makes developing multiple projects with different packages a breeze. Where other people might use a VM or Docker to isolate build dependencies, us Nix users write specifications for an environment and get a special shell with all our dependencies pre-linked. I digress, but it's a neat project in it's own right that even supports MacOS if it sounds like something you'd want. I've used it in-prod and have nothing but good things to say about it.

None of your comebacks are things that are show stoppers.

Apple music loads when you plug in headphones? Is that the same as your laptop doesn't suspend and resume at all?

The taskbar has things you don't like in it? Is that the same as "the UI for most apps are show stopper broken"?

If I fix the icons in my dock, they stay fixed. If I fix something in Linux, someone is going to come along and break it next time I patch something.

See the difference? I like the mac as an access device for power tools BECAUSE the kind of folks who like messing with computers aren't messing with mine.

And most of what you mention in the last paragraph needs to be prefaced with "if you don't mind burning 4x more battery on doing it without acceleration", and "if you don't mind it looking like a small child chose your fonts".

It's not enough for it to be kinda usable if you squint, it needs to use the hardware I paid for, it needs to suspend and resume and boot securely, it needs to look good, display in the colors I want on the display hardware I choose, and let me remap the keyboard without using 10 apps to cover all the weird edge cases.

That's table stakes.

How about "I can't control the volume through the Mac if my audio goes to a digital output, like HDMI".

My monitor has audio out, which I plug into speakers... both have their own volume, but I'd rather use keyboard controls, but I can't, OSX disables volume control completely.

Also, you can't have a window span monitors. It only appears on the monitor that has >50%.

Links opened from non browsers open in the window physically closest to the opening app (ish). If you run chrome with multiple profiles, you can't just expect the most recently used window to open the link, you must position the window with the profile you want to use overlapping the other browser, often requiring me to drag a window fully to the other monitor (because windows can't span monitors).

OSX is the worst window manager ever created. There are states you can get into with your mouse that you can't reverse without a obscure key combo. Window snapping took how long, and it's still the worst. you can't make a window be as big as it can be without making it full screen.

It's just the worst.

I've been told I can fix all of these things... if I buy 10 different $10 apps.

Nope, none of them are showstoppers at all. They're papercuts, and you're welcome to endure them if you think it feels so nice.

I moved on from MacOS 5 years ago (after the Catalina announcement) and don't miss a thing. I also pay substantially less money for the same software with no built-in advertising at all. My news app doesn't link out to Taboola, my music app doesn't ask me to subscribe or buy albums, my Docker doesn't rely on a VM. You have to drag me back kicking and screaming to Windows or MacOS, because they're both bad operating systems nowadays. Neither one of them is a better choice than the other, you're either stuck with Pinky or dealing with The Brain. I choose neither.

Strange to me that none of the items you mentioned ever happen to me, with the one caveat being I had to tweak my taskbar and dock slightly when I first set up the Mac for the first time. However, I am willing to bet for just about anyone within the HN community no one uses their rigs default out of box without some tweaking no matter Linux, windows or MacOS. My guess is that most do pretty extensive tweaks to set their systems up the way they like them.

Perhaps I added fixes or did configuration tweaks when I originally set up the system and I just forgot and those are keeping those items you mentioned from bothering me. I think on this current box that was 6 years ago and has required nothing since and just reliably runs.

Why the hell would I need a mac laptop for work for which I would need to spend not sure how many hours setting up a development environment while the OS actively fights me? With literally a retrofitted (pun intended) homebrew packaging system that slings binaries compiled by randos on the internet...

Oh Apple software and hardware is so secure... Bruh, your entire dev env unless you're developing in xcode is literally a supply chain attack waiting to happen. And at the same time it is hard to make work and breaks randomly with OS updates or bottle updates or just after a restart with no apparent reason.

Please... Fractional scaling is (allegedly) not working... Big deal, even if it was true (it's not https://i.imgur.com/wm84JxU.png)...

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