I personally had an okay time with Linux sleep in 2019 but for the life of me couldn’t get sleep-to-hibernate working and a quick google does not instill confidence in the current state of the world here. At least the process to set it up in 2024 is more straightforward on PopOS compared to my 2019 Ubuntu experience https://www.adlrocha.com/til/2024-02-13-linux-hibernate/
Power management is the one area Apple’s nanny state is a substantial advantage. Android took a long time to get good at battery compared to iOS (on my Nexus in 2013 I remember doing a LOT of fiddling to make sure random apps weren’t waking the CPU too much) but it seems great today.
Hopefully mainline Linux laptops get there too. Until then I’ll keep updating my mac-setup.sh script with ever more work-arounds…
First I had a Fedora/KDE, and had lots of trouble. Now I'm on Gnome and everything just works, nearly as well as on macos. Battery life sucks of course but that's AMD for you.
On the UI/UX side of things, definitely a worse experience than even stock Windows or Linux with Gnome, and that's coming from someone who generally likes it but got so tired of recent (at the time) bugs and jankiness that I had to migrate elsewhere. This was probably around 2016 or so, around the time when it seemed like there was no QA department at all at Apple.
There's definitely been a bit of jank and a few poor design decisions made, but to compare it to Windows unfavorably is a bit overblown, considering Windows doesn't seem to have ever deleted code. Version to version on Windows just adds thin veneer over the old one, and leaves me scratching my head; many "They still have THIS!? wtf" moments, like putting carpet over a crack in the foundation
This + keeping the old stuff around is what makes Windows more fitting than macOS in a professional environment. Still, its hard for me to understand using either if you're a developer who favors stability.
Just the other week I was unable to poweroff/reboot Windows without it locking down an update on next boot, which pisses me off. Of course, next time I wanted to use Windows, I just needed to check on something quickly, but then this forced update came back to bite me and what should have taken 2 minutes at tops now took 15 minutes.
Of course, particularly in professional industries like engineering that rely on expensive and complex Windows-only software, running old games etc.. I don't claim it's not worthwhile, but it's also a lot of baggage weighing it down. I'd be fine with running it for that purpose, since my job would not be to have opinions on my operating system necessarily. Having been in a supporting role for general office Windows pcs recently, I did find its stack of even first-party quirks very frustrating to deal with, even though I use it regularly for gaming. IIRC I even had to dip into the registry editor to fix some value that was left unset by the imperfect configuration of the bizarre Outlook profile system.
Most of the time I just install the game I want, run the game, shut it down, leave it at that, and rarely run updates. Relying on it for anything more complex would drive me crazy.
Macos could be better in some ways, the Settings app lately is miserable and the mouse tracking controls suck, SwiftUI has performance/documentation issues and should be open source, but it's reliable and the UI is pretty consistent, and while I'm sure there are some deeper quirks once you dig deeper, I'd really have to be looking for them.
Haven't tried Gnome in a while, it's always seemed fine enough, don't have much to say about it atm
1. Don't like Gatekeeper? Run `sudo spctl --master-disable`. Afterwards, go to System Settings, Privacy & Security, and you'll have the option to allow applications from "Anywhere." You can now run unsigned code whenever you want. No notarization required. No disabling SIP required. Although, if you don't like SIP, `sudo csrutil disable` from Recovery Mode will do the trick. Don't like needing to "bless" your boot image to ensure a lack of tampering? `sudo authenticated-root disable` from recovery mode, and we're mostly back to the older days of macOS. Don't like code signing anywhere, even for system services? nvram boot-args="amfi_get_out_of_my_way=0x1" from recovery mode is all it takes.
I would never use a broken signed system volume on a work machine. However, good news, macOS lets you have completely isolated secure boot practices for each volume. As a result, you could have a fully-secure stock macOS with Apple Pay and all the features; and a macOS with no SSV, apps from Anywhere, and a homebuilt XNU kernel side-by-side without any loss in functionality.
2. "useless BS, parlor tricks, and gizmos" is equally applicable to Windows; and frankly many Linux distributions at this point. Only KDE was shameless enough to ship a rubber ball for my desktop (https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/kde-bouncing-ball-plasma...). I actually do appreciate some of macOS's "parlor tricks" and use them regularly (such as "desk view" with my iPhone), so YMMV.
3. Don't like the in-box apps? Put them all in a folder, disable notifications, never think about them again. At least they won't nag you to turn them back on, like Windows begging you for a Game Pass trial. Or, if you're really hardcore, disable SIP, mount the root disk, delete them all, "bless" your disk image (unless you killed authenticated root), and reboot.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/zhl71h/a_very_silly_...
https://gist.github.com/macshome/15f995a4e849acd75caf14f2e50...
Like yesterday double click title bar to maximize windows mysteriously stopped doing anything on my M4 MBP. Why??? Guess I’ll try a restart and see if it helps…
Completely agree. Job's best delivery, ever.
- grid Expose (Mission Control returning to the jumble in Lion… whyyyyy)
- persistent grid of virtual desktops
- one button access to widgets
- Fun, visually distinct and obviously interactive icons/buttons
- window title bars and proxy icons
- bundled apps like Pages and iPhoto before they were simplified/rewritten/dumbed down
- System Preferences (RIP) before they buried display settings and network things
- green traffic light maximizes window instead of annoying full screen thing