Hacker News Reader

Comment by wartywhoa23 | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Ubuntu for 3 years now, and now that I'm about to upgrade my 13 y.o. laptop, there's a dilemma for me between choosing some top(ish)-spec x86_64 laptop or macbook pro M4.

The former just keeps me going with Ubuntu, but forces to still dual-boot Windows for some creative software I use that Ubuntu lacks (a certain DAW and a CAD modeller). The latter gives me an awesome (or so it seems) OS that is much closer in spirit to Ubuntu than to Windows and supports everything I need, but leaves me vendor-locked to whatever user-hostile directions Apple might take in the future.

I'd like to ask people who had been using both Ubuntu and MacOS, what would you advise? And MacOS users in particular, are you happy with the direction it has been evolving, and with that of Apple itself?

View on HN

  > I'd like to ask people who had been using both Ubuntu and MacOS, what would you advise? And MacOS users in particular, are you happy with the direction it has been evolving, and with that of Apple itself?

macos out-of-the-box experience is gonna be much better and smoother and more consistent than ubuntu for sure, and you get both unix environment and most desktop software (check first of course) that windows has too...

that being said, personally i am not so happy with apple's direction either, which is sliding (much much more slowly than windows) in the direction of buggy software updates, worse overall ux and more and more marketing driven changes...

i really like ubuntu and kde (kubuntu) and i feel like at some point the ux polish of it and the "de-polishing" of macos at some point will converge where i'd just install linux alongside macos and not miss much (but there are lots of reverse engineering issues remaining)...

so my idea is to stay on macos for while more while figuring out how to plug holes (such as smoother iphone integration) and getting more accustomed to kde/linux/ununtu before fully jumping ship...

idk if that is super helpful, but its where im at now in my thinking.

Thanks, I appreciate your feedback!

Hi, had to create an account just to answer. Vendor lock-in is not that much of a problem with macOS; you can install pretty much anything you want and it looks like it will still be in the future unlike mobile platforms. MacOS is very easy to get used to so the transition shouldn't hurt :) If your only concern is vendor lock-in, I think you should be good with macOS. I am saying this as someone who switched to Asahi because I wanted more freedom relative to the desktop environment (wanted a real tiling window manager). MacOS + Apple hardware is an incredible combination that has not been reproduced anywhere. Maybe one thing to be careful of: you cannot install Linux on M3 and M4, so if you want to make a switch later on, you won't be able to. Ah and btw you can dual boot Asahi on M1 and M2!

Hope I helped a little :)

Oh, thank you very much for chiming in! That twist on Asahi x M3+ was interesting - is that because something wasn't ported yet and the support will be there one day, or there'll be a hard block for Asahi forever for M3+?

From what I understood, the CPUs are different and need work for them to be supported. There is no hard block, but sadly, two key people resigned from the Asahi Linux team. I am not even sure if there is someone even trying to work on this.

Another example is microphone support on M2 series that's not there yet.

Many issues with Asahi are also that there is an incompatibility in page sizes (16k on MX vs 4k on most CPUs), and combined with the usage of ARM, software compatibility is an actual problem if you want to use VMs, DAW software (nothing will work there except Reaper ...) (Maybe this paragraph was a bit ranty, but I'm actually very glad we got Asahi in the first place. It's my daily driver and I'm relatively happy with it)

TL;DR: no hard blocker but there is a people "problem"

With Tahoe Apple lost me as a customer with their greatest USP: great UX. now it’s no longer any better than the best of Linux, where there is no one monopolist steering the ecosystem.

So I’d go with Ubuntu.

Thanks for sharing your opinion!

Be careful, your laptop battery life might drop off a cliff. A lot of laptop manufacturers have tightly coupled power integrations with Windows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com