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Comment by osigurdson | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about the "you should too" part. I use Arch, it works fine for me but I am patient and want to use it. Realistically, I would expect the largest migration should be devs switching from mac to Linux. I don't see any reason at all to use a mac for development anymore.

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Unfortunately Mac hardware is a huge leap ahead of anything else.

Most of those advantages are practically irrelevant for the majority of users or a matter of having gotten used to things being a certain way.

No, the touchpad alone puts it way above every laptop I’ve tried

The touchpad is great, yes, I like it, too. But I'm anyway mostly using mouse and keyboard and occasionally the 3-finger-swipe which is possible with Thinkpad+Linux as well since a few years. Thinkpads are also famous for their touchpad/trackpoint if one doesn't fancy using a mouse.

> I'm anyway mostly using mouse and keyboard

Have you considered that you're using the mouse because the touchpad doesn't work as well on any other OS?

It's not the hardware, it's the software somehow that makes the touchpad usable in Mac OS.

i have been using macbooks for many years as that's usually the only corporate option next to thinkpad+windows. and i definitely prefer a logitech mouse.

Steelseries not good? Razer? Microsoft?

That just isn't true. Battery life, for example, is definitely not irrelevant for most users.

Most people sit at their desk with the laptop plugged into the socket and use the battery for meetings or in a cafeteria. Either takes maybe an hour or two, three hours tops.

So what? Most people don't care about battery, so let's just have a crap battery? That argument would work, if Apple released a super light laptop with a tiny battery, specially made for "most people who sit at their desk".

No, people do care about battery life. That's where Macs excel. (I'm saying this as a Thinkpad user, where getting 6-8hrs of battery is doable, if you don't do anything on the laptop).

my point is that foregoing a superior OS for reasons that are only relevant on paper is not logical.

Sure, there are pros and cons for everything. It also depends on circumstances. I remember in 2012 I'd dim the screen and play with cpufreqd to get maximum time out of a battery, because I had a 3h train ride to my university weekly, with no power sockets most of the time on the train. I barely could do 3h. Today, in age of cheap PD powerbanks and USB-C everywhere, I'd easily take a better OS over battery life.

Mac battery life is insane - I agree. It is very impressive what they have done. Still, I prefer my ThinkPad running Arch even though it probably has 1/2 the battery life of my Macbook.

Has apple severely degraded the developer experience on MacOS recently or something?

You may not need it but no kernel support for containers / cgroups is a deal breaker for me. Windows at least makes an attempt with WSL. But, at the end of the day, most things are just about rationalizing what you want to use. I personally identify with Linux tribe, not Mac tribe therefore that is what I want to use.

I had no idea there was no kernel support for containers. I use containers a lot now but haven't used MacOS in years. Thanks for the info. (Fedora/ Windows user myself)

Omarchy is a nice experience for devs.

Funnily enough, though, you can get a very user friendly experience using Niri and Dank Linux (don't remember the exact name). It takes two 3 CLI commands to install, and the top bar incredibly cool, compared to the i3 defaults and even to what I remember of Gnome and KDE.

Next up: somebody comes up with a desktop environment called BTW.

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