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Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users

These threads always end up with veiled insults like this. Can you really not understand people who use Windows, Linux and Macs? They each have their strengths depending on what you are doing.

> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want

I've use Macs since my first G4 PB, Linux for longer, and used to develop for Windows though it's been a very long time. I've never felt stopped for doing what I want.

> by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS

Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro. I'm sure desktop Linux has improved since the last time I tried running it as my main computer, but I just not sure what the point is now.

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I've recently heard that using Linux is an excuse to spend the day tinkering and ricing and do no productive work. It's the same kind of prejudice, but opposite.

I like the freedom to run my machine the way I want, but I also enjoy something that is reliable and seamless. My macbook air's battery lasts forever. It works flawlessly, almost always. "oh with nixos if you brick it you can rollback..." that's great, but it does not beat working great on the first try.

Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.

NixOS is an extreme case, and I only mentioned it as a counter to the OP's article which was talking about the mammoth efforts required to remove unwanted processes. More generally, there are plenty of Linux distros which "just work" out of the box for most use cases.

> Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.

Same here. macOS has been death by a thousand little cuts, and I'm finally accelerating my move away from it, as Apple locks it down more and more, and as they spend their engineering talent on crap I ultimately don't care about.

While I've switched most of my computers over to Linux, I still have not moved my daily driver over. There are so many silly little things Linux (and its various desktop environments) gets wrong and are just annoying enough to make me not want to use it every day, like scrolling with a trackpad.

> I've recently heard that using Linux is an excuse to spend the day tinkering and ricing and do no productive work.

This is why, despite 20 years of using Linux with many successful Arch and Gentoo installs behind me, I just use Fedora or Mint. I can get a development environment set up in 15 minutes, and when everything inevitably explodes and a system update deletes glibc I haven't invested much.

No insult intended. I genuinely wasn't aware of what advantages macOS offers for a power user (by which I mean someone who wants to do tasks more advanced than browsing, email, etc.). From quickly skimming the replies the common theme seems to be a mixture of battery efficiency, hardware compatibility, and Mac-only software.

> Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro.

Yes, but my comment wasn't made in isolation or directed at people with your objectives. The OP's article is about doing exactly this, but in the opposite direction (expending large amounts of effort to remove unneeded processes). See for example: "if we assume that we need to identify just 500 candidates, and each takes an average of one week to research, that would take over 10 person-years".

Starting with that as the baseline (as opposed to starting from your position which is that you're not interested in spending time on this issue), building up from zero is a lot more straightforward. And, if you use something like NixOS, you generally only have to do it once since the idea of "reinstalling" the OS (e.g. for new versions) largely goes away: subsequent effort is just about changing your mind about what software you want, or what version you want (as with any OS).

> I genuinely wasn't aware of what advantages macOS offers

It's been out for a while.. why are you interested in the debate if you've come this far, have no idea, but want to lead with a counter-assertion?

Why are we making personal attacks, instead of simply listing all of the unique system-selling features in macOS?

Again, my comment wasn't isolated. It was a response to the article. In that article, the person was concerned with tracking down 500+ potentially unneeded processes, and lamenting the difficulty and time consuming nature of doing so.

Perhaps I could have phrased my question better, but what I'm really asking is: for that type of user, why would you pick macOS over Linux when such things are trivial (relatively speaking) in Linux by comparison. Note that I didn't ask "what advantages does macOS have?" I qualified it with: "which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?". I wasn't suggesting that there are no advantages at all. Nuance matters here.

That "which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want" is utterly superfluous.

The way I want to run my machine is by running macOS and using its features, app ecosystem, and so on.

Not once have I ever felt I've had to make a sacrifice to do so.

At the risk of sounding repetitive, my comments are in the context of the OP's article which is specifically about a scenario where you lack control in macOS. If you're someone who doesn't care about being able to do what the article wants to do, then your use case doesn't fall within the scope of what I'm referring to.

> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?

I’ve never felt like I couldn’t run my machine the way I want. When I leave macOS is when I start to miss all integrations and ease of use affordances.

One of the times I made a big push to try Linux again on the client I was fighting with getting HiDPI working well, and the most common response was “you don’t need that”. Huh? Speaking of running the machine how I want.

Every decision is a trade off, even Linux. You feel like you can do anything you want, but it’s just a set of different things you can do. We’re long past the days where someone can buy hardware and write every piece of software from scratch for themselves. We all depend on others to make decisions for us, and some of those decisions will limit us in some way.

> what advantages macOS offers for a power user

The serious answer is that you get an "it-just-works"⁺ Unix-like operating system that gives you a development experience on-par with Linux.

If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.

If you care about configuration for your window manager, desktop environment, or systemd services: you will not like macOS.

If you are a graphics engineer or a kernel engineer: you will (probably) not like macOS.

If you are a C++/Rust/Python/JavaScript/Java/mobile/desktop engineer who wants a rock-solid developer environment and doesn't care about the above: you will like macOS.

You get all the Unix tools you could ever want, whatever shell you want to use (Zsh, Fish, even PowerShell), clang/LLVM, etc.

Does that answer your question?

⁺: caveat being "it just works" is getting less and less true with every macOS release.

> If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.

Even then, that's debatable. Should say if you like doing sysadmin stuff on your own machine.

I am a sysadmin, and my daily driver is an M4 macbook pro and I wouldn't have it any other way. I admin other machines, I don't want to play sysadmin for my own. But its mostly for the hardware more than any other reason.

I think a surprising number of kernel engineers like Macs

This would be my answer, though I also do sysadmin stuff from macOS just fine. I've used OSX/macOS for a long time, I understand how it works and how to move around, and the ecosystem integration is nice. Adobe products, MS products also all work without any hassle along with any software development I want to do. Then there's the hardware which Apple Silicon has been great for. I bought an M1 Max 64gb laptop on release and it still never feels slow. Battery life is great, trackpad works great, etc...

And I say all this knowing that someone can likely get similar use out of a MS or Linux laptop. At this point, just pick what you know and get on with it.

> I also do sysadmin stuff from macOS

MacOS is fine as a client/dispatch node for SSH/Ansible/Terraform/whatnot; I think they meant that you cannot sysadmin MacOS itself as a target with many of the same tools/techniques you would sysadmin a Linux server.

I wish that weren't true, as someone who struggles with a lot of cross-platform Puppet tooling that I wish behaved better on Mac. No, Nix doesn't help; not when the goal is "configure other people's machines to a baseline but don't otherwise prescribe how they should use them".

Good point. We all end up with different definitions of sys admin. I’ve managed fleets of Linux servers just fine with a macOS as my only client computer, but I’ve never managed other clients. Maybe a Linux client would have helped in that case if sys admin was my singular job, but even then I may have just created a Linux client in my vps to use as the management node.

> If you are a graphics engineer or a kernel engineer: you will (probably) not like macOS.

On the contrary, Metal is the most developer friendly of the modern 3D APIs, and macOS is the best desktop OS having graphical debugging tools in the box, with modern language tooling without the mindset only C and C++ are worthy to be used in graphics programming.

And I thought that I'm the only one saying that. I bought my first mac just because of that, it was rock-solid, it was unix, and it came with ruby/python/xxx preinstalled so that I could just worry about doing the work.

But from (let's say) El Capitan, I am always postponing upgrades, and recently I've been only upgrading by buying a new machine every 2 ys (except this year, I had to upgrade because of Metal, but I'm still one version below, still scared to upgrade to Tahoe). Every new feature they add to their OS I'm just disabling, every time I upgrade. Either I am not their customer anymore, or they are more and more clueless.

And it's not that hard, I just want it to work so that I can focus on my own stuff.

> a power user

By power users do you mean only hackers/programmers/server admins?

How about graphical design professionals? Music producers? And all other types of professionals who work full time in front of their computers? They need high quality machines and operating systems, so there's your customer base for MacOS.

There are a lot of users who don't want to do tasks more advanced than browsing, email, and ssh, and will go far into diminishing returns of additional hardware cost to polish the performance on those three tasks (measured by battery, screen, keyboard, battery, networking, general lack of fussiness, battery, etc.)

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