macOS has plenty of it's own OS adverts.
It's a useless metric.
MacOS's ads whilst I still detest, is a one-off prompt. Window's ads can sometimes only be removed with registry key configs OR deployment of management policies...
I’m a local account user. I don’t use any of the above.
And if you have the notch this is very far from a theoretical problem.
If I delete my Dropbox icon out of the menu bar how am I supposed to know that it's running, click on it to see its status, quit the program, etc.
Sure, I could also uninstall all the programs I use but that does seem to defeat the purpose of having the computer.
We’re talking about a limited resource (a few inches of screen real estate at the top of the screen) that tons of app developers feel entitled to occupy. Now we could have some kind of system whereby excess icons get dumped into a … menu, but that defeats the entire purpose since they’re no longer on the screen all the time!
There are plenty of apps out there which do not feel entitled to a slice of this precious screen real estate. I think it’s worth supporting them!
This is just not true. The purpose is not necessarily to have the icon on the screen all the time. If the menu doesn't exist, the buttons don't exist either, and plenty of applications are built assuming that you have access to their bar icons while they're running.
If the icon is missing there is _literally_ no other way to use the relevant functionality. If the icon is hidden in a menu, you can use the functionality, it's just an extra click.
Why do people keep saying this? I have been on M1 Air on Asahi for the last 4 weeks, getting 8-10 hours daily. I see my wattage consumption on screen at all times, it varies between 2.5-3W when scrolling web and around 5W when actively working with apps. I see no difference between macOS and Linux! The only difference is the s2idle consumption but personally I don't care, besides all other modern Linux laptops have same exact issue, often worse.
On my Intel T14s 4th Gen I was getting maybe 5 hours, and that's already with heavily optimized setup!
I agree, they are lazy.
Not to mention the amazing amount of services running in the background, at least 80% of which I haven't needed in the 6.5 years I have my Mac, but can't stop / remove / disable.
My Linux laptop is supposedly 40% weaker than my desktop Mac, so the online sheets say at least. It runs my work's integration test suite 15% faster.
A lot of us have given Macs a very honest chance. It's okay and it's very workable, that much is a fact -- but if one is willing to pimp their machine and OS -- nowadays made even easier by LLMs -- then the experience and everyday ergonomics and actual dev-enhancing abilities quickly outpace a Mac.
And I wish that wasn't true because I wasn't looking forward to changing my main machine. But the annoyances and slowness and closeness just compound until they start literally reducing your everyday productivity.
And really, who cares if it had 10,000 background services if 9,999 are idle at any given time? Run `ps auxwww` on a Linux box sometime and it’ll look similar.
> And really, who cares if it had 10,000 background services if 9,999 are idle at any given time?
Normally I don't. I have an okay idea on how modern OS-es work; temporary swaps, compressing RAM for rarely used background processes etc. -- they work amazing, macOS included.
I suppose my problem is more the services that _do_ interfere, like the one that feels it has to scan every CLI command I launch, to the point that it became noticeable, especially side by side with the "weaker" Linux laptop and hell, even with a VM-ed Linux inside my gaming PC as well.
So OK, I accept the correction: does not much matter how many are they in general. Those that interfere though, and I can't stop them -- this is where I drew the line and gradually started my migration away from macOS.
And this:
> Run `ps auxwww` on a Linux box sometime and it’ll look similar
...is objectively false. I just tried it; even my home server that's doing plenty of stuff I get 244 items. On the Mac I am writing this? 840.
Maybe the laptop with KDE will have a touch more than 244, but I doubt they'd be 840.
Call me a purist, I like to know what my background services are doing, though I'll admit I care less and less with age.
I’m not trying to be pedantic here, but I genuinely don’t know what you mean here. Macs have built-in virtualization and containerization. Docker and podman etc are wrappers around it, but the internals are built in.
Did you mean they have to emulate x86 code if you download an x86 image instead of a native one?
OrbStack bridges a good chunk of the Linux performance gap however. I was using Colima before and then the Linux laptop was running the integration test suite ~60% faster. OrbStack reduced that to 15%.
If you asked me to use a Windows machine I would be frustrated from day one and would want my Mac back, but everyone else where I work (except one) uses Windoes every day, and I don't know how they do it.
As far as needs, I haven't been a serious dev for a long time (ask my employees who won't let me near any code), so containerization is a non issue I could care less about for myself, but (for personal use) there are apps on Mac that work for me that don't run on Windows, and definitely don't run on Linux.
There are probably reasonably "objective" measures that can be used to rank OS's agains each other, like security or bugs, but even some measures that sound objective may be based on data but their value is subjective. The OS wars are old, and maybe I'm old too, but they're getting tired (unless we want to discuss how the AmigaOS was better than any other OS at the time but with one fatal flaw.)