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Comment by himata4113 | Hacker News Reader

Still wishing for the day apple is split into the hardware and the software company. I want their silicon, but I will never use their (arguably terrible) operating system. If I can't run my own kernel and kernel modules then it's a device that I don't own. Firmware is alright in some cases, but my laptop next to me is running core boot just to prove a point.

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But you can run your own kernel on Macs, no? Isn‘t driver support the issue?

Maybe Apple Hardware would write Linux drivers to sell their hardware for servers. Intel contributes to Linux kernel. AMD contributes to Linux kernel. Nvidia contributes to Linux kernel. A lot of hardware manufacturers support Linux to some extent. It's no longer reverse-engineered wild west.

Driver support is pretty hard when nothing is documented and security features limit reverse engineering. Hardware companies either document their hardware properly, or they write drivers for third party operating systems, or both.

Not on new silicon and asahi linux is still pretty damn far from being able to use it seriously. I do appreciate the effort, but I am just saying that it would be a lot better if you know, apple sold the hardware so vendors could build laptops with apple silicon.

Apple literally made step by step instructions for compiling and running your own kernel on Apple silicon. Not sure how you think asahi Linux works otherwise. Sure the drivers are anywhere from bad to non existent but that’s not the same thing as being unable to run your own kernel.

This is news to me, where can I find this? I was under the assumption that most of asahi linux was reverse engineered. It's the reason why they're also stuck on M3?

Edit: I can only find 3rd party resources. The only first party is for older macbooks (intel based)

(arguably terrible) operating system

macOS has made some arguably poor design choices, but it makes it hard to take someone seriously when they state the whole OS is terrible.

It's the worst OS we have.. except for all the others.

It could be just me, but every time I tried to do something I sat thinking that I am not the target audience for this thing. I don't like the UI, I hate not being able to talk to the hardware the way I can on linux (uart took me way too long to get working), I am angry that I am not able to run kvm, I hate not being able to replace the desktop and fix bugs myself. That's what makes it terrible for me.

So you're upset an operating system that is called macOS is not in fact Linux. Gotcha.

Yeah, if it was Linux it might actually be usable!

I'm not sure how Apple acolytes can say this stuff seriously what with the deluge of complaints and completely broken features and terrible UI their own kind have been posting about it recently. You can't accept that Apple could possibly do wrong?

what with the deluge of complaints and completely broken features and terrible UI their own kind have been posting about…

Remind me which OS we were talking about again? Because it sounds like all of them. OS usage as a team sport is just dumb.

I agree linux is just as bad, but at least I can fix it! Especially now in the age of AI I have fixed 30-40 issues with KDE that were bothering me and now they're gone.

The reason why I don't upstream is because.. it's AI and half the changes are very opinionated. However, my enjoyment and productivity went up a lot. My KDE is closer to hyprland than anything and I love it.

I agree linux is just as bad, but at least I can fix it!

I for sure see the appeal. Even if macOS desktop were open source, though, I doubt I'd do much about my complaints. For my use cases, I don't want to turn OS maintenance into a hobby, and whatever complaints I might have aren't big enough to go to the trouble to begin with.

Bespoke user land does have its temptations, though. Maybe I'll finally get off my butt and load up a distro on that old 2012 MBP that doesn't get macOS updates anymore.

AI is a beast at figuring out the internals I picked up oh-my-pi from one of the posts on this site, it's cake compared to what it was even just a year ago.

I have spent a significant amount of time with all 3 OSes and Linux was by far the most functional and least broken. I haven't used Windows since Windows 10, though, but I have used macOS as recently as last year.

pretty much, it's unix and I want it to be unix, but I get the worst parts of linux and windows combined.

I see you. These folks trying to talk you into liking MacOS are missing the point. You’re being perfectly clear about not liking it, and why — it’s not built for you. And that sucks, ‘cause their hardware is top-notch. It’s true pain.

Apple really is leaving everyone else years behind in making hardware. Yet they’ve never done what I would consider obvious geek-friendly things to MacOS. I’m sad about it too, and I wish the OS were better.

Fair enough, thanks for clarifying your distaste for macOS. Sounds like any closed source OS just isn’t for you. :-)

MacOS IMHO is no longer a viable OS for people like us(who know what this website even is). MacOS26 along with Windows11 are enshittifying and in some ways it's glorious to see. I do feel bad for non-IT people though, Linux is daunting to them...I get it.

With my setup (GhosTTY, tmux, nvim) I don't have any problems honestly. When working with UI stuff I use rectangle to get a bit of the tiling behavior I was used to on i3, but nowadays I need that less and les because of browsers adding split view within themselves.

Battery is great and everything feels snappy even after the PC being powered on for weeks.

There's a reason macOS is the least-used OS behind Linux and Windows. If it was any less terrible, we would know.

Source? [1] states 12% for macOS and 3% for Linux.

[1]: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

Steam reports 3.4% for linux and 2% for macos (last montg. This month numbers are probably hit by systematic measurement errors).

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Also, the 16% “unknown” in the graph you linked to implies huge error bars on macos vs linux!

Steam stats aren't particularly meaningful in this context, because MacOS is largely unusable for gaming due to not being able to run most games.

Valve themselves have given up on supporting their games on Mac, likely due to the total lack of backwards compatibility.

That's desktop market share. I'm sure the comment you're replying to means overall usage including mobile and server, where Linux is far and away the leader.

Why would anyone compare market share of a desktop OS and include server / mobile / embedded?

Because they want to make Linux sound good I guess?

macOS is not perfect but I don't think anyone could seriously argue that it is terrible.

It’s pretty bad. IPC doesn’t work reliably any more. The window manager is unusable. Spotlight misses results and also pegs the cpu, killing battery.

Finder is bad enough on its own, but the 1:N mapping from logical directories to filesystem directories (like photos, home, applications, etc) makes it essentially unusable without spotlight.

Notifications are flaky as hell (missing phone calls and messages from contacts, but displaying explicitly blocked spam sms).

Copy paste between devices has never worked right.

Which part of the OS is not terrible in your experience?

Edit: also, compatibility with video games (even ones released for macos) is abysmal. It’s much worse than Linux’s ability to run the Windows version of MacOS native releases!

Which part of the OS is not terrible in your experience?

Not OP, but accessibility tools on mac put other desktop OSes to shame.

> Edit: also, compatibility with video games (even ones released for macos) is abysmal. It’s much worse than Linux’s ability to run the Windows version of MacOS native releases!

Linux can run Windows native games because Valve has shoved millions and millions into perfecting Proton.

And I still wonder why Apple hasn't just dumped a billion on Valve's door to build a similar tool for macOS.

Apple’s ‘Game Porting Toolkit’ is basically Proton; they just haven’t made a GUI for it.

The issue with that it requires the dev to do a "port". Proton requires absolutely nothing.

Are you sure? Port may be in the name, but it seemed like people were using it like Proton, random users trying it with various games. Not sure if this is still happening. There was also Whisky, but that's been abandoned. "Wine Supercharged... with the power of Apple's Game Porting Toolkit."

It seemed like you could just play games with it, but that Apple didn't want you using it that way.

Apple highlights a different use case than Valve, but the underlying program is equivalent.

They’re both forks of wine ( https://www.winehq.org ) - the game porting toolkit's main addition is that it'll also convert Vulkan shaders to Metal.

Setup is more of a hassle because it's not integrated into Steam, or into the OS as a handler for .exe files, etc. But you can install the Windows version of Steam using the game porting toolkit, and then download & launch windows games from there.

I suspect the main reason they don't want to pitch this as an end-user feature is that it’s dependent on their x86->ARM translation layer, which they probably want to ditch in a few years. But it’s there for now!

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