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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

(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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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