It was really surprising how put together it all is. The steam integration is seamless and it can play a ton of stuff even on an older NUC w/out a GPU.
It was the first time I can say that installing a linux OS was easier and friendlier than Windows.
I'd say that from work experience managing an IT department that maintains and deploys both Windows and Linux machines, the administrative overhead involved in working with Windows first exceeded that of Linux at some point in the Windows 10 life cycle -- at least five years ago. Since then, Windows has been getting worse and worse, and Linux has been getting better and better.
With most corporate software being accessible via the web and/or being cross-platform these days, we're seriously debating moving the standard corporate workstation configuration to Linux.
(In David Attenborough's voice)
It's been that way for about 20 years. Where have you been?
So years ago you also generally had to understand partitioning and filesystem formats, which most people are clueless about.
Sure, they were learning opportunities, but most people weren’t trying to learn anything. They just wanted to get on MySpace, download free music, chat with friends.
My last laptop used an audio amplifier that made the speakers not work for ~2 years, that required patching the kernel to fix. It's only recently a vanilla version of the kernel works.
We aren't completely out of the woods yet.
No-one really needed to care about partitioning.
I remember spending a lot of time partitioning stuff in those early days, especially if trying to dual boot.
It certainly was not as easy to setup as Windows.
its such a breath of fresh air
I don't use Apple Intelligence, Safari, or Siri on my Mac, and I'm extremely happy to report that Apple does not nag me to use these features at all. THANK YOU APPLE.
Windows would open Edge for random reasons instead of my preferred browser to nudge me to use it, Cortana was a constant reminder in W10 because it was part of Windows Search, and of course, we all know how they push Copilot.
Apple isn't perfect (iCloud is fine on macOS, but iOS is quite misleading and often defaults to on even if you really don't want it), but overall my Mac respects my wishes as a user and it makes me look forward to using my computer as a tool.
macOS does have its own user-hostile issues, but they are more in the form of making things like running downloaded software and modifying your system irritatingly difficult, and not Windows's pathetic and desperate attempts to cajole you into using their features.
Workplace very strictly requires Ubuntu LTS for toolchain & compatibility reasons, otherwise I'd run Debian or Fedora or Tumbleweed with Ubuntu containers/VMs where needed.
Nonetheless, Linux popups and promotions (even from enterprise distros) are not nearly as bad as the Windows 11 experience.
It’s impressive they have dropped the ball so hard that it’s causing a complete rethink for so many users like myself. Bullet >> golden goose.
Does Microsoft understand consent?
[ ] Yes
[ ] Ask again later Upgrade to MacOS Tahoe?
[ ] Yes
[ ] Remind me later What accessibility settings do you need?
- [four options/catgories]
- Remind me Later (or something)
Recent betas also seem to break some small things, not sure if due to change in code itself or a faulty migration.
Google really was competent in the 2005-2020 era (probably further on the left, that’s just as far as I remember).
I don’t think Microsoft has seriously disappointed anybody paying attention since 2012 or so.