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Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

Apple still has the best hardware so I moved to it for the last few years, but the closed software ecosystem is terrible for taking advantage of it.

I wasn't able to debug network errors (restartin my Mac worked), Metal was missing low level disassembly / debugging tools (there is some hard to use UI), but the worst thing was the inflexible windowing system.

Even getting all the window handles on all screens/desktops with their titles and programs is impossible.

I just decided that I move to Omarchy 4 (basically Hyperland + QuickShell) + NVIDIA GPU, and I already was able to customize it more than my Mac in years.

I will miss Apple's hardware for sure, but not MacOS and the missing hardware documentation

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> but the closed software ecosystem

There's aren't really any alternative OS [1], but I don't think it's fair to say there's a closed software ecosystem. You can install/compile/run whatever you want, including kernel extensions. The hardware isn't locked.

[1] Hardware isn't locked: https://asahilinux.org/about/

> Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices.

I wanted to try it but it works just on M1 and I have M4. I was also considering upgrading to M5/M6, again to take advantage of what I really love: access to the 2nm process.

The performance you get with M5/M6 in theory is crazy (especially having matmul cores with such an energy envelope and unified memory). By the time I can use it well in Linux there will be M7/M8 though.

With NVIDIA I can buy a Blackwell based core right now and use it (even if I will have much less GPU memory. Though it will be high bandwidth).

It’s barely a “feature” that they let you execute arbitrary code on your own hardware.

They don’t provide any source code or documentation (which they easily could) so if want to do literally anything with your “open” device you must first reverse engineer the entire MacOS driver stack like the Asahi project did. Great fun, but it’s a criminal waste of incredibly talented engineer hours.

On top of that, the reason Asahi doesn’t work on M4 and later is that Apple has intentionally modified the ARM core to prevent stock MacOS from running once the hardware is “unlocked,” which makes it way more difficult to reverse engineer.

Bastards.

Give IBM some time, and there will likely be similar stuff on Linux distributions. The Linux kernel has been dropping hardware support, and systemd has been getting some... interesting features.

Naturally, the benefit for Linux is still the variety available in distributions. While IBM's RHEL and Canonical's Ubuntu may adopt some questionable stuff, Slackware, Devuan, Omarchy, and such likely won't.

> interesting features

Can you elaborate at all?

Features to replace installation, cloud metadata uniformity, better secure boot support, boot loader support, and improved TPM support. None of this sounds user hostile, but taken together and handed to the corporate Linux vendors? This easily becomes a way to make Linux a licensed appliance. Yet, handed to a group like Arch, it just enables wildly cool stuff. Incentives are a thing.

I had a chance to try Omarchy past few days and it's just very different vs macOS. I honestly never had a problem with the windowing system ever since I built my own customization scripts (i.e. Hammerspoon). I can see the appeal for someone who wants ultimate customization though but macOS still wins overwhelmingly when it comes to polish, ecosystem, user experience, and apps (nothing comes close).

It’s not just Omarchy, there’s really not much out there in the desktop Linux sphere for those who are mostly happy with how macOS works out of the box. Everything is either in a similar vein to the Omarchy setup (hyper-minimal tiling WM), Windows-like (KDE, Cinnamon, most other DEs), or a chimera with a grab bag of design bits from every desktop and mobile platform (GNOME, Pantheon, COSMIC).

It’s a bit depressing because it means that if I ever feel forced to switch my daily driver, it won’t come without a dump truck load of friction, frustration, and lost productivity, which I’ve validated by using the various Linux desktops on secondary machines.

There were 1000 plugins created for Omarchy 4 in 2 days. That's why I don't feel it being hyper minimal anymore.

It's still not well integrated of course as those plugins are from different people, but I at least don't feel powerless as I know I can make any change easily.

It is just regular resistance to change. Loss of productivity is exagerated, it indeed exists in which ever direction but it is only temporary.

Perhaps, but one of desktop Linux's defining philosophies is the machine working for and adapting to the user rather than the reverse, so it's a letdown that this only really applies if you're coming from Windows or have been a Linux user all along.

Choices are always opinionated by the dev but you can always fork and change to obtain what you need. MacOS doesn't let you do that and isn't easier to switch to.

With the caveat that one has the time and energy to fork and modify in the first place, and then additionally has time and energy to maintain the changes that upstream won’t take…

Nothing new under the sun.

You can't expect any system, even the most configurable ones, to be ready out of the box to everyone's particular nitpicking without a minimum of effort.

KDE Plasma is as good as it gets if you'd like to transition from MacOS:

https://pointieststick.com/2025/10/04/a-mac-like-experience-...

I run KDE on a secondary machine and it's the best it's ever been, but for me it's best for single-purpose machines where desktop differences basically don't matter. It's about on par with one of the better Windows releases (XP or 7 maybe) in terms of how frustrating I'd find it to do work under.

It's interesting because I just haven't felt the polish.

For example when using PyTorch I wanted to try to speed up my NN kernel by 2x by just using half precision and haven't noticed any speedup at all. Also I was missing the easy to use GNU tools that had to be mixed with Apple's tools.

I loved using Arc browser as well, and I'm missing it, but I guess I will do without it somehow (Chrome's vertical tabs are just not the same).

My main program missing from going back to Linux was ChatGPT Desktop, but now it's there.

I just checked out Hammerspoon, I'm happy for you that you wrote it, and looks great, but it has the same problem that I had: for security reasons Apple stopped allowing the window APIs to get all important information on other workspaces. You can only do it with Accessibility API. I was trying to fight with it but have up.

If the browser being Chromium-based isn’t a hard requirement, it may be worth checking out the Firefox-based Zen Browser[0]. Its UI is very similar to that of Arc, to the point that I’d call it Arc’s spiritual successor.

[0]: https://zen-browser.app/

Well, Arc is basically dead on Mac now anyways :(

I think the worst is the lack of support for 'click-through' behavior on MacOS. This is that you have to select a window first with left-click before being able to select UI elements within that window with left-click. The amount of time lost with extra clicks is incredible.

It is even more frustrating that this behavior is somewhat inconsistent, with some applications allowing this and others not (although it is more often the latter).

I made a workaround solution here with minimal setup/overhead: https://github.com/dainank/apple-click-through but I do wish someday this could be configurable in the OS as a setting.

The clickthrough behaviour used to be the default in NeXTstep (and it was one of the things which I misliked not having when switching from my Cube to my work Mac and ThinkPad portable ages ago).

The apps it works in are probably written in Cocoa née "Yellow Box" (allegedly so named because Bill Gates stated that rather than write apps for NeXT APIs he would instead....)

The way I fix it when using my Mac these days is to only use apps written using Objective-C and so forth.

I don't understand how absolutely basic things are not possible on Mac OS. Switching between two windows easily, displaying hidden files in the finder... These things would be way easier to solve than building the next generation hardware.

You can show hidden files in finder. Do: Command + Shift + . (period)

Switching between program is command+tab

Between windows in a program is command+~

How are you liking Omarchy? I saw a video on it recently, and it looks 'pretty' but still looks like it's a lot of memorization of shortcuts and feels like the 40% keyboard of OS's. Like some people it's absolutely amazing, but lets be honest, it's going to be really difficult to be as productive as a full fat keyboard.

As a long time Emacs user, I beg to differ. Muscle memory will settle in after a few days. I still use Emacs shortcuts to navigate text boxes on macOS.

The most disruptive thing in Omarchy is not the keyboard, it's the tiling WM in my opinion.

On what hardware you running Omarchy?

Just Beelink, but it doesn't matter at all.

I ordered an ASUS Zephyrus G16 with 5090 NVIDIA card + 1.9kg (quite an overkill, and I know that I will have to limit power output), but hasn't arrived yet.

But what's fun is that I love QML+QuickShell with its hot reloading, Hyprland with its Lua support.

With AI nowdays it's just so easy to do deep UI changes that wasn't possible a year ago.

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