I’ve been dabbling in Linux since the early 2000s with Yellow Dog, SUSE, and Ubuntu, tried making it my daily driver in the early-mid 2010s, and for the past 5 or so years have been using it in a secondary/tertiary role.
Recently I’ve been trying to move my gaming box from Windows to Fedora (which I’ve found mostly makes the right tradeoffs to suit my preferences). I’ve gotten things to mostly work, including games that have been blockers in the past, but just yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity. No big deal I thought, just go into settings and add it back, but as it turns out the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky and most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection. No, you have to drop down and use nmcli afterwards to fix things because the UI also doesn’t surface the right checkbox. I wouldn’t have even figured that out if it hadn’t been for a chatbot’s assistance.
This is the exact sort of time-burning nonsense that isn’t a problem on either of the commercial platforms that I tend to encounter under Linux. Is this single instance going to push me to reboot that box back into Windows? No, but if issues like that keep cropping up eventually one will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Desire to avoid continued frustration will win over the logical portion of most peoples’ brains.
They’re also a crutch that shouldn’t be necessary for tasks so commonplace and simple as adding a network interface.
I see this as IBM/RedHat is a better steward/maintainer than other projects.
I think GNOME gets some things more correct (it has a much better grip on design for instance), but I don’t agree with its strictly-minimalist philosophy that makes the macOS desktop look full-featured in comparison.
XFCE and Cinnamon are probably the closest to striking the right balance as far as I’m concerned (and are boring in a good way) but sadly they don’t get a fraction of the development resources that the big guys get.
Sometimes CLI utility help commands fill the gap, but often they’re too spartan or don’t even exist.
No amount of experience using GUIs stops me from about 40% of the time I don't already know how to do something having to find a youtube video that explains what arcane path I need to take through a menu to find a setting, and if the menus have changed I might have to find the part of the video that explains what I'm looking for, watch it, realize it's changed, and hope I can find a more recent one. This goes for both native and web applications, for mobile and desktop, for every operating system I've ever touched. Sometimes there's a text explanation I can find, usually via a web search or llm. Sometimes I can guess at where something might be (Tools > Preferences? Wait maybe it's settings? Is this one a view setting? Hamburger menu? O wait no that one's in account settings. Ah, that one's under a different specific tab because the org that makes the software considers it an integration and also they A/B tested that it's more discoverable in this other place so they moved it since the youtube video I saw about it). On a web browser it's helpful to be able to dig into the page via debug consoles, sometimes I can search for some string I know is the name of the setting, or a value that's probably currently set. I can do all that, if necessary, but I'm certainly not comfortable claiming it's "easier"
Also, you are now using the tool that is best suited to "use AI". You will hit those rough patches, and it's good to know how to work through them. But sometimes there is just no time for such bullshit, and you now have a tool at your disposal that can just sweep these problems away. It is not without its downsides, but this is a clear "dumping the baby out with the bathwater" scenario.
Your post has the same energy of the old codgers who won't "learn computers" and impotently swim against the tide. It's fine if you want to do that (you do you), but you are swimming in the wrong direction IMO.
(If you don't work in tech, the magnitude of my recommendations would soften towards you in particular, but the velocity would remain the same.)
These vaguely threatening LLM promoter comments are almost like cultish "believe in $DEITY or you'll go to $PERDITION" preaching. It's just freaky.
I'm genuinely wondering what goes through their minds when they post this.
On the other side of the fence, the aversion to using the tool seems equally cultish, like not working on the Sabbath.
If it makes you feel any better, I don't think this tech is "AGI" and that it seems to have some fundamental limitations that make it perform worse than a 3-year-old can perform on many tasks. But it's foolish to avoid something that could cause you to be replaced by some idiot that can do untold damage with just a few prompts, all because you didn't (assuming you work in tech) want to stay on top of the tools available to you.
IE, the ethernet port shouldn't just disappear from the OS; it doesn't matter that now it's a little easier to fix the problem.
However, those only exist because real people talk about problems on forums. If we fully integrate an LLM into the desktop and nobody discusses the issues they run into anymore, will LLMs continue to be able to solve the problems?
That applies just as much to Windows and MacOS as it does to Linux.
I installed ChatGPT on her laptop and allowed it to run a certain subset of shell commands and it finally worked.
If im gonna have to muck around in the terminal to do the most basic of tasks, I may as well use Linux so I actually have a semblance of ownership on my computer.
I thought that after a few months of using Linux.
If you don't like something on a proprietary OS, you can save a lot of time by having no way to change it and suffering the problems permanently.
I was forced to the file explorer on Windows, and the file explorer was good so I didn't mind. I was also forced to use MS Paint. And it was good for a long time, until they added layers. Now my primary use case of it (pasting an image and cropping it) doesn't work as well as it used to.
On Linux I don't even have that choice. There are choices, yes, but none of them do what I want anyway.
What truly drives me insane is that if you say "I just want what Windows does" people tell you that it's not Windows, it's "different(tm)." Then you ask why do Linux software sucks in comparison to Windows, and you get told "well, it's because Windows has $ to spend in R&D." So it's double-think. Developers are aware proprietary software spends tons of money they don't have in R&D, and yet they shy away from just copying the results because they don't want to be Windows.
I just want Windows, but with freedom. I don't want "different" if it's not going to be better.
Are there actually people who claim this? Microsoft has plenty of money but the premise that they use it to improve the user experience seems contrary to evidence.
When something sucks on Linux with no alternatives it's usually because most people don't use the feature you want, e.g. because there is another way to do the same thing and more people are doing it that way, and then no one bothers to make thing you want because their desire to have that is already being satisfied by something else.
Of course, one of the choices you have is to build the thing you want yourself, which is why it works out that way. The chances of someone having done that go up the more people want it to exist. When the number is low, you have to decide if you want it enough for the person who makes it for everyone to be you. And it's fine if your answer is no, but now you know why that thing doesn't exist.
Do a minimal install. Add just enough packages to get X working.
Configure a simple window manager like openbox or dwm.
I uninstall the networking managers. I wrote a simple bash menu program. In one terminal I used that to launch wpa_supplicant for the current network. In another window, I run dhcp. I have a workspace just for that.
When I stay in a hotel, I need to set up a new wpa supplicant profile, and that takes a few minutes. It's klunky. But system upgrades pass by without me noticing.
It's like running an old car with carburettors and simple electrics. You learn the machine once, there's hardly anything to go wrong.
Networking protocols, connections, error states, etc are inherently complex and require equally sophisticated handling that linux may not always do. Some software chooses not to handle at all and expose directly to the user - but others like KDE simply lack the millions of dev-hours of polish that Windows and Mac have.
As for KDE polish, the only reason that’s true is because of someone’s choice to not put energy toward that part of the desktop.
Linux needs polish for sure, but given a finite amount of time, energy, and money the reasons are likely more complicated than "they don't care"
Gentoo is quite a bit more work to get set up than other distros, but
* Once you get it set up, it just keeps on going
* If you're already fairly familiar with Linux system administration, the setup process isn't hard... it just involves a lot of waiting, unless you use the distro-provided precompiled packages
* There's really good documentation that walks you through the installation process and leaves you with a computer with a functioning bootloader and kernel, Internet access, and some pointers towards what you might want to install next
While /technically/ still true, I lament that it is increasingly inapplicable to the world around us today.
Yes, don't try to actually get any work done, install anything you care about, or use it in a way that improves your life at all. Just reorient your life around learning this clunky system and don't expect to get any actual benefit from it until you've spent years learning it.
This is the standard Linux pitch, followed by "why doesn't anyone use it!?"
Switched from Windows 11. My work system is a Mac. I just love how the Linux gets out of the way, everything just works, UI much better and consistent than Windows.
And I'll probably keep receiving security fixes and app improvements in 10 years for my old Thinkpad.
Keep it working
Forget about it
That is me on Debian.
I spend a disproportionate amount of time tinkering with Linux desktops trying to make them act the way I like anyway, but the amount of tinkering is exponentially higher with a minimal WM setup. I can’t get any work done under them.
I also don’t really care to administer everything via the CLI and don’t find it a good use of my time to write Bash scripts for everything. If I’m going to do that I’d rather just write my own DE, because even if that’s a wildly larger task than writing a few scripts I’m going to get vastly more satisfaction out of it since I can make everything work exactly as I think it should.
Every time my connected monitor wakes up from sleep it steals audio back from my internal laptop speakers, the only way to fix it is (with the help of a chatbot to write a script) to permanently turn off the monitor speakers.
All of the rough edges with Linux that are legitimately worse are not things that are the fault of Linux. Tools and games and video streaming services which are either not tested or deliberately designed so they cannot function on Linux.
It was there before.
In Linux it's there.
Next step is unseat/reseat the PCI device, check connections to the motherboard, and leave powered off for a few minutes. Hopefully windows will decide the device exists.
I tried putting the driver files on a USB stick but the Windows installer refused to recognize those.
After the learning curve of linux desktop(well kde) it's basically the same as macos for me and for most people that would use it. most of the computing is done in the browser and that's basically the same experience in any os.
I wrote an article on my transition [0]
[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/blog/publication-looking-back-w...
LLMs are great though. I had a physical RAM issue that resulted in a bad pacman upgrade, failing the mkinitcpio process and corrupting that kernel upgrade. I had never ran into this before and it was complicated by LUKS being enabled. Claude was able to get me the right steps to remount the LUKS drives while I was chrooted in on a live USB, from there I was able to reupgrade and all was well.
The author's inability to uninstall or fully disable AI features is one for Mac OS. Window management is a common one for people used to other systems.
Windows has many, with (again) AI features that are hard to get rid of, and attempts to coerce users to create an online account being two of the most prominent lately.
So yeah, KDE's NetworkManager frontend is a little janky sometimes, and they should fix that. Is it worse than trying to coerce the user into using services they don't want to? For some people, probably. For me, no.
Should AI features be easier to switch off? Sure, no argument there, but a problem like a network interface vanishing, breaking internet connectivity, and re-adding not working as expected is much more serious, even if it’s an issue that impacts fewer people. At least the system with unwanted features is still usable for work.
Commercial operating systems aren't immune. I found several people having a similar problem with Windows 11 on Microsoft Q&A, as well as a thousand third-party sites offering instructions to fix it, likely all infested with ads for "fix your computer" programs that will make things worse: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5583596/...
I'd expect Mac OS to be better, in part because it only has to support a few models of computer. Perhaps it is, but it's also not immune: https://superuser.com/questions/1756912/ethernet-interface-d...
GNOME is a project whose manifesto is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck", for a very specific value of not sucking roughly equivalent to "Let's make Unix into a shitty version of Windows". I'm picking on GNOME because its development psychology has infested the Linux ecosystem, yielding horrors like NetworkManager, dbus, frickin' systemd, et weary cetera. There's a sense that Unix-style composability, modularity, and (conceptual) simplicity is something that has to be hidden from the poor end user, but the people who are implementing the means to do so lack the organizational competence to pull it off. So the absolute state of things for Linux desktop use in 2026 is a tradeoff between jank and brokenness on the one hand and being exposed to Linux's technical underside on the other. I don't mind so much because I've never minded getting technical. I'm the kind of guy who still logs in at the VT console and types 'startx' to get a graphical session going because I came up on early Linux and appreciate being reminded of what underlies that UI convenience. And it sure beats being stuck on Windows or Mac, where it works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't you often can do little but shrug your shoulders and say "wellp, them's the breaks".[1] And that's before adding in AI cruft, advertisements, mandatory online accounts and vendor spyware.
The price to pay for having a hot rod is a lack of a luxury interior from the finest Swiss craftsmen. But a) you have a hot rod; b) it won't sell your driving data to insurance companies!
[1] In the 90s I heard stories from hackers about normies who just kind of assumed that computers were flaky, fragile machines that lost your work every now and then and needed to be restarted at least once a day in order to function. And when they heard of Linux or FreeBSD, their minds were blown because they didn't know computers could do that. But the computer wasn't flaky or fragile; Windows 9x was.
While I have no aversion to CLI use, editing config files, etc where that is the best way to do things, my introduction to computing was Classic Mac OS. As such my platonic ideal OS looks a lot like Classic Mac OS without its well-known weaknesses: practically nothing is hidden or obfuscated away from the user, the filesystem is laid out for humans before computers and is easily navigable by even non-technical users, GUI control panels are treated as canonical configuration rather than a loosely bolted-on layer, and extending and customizing the system is as simple as moving files in/out of designated directories (e.g. /System Folder/Extensions/).
It’s a vastly different mindset than is found on any *nix-based system, and as well as modern macOS works for me even it still doesn’t meet that standard.
I think people are generally more willing to put up with the former.
I've been using it on my tablet, as I do find it to be a nice UI for the touchscreen, but I may switch to KDE because Gnome's onscreen keyboard is horrid, and difficult to replace.
And then they decided the Windows registry is such a good idea, they should replicate it.
While I'm not deeply familiar with Red Hat/Fedora - I'm curious if you know what happened here? What changed to trigger this behavior?
Looking at a few search results - looks like an upgrade to 44 likely exposed/introduced a bug in power management that result in the Ethernet being turned off, and the kernel mode unloaded?
I'm guessing the intention behind the change was to enable more power saving.
But that is certainly a valid concern with most Linux distros - ocationally an improvement (higher resolution, faster, better color depth console or driver) will mess with bootloader, x/Wayland etc.
Still driver yank isn't unheard of with windows upgrades either. With MacOS I'm just going to assume any os upgrade is likely to cause some issues - even when Apple owns both the hw and os.
GNU/Linux has had a few moments with netbooks, or selected XPS 13 models, both now past memories.
On one (15year old MB) we stream videos nightly.
What are those correct settings? Do you need something particularly special done for your Ethernet connection to function? Given that you were there because you were troubleshooting a NetworkManager failure, I'd also wonder if NetworkManager changed in a way that made that "add interface wizard" not work correctly anymore.
> ...the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky...
As you've discovered, NetworkManager is intermittently horrifically flaky. Every time I think about how it's the default for most Linux distros, I get so angry.
I used to enthusiastically use it for everything until the maintainers released a version that would always attempt to set the interface MTU to 0 after bringing it up, which the OS would clamp to something else... 12xx or 14xx, I can't remember. [0] After that clownshow, I dropped NetworkManager forever and used the "legacy" tools that had been working reliably for ages and continue to work reliably.
In the case of wired Ethernet interfaces, all that needs to be done for pretty much every home user is to bring the interface up and start a DHCP client like 'dhcpcd'. In the case of WiFi ones, you bring the interface up and start wpa_supplicant which can be managed with something like wpa_gui. Not-coincidentally, the Linux distro I use supports using both of these with its network configuration-and-activation tooling.
[0] For those who don't know what MTU is, know that the effect of this misconfiguration is that your network communications will intermittently stop dead for no clear reason at all. Things have gotten quite a bit better since then, and you can run mixed-MTU networks if you're careful about it... but back then, this immediately launched you into flaky network purgatory.
Specifically, on my machine interfaces created in KDE settings have a flag to prevent automatic DNS resolution toggled on, and this is not represented by a corresponding checkbox in the wizard or when editing the interface. As a result I could ping other devices on the network and external IPs like 8.8.8.8, but not browse the web or do anything else that requires DNS resolution. One has to use nmcli to toggle that flag off.
By this, do you mean that interfaces created will get their IP addresses via DHCP, but will ignore DHCP-provided DNS & etc servers?
If so, given how incredibly insane that is to be a default, there's no way that the wizard is doing that. Given my past experience with NetworkManager, I expect NetworkManager made a batshit-crazy backwards-incompatible change and didn't bother to tell anyone. I know that that doesn't fix your problem, but maybe it will encourage you to find out how to stop using this fantastically complex network management software that you don't even need and is clearly maintained by a pack of ADHD-addled clowns.
EDIT: And no, I'm very aware that this does nothing but reinforce your point that some of the components that the major Linux distros are using are nothing but boxes of razor blades. I guess I'm just lucky that I came across Gentoo Linux a quarter-century ago.
Build quality (aluminum), charging (magsafe), screen resolution, battery life, noise (or lack thereof), trackpad…
It’s like other vendors aren’t even trying.
Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
The peak was my high school Gateway laptop.
It's annoyingly non-deterministic.
I've never had a laptop mouse button ever break down on me.
Anyway, I was sure something was up, checked settings, and found a new feature akin to 'more accurate mouse'. I disabled it and my trackpad started working again. Everytime I have to use that PC I get angry about something unbearable windows thought was a good idea. Tbh my Linux has been driving me up the walls recently. I think I just don't like computers at all.
I find the Mac better for scrolling, clicking, gestures and zooming. It’s rejection of eg palm input and the size of the touch pad are great.
Gesture is more an OS functionnality but I am not sure how a trackpad can be better or worse for scrolling or clicking. You slide 2 fingers, it scrolls right? you click (or rather tap these days), it clicks? right? Can a trackpad click "less" or even "scroll less"?
OK maybe some handle better wet fingers, that is maybe the weak point of my current trackpad.
I laughed. I have a work HP machine. The click is only available on the bottom half or third of the trackpad, with no visual indication of the area. It takes a strong push. It’s bad. The scroll is shiite too.
When you get one that doesn’t work right, you really miss a good one.
The old Mac trackpads were great. The new Mac trackpads where they increased the size, and made it solid-state feel terrible to use. Make it make sense.
My guess? Most people don't care, but the discussions are driven by the few who do, because for them, it's a really big deal, and they'll pay accordingly. Similarly for "My code is unreadable unless it's on a 4k display at 220+ PPI" -- I'm sure it's true for them, but for me, a crappy FHD display I can get for $100 is great for coding.
I'm like this with Linux...I pay System76 a premium because I care about how they go about building their systems, both hardware and software. To normal folks, it seems like a crazy thing to pay a premium for, but for me, it's a great deal.
If you look at MacOS with a critical eye, it's nearly impossible to say it has good UX. It's outdated and everything requires more clicks. Finder stuck 20 years ago. Hard to find settings. Poor screen real estate. Hard to read text with transparent everything.
Let's kill this myth that "Macs are more intuitive to use".
To be fair, the whole thread is about tolerating Apple because how good the hardware is :)
Sounds like you are talking about software also.
For example, this teapot has bad UX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things#...
I have to agree on the hardware quality though but that doesn't do everything as I still have to use the OS
In comparison, both MacOS and Windows look more amateur with some leftovers not translated. (Like "Windows Update" on Windows for example)
My both parents use linux and are happy with it. If you mostly use just the browser and reading e-mails, I don't see any better system even for someone who is non-technical.
If thats all you do you might as well just use macos. Something comes up you can just send your parents to the apple store. Probably one of the last places on earth you can get a real life human in a real life building from a real life major company to sit down with you and walk you through your issue. They will do this for free, you only pay for an actual repair job, which you can also of course do there for a relatively fair price all things considered for oem quality work. Not sure where I would take any other laptop for repair. Do people even repair laptops as a business?
Running an AMD card on my Dekstop system. It's invisible as an Intel on-board graphics card, and this is a great thing.
Much greater than rebooting to a black screen because NVIDIA decided to not support your GPU anymore because it finished its economic life for the company, not you.
For example this dell is superb, has tandem oled with 200% scaling and runs linux (dhh runs this on onarchy)
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptop-computers/spd/xps14da...
I'm not exaggerating, I had so many horrible experiences.
I've probably heard "this time is different" on the topic of PC laptops catching up to Macs a hundred times over the last decade, but it never is...
It's hard to rebuild trust after selling a computer (without a CD drive) without networking drivers and no indication of which wireless chipset it has, but including a CD with said drivers.
The good ThinkPads with Magnesium feel much better (both for hand and lap) and are lighter. And the expensive and complicated build allows maintenance (replacing a keyboard is a bless on the X13). Lenovo is just stupid and also allows to purchase low quality screens, low quality frames and even a Windows. A thing that Apple never allows, you cannot purchase a bad configuration.
The MBAs at Apple figured out much earlier, that a rigid metal frame is cheap and gives the impression of quality.
Aside from that?
Customers are guilty, wanting a shiny and quick solution. And governments and companies by following ultra rigid and outright stupid purchasing guide (ISO craziness and “we can drop Windows, we invested another 300.000 in a Windows only Application).
I haven't abused this m series mac as much. But my old original aluminum unibody from 2012, that thing lasted about 12 years until water damage took it out. It fell to the floor on every corner multiple times. None are perfectly round anymore due to the force of the impacts. Never shattered the screen or affected anything with the computer.
I have a friend who ran over his with his f150. That did end up putting some cracks into the screen, but it still worked and he still used it in that state for a couple years at least.
Previously either VMware Workstation or Virtual Box.
Also I am not speaking from a position of no experience, as some projects require being assigned Mac Books, that I gladly return after delivery.
It's just that mishmash of OSFMK (with BSD APIs of 1991 or so) with random additions of newer APIs does not necessarily make it a great Unix to work with in 2026
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
As for tmux, I know UNIX since 1993, went through Xenix, DG/UX, Solaris, NeXTSTEP before GNU/Linux started to take off, worked across Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, OS/X before GNU/Linux really took off.
To this day I don't care tmux exists, just open a couple of terminal windows.
If you are going to mention jobs across sessions, nohup does the job.
So no. The MacOS you use is not Unix.
They buy macOS and then complain macOS isn't Linux, duh!
Once a colleague seeing me work looked at my screen, lifted his head and pointed to my colleague saying "Have you seen how this guy work, he's a maniac!".
Mastering the tool you have always brings speed and smoothness into your process, one step at a time.
Microsoft has Meta+ and Alt+ combinations dime a dozen, and it's consistent across versions. KDE has extensive programmability which allows you to design you own. Both allows you to pack so many features into a small number of keys and work across applications or in general without thinking.
A terminal? It appears. A window? You call it without thinking. Ran out of space, a new desktop is just an instinct...
It seems that no other device makers are seeing the value in Apple's many-devices-acting-as-one approach. It makes for some serious vendor lock.
I was a true Linux believer, and I still switched to a Mac because I needed things to just work. Poor battery life, awful HiDPI support, strange driver issues all contributed. Yes, I could fix them. I opened bugs and could talk to the engineers responsible to get things fixed ASAP. Even so, it was a second full time job keeping up with it.
Xiaomi certainly does: they have billboards touting it: along the bottom they show phones, dishwashers, cars, laptops, and everything in between.
I always run Linux (Debian primarily) on my desktops and servers with a zealot-ish dedication, but what Mac and macOS brings to the table as a portable machine is irreplaceable with anything else.
Even a top end ThinkPad with a well groomed Linux distribution can't come close, sorry.
> and durable keyboards
It wasn't that long ago they had terrible keyboard lifespans which could be a death knell for the laptop, and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec. They've come far in recent years, and I certainly wouldn't be sad if it was my main machine yet I don't expect them to be an outlier forever.
In some dimension Apple (and any serious manufacturer) is always going to be ahead - and they certainly are in non-gaming portable CPU/GPU combos right now. Alas, they aren't ahead in many other dimensions; my Fedora X1 Carbon is my strong preference over my M4 macbook pro and a large part of that is the basic usability of the system and window manager (sway), which is something Apple will never match until we meaningfully switch interaction paradigms.
Yes, their butterfly switch keyboards were really bad. I skipped that generation. I own machines from 2006, 2014 and 2020.
> and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec...
Apple unfortunately does this sometimes, but interestingly just before changing CPU architectures (Power to Intel, Intel to ARM). I sometimes think whether it was semi-intentional. I don't blindly support them, however.
> that is the basic usability of the system and window manager (sway), which is something Apple will never match until we meaningfully switch interaction paradigms.
I'm way faster in my Debian + KDE system as well, but portables are always secondary machines for me, so Mac doesn't bother me much.
Also, I like running different operating systems and paradigms at the same time, so I can learn from all of them while developing some stuff for myself and others. However, as I said multiple times over the years, macOS is the "alternative" OS for me, not the primary one. Linux has that part for the last 20+ years.
I find a trackpad (even a Mac one) is absolutely infuriating to use compared to a decent mouse.
Battery life/screens/magsafe I'm plugged into a dock 99% of the time so it's irrelevant, but when forced to occasionally, the ergonomics of looking down at a single small 1x in screen is just terrible if doing it for hours and also makes my back feel horrible.
I have a Linux server, and use cloud Linux machines extensively, but at least the last time I checked, Linux desktop sucks. There are always memory management issues, doing a video call makes my fan sound like a jet taking off, not sleeping, put my laptop in my bag and it gets to hot to touch - that’s just off the top of my head, I’ve tried Linux laptops on multiple occasions and they suck.
That, or make hardware compromises and buy a laptop that provides official Linux support, which is likely to have a more Mac/Windows-like experience of things "just working".
if you use distros which ship the latest _stable_ release of software
and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues, something I haven't exactly had with either Windows or Mac
like my current gaming setup from a year ago(roughly) was setup once, I had to fiddle some minor tweaks during setup and since then it "just works tm". No issues, not know how needed, nothing. (At least for the Games I play.) But also not Nvidea which has in recent years increasingly more QA issues across _all_ OSes and _all_ hardware including their supper expensive AI cards... But that is more a Nvidea then a Linux Problem, by now, was different in the past.
> but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues
These are defining qualities of something that does not "just work"
I also find Apple's choice to just continually create 1G swap files until the system locks absolutely baffling.
I've been regularly plugging/unplugging my usb-c docking connected to ethernet while being on teams video call without issues on both linux and windows but ultimately it depends on the protocol. Web/https stuff is usually more forgiving thanks to sessions being maintained "externally" from the protocol itself. Copying files via sftp be a different experience I reckon because you usually use a different source ip address when you switch and need to initiate a new connection.
Idk. about desktop Linux, but my phone does the (WLAN -> Mobile) switch just fine.
If it's about _not reconnecting_ (e.g. which for many apps might require some manual pause/resume of streamed data or similar), then things are more complex as you can't keep your IP, so it then depends on weather the application uses HTTP3/Quick or similar protocols in implementations which are designed to be able to freely roll over to different IP addresses.
So both yes and no :)
macOS has a 'service (priority) order':
* https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/05/service-please-manage-mul...
It's no different that having multiple default gateways in Linux (with different metric/priorities):
* https://superuser.com/questions/1600190/change-order-of-rout...
And when your default route changes so will the TCP connection end-points. This is mostly an issue when you have a stateful session, like SSH, and less so with 'bursty' traffic like web surfing or e-mail.
By default wired connections are higher priority. I've been on Wifi with a MacBook and patched in with the Network Settings panel open and see the change, which is reflected in the output of "netstat -rn". Underneath the hood most of the macOS kernel is (Free)BSD/Unix.
Until we get SCTP multihoming popularized this will generally be an issue on any operating system. Though it would perhaps be nice to perhaps have a socket (TCP) API flag to tell the kernel "keep me on the initial interface as long as it exists" so sessions don't flip over.
I'm not talking about sessions dropping. It has the symptoms of an IP conflict, absolutely no traffic can pass until I disable Wi-Fi. Any other laptop I have ever used would just switch, maybe drop an SSH session, but not this.
>> > and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
is for how how to have a reliable acceptable Linux experience and I have less issues with rare occasional hick ups then I had on Windows and Mac in the past. But that is long ago. Through just looking at all the AD/snooping issues, how often windows seem to have broken updates etc. this is way nicer on Linux and seem to be still not worse on Linux then Mac.
> > but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues
the example here with my gaming setup _doesn't_ require "have enough Linux know-how",
after the initial setup it so far just did works
The initial setup was just running a trivial install + ~2 simple to do and find through search, but should-be-unneeded initial tweaks (both Steam specific).
through I currently happen to only care about games both available on Steam and running on Linux without Linux specific manual setup/tweaks (like Silk Song, Nine Sols, Detroit Become Human (but all native 4k)). And it's all AMD and no "unusual" consumer hardware components.
> and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
A Linux sysadmin teammate of mine has >10 years of running Linux servers, and chose to install Ubuntu on his work Dell laptop, and in the ~2 years he's been running that thing he's had regular (2-3/month) issues with audio during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meetings sessions. Both Bluetooth and wired headset connections.
At my last job (pre-COVID) I had a Linux workstation at my desk and a Windows laptop. At where I'm currently at we're hybrid and so we get laptops and I chose a MacBook because I knew I could both do my daily sysadmin chores through Terminal and also have access to 'business apps'.
Could it be due to a poor support of Linux by these proprietary apps? Possibly even intentional.
I think to remember that the most absurd thing was that if you tell Teams "this is chrome" (even when it's FF) it did work just fine.
I don't know about the app but it has been a solved problem on linux using the web browser early in 2020 when people started getting sent home due to the covid and remaining bugs were quickly ironed out.
I bounced around between Windows and Linux on my personal computers for the last 20 years. Generally I'd run Linux until something died or I needed Windows, and I'd return for a bit. I've been exclusively using Linux since 2019 or so. I don't think I'm going back.
But don't fool yourself. You're subverted to Apple's rules the same as Microsoft users are to Windows.
I prefer to fight a little bit on an update on a unix system on something that is not working 100% to give up choices. When you use Windows, MacOS, Android you do not have choices. Choices are dictated from above, like it or not.
As for me every time I have to interact with something that is not BSD or Linux I suffer miserably.
Yes, there is a whole moral discussion to be had, but as much as you win points for doing the better thing, the better things don't really pay bills.
The good news though is that we definitely won the server war. We can spin up VMs and install Linux without licences. We have access to software that works well, security updates, frequent releases, a massive ecosystem of free software, no advertising, very little to no licensing for software, and it works incredibly well. So much so, that we can't even imagine a world in which servers require licence keys or subscriptions or a marketplace account.
Imagine now, if laptops & workstations were as solved as servers are.
That's why we aren't there yet, because they're not.
Some people understand the concept of trade-offs but don’t understand how other people don’t want the same trade-offs as they do
Apple doesn't even have a tiling window manager as far as I know.
A tiling window manager is a different concept.
I'm sorry but objectively macOS window management is wholly subpar compared to the options on Linux.
Rectangle is a literal hack on top that hopefully works when you need it. Rectangle is great, but Rectangle, Yabai and whatnot can only hope that the undocumented private APIs that macOS _allows_ them to use today don't mysteriously break tomorrow.
Meanwhile a Linux window manager actually does its full job unencumbered because it's a _real_ first class window manager and not a hack.
Are we? Not sure what usability and quality improvement there are in an OS where you have to fight against its vendor's decision.
Most critics against Linux I read come from people who never took the time to choose perfectly supported hardware in the first place but just buy whatever bleeding edge stuff is available running on windows, then hope it will works. It is like criticizing Apple/macOS because it doesn't work well on an hackintosh really and is completely dishonest. I don't criticize windows because it doesn't work on the latest Macbook M8 ultra studio pro nor do I criticize iOS because it doesn't work on my Samsung Note tab 6 or macOS 27 because it doesn't work on a Microsoft Surface.
I haven't had any update nor hardware support issue in the last 15 years because I have chosen hardware based on Linux support compatibility before purchasing them.
Bad or not as good?
For many people not as good can be good enough.
For instance I am mostly working from home, and will never spend more than 6 hours straight without a pause nor do I work "on the road" so I never cared about having a +11h of battery life. I understand it can be very valuable in some circonstances but it has never been a thing for me and for many people using their laptop mostly at home. I wouldn't trade having a forced siri install or the shitty keyboard that used to come with macbook a few years ago for more battery life than I actually need.
You're unique! Also I hear what you're saying about the vast choice of laptops available with amazing Linux compatibility
I don't think so. Critics are usually more vocals than people who have no issues.
My grandmother used linux for years without issue in the late 90's, my ex inherited a computer from me 16 years ago and was still using Linux last I checked 7 years ago, having migrated from slackware to ubuntu on her own without being a particularly tech savy person. She had no wish to get back on windows as it just worked without getting in the way. My current wife migrated to linux without realizing it when the hard drive on her laptop died, she only figured it out when she realized icons of her office suite were different. Using an immutable distro has been painless for her so far in 3 years, same for my daughters, as update are done in the background and system boot simply to new image when started up. I am not even doing any maintenance, just checking once every few full moons that the auto update is still working (which is the case).
> Also I hear what you're saying about the vast choice of laptops available with amazing Linux compatibility
The irony is not lost when I consider this vast choice it is at least bigger than the choice of laptops[1] running macOS at any given time.
[1] currently 8 according to Apple's own comparison table separating model into line, then screen size and cpu.
Probably 99% of Apple / Windows users aren't very tech literate so if they have to fight an update they'll just think it's broken.
It's just basic business practice, cater to the 99%, don't worry about the 1%
As another example of what you can’t disable: I don’t wish to subscribe to Apple’s paid iCloud offerings. Yet there are several places in the UI both in macOS and iOS where there are non-removable ads for the service under certain conditions. For example, when your local storage fills up. Oh and now there’s a non-removable 20GB+ Apple LLM model now taking up space on my 256GB ssd. Thanks a lot Tim/John.
I am satisfied with current set of choices on my Win 10 & Android 13.
As for the OS, everytime I tried MacOS, I find rapidly major showstoppers. It's like people are just blind to them.
If I'd qualify each platform, I'd say Windows is a toy, Mac is a piece of art, Linux is a tool. I picked my category.
When I first tried macOS I hated it and had a long list of issues I could give. They are all still valid but it turns out they don’t actually stop you getting work done.
A lot of other crafts and jobs need way more expensive hardware. Software engineers "only" need a $1,000 - $3,000 laptop every 5 or so years. That's typically less than 0.5% of that 5 year's salary.
How about "not worth the cost" instead.
Not worth the cost of losing the freedom to run your own software and make your own choices.
Commodity laptops might be slower and less flashy, but if Linux goes in the wrong direction I can install FreeBSD or OpenBSD or my own vibe-coded OS or whatever.
Western society has for the last few decades surrendered principles for convenience, and the state of modern computing is a microcosm of the consequences. You're all consumers now, instead of users.
All of our Linux stuff is rock solid and is what we actually use to communicate with our satellites. We will explicitly avoid Microsoft and Apple here.
Compared to the last XPS I had, it's substantially better for my use case, since I'll generally be remoting into systems anyway.
I find the Apple offering's keyboard worse to type on, its enormous touchpad is a chore to engage with compared to the venerable Trackpoint, and the operating system feels contrived to make simple things difficult.
The x220 thinkpad is 14 years old now. And has a 500 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM. Perhaps in another 14 years Apple will be able to match it feature for feature.
One might well ask why I own Apple hardware at all. The answer is to buy entry into their walled garden as a developer.
Can Mac laptops run QubesOS?
Apparently it doesn't judging by the tons of articles published after every macOS update.
> just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
And I am on a run of 11 years of update (since Fedora 25 or 26) without a single issue. Anecdotal evidences are just that. Anecdotal. Some people will have issues, others won't. Putting yourself in a situation where you have less risk of having issues like not using hardware from a company whose drivers are not maintained in the mainline kernel source tree goes a long way.
> but that sort of thing only happens on Linux (and windows probably)
Yeah right.
https://support.apple.com/es-es/guide/mac-help/-mchl4e4b758d...
Ironically the website from the company that is supposed to make software "that just works" do not let me put their page in english and force it back to spanish ignoring my choice. Hum.
You might not know this since your main language is spanish, but in America for the last 20 years every single linux engineering job gave me a macbook pro to work from. Big tech, small tech. And the one that didn't, they gave us chromebooks that everybody hated, but you weren't allowed to use apple there and don't you dare complain about the chromebooks because you knew they weren't going anywhere.
Me and my peers who don't live the richard stallman life expect a macbook pro as our work tool and wouldn't take a job somewhere that throws us a $1500 thinkpad or system76 or whatever to do our day jobs. We can have those at home.
My main language is not spanish either, and for the record spanish is used officially by 14% of the US population (and is estimated by 18% by other sources) so you are taking a lot of shortcuts to decide where I am and what is my main language.
> Me and my peers who don't live the richard stallman life expect a macbook pro and wouldn't take a job somewhere that throws us a $1500 thinkpad or system76 or whatever to do our day jobs. We can have those at home.
FWIW at the only job I got from a US tech company, we were given Dell laptops on which many dev installed linux. Company before that proposed Macs but many preferred linux running thinkpad due to the crappy experience at the time running docker on thermal throttling x86 macbooks.
So I smell a lot of uncalled for arrogance from your part. Personally I wouldn't expect a "work tool" that force install a local LLM model to fill up my hard drive and a has a barely usable desktop with stupid rounded corners acting weirdly.
The "work tools" had no twinkling of an installed LLM until this year. I've used Macbook pros at work for 15 years. I'm writing this on a $3500 macbook pro I bought myself and pissed about the LLM thing.
Completely irrelevant to the conversation until now.
And wow, shocking, you aren't working in American tech.
PS: Here in America, at real tech companies not the ones that let you do whatever you want to your corporate hardware, you wouldn't be allowed to install your own linux distro on a company laptop. You MIGHT be allowed to install their RHEL or something they've prepackaged with their own root accounts and spyware. You doing it yourself? That's an IT security violation straight to a fire just about everywhere that pays a real salary.
So instead of crying about me pointing out that you likely aren't American, maybe you should listen to the people in the field much longer than you who are much more experienced with the whole linux vs mac corporate thing. I will walk out the door if a USA tech company tries to hand me a dell. And now, what, I installed linux on it and have literally no IT support and have to fix my own laptop instead of donig my engineering job. I've was there 20 years ago, never again.
And no I didn't get fired from that US tech firm for installing Linux on my laptop, I actually asked about it during my interviews.
So in a US centric forum, most likely you'll find bilingual people that live in the US.
I think a lot of the people who go on about Apple software quality are full of it, frankly. They either just don’t care or don’t notice the bugs.
Definitely windows. It often forgets things.
I pulled the same update, and it was annoying but it came nowhere near bricking itself. The integrated graphics worked, it just disabled the Nvidia open-source driver for the GPU. Simply (re)installing it fixed it. Notably, just asking ChatGPT for the solution worked (after pasting the output of a few commands).
That's defined as "the device has become a brick, cannot be recovered". It was mostly popularized by broken firmware updates which effectively destroyed the device, as it could no longer be salvaged.
You calling a borked package install in userspace almost bricked is telling about your technical capability.
And I agree that people that are basically technologically illiterate should not use Linux.
They could if someone administers it for them, but if nobody can help them - it's just not the right choice.
We lost the battle over “literally “ a decade ago and I’m not going to spend my time fighting a bunch of people who would rather scroll through 5 second videos all day than pick up a book.
It's fine most of the time, so it's not a big deal... But if you're unwilling and they're technologically illiterate: they will not be able to recover. Apple has the genius help desk which will sort them out, with Linux... You're gonna have to find "someone", "somewhere".
Can be done for sure, however once again: I would not recommend
I had my parents on Linux for a hot second, and got tired of them calling me for help. So I switched them to Mac, and then I discovered they still call for help. At least with Linux I knew the system well.
Just my 0.02, but Linux is a smarter choice today than it ever was, because AI is extremely good at fixing things. I can fix most anything on my machines, but I still use AI, because it does it while I'm doing other stuff.
Are you unaware that they likely want to talk with you, and the technological issues are likely just the vehicle for this?
I suggest you just help them and try to savor the time you have with them. The time is likely a lot shorter then you expect. But of course, just a random bystanders perspective
Not the person you're responding to, but: They may want to learn to communicate honestly. I would find the situation described deeply irritating. Enough to cut contact for a while, even.
I wonder why? If nobody can help them, they are fucked on any OS.
For both windows and Linux you'll have to find someone thats willing to help you, essentially. Usually a lot harder for those people. Especially with Linux ime, as even fewer places know enough to help you, even if they may be able to handle windows
To use Linux on the desktop you first have to know about it for a start, so you are unlikely to end up with a linux OS without knowing anyone using it or an association/usergroup promoting it.
I've spent the last 2 weeks trying to get Windows to work (hard crash at random times) when it ran flawlessly on Ubuntu.
The issue appears to have arisen because Windows decided to update my graphics drivers, so making them (for reasons AMD perhaps need to sort out) incompatible with Adrenaline. A million reboots later, using arcane programs to clear out hidden installs, hidden config, and trying to get details from a system that will readily tell you it recovered but gets shy about what caused it to crash .. eesh.
My experience is you need far more expertise to run Windows. Maybe if MS tested they're releases so it didn't break itself all the time ...
Edit: I also experienced the Nvidia driver update that broke a bunch of things on my (Fedora) server last week.
Which is the whole point, no? There would be more Linux everywhere if it didn’t occasionally break in ways that require special expertise to fix.
You think wrong.
I maintain multiple Linux system on the side an know about it well enough.
The Nvidia drivers however are not bios/uefi in case you didn't know. That's what firmware is.
Those can still be flashed from a root Linux booted into a graphical interface, but nonetheless were not the topic of discussion.
Aside from that - a borked kernel can still be easily recovered for most nowadays, as they usually keep the old versions around with a simple picker after an unsuccessful boot.
Still, I'm unable to grasp the point youre making in relation to what I said. I thought I was very explicitly recommending against people without any technological capability to use Linux... You seem to agree?
Anyway.
This thread spawned off of a discussion about how people still use Apple because though Linux may be easier than it's ever been it's still hard for anybody to run a Linux desktop system without occasional downtime and repair when something breaks. That was the point of the comment you initially responded to.
But, you missed it; you responded to:
"and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt"
with:
"well um axually you don't know what bricked means and that's probably a sign that you're too dumb to use linux. people who are too dumb to use linux shouldn't use it".
Even though we agree on the point, I felt like your response wasn't fair or really even apropos. So I replied. To be crystal clear:
1. they did fix their problem, but it was not a fun time for them. I can empathize 1000% with that. Sometimes I just want to do something and Linux (and everything I sign up for when deploying it) itself gets in the way. When an apt update causes a boot failure, irrespective of whether it's a failing driver or a borked firmware, it's annoying and it gets in the way. It's not an issue of technical literacy. You still have to figure out the issue and fix it which costs time and attention that is so scarce these days.
2. "bricked" has evolved colloquially to refer to a spectrum of failure modes covering everything from "the firmware is toast" to "user-space didn't come up". never mind that the author used the term "almost bricked" to indicated they knew it wasn't hard bricked but intended to communicate that it also wasn't functional. your entire attack stems from you rashly misinterpreting the author's intent here. but even if the author had demonstrated clear technically illiteracy, there's a way for you to add commentary about the definition of bricked without the distraction of attacking the person's technical aptitude. I think everyone knows it's almost impossible to inadvertently hard-brick anything these days
All in all, you, me, and the comment you initially replied to do seem to share the same understanding: to operate linux you need to have a level of tolerance to deal with the occasional issues that come with it. And for many (even technical) people that's not the right balance. Everything else you introduced to the discussion detracted from that point.
There was a discussion on this forum just a few days ago wondering why Apple is so hostile to open source support on its devices. And consensus here was that, no, it clearly wasn't due to competetive pressure.
But clearly it is. Because to many consumers, if you have to run MacOS to get an M6, you'll run MacOS instead of Linux. And that makes enshittifying MacOS as a revenue center very tempting.
> Also the OS mostly “just works”
Article is literally about the OS not working as desired, though.
> Build quality (aluminum)
This is such an ignorant take. Every other laptop has an Aluminum shell. Dell, HP, you name it. My Sony Vaio came with a metallic shell in the early 2000s. As a Macbook owner, I am still extremely worried about coffee spilling on my keyboard. A problem that was solved decades ago by every other manufacturer but not Apple. My touchID randomly stopped working in under 2 years of owning my laptop too and the hardware needs replacement of the entire logic board. So, tell me again, where is this "build quality" that you speak of?
I prefer the X1 Carbon’s body a thousand times over Apple’s unibody design, which I find cold and uncomfortable, and it tends to dig into my wrists.
And I’d take a TrackPoint over Apple’s trackpad a million times over.
Of course, that’s just my personal preference.
we should strive and push to keep having these a alternatives. Which the industry is trying to remove.
The ancient wisdom of "never nvidia" when using Linux/BSD continues to ring true into the future.
I have an old Macbook Air that's no longer supported by the latest MacOS. Trying to do anything on it is like pulling teeth. The simple act of running a modernish web browser is a horrible experience of "This App is no longer supported".
On Windows a laptop from the mid 2000's is still entirely usable albeit a bit slow. Not so with MacOS. You 100% cannot run a single piece of modern software. You have to dig around for forks that specifically support older versions of MacOS and if you want to run a browser with Plugins, good eff'n luck! Now you're trying to find a fork of Chromium that supports Adblock, but also have to find and old version of Adblock which isn't hip to all the new invasive ad technology.
MacOS is not for poors it appears.
X is usually “pick hardware with good support in ToT kernel” or “use distribution Y” (where Y is somehow different in every post) or “do you really need feature Z that’s better on Mac? You’re making the wrong trade.”
To each their own but I’d rather not deal with XYZ and just get the thing that works.
p.s. I do hope they put a toggle back for Siri and their on device AI stuff
Yes, but the point of the linked article is that this preference inevitably results in your device spying on you. To each their own indeed.
Edit: and of course I see your P.S. note. But that isn't really responsive. Most Linux users would point out (P.S.) that they'd like their hardware to be faster and lower power or their OS to be a little cleaner. But alas, you can't have everything.
Sure, Linux laptops are not "pretty", but I don't need a computer to be pretty, in fact I hope that someone starts to produce again laptops identical to old IBM thinkpads (not the insult to the brand that Lenovo is building) but with modern hardware, a computer that had every port you need on it, no adapter required, that you could have it fall from a ladder and not break, with removable battery, hard drive, with the trackpoint instead of those stupid trackpads, I want it even with a DVD burner fuck it. I don't care it to be small, I care it to be functional.
A large portion of the HN crowd woefully underrates this aspect of macOS. The types who would get pleasure tweaking their OS and understanding it intimately are overrepresented here, though props to them.
I don't care what people say; macOS is the only OS I've ever used that has never booted to a black/blue screen with relatively cryptic error after performing an upgrade. Not once ever. Windows today is of course abusive to users and shouldn't be used, and as much as I absolutely love Linux as a server OS and for VM appliances, I get no joy whatsoever trying to figure out why the DE stopped working after letting the OS update itself or debugging subpar rendering from the Wayland compositor or X11. (Linux people still tell me this isn't a problem in 2026 but, guess what, my Ubuntu VM hit a black screen a couple days ago after upgrading with no other changes made to the installation, so they're wrong) That and so much graphical Linux software is written with the attitude of "I'm a freak who thinks context menus shouldn't exist so fuck the user and fuck anyone who tells me I'm wrong", yet so many DEs integrate these apps anyway.
The worst thing that macOS has ever overtly done to me is slightly change the look of its interface over the years, which is incredibly minor compared to all the changes that Windows, Ubuntu, Gnome, and KDE have gone through in the last decade. Does it pull lame crap like phone home? Probably, but these days I assume that just about all software thinks it knows better than I and constantly pings cloud servers. MacOS is not really unique in this regard. I will switch to my own Linux if Apple goes down the road of "use our AI or else", but for now I don't really see the venom towards macOS to be justified when it's incredibly easy to prove that the alternatives are usually very poor.
Oh yeah, and the hardware is excellent. (except for the keyboards which need TPU dam covering them or else dust kills them after a couple years)
This happened to me once with a Mac upgrade!
And it’s still fewer times than something has happened to one of my Linux machines, by an order of magnitude.
There are little annoyances with Macs and occasional frustrating problems, but after using them side by side with other operating systems for years it’s what I choose for the daily driver.
Most complaints come from people who have become familiar with one OS for a decade and then get angry when they use something else and it’s not the same as their familiar thing. There isn’t much value in those comparisons.
Happened to me years ago. No biggie, installed a backup and noticed I had somehow removed the most important directory with all my work files from the the time machine back up. Hardly Apple’s fault, though, but I got complacent with ”it just works”.
Since then I come to conclusion that the saying should go: ”It works - until it doesn’t”. If it os not the OS, it is myself who messes something up.
These days I almost solely use Linux. I have M1 Mini as a media centre connected to TV and I have to use Windows crap at work. Opening my Linux seems like a hig from an old friend in comparison. I might need to read docs and fight with drivers every now and then, but fuck it, I don’t care. Because this one is mine.
And yeah, "It works – until it doesn't" is probably the most accurate statement that can be made about all technology. My original comment also can make it seem like I'm taking a dump on Linux, but my gripe is more about Linux desktop environments. Linux absolutely can be a really stable OS, but I've only been able to truly reach that for myself by compiling my own kernel and composing my own desktop environment from barely-related packages. This is where I totally relate to your sense of "fuck it, I don't care because it's mine." Maybe someday I'll end up completely switching to my own Linux OS.
one was a permissions/capability issue, but the other was straight up performance. As someone said above, an AI agent drilled down on both workstreams immediately, so the pivot wasnt too rough
There are some incredibly good PC laptops out there with the same kinds of features of MacBook Pros and more: long battery life, haptic trackpad, aluminum CNC build, long sleep battery life, etc. Check out Intel core series 3.
I’m a very happy with my Framework 13 Pro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvXZVJXIyqM
ngl Mac users are to computers as Tesla drivers are to cars, they buy them because they don't want to learn anything.
This "just works" thing is propaganda. Computers never ever do that
The apple touchpad is better - but all touchpads suck. Still miss old school IBM ThinkPad stick.
The laptop quality is great; great sound, battery lasts forever compared to mine (framework). Userspace tools and UI is terrible and have no control over but the hardware and the software integration is top notch. (I live in the terminal, and have nix-darwin to bring my existing setup to mac so it's not jarring most of the time)
Won't look back when I can transition back to linux full time; I'll be so happy. But I can see why people go with apple products. I really hope that ARM laptops become a regular thing.
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/jan-2025-state-of-linu...
Apple has rabid fans, they will absolutely put up with this and tell you you're wrong for not wanting to.
for some odd reason though, there's not many rabid windows fans.
Windows users are the ones who don't want to think about the OS at all. They want to get something else done and have the OS get in their way as little as possible. Linux fans want to dig deep into their OS and play with its internals; Mac fans want the OS to be an experience: trendy, sleek, reassuring. The kind of people who like it when the AI tells them "you're absolutely right!". Windows users generally understand that Windows is awful; the worst operating system, in fact, except for all the other ones.
Apple users to Windows users: I feel bad for you
Windows users to Apple users: I don't think about you at all
I've been using Linux since the a.out days and MacOS X since the PowerPC days, and I find MacOS less of an ordeal for day-to-day tasks as my terminal/workstation. I sysadmin Linux (and previously also Solaris and IRIX) servers for a living. It's been several years since I had to daily drive a Windows machine (though I've heard PowerShell and WSL2 are pretty good).
I'm not sure what "ordeal" you are referring to. I'm mostly in Terminals SSHing places, so perhaps my work use cases are not 'advanced' enough to bump into them? (I also use macOS for my personal systems.)
Firefox added ads to the browser homepage - maybe now the money-grabbing lawyer who was in charge finished vampirically squeezing it for every cent they could make, perhaps we'll move past that nonsense.
I’ve used Apple for my daily driver for years and I could not figure out what this was referring to. What ads? The only thing I can think of is if you open the App Store app and see a promo image for some apps to check out?
So yeah, I love linux but fucking shit if it aint ridiculous on some pretty fundamental issues that (looking at my watch) were solved forty years ago!
Regular Joe and Jane, don't care about UNIX experience, want a ready to use computer they can buy down at the local PC store on the shopping mall, being able to share stuff with the neighbours, which also don't have any clue over technology, and so on.
Also when it breaks down, and they don't have a nephew to call in to repair their computer, it should be easily repaired at the same PC store, which usually has employees that only care about Windows or macOS, and do the bare minimum to revive the system, while charging a good deal per hour.
Ah, and for all the mess Apple and Microsoft pull with their desktop programming frameworks, I lost count what is now the full stack framework for doing desktop applications on GNOME, KDE, XFCE, or whatever happens to be the distribution that was taken out of Distrowatch.
Unfortunately, there is too much friction for the average person who just wants to get things done instead of tinker for every specific use case they have.
Thus, it’s just less painful to put up with the hostile ads and spying.
This flexibility makes it difficult to make broad sweeping statements about the thing. Certainly however, it's impressive to log into a linux server and see an uptime measured in years. (Impressively horrifying, depending on your security posture, but impressive nonetheless.)
It's not just privacy violations. Those are the tip of the iceberg. I used to open the Activity Monitor and see a couple pages of processes. Now it's in the hundreds.
It's stuff that was badly done even before AI. The industry has been drunk on SaaS for way too long, and with SaaS comes the junk/slop and the privacy violations.
I've been doing my part and cancelling all my subscriptions apart from power, water, internet and garbage.
I switched my desktop to Ubuntu about a year ago, and while it's not 100% free of trouble, I still can't imagine running Windows 11 again. My MBP still runs MacOS and I haven't been pushed far enough to want to try installing a Linux distro on it.
Windows has always been weird like that. Relevant HN post from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599481
That said, I recently bought a Windows laptop (which was wiped to run Linux day 1). Before I installed Linux I had one task I needed Windows for. To create a local account and not connect it to the internet, I had to lookup a keyboard shortcut to show a terminal, lookup a command to run the setup in a different mode for IT departments, then run through setup again to make my local account. Once in the OS, because I wasn’t on the network, 90% of the start menu was full of placeholder icons that needed the internet to download the actual icon… presumably a bunch of cloud services (ads). Then there were basics, like trackpad performance… it was unusable, I had to get a mouse to move around without pain. Once Linux was installed, the trackpad worked great, maybe even better than macOS, it’s close, just a matter of preference.
Compare that to macOS, which still lets you make a local account without jumping through hoops, runs fine without iCloud, and has all local apps that won’t leave you with a bunch of placeholders. The basic hardware, like the trackpad, also works well out of the box.
macOS and Apple aren’t perfect, but are still miles ahead of Windows, imo.
Linux isn’t perfect either. Initial hardware support was very hit and miss depending on the distro. Things I’d consider basic functionality required plugins that I had to hunt for. Other annoying out-of-the-box defaults required plugins + custom scripts to resolve. All of this can be very frustrating. Most people don’t want to tinker this much.
No system is perfect, it’s just a question of which tradeoffs a person is willing to make.
Mission Control? Launch Pad? App Exposé? Spaces?
Features that I don't want but take over my machine if I accidentally use the track pad wrong.
I'd love to see MacOS cull that crap from decades of feature creep.
My wife gave up her Dell Windows laptop because the performance was terrible. I installed kubuntu and started using it, and then she immediately reclaimed it because all she ever needs is a browser and Linux vastly improved the performance. ("Well, it is my laptop...") She knows nothing about Linux, and the only Linux-specific question she ever had was how to recover when it sometimes doesn't wake up from sleep. Overall, much less frustration than Windows.
I was using Windows on my personal-but-for-work laptop; it got to the point where I hated it too much so tried Linux. Most stuff was great (even Teams was 90% fine!) but I couldn’t function professionally without installed versions of Office, and I couldn’t find an acceptable workaround.
I then switched back to MacOS and am mostly happy hanging on to Sequoia… but I’m dreading the point at which (for some reason) Apple make it unavoidable to upgrade.
Then… Windows 11 LTSC?
This is the billion dollar question for corps though. Windows and MacOS are first class citizens of the corporate IT universe and all the weirdness of corporate IT works. MDM, identity/auth, Office, LOB apps, video, document signing, data labeling, everything.
Linux has taken huge, heroic strides, and has caught up to about 2005. Corporate IT simply will not sanction Linux desktops unless they are provably as well versed in the entire ecosystem as Win/Mac, barring a "political" decision made at the top to make it happen.
To change this would require a profoundly deep, expensive, and continuing investment in all aspects of the 'Modern Work' experience, plus genuine commitment from Microsoft to make it happen (which would likely require lawsuits and enforcement).
The situation today is that a few orgs are playing catchup on some features, but that will never be enough to match a platform that has been dedicated to corporate life for 40+ years, and from a company infamous for extending their advantages to extinguish the competition.
MacOS 27 is a lot less shit than 26, thankfully. I upgraded from 15 to 27 directly (on a M-series Mac).
I use a Mac at work and iPad Pro at home. Never once have I considered either usage “an ordeal.”
Do I just have a really high threshold for frustration or do you have a desire to complain?
There is some overlap but it isn’t much.
My next laptop will not be a Mac, I'll be going back to Linux for sure.
I also won't go near an x86 processor ever again after using the mX/arm procs.
We're paying for the hardware. The 100x better screens, speakers, battery life, the apps on macos blow linux apps away even if all of them, even the most simple apps, cost $20+.
But with that said Apple has also priced me out of buying another MBP for a long time with how expensive their 64gb+ versions are. My m1 max was $3500 and I can't believe I paid that, but here I am 7 years later still using it and it cranks. I'd have replaced 3 x86 laptops by now.
Oh, and I had the entire laptop replaced for $99 when its battery got bad and the screen cracked last year thanks to applecare, though that did require me paying for applecare at $99/yr each year. But that still doenst add up to another $3500 laptop. I just drove to the apple store dropped it off and picked it up a week later.
Yes, an anti-AI mood had entered the mainstream (anti-data center in particular), but I don’t think people will connect this to that.
For most people, this Apple Intelligence change isn’t a ‘really hostile’ move. They keep the default settings. They have disk space, because most people don’t use terabytes of space, and Macs come with, historically speaking, tons of storage now.
They will upgrade, and if they notice at all, it will be because ‘Siri works way better now’ (and all people who use Siri, whether here or in the general population, complained about Siri not understanding anything complex and seemingly not knowing anything much of anything before). This is probably, on the whole, going to be good for Apple’s reputation.
A Mac mini base model comes with 256G. It is manageable but barely unless used with an external disk.
22.8G as quoted in the article is about 10% of the available space and it is something that cannot be offloaded to external disk.
Many people including myself are going to be furious when their Mac is upgraded.
Yes, the slow enshittification and the increasingly obnoxious push for services and recurring revenue on MacOS is worrying, but it's also extremely reliable in a way that Linux simply isn't. I love Fedora KDE for freeing me from Microsoft, but there's a new issue every month - usually minor, but sometimes not. As of last month I had to restart plasma-shell multiple times a day because the desktop window would become non-responsive when CPU was under heavy load.
Helps that macbooks have excellent hardware and battery life, too. I just wish users weren't increasingly treated like cattle to be milked.
Price as well? Yes. When I bought my first MacBook Air in ~2011-12 I was shocked to see what I got for ~57K INR (no, I am not converting it to USD) I would not have gotten from any other OEM even for fricking 120-130K INR (I had the choice here to instead say 1.2-1.3L :D). And that hasn't changed more or less.
But their OSs are pathetic, their software (even other than the OS part) are downright disgusting. But they sort of have a great personal computing hardware monopoly. Because no one else bothers to make it. For whatever reason.
They make it increasingly hard to make Linux on this. Really really hard.
What else sucks? Repair and repair cost. You are literally using a costly (bank-broken-level) repair affair ticking time-bomb in your backpacks - there is no two way about it.
And people who are going to say, like every time, "but how many times has your Apple device broken down", or even "but why won't you buy a new one after 3-4 years", or something even more stupid like "wait.. so your AirPod stopped working after 3 years.. you wanted it to last for 30 years?", please go and put the head back into the warm sand where it safely was. Anyone saying, "but they give you repair kits", please f-- off!
tl;dr: it's not the right way to buy personal computing hardware, but the the closest right way is a decade behind or at best many years.