Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

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> Also the OS mostly “just works”

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)

> 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.

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.

It's funny because I wrote my comment this morning and then an hour later my manager told me unprompted about how his work Macbook updated over the weekend and got stuck in a boot loop! I have a feeling the blame might actually be on some IT department configuration going haywire, but it could be Apple's fault for all I know. That was an amusing coincidence.

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.

> 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.

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.

It's things like this that make me imagine what kind of Linux desktop we could have if one of them had the kind of budget that goes towards Windows and macOS. The kernel itself is great and tons of money is effectively invested towards it and its ecosystem. In my humble opinion, it's the Linux DEs that sometimes get really close to being as equally awesome but never quite get there. MacOS is by no means what I consider a perfect OS, but it's reliable enough that I haven't had to think to myself "what if my computer stops working tomorrow because reasons." I know it happens to people, but it seems relatively rare in contrast to the alternatives. The one big exception might be the removal of Rosetta, but developers and consumers have had an abundance of time to migrate to Apple Silicon. In general, macOS respects me enough such that it isn't constantly trying to make me adapt to new ideas. You know something? I hate that I'm practically kissing the rear end of a gigantic corporation that does other things that are anti-consumer and anti-developer. I don't worship Apple. I think GrapheneOS is better than iOS. But I appreciate that their desktop OS causes me the least number of frustrations. And speaking of GrapheneOS, it essentially benefits from Google's budget towards AOSP, and Linux DEs don't have this advantage. Imagine if they did and we had a Linux DE that was as solid as GrapheneOS, and without the BS that comes with Android.

I know what you mean, but my System 76 laptop comes pretty darn close to 'just works.' Certainly closer than Windows ever did for me.

It's been ages since I've looked at System 76. They have quite an impressive lineup of products now! I'll definitely be checking them out the next time I want a personal computing device that's not tied to Microslop or Apple.

And System76 charges you just as "absurdly" as Apple. But people don't complain about the price there like you see with Apple.

Ya wayland v x11. I ended up having to sideload xcfe+x11 just to do 1) video streaming work 2) kicad

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

When you say "sideload" you mean... "install packages"?

Yeah I hate the term "sideload", but I'm guessing they meant it in the sense that they installed a separate DE within a distro designed around its original DE. Ideally, the DE that ships with a distro should be able to solve problems like video streaming and KiCAD with relative ease in the year 2026. Although I'd be curious as to why exactly that person decided they needed to change their setup in that way, I also can't say I'm entirely surprised that they would end up needing to do something like that.

The idea of a distro being "designed" around a particular DE has always annoyed me too. I'd hear people saying they wanted to try KDE so they wiped Ubuntu and installed Kubuntu instead and it's like, buddy you could have just... installed KDE. I know some specialized distros are really all about shipping a nicely-configured setup for their specific DE, but your old standbys like Debian, Redhat, Arch, Slackware, these are all infinitely flexible.

The idea, I think, is to provide a sense of GUI unity that Windows and Mac mostly provide. While it's nice in principle, the reality is you're going to install other software, and it's often going to use GUI libraries that don't perfectly match or match at all with your Linux DE. Personally, I've never found the need for a system to be designed so heavily around a DE. Like you said, it's entirely feasible and relatively straight forward to download Debian or whatever distribution and install a DE and chances are it will work ask expected. Well, until you perform an update/upgrade and boot to a black screen, but that's a different story. Once you've got your kernel and init system of choice, you can pretty much do anything you want. A premade DE is hardly even needed if you have a modest familiarity with how Linux works. The only downside is the added work from setting it up and debugging it, but people who use Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, MATE, LXDE, and so forth, end up doing that anyway eventually.

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