Not gonna lie, I would like a "Black Edition" of macOS. There is a decent OS buried under tons of rubble.
Speakers, touchpad and battery life are inferior. Speakers are OK after installing EasyEffects and I don't use the touchpad while programming. And battery life is close enough
Cachyos with KDE is 10x better than MacOS. So it doesn't make sense to use macbooks for programming anymore IMO.
You can't even see the update download speed or progress percentage on MacOS, and have to approve 3 times to run a downloaded program, brew is terrible in terms of performance etc. etc. etc.
I usually use XMonad, but then I nearly do everything in the command line, and I don't like to move my windows around via mouse. (Though XMonad supports that, too.)
XMonad works for me, but I wouldn't call it out specifically as contributing to the experience.
> You can't even see the update download speed or progress percentage on MacOS, [...]
What program are you talking about? You can customise eg Firefox on Mac, just like anywhere else, with extensions to look however you want.
> [...] brew is terrible in terms of performance [...]
I'm trying to fix at least brew's Python performance a bit:
Only major issue I had was because of cachyos (I think) or just some LLM commands I ran that broke my sound output so I had to reinstall the OS. I probably had more but was using other OS like EndeavorOS/Manjaro before and don't think it was related to KDE.
Also I just like the UI of it and can find any setting I want easily.
> What program are you talking about? You can customise eg Firefox on Mac, just like anywhere else, with extensions to look however you want.
I mean the Software Update thing that updates the OS itself. I also had issues like ghost updates for xcode tools with it (updates come even after I uninstall xcode tools).
> I'm trying to fix at least brew's Python performance a bit:
Nice!
I usually use something like 'nice sudo softwareupdate --all --install --force ' on Mac for updates. But yeah, it can be a bit of a pain.
I can't speak from personal experience since my only laptop is an Intel Framework 13 with no dGPU, but there'll be two other main cases both involving Nvidia that tend to bite people.
1. "Gaming" laptops usually with integrated Intel GPU + Nvidia discrete GPU. Not sure what advancements have been made in power management, there. I know there's some incantations one can put in .desktop files to prefer the discrete GPU for like, games, but not much more I can speak to.
2. General fun involving the fact that Nvidia's "gold-standard" drivers are not mainlined in the kernel, but maybe the fact that they are "open source"* means at some point there'll be parity with them. I think that is the goal of Red Hat's Nova driver in development.
* these days, the GPUs got complicated enough they have management processors on them that can actually run most of the complicated algorithms via a firmware blob. So the current open-source drivers basically bridge the gap between the kernel's various subsystems and that little processor to work the magic.
On another note, Intel Xe/i915 have been pretty good, I've used both for integrated GPUs and an Arc Alchemist-generation discrete card of theirs. The framework 13 12th gen intel GPU struggled at the start with a lot of hangs but within a few months of launch, some smart cookies at Intel managed to fix various bugs and it was smooth sailing from there, with the exception of thermals just being in a rough spot on that generation.
I suppose it depends upon the model, but I find my Lenovo Yoga's touchpad vastly superior to my MacBook Pro's touchpad. Tracking is fine on both, yet I'm having trouble trouble with the MacBook Pro consistently handling clicks. Granted, that is probably a software thing. As an added bonus, the Yoga has a touch screen which folds back, both of which are nice to have. (Agreed on the Mac speakers being significantly better though.)
> Cachyos with KDE is 10x better than MacOS.
That is subjective. I definitely agree with you, but a lot of people won't. Then again, I have been using Linux for about 30 years so modern macOS feels limiting and there is very little I can do about it.
I was running Asahi/NixOS on a Macbook Air for a long time, and that experience was also top notch--only battery life was a few percentage points worse on NixOS--but the aarch64 software situation and emulation experience were just not there. I expect they've improved a bit since.
If someone would make a quality laptop that doesn't look like a Honda street racer and has excellent audio, I'd be very happy.
The point is if a Linux distro setup isn't feeling 10x better than MacOS then that person can actually go ahead and either tweak that distro, or pick another one, and tweak that to possbily make that 1000x beter than MacOS. Even if they don't know how to do it they can seek help in a forum and they will find hundreds who are already doing that. Unlike in a Apple forum where they would be first booed and then told they are holding it wrong.
Which may be great for you. I do it as well, though I'm not sure I would choose that path if I were starting out today. After all, modern systems are much more complex. At least I had the benefit of starting out with Linux in the 1990s, so my abilities grew as the operating system grew.
Yet even in those simpler times, most people would consider operating systems that they felt compelled to tweak as inferior. I many ways, they would rather deal with an operating system where everything is ready to go, whether they need it or not.
While being able to customize everything is nice, I prefer a curated experience that nails the defaults so I don't have to tweak it.
macos used to be that way from leopard to mountain lion IME. Now I'm considering switching back to a linux workstation bc I can't stand liquid glass and the devolution of a desktop OS becoming a mobile OS
The single thing I had in macOS I can't replicate in Linux is Preview. Other than that, literally everything is better on this side. I expected to have a bad adaptation period, but the experience has truly caught up.
It wasn't hard to set it up either, I actually had more trouble removing ads and similar crap from windows (it's a dual boot for gaming). But I wouldn't say it's grandma-friendly if that's what you're after.
And so much useless crap you can't turn off without disabling SIP, which it doesn't feel like you're meant to, because who knows what daemon will bring down the entire system when another it expects to be there isn't…
In theory I'd prefer a MacBook Neo as a Plex server over my current cheapo Acer laptop with an Alder Lake-N CPU, for lower power draw and better hardware encoding, but in practice, I don't really want to try that with macOS instead of Debian.