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Comment by II2II | Hacker News Reader

> Speakers, touchpad and battery life are inferior.

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.

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I use both macOS and Linux (NixOS + gnome/niri) regularly. When everything is working properly--and, to be clear, I'm talking about the macOS side--I see almost no difference between the two operating systems. I'm on a ThinkPad on one side and an M2 Macbook Pro on the other. The only meaningful difference not attributable to something like different screen size is that Apple displays are damn good, and their speakers are otherworldly.

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.

Frameworks getting there. Display and keyboard aren't as good as macbooks or thinkpad, but repairability and Linux support are top notch

> but a lot of people won't

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.

> 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.

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.

Came to linux much later but absolutely agree.

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

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