Why I moved from Linux to Mac OS X | Hacker News Reader

Why I moved from Linux to Mac OS X

blog.kier.pe

16 pointslelf14 comments

Why I moved from Linux to Mac OS X (2006): Oh, hey, it's a beautiful Unix laptop and it doesn't need any tweaking for the wi-fi to work. I'll buy this and recommend it to my family also.

Why I moved from Mac OS X to Linux (2012): They're obviously pushing for a walled garden experience just like the iPhone, which is reprehensible enough on its own to warrant a boycott against the whole company.

The PC users laughing that you cannot change the parts are right. It reduces quite a lot of the expense if you can swap out just the CPU or just the GPU. But hey, let's glue the ram into out laptops and overcharge for real capacity.

What's this thing Objective-C developers were tweeting this week, you have to be pre-approved to get a certificate that signs kexts? Fuck Apple, I'm tired of it and I have learned my lesson. I'm going with Android or Firefox OS for mobile and Linux or BSD for computing.

> They're obviously pushing for a walled garden experience just like the iPhone, which is reprehensible enough on its own to warrant a boycott against the whole company.

There's no evidence they're doing this. For average users there's signed applications, and it's literally a single checkbox to disable them if you don't like it. There's also no requirement for any applications to be signed.

> It reduces quite a lot of the expense if you can swap out just the CPU or just the GPU.

You have never, ever been able to do this with an Apple laptop.

The walls are already going up. To use iCloud integration you need to be installed through the OSX app store. Apple wants the control and they want their 30%. Microsoft is trying to do the same thing through Windows 8 and in a very similar way.

I agree entirely and followed a similar path to what you did. I switched from linux to OS X in 2004. I'm looking to switch back, but the linux desktop experience hasn't changed much if at all in the intervening years. Elementary OS gives me hope, but it just mimics the OS X look and feel, but uglier.

What's keeping the linux community from creating a beautiful UI for linux? Is it because UI designers don't get involved in open source projects?

I'm also a sysadmin. I tried to switch to Mac mainly for the more polished os expectation.

I found I had a less polished experience. I support Linux. I program as a hobby, I found the development experience on Mac frustrating it wasn't as easy to set up an environment similar to my Linux one at work and on my Rackspace servers.

I really don't consider the closer to Unix a valid argument. There's tons of operating systems closer to Unix that OSX, check out *BSD or jump over to OpenSolaris/Illumos.

Mac OS X as well as Solaris have been registered as SUS compliant, whereas Linux has not.

http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

I had a similar experience, with the added problem that on linux I was an xmonad user. I Persisted because I found the games I want to play are all available on OSX, which meant instead of dual booting linux + windows I could just stick with one operating system.

Development happens either in a Vagrant VM so that I can replicate the environment my server is running in (usually U12.04), or on a VM somewhere else. This has the added bonus of forcing me to be more explicit about what my minimum dev environment is, and keeping my host OS clean.

The main thing I can suggest to anybody wanting to do the same is to buy an SSD, no matter what other choices you make with your Mac. The speed difference is just unbelieveable; you'll never want to go back to anything with a spinning disk.

Installing Homebrew [0] wouldn't go astray either, it's a package manager for OSX that's similar to aptitude on Linux.

[0]: http://brew.sh/

Ultra light fonts are made for headlines, not for body copy. They lead to very even gray levels, which is great if you don't want to read the text. If you want to, though, it's a real strain on the eyes.

Edit: See font designer Erik Spiekermann on the topic (English captions are available): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw0syzCeH4Q

There were similar complaints when this was posted on /r/linux[1].

The only change that seems to have been made since then was in fixing his completely wrong description of the history of Linux.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1nx0qf/why_i_moved_fr...

I'm a Java developer, do music recording and plays the synthesizer. Unless there's a Linux laptop in the market that can let me do all these without hours of configuration, I'll stick to my Macbook Pro.

I know that Garageband isn't meant to be a professional recording software, but it gives me what I need, and so far, Linux can't meet any of those requirements yet.

Look at any of the laptops from System76. With gaming looking like it's coming to Linux in a big way, I put my money where my mouth is and bought one. They're fantastic machines.

Too generic and "blah..." reason about why he move (He want to play more games, and he worshipe Apple hardware), i undestand but i tought that it was because something more interesting, instead somthing so common.

Actually playing games under linux right now is extremely easy. A lot of stuff runs on wine or native.

The VGA passtrough on my new rig took roughly 1 hour to set up (the reason I chose non-K processor) and is working like a charm. So i can play anything I want on a clean W8 install. And that is on Arch - not the easiest distro to work with.

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