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I don't understand why the hacker scene these days is full of proud OSX users. What happened to the proud Linux hackers we've always had? They told me to use OS

I don't understand why the hacker scene these days is full of proud OSX users. What happened to the proud Linux hackers we've always had? They told me to use OSX at the job I recently started, and I only lasted a week before I told them I wanted to install Linux.

geniium 11y ago
maybe a week isn't enough...
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
  It was more than enough.
enraged_camel 11y ago
Because OSX provides a reasonable middle ground between usability and control. You can use it as a regular user when you want to do things like listen to music, watch movies and browse the Internet, and you can also use it as a "hacker" by leveraging its "Unixness". It also integrates extremely well with other parts of the Apple ecosystem, unlike Linux.
jsolson 11y ago
Part of the 'pride' behind being a Linux hacker came from heavily customizing, breaking, fixing, and generally maintaining your dev kit. I have a friend who's taken on a motorcycle rebuild project and I can see a lot of analogs there. For me, personally, I realized that having a system which I can take from zero to 'dev ready' in less than an afternoon (which I did recently with a freshly shipped MacBook) is the main 'feature' I want from my dev software stack. I don't love all of OS X's defaults, but I customize very few things. The bigger issue for me, though, is hardware. I know this varies dramatically from developer to developer, but weight, size, battery life, and display quality (in roughly that order) are my primary concerns with laptop hardware. I recently switched my work laptop from a Chromebook Pixel (first gen) to an 11" MacBook Air and I've been thrilled with the change. That said, the leap in display quality and general machine 'feel' from the Air to the MacBook I use for personal developer is almost as big, for me, as the leap from the Pixel to the Air. Apple builds hardware that feels 'right' to me in a way that other manufacturers that I've encountered don't. So, I can't speak for others, but there's why I'm a proud OS X user instead of a proud Linux user.
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
  The hardware is very nice. I'm typing this into a Macbook running Arch Linux. However, I don't know if it's fair to say you can't get up and running in an afternoon these days, even if you have a heavily customized system like I do (https://sr.ht/-77r.png https://sr.ht/-77r.png). I expect that the sort of people who invest heavily in making their Linux setup their own are people who have the hardest time with OS X - everything just felt wrong for me, and it was very difficult to use because of this.
  - jsolson 11y ago
    Personal preferences will naturally remain personal. There were a bunch of things that felt unfamiliar to me on OS X, but few that felt 'wrong'. Then again, I made the switch back in 2005 or so to a PowerBook G4. Linux was a very different beast then, and just having it run on a laptop was a bit of an effort. Expecting decent battery life (or all of your hardware to be functional) was more or less out of the question. Another factor is that there a bunch of things people want/expect from a window manager that I never took advantage of, the biggest two being virtual desktops and focus-follows-mouse. I imagine if I had a strong dependency on either of those, the switch to a Mac would've been considerably more painful. On the other hand, features like Expose felt very natural to me (and at the time Linux equivalents were... poor). These days my life consists almost entirely of running full-screen apps and trackpad swiping between them, which would probably drive most X11 users batty :)
fishtoaster 11y ago
I think a lot of hackers got tired of messing with drivers just so they could get the sound to work when they watch Netflix. As OP says, Apple's "It just works" level has gone down, but it's still leaps and bounds ahead of Linux. OS X provides a system that "just works" at least as well as Windows, but has a real unix system underneath. Especially in web development (where a lot of developers are building stuff that will end up on a Linux production box), it's quite helpful to have a system that lets me use a lot of nix tools. OS X meets both goals adequately, whereas Windows lacks the nix tools and Linux lacks the "it just works".
- danielweber 11y ago
  Yes, I used to love my Linux laptops, but I had coworkers also using Linux who I could bug for advice on the One True Way to do things, and would tell me when the One True Way was now Some Other Way. Sound, oh sound. How many sound daemons did the community go through? After getting Linux set up, I was always scared to change anything, because I might lose a whole day recovering my desktop. Back when spending a day messing with an OS was a learning experience, this wasn't a bad thing, but I learn absolutely nothing from it these days.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
joshstrange 11y ago
Because maybe we value our time a little more than our "geek-cred".... While I agree with 90% of the OP's points the base OS is still ROCK SOLID compared to ANY linux desktop distro. I have been slowly migrating away from OSX's core apps but I won't even dream of leaving the OS anytime soon. I've got better things to do then rebuild my entire desktop environment every few months when a graphics driver pukes or similar. OSX may have bugs but the bugs created by tons of linux packages interacting are FAR worse. Also I care what my DE (Desktop environment) looks like, there are a couple of nice looking Linux DE's but they normally work for only around 70% of apps so you have a couple that stick out like sore thumbs. On OSX this only happens for things like some Java apps and even then they still look fine if a little out of place.
- vacri 11y ago
  > the base OS is still ROCK SOLID compared to ANY linux desktop distro. At my last work, my desktop was an ubuntu LTS version. It was rock solid, and ran as fast the day that office closed down as the day I set it up. The same could very much not be said of the macs in the office - almost all of which had slowed down considerably. One macbook with 4GB of RAM had zero free memory on a fresh boot with nothing loaded! I had to install some 'ram compactor' tool to get the laptop to actually load some office software in a reasonable time. Occasionally I'd get called over to help troubleshoot this or that with the various macs, and usually in the first couple of minutes, I'd be saying something along the lines of "how can you work with it this slow?". The mac users in this office were a mix of normal users and power users. The only expert user had a top-end model less than a year old, so he wasn't getting the same problems, of course. So no, I don't agree that the base OS is ROCK SOLID compared to ANY linux desktop distro. You say you have better things to do than rebuild your entire desktop environment every few months? I have better things to do that wait for my desktop environment in day-to-day work. Unless, of course, I'm willing to throw gobs of money at the upgrade treadmill, which means replacing the hardware regularly, which means... rebuilding the desktop environment on the new machine...
bsder 11y ago
Display and networking. Graphics is so much easier to deal with on OS X than Linux it makes me cry. I take my laptop between a 4K monitor on Thunderbolt, a 2560 monitor on HDMI, and a 1920 monitor on DVI. And I don't have to edit a single file on OS X. I shudder with the thought of that on Linux. Networking just works on incarnations of OS X prior to 10.10. I can pop my laptop open and it pretty much connects anywhere with no configuration changes and only asks when I have to cough up a password. Linux still regularly makes me do wonky command line dances when the interface suddenly disappears or goes down.
- pascalo 11y ago
  To give a counter example, I run Ubuntu 14.04 on a NUC with a Dell U2713H via displayport and a samsung 24 inch via HDMI. The whole thing was a matter of install, and be ready to go. No command line dances needed. I think it comes down to picking hardware that is supported well, i.e. Intel stuff. Apple of course for the most part knows it's hardware and doesn't have to include a gazillion drivers for graphics boards of all make and model.

geniium 11y ago

maybe a week isn't enough...

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
It was more than enough.

enraged_camel 11y ago

Because OSX provides a reasonable middle ground between usability and control. You can use it as a regular user when you want to do things like listen to music, watch movies and browse the Internet, and you can also use it as a "hacker" by leveraging its "Unixness". It also integrates extremely well with other parts of the Apple ecosystem, unlike Linux.

jsolson 11y ago

Part of the 'pride' behind being a Linux hacker came from heavily customizing, breaking, fixing, and generally maintaining your dev kit. I have a friend who's taken on a motorcycle rebuild project and I can see a lot of analogs there. For me, personally, I realized that having a system which I can take from zero to 'dev ready' in less than an afternoon (which I did recently with a freshly shipped MacBook) is the main 'feature' I want from my dev software stack. I don't love all of OS X's defaults, but I customize very few things. The bigger issue for me, though, is hardware. I know this varies dramatically from developer to developer, but weight, size, battery life, and display quality (in roughly that order) are my primary concerns with laptop hardware. I recently switched my work laptop from a Chromebook Pixel (first gen) to an 11" MacBook Air and I've been thrilled with the change. That said, the leap in display quality and general machine 'feel' from the Air to the MacBook I use for personal developer is almost as big, for me, as the leap from the Pixel to the Air. Apple builds hardware that feels 'right' to me in a way that other manufacturers that I've encountered don't. So, I can't speak for others, but there's why I'm a proud OS X user instead of a proud Linux user.

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
The hardware is very nice. I'm typing this into a Macbook running Arch Linux. However, I don't know if it's fair to say you can't get up and running in an afternoon these days, even if you have a heavily customized system like I do (https://sr.ht/-77r.png https://sr.ht/-77r.png). I expect that the sort of people who invest heavily in making their Linux setup their own are people who have the hardest time with OS X - everything just felt wrong for me, and it was very difficult to use because of this.
- jsolson 11y ago
  Personal preferences will naturally remain personal. There were a bunch of things that felt unfamiliar to me on OS X, but few that felt 'wrong'. Then again, I made the switch back in 2005 or so to a PowerBook G4. Linux was a very different beast then, and just having it run on a laptop was a bit of an effort. Expecting decent battery life (or all of your hardware to be functional) was more or less out of the question. Another factor is that there a bunch of things people want/expect from a window manager that I never took advantage of, the biggest two being virtual desktops and focus-follows-mouse. I imagine if I had a strong dependency on either of those, the switch to a Mac would've been considerably more painful. On the other hand, features like Expose felt very natural to me (and at the time Linux equivalents were... poor). These days my life consists almost entirely of running full-screen apps and trackpad swiping between them, which would probably drive most X11 users batty :)

fishtoaster 11y ago

I think a lot of hackers got tired of messing with drivers just so they could get the sound to work when they watch Netflix. As OP says, Apple's "It just works" level has gone down, but it's still leaps and bounds ahead of Linux. OS X provides a system that "just works" at least as well as Windows, but has a real unix system underneath. Especially in web development (where a lot of developers are building stuff that will end up on a Linux production box), it's quite helpful to have a system that lets me use a lot of nix tools. OS X meets both goals adequately, whereas Windows lacks the nix tools and Linux lacks the "it just works".

danielweber 11y ago
Yes, I used to love my Linux laptops, but I had coworkers also using Linux who I could bug for advice on the One True Way to do things, and would tell me when the One True Way was now Some Other Way. Sound, oh sound. How many sound daemons did the community go through? After getting Linux set up, I was always scared to change anything, because I might lose a whole day recovering my desktop. Back when spending a day messing with an OS was a learning experience, this wasn't a bad thing, but I learn absolutely nothing from it these days.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

joshstrange 11y ago

Because maybe we value our time a little more than our "geek-cred".... While I agree with 90% of the OP's points the base OS is still ROCK SOLID compared to ANY linux desktop distro. I have been slowly migrating away from OSX's core apps but I won't even dream of leaving the OS anytime soon. I've got better things to do then rebuild my entire desktop environment every few months when a graphics driver pukes or similar. OSX may have bugs but the bugs created by tons of linux packages interacting are FAR worse. Also I care what my DE (Desktop environment) looks like, there are a couple of nice looking Linux DE's but they normally work for only around 70% of apps so you have a couple that stick out like sore thumbs. On OSX this only happens for things like some Java apps and even then they still look fine if a little out of place.

vacri 11y ago
> the base OS is still ROCK SOLID compared to ANY linux desktop distro. At my last work, my desktop was an ubuntu LTS version. It was rock solid, and ran as fast the day that office closed down as the day I set it up. The same could very much not be said of the macs in the office - almost all of which had slowed down considerably. One macbook with 4GB of RAM had zero free memory on a fresh boot with nothing loaded! I had to install some 'ram compactor' tool to get the laptop to actually load some office software in a reasonable time. Occasionally I'd get called over to help troubleshoot this or that with the various macs, and usually in the first couple of minutes, I'd be saying something along the lines of "how can you work with it this slow?". The mac users in this office were a mix of normal users and power users. The only expert user had a top-end model less than a year old, so he wasn't getting the same problems, of course. So no, I don't agree that the base OS is ROCK SOLID compared to ANY linux desktop distro. You say you have better things to do than rebuild your entire desktop environment every few months? I have better things to do that wait for my desktop environment in day-to-day work. Unless, of course, I'm willing to throw gobs of money at the upgrade treadmill, which means replacing the hardware regularly, which means... rebuilding the desktop environment on the new machine...

bsder 11y ago

Display and networking. Graphics is so much easier to deal with on OS X than Linux it makes me cry. I take my laptop between a 4K monitor on Thunderbolt, a 2560 monitor on HDMI, and a 1920 monitor on DVI. And I don't have to edit a single file on OS X. I shudder with the thought of that on Linux. Networking just works on incarnations of OS X prior to 10.10. I can pop my laptop open and it pretty much connects anywhere with no configuration changes and only asks when I have to cough up a password. Linux still regularly makes me do wonky command line dances when the interface suddenly disappears or goes down.

pascalo 11y ago
To give a counter example, I run Ubuntu 14.04 on a NUC with a Dell U2713H via displayport and a samsung 24 inch via HDMI. The whole thing was a matter of install, and be ready to go. No command line dances needed. I think it comes down to picking hardware that is supported well, i.e. Intel stuff. Apple of course for the most part knows it's hardware and doesn't have to include a gazillion drivers for graphics boards of all make and model.