> Apple has never been about the What (ticking boxes in a checklist), more about the How (the overall experience) That's the key issue. If you're starting out,

> Apple has never been about the What (ticking boxes in a checklist), more about the How (the overall experience) That's the key issue. If you're starting out, do not like to customize, or have not yet reached your (locally optimal) setup, then I guess Mac is superior. However, having perfected my setup over the last 12 years, I find the default Mac tools quite limited; e.g. Time Machine is inferior (except in UI) to Borg, to which I've switched recently from Bup, to which I've switched before from a set of rsync scripts (which are time-machine equivalent, and I had them running long before time machine existed). I don't make music (so don't care about GarageBand), and I also care about privacy so all the cross-device integration that apple offers goes out the door. Thunderbird is, for my use case, superior to Apple Mail; Firefox is superior to Safari. Finder puts junk all over my file system, and the old hacks to stop it (aseptic, and a couple of others) are no longer supported under Sierra. I like Unity (the v on 14.4 - I think v7) with a few tweaks much better than the Mac doc, though that's a matter of taste. And I like the transparency of the system. My main laptop ubuntu never breaks, but when I do weird experiments on other hardware, I can actually tell what's going on - if my Mac had trouble booting, it's likely the recovery partition will come useful - but there's basically nothing else I can do.