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The difference is you pay a huge premium for Apple products, Linux distros are generally free (unless you want enterprise-style support). The same criticism ap

by nxc18 9y ago

The difference is you pay a huge premium for Apple products, Linux distros are generally free (unless you want enterprise-style support). The same criticism applies to Windows - give it away for free and I might care less about crashes and the huge slide in quality over the last ~5 years.

st3fan 9y ago
I'm happy to pay a premium to never again have to deal with xorg.conf. All platforms come with a cost.
- foepys 9y ago
  FWIW, X configures itself nowadays and Wayland also just works. But I know where you are coming from. Everything audio related for example is still in very bad shape when you want more than Intel HDA.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Canonical is not of the same opinion, they just gave up on Wayland for the next LTS release.
    - vurpo 9y ago
      Wayland may be ready for default in Ubuntu and Fedora, but they clearly didn't consider it ready for LTS. They have already said the next non-LTS version will still have Wayland as default.
  - sneak 9y ago
    Now try hotplugging an external display.
- madaxe_again 9y ago
  Yeah, except 15 years ago it was xf86config with xinerama if you wanted multiple heads, and lcds are a walk in the park compared to CRTs - I actually killed a nice 21” monitor by screwing up the frequencies. I even recall the delightful process of having to modify graphics drivers to work with the bizarre Chips&Technologies integrated graphics I had. At that point, OSX was such a breath of fresh air. Xorg.conf is a delightful stroll through a meadow compared to the nightmare fuel that came before, and in setting Linux (Kali,Ubuntu) on several machines of various spec over the last weeks, it has Just Worked.
derefr 9y ago
You’re not paying for the OS; you’re paying for the hardware. If Macintosh hardware was buggy when running Linux or Windows, for reasons to do with, say, badly-written ACPI tables, then you’d have an argument. As it is, it’s the opposite: Macs run both Windows and Linux “easily”, while other vendors’ buggy hardware has to be patched over with heuristics in these OSes because it has non-conforming device names, responses to introspection queries, etc. Apple hardware is uniquely well-engineered. If you’re writing your own hobbyist OS, it’s a breath of fresh air to run it on a Mac, compared to other kinds of PCs. This is, coincidentally, also the reason it’s so hard to run macOS on other vendors’ machines. Windows and Linux paper over all the brokenness in hardware land, and so machines built for Windows/Linux rely on these heuristics with sloppy integration work. Apple, meanwhile, just does the integration to the standard in their hardware, and then relies on said standards-conformance in their OS. If everyone conformed to hardware ABI standards as well as Apple does, Hackintoshing would be a matter of just dropping a patched dont-steal-osx.kext into your install disc and calling it good. Everything else you have to do is the hardware vendors’ fault.
- Sephr 9y ago
  You will not find significant fundamental hardware differences between the latest high-end Apple and Dell laptops. > As it is, it’s the opposite: Macs run both Windows and Linux “easily”, while other vendors’ buggy hardware has to be patched over with heuristics in these OSes because it has non-conforming device names > This is, coincidentally, also the reason it’s so hard to run macOS on other vendors’ machines Are you not aware that OS X does various explicit checks to make sure it is running on approved hardware, regardless of compatibility and capability attestation? Apple doesn't want OS X running on non-Apple hardware.
  - derefr 9y ago
    > various explicit checks to make sure it is running on approved hardware Er, yes, that's the "dont-steal-osx.kext" that I mentioned. My point was that thwarting those checks is a very small part of getting macOS to run on a system (and is a solved problem—if it was all that was required, Hackintoshing would be a one-and-done thing, rather than something that breaks on every system update.) The majority of the (continuing) effort of getting macOS to run on arbitrary hardware—hardware that, by its components, should be compatible with macOS's drivers—is dealing with vendors' whack-ass "doesn't even pass static analysis using Intel's own provided AML compiler" DSDTs (which macOS rightfully tosses its hands up at, but which Windows and Linux heuristically munge into something barely passable and then use it.) > latest high-end Apple and Dell laptops Dell (along with HP and Lenovo) are the better vendors as far as spec-compliance goes. Really, any of the PC makers who have an "enterprise workstation" arm, have the in-house expertise for things like ACPI compliance, or UEFI compliance, or PXE compliance, etc. But other vendors? Acer? LG? Xiaomi? Razer? Better to not even try.

by nxc18 9y ago

st3fan 9y ago

I'm happy to pay a premium to never again have to deal with xorg.conf. All platforms come with a cost.

foepys 9y ago
FWIW, X configures itself nowadays and Wayland also just works. But I know where you are coming from. Everything audio related for example is still in very bad shape when you want more than Intel HDA.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Canonical is not of the same opinion, they just gave up on Wayland for the next LTS release.
  - vurpo 9y ago
    Wayland may be ready for default in Ubuntu and Fedora, but they clearly didn't consider it ready for LTS. They have already said the next non-LTS version will still have Wayland as default.
- sneak 9y ago
  Now try hotplugging an external display.
madaxe_again 9y ago
Yeah, except 15 years ago it was xf86config with xinerama if you wanted multiple heads, and lcds are a walk in the park compared to CRTs - I actually killed a nice 21” monitor by screwing up the frequencies. I even recall the delightful process of having to modify graphics drivers to work with the bizarre Chips&Technologies integrated graphics I had. At that point, OSX was such a breath of fresh air. Xorg.conf is a delightful stroll through a meadow compared to the nightmare fuel that came before, and in setting Linux (Kali,Ubuntu) on several machines of various spec over the last weeks, it has Just Worked.

derefr 9y ago

You’re not paying for the OS; you’re paying for the hardware. If Macintosh hardware was buggy when running Linux or Windows, for reasons to do with, say, badly-written ACPI tables, then you’d have an argument. As it is, it’s the opposite: Macs run both Windows and Linux “easily”, while other vendors’ buggy hardware has to be patched over with heuristics in these OSes because it has non-conforming device names, responses to introspection queries, etc. Apple hardware is uniquely well-engineered. If you’re writing your own hobbyist OS, it’s a breath of fresh air to run it on a Mac, compared to other kinds of PCs. This is, coincidentally, also the reason it’s so hard to run macOS on other vendors’ machines. Windows and Linux paper over all the brokenness in hardware land, and so machines built for Windows/Linux rely on these heuristics with sloppy integration work. Apple, meanwhile, just does the integration to the standard in their hardware, and then relies on said standards-conformance in their OS. If everyone conformed to hardware ABI standards as well as Apple does, Hackintoshing would be a matter of just dropping a patched dont-steal-osx.kext into your install disc and calling it good. Everything else you have to do is the hardware vendors’ fault.

Sephr 9y ago
You will not find significant fundamental hardware differences between the latest high-end Apple and Dell laptops. > As it is, it’s the opposite: Macs run both Windows and Linux “easily”, while other vendors’ buggy hardware has to be patched over with heuristics in these OSes because it has non-conforming device names > This is, coincidentally, also the reason it’s so hard to run macOS on other vendors’ machines Are you not aware that OS X does various explicit checks to make sure it is running on approved hardware, regardless of compatibility and capability attestation? Apple doesn't want OS X running on non-Apple hardware.
- derefr 9y ago
  > various explicit checks to make sure it is running on approved hardware Er, yes, that's the "dont-steal-osx.kext" that I mentioned. My point was that thwarting those checks is a very small part of getting macOS to run on a system (and is a solved problem—if it was all that was required, Hackintoshing would be a one-and-done thing, rather than something that breaks on every system update.) The majority of the (continuing) effort of getting macOS to run on arbitrary hardware—hardware that, by its components, should be compatible with macOS's drivers—is dealing with vendors' whack-ass "doesn't even pass static analysis using Intel's own provided AML compiler" DSDTs (which macOS rightfully tosses its hands up at, but which Windows and Linux heuristically munge into something barely passable and then use it.) > latest high-end Apple and Dell laptops Dell (along with HP and Lenovo) are the better vendors as far as spec-compliance goes. Really, any of the PC makers who have an "enterprise workstation" arm, have the in-house expertise for things like ACPI compliance, or UEFI compliance, or PXE compliance, etc. But other vendors? Acer? LG? Xiaomi? Razer? Better to not even try.