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The problem with replacing MacOS is that its key value lies in aspects that the open source community have yet to succeed in, or are structurally unfit to succe

The problem with replacing MacOS is that its key value lies in aspects that the open source community have yet to succeed in, or are structurally unfit to succeed in.[0][1] — System-wide UI consistency, especially in the fine details — Singular UI/UX vision eliminates points of confusion and everything-is-a-compromise choices for third party developers — Navigable by non-experts, even when things turn to shit — Nominally "perfect" hardware support — Robust colorimetry — Millisecond audio latency I use Linux extensively, but I'm not aching to leave macOS as my primary platform. Yes, they did start to go a bit loopy and off-track around Mac OS X 10.7–10.9, but from my vantage point it has been all uphill again since Mavericks. The idea of running Mac apps in a Wine-like compatibility layer sounds worse than anything Apple could ever do to macOS. Yes, I like free. And yes, I like personal choice. But I value my time and I'm sorry to proponents of other platforms, but macOS just values my time more than any other platform. ________ [0] The achilles heel of the open source community stems from the lack of a unifying vision and a top-down approach. This has major advantages as well as major disadvantages. But nonetheless it affects the result. And depending on your priorities, the advantages might outweigh the disadvantages or vice versa. [1] And to be fair it's equally true in the opposite direction. Open source succeeds in many aspects like robustness, hardware compatibility, longevity and transparency/deep trust. Hence why it has utterly destroyed the server market. These areas of success are not accidental or arbitrary.

netheril96 8y ago
— Internationalization
- sjwright 8y ago
  — Accessibility (deaf, blind etc)
microcolonel 8y ago
> — System-wide UI consistency, especially in the fine details > — Singular UI/UX vision eliminates points of confusion and everything-is-a-compromise choices for third party developers I mean, first-party GNOME applications are as consistent as first-party Apple macOS applications; and third-party macOS applications are as highly customized as third-party applications one might run on GNOME. Not sure what you base your experience on but this is not really any more of an issue for those looking for consistency over all else. > — Properly accessible by non-experts, even when things turn to shit I'd like an example, not really sure what you're talking about here. In my experience, when things go wrong on macOS, you're prettymuch SOL until the broken feature is either fixed, reimplemented, or removed in a subsequent major release of the operating system. In my experience, Apple doesn't respond to bug reports any more than other desktop OS vendors, including open source ones. > — Nominally "perfect" hardware support The graphics drivers on macOS are very poor. Apple's decision to neglect and then subsequently abandon OpenGL is pure laziness, and their implementation was already bad when they were still maintaining it. Furthermore, hardware compatibility with random gizmos on macOS leaves a lot to be desired in comparison to Linux, in my experience, though I guess your mileage may vary. > — Robust colorimetry colord works just fine for me, no amount of software is going to profile your monitors for you though. > — Millisecond audio latency I'm pretty sure CoreAudio frames are not less than 44 samples. What I will give Apple credit for is a great set of graphics manipulation libraries which make it simple to use high quality scaling and manipulation algorithms, and making sure it's a conscious choice to use cheaper, faster ones, and their implementation of seamless suspend-to-disk with full disk encryption is admirable (though honestly, dispensable at the end of the day). Their shaping and font rendering libraries are almost as good as Harfbuzz and FreeType 2 (though I think they've just started using FreeType at least on some platforms). Accessibility features are also pretty good, and depending on what disability you have, it's a tossup between GNOME and macOS.
- sjwright 8y ago
  All those points are fine, but they're all yes-buts. — I mean, first-party GNOME applications are as consistent as Straight-up disagree. It all depends what your threshold of UI/UX consistency is. Unfortunately most open source enthusiasts have a low threshold. It is difficult to convey the importance of a thousand subtle details, each one impossibly trivial, but the sum total moves mountains. — I'd like an example, not really sure what you're talking about here. An example: If my aging father's Mac turns to shit, he can hold down R, boot up the computer from the recovery disk and restore from a Time Machine backup that he himself set up with no assistance required from anyone. — The graphics drivers on macOS are very poor. That's really a marginal opinion. Maybe if you're an OpenGL developer. Apple provides an excellent framework (Metal) which works brilliantly. Yes it would be great if Apple delivered first-class support for Vulkan, but complaining about OpenGL is last decade's problem. — colord works just fine for me It's increasingly robust at handling the basics, yes.
  - microcolonel 8y ago
    > That's really a marginal opinion. Maybe if you're an OpenGL developer. Apple provides an excellent framework (Metal) which works brilliantly. Yes it would be great if Apple delivered first-class support for Vulkan, but complaining about OpenGL is last decade's problem. The Metal drivers are more stable, but the shader compilers generate slow code, just like the old Apple OpenGL drivers (the ones they wrote for the Intel GPUs). OpenGL issues are not "last decade's problem", I have on several occasions needed to write workarounds in WebGL shaders to prevent the NVIDIA drivers from crashing the whole windowing system (and every application with it) on macOS. On the same hardware, the drivers on Linux are faster, more stable, and more featureful and also include implementations of Vulkan. > An example: If my aging father's Mac turns to shit, he can hold down R, boot up the computer from the recovery disk and restore from a Time Machine backup that he himself set up with no assistance required from anyone. That's not a macOS feature though, that's an Apple PC firmware feature. I'll grant that AFAIK no vendor who ships a Linux distribution by default has a durable recovery partition, but there's nothing about macOS itself which makes that easier.
    - 8y ago
msla 8y ago
> Nominally "perfect" hardware support With the decline of Apple hardware, this is less true, and modern Linux hardware support is, at worst, no worse than what other OSes provide, in my experience. > Navigable by non-experts, even when things turn to shit I think the "Closed Box Philosophy" of Apple either defines or disproves this: Non-experts can't be tripped up by having to fix things... because nobody outside of Apple can fix things, eh? Can't screw up something you're not allowed to do. > The achilles heel of the open source community stems from the lack of a unifying vision and a top-down approach. This means that I can keep running Window Maker and nobody can take it away from me. In a broader sense, I'm not afraid to upgrade for fear of losing some part of my workflow due to a high-level decision taking an option away from me. I can use Emacs even if everyone else around me is using Vim, I can use qutebrowser even if nobody knows what the fuck a "Cute Browser" even is, I can write in Ruby even if the Current Dogma is JavaScript.
- icxa 8y ago
  > With the decline of Apple hardware, this is less true, and modern Linux hardware support is, at worst, no worse than what other OSes provide, in my experience. I will still take a perceived regression in hardware from Apple over anything else on the market today. They are that far ahead. Still the best touchpad and connectivity support which are the two most important factors in my book. Also still the most aesthetically pleasing and known brand of laptop in the world. The latter point is not so important in my book, but I do believe it helps contribute to the resale value of the Mac, which again is class leading in terms of mass produced laptops.
  - techntoke 8y ago
    This is entirely subjective. Aesthetically pleasing and "well known" may be factors for you in a purchase decision, but I personally prefer more open hardware and choice in my purchases so that I can fine tune each component and not be at least a year behind when it comes to modern hardware when making a purchase to get better performance than what Mac will offer for a fraction of the cost. Also, if you care a lot about looks then I'd recommend checking out Razer, or aluminum chassis notebooks: https://www.reinisfischer.com/top-20-aluminium-chassis-notebook-laptop-computers https://www.reinisfischer.com/top-20-aluminium-chassis-noteb...
techntoke 8y ago
> System-wide UI consistency, especially in the fine details > Singular UI/UX vision eliminates points of confusion and everything-is-a-compromise choices for third party developers There are consistent themes across both GTK+ and Qt. Pretty much all my apps share a similar theme and UI. There are Mac Apps as well that deviate from whatever "standardization" you're referring to. > Navigable by non-experts, even when things turn to shit It is no longer 2004. A lot of Mac users are also more than capable of running a few shell commands when needed. There are tons of web UIs and graphical apps to manage a Linux OS, from hardware, users, configuration, etc. However, a properly configured Linux OS won't need a lot of interaction on the frontend. > Nominally "perfect" hardware support Linux has way better hardware support than Mac. I'm not sure what you're referring to here. > Robust colorimetry Agreed, this is one area that needs some improvement, but last I checked it is pretty well supported: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ICC_profiles https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ICC_profiles > Millisecond audio latency Already exist: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Professional_audio https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Professional_audio
- msbarnett 8y ago
  > There are consistent themes across both GTK+ and Qt. And then you open an app that’s neither GTK+ nor Qt, and you’re back to square one. Besides, there’s more to UI than “theme”. I have ^w mapped to delete word on OS X. One line in one config file. It works universally in every text box on the system. I tried setting that up in Linux. Eventually got it working through some gnome setting or some such. In some apps. Firefox didn’t respect it and wanted its own setting iirc. Then it would forget it every few months and trying to delete a word while I was typing would unconditionally close the browser. Fucking ridiculous stuff like that abounded. Life’s too short. > Pretty much all my apps share a similar theme and UI. There are Mac Apps as well that deviate from whatever "standardization" you're referring to. A few (very few anymore, in my experience) might deviate in terms of widget styling. Essentially none ignore system wide keybindings, or fail to integrate with system wide services, etc. In terms of inconsistency it’s night and day vs what I’ve had to put up with from Linux desktops.
  - flukus 8y ago
bayindirh 8y ago
As a long time (10+ years) Linux and macOS user, I accept most of the things you say, and macOS is an extremely time efficient platform to do work. However, the lack of unifying vision is not an Achilles heel of the open source community. It's the essence of it. I like how any two installations of two distributions are never the same, and this broad ecosystem just works, tumbles, fights and creates new stuff. I've created a compression algorithm [0] for my graduation project. It was a novel approach, but performed worse due to some technical reasons. One of my professors asked why I didn't compare it to a similar algorithm instead of plain old Zip. I said that our algorithm is never tried before, and it's pretty novel, so we had no equal to compare. Then, one of my other professors replied to other professor asking the question. "There's no need to find an equal to compare. They did something new and untried. This is research". Equally, Darling doesn't need to surpass macOS to be useful, because "this is research" too. Maybe they will learn something useful from this endeavor and incorporate it into Linux or their future development career. This Katamari Damacy nature of GNU, Linux and free software community makes it so powerful and unique. Let Microsoft, Apple and Google have a top-down approach and others play as they feel and everyone improves the world as they wish. [0]: https://www.academia.edu/20575315/Lossless_Text_Compression_Technique_Using_Syllable_Based_Morphology https://www.academia.edu/20575315/Lossless_Text_Compression_...
- sjwright 8y ago
  I don't disagree with anything you've said, and I don't think that my post—if read in full—disagrees with it either. The lack of unifying vision in open source can be both an Achilles heel and its most valuable asset. The lack of a community-led ethos in macOS can be be both its Achilles heel and its most valuable asset.
  - bayindirh 8y ago
    Honestly, I missed your last footnote only. Possibly I got distracted by something. My fault. When read in full, we're on the same page. OTOH, I also didn't disagree with you on anything it seems. So, the two comments can be nicely summed up as a look to same lawn from a opposing vantage points, since I use Linux more often than macOS (albeit I have a MacBook Pro that I use pretty regularly). If my tone sounds a bit harsh, sorry for that. English is not my mother tongue. Also, if you can tell me where it's rude(ish), I can work on it.

netheril96 8y ago

— Internationalization

sjwright 8y ago
— Accessibility (deaf, blind etc)

microcolonel 8y ago

> — System-wide UI consistency, especially in the fine details > — Singular UI/UX vision eliminates points of confusion and everything-is-a-compromise choices for third party developers I mean, first-party GNOME applications are as consistent as first-party Apple macOS applications; and third-party macOS applications are as highly customized as third-party applications one might run on GNOME. Not sure what you base your experience on but this is not really any more of an issue for those looking for consistency over all else. > — Properly accessible by non-experts, even when things turn to shit I'd like an example, not really sure what you're talking about here. In my experience, when things go wrong on macOS, you're prettymuch SOL until the broken feature is either fixed, reimplemented, or removed in a subsequent major release of the operating system. In my experience, Apple doesn't respond to bug reports any more than other desktop OS vendors, including open source ones. > — Nominally "perfect" hardware support The graphics drivers on macOS are very poor. Apple's decision to neglect and then subsequently abandon OpenGL is pure laziness, and their implementation was already bad when they were still maintaining it. Furthermore, hardware compatibility with random gizmos on macOS leaves a lot to be desired in comparison to Linux, in my experience, though I guess your mileage may vary. > — Robust colorimetry colord works just fine for me, no amount of software is going to profile your monitors for you though. > — Millisecond audio latency I'm pretty sure CoreAudio frames are not less than 44 samples. What I will give Apple credit for is a great set of graphics manipulation libraries which make it simple to use high quality scaling and manipulation algorithms, and making sure it's a conscious choice to use cheaper, faster ones, and their implementation of seamless suspend-to-disk with full disk encryption is admirable (though honestly, dispensable at the end of the day). Their shaping and font rendering libraries are almost as good as Harfbuzz and FreeType 2 (though I think they've just started using FreeType at least on some platforms). Accessibility features are also pretty good, and depending on what disability you have, it's a tossup between GNOME and macOS.

sjwright 8y ago
All those points are fine, but they're all yes-buts. — I mean, first-party GNOME applications are as consistent as Straight-up disagree. It all depends what your threshold of UI/UX consistency is. Unfortunately most open source enthusiasts have a low threshold. It is difficult to convey the importance of a thousand subtle details, each one impossibly trivial, but the sum total moves mountains. — I'd like an example, not really sure what you're talking about here. An example: If my aging father's Mac turns to shit, he can hold down R, boot up the computer from the recovery disk and restore from a Time Machine backup that he himself set up with no assistance required from anyone. — The graphics drivers on macOS are very poor. That's really a marginal opinion. Maybe if you're an OpenGL developer. Apple provides an excellent framework (Metal) which works brilliantly. Yes it would be great if Apple delivered first-class support for Vulkan, but complaining about OpenGL is last decade's problem. — colord works just fine for me It's increasingly robust at handling the basics, yes.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  > That's really a marginal opinion. Maybe if you're an OpenGL developer. Apple provides an excellent framework (Metal) which works brilliantly. Yes it would be great if Apple delivered first-class support for Vulkan, but complaining about OpenGL is last decade's problem. The Metal drivers are more stable, but the shader compilers generate slow code, just like the old Apple OpenGL drivers (the ones they wrote for the Intel GPUs). OpenGL issues are not "last decade's problem", I have on several occasions needed to write workarounds in WebGL shaders to prevent the NVIDIA drivers from crashing the whole windowing system (and every application with it) on macOS. On the same hardware, the drivers on Linux are faster, more stable, and more featureful and also include implementations of Vulkan. > An example: If my aging father's Mac turns to shit, he can hold down R, boot up the computer from the recovery disk and restore from a Time Machine backup that he himself set up with no assistance required from anyone. That's not a macOS feature though, that's an Apple PC firmware feature. I'll grant that AFAIK no vendor who ships a Linux distribution by default has a durable recovery partition, but there's nothing about macOS itself which makes that easier.
  - 8y ago

msla 8y ago

> Nominally "perfect" hardware support With the decline of Apple hardware, this is less true, and modern Linux hardware support is, at worst, no worse than what other OSes provide, in my experience. > Navigable by non-experts, even when things turn to shit I think the "Closed Box Philosophy" of Apple either defines or disproves this: Non-experts can't be tripped up by having to fix things... because nobody outside of Apple can fix things, eh? Can't screw up something you're not allowed to do. > The achilles heel of the open source community stems from the lack of a unifying vision and a top-down approach. This means that I can keep running Window Maker and nobody can take it away from me. In a broader sense, I'm not afraid to upgrade for fear of losing some part of my workflow due to a high-level decision taking an option away from me. I can use Emacs even if everyone else around me is using Vim, I can use qutebrowser even if nobody knows what the fuck a "Cute Browser" even is, I can write in Ruby even if the Current Dogma is JavaScript.

icxa 8y ago
> With the decline of Apple hardware, this is less true, and modern Linux hardware support is, at worst, no worse than what other OSes provide, in my experience. I will still take a perceived regression in hardware from Apple over anything else on the market today. They are that far ahead. Still the best touchpad and connectivity support which are the two most important factors in my book. Also still the most aesthetically pleasing and known brand of laptop in the world. The latter point is not so important in my book, but I do believe it helps contribute to the resale value of the Mac, which again is class leading in terms of mass produced laptops.
- techntoke 8y ago
  This is entirely subjective. Aesthetically pleasing and "well known" may be factors for you in a purchase decision, but I personally prefer more open hardware and choice in my purchases so that I can fine tune each component and not be at least a year behind when it comes to modern hardware when making a purchase to get better performance than what Mac will offer for a fraction of the cost. Also, if you care a lot about looks then I'd recommend checking out Razer, or aluminum chassis notebooks: https://www.reinisfischer.com/top-20-aluminium-chassis-notebook-laptop-computers https://www.reinisfischer.com/top-20-aluminium-chassis-noteb...

techntoke 8y ago

> System-wide UI consistency, especially in the fine details > Singular UI/UX vision eliminates points of confusion and everything-is-a-compromise choices for third party developers There are consistent themes across both GTK+ and Qt. Pretty much all my apps share a similar theme and UI. There are Mac Apps as well that deviate from whatever "standardization" you're referring to. > Navigable by non-experts, even when things turn to shit It is no longer 2004. A lot of Mac users are also more than capable of running a few shell commands when needed. There are tons of web UIs and graphical apps to manage a Linux OS, from hardware, users, configuration, etc. However, a properly configured Linux OS won't need a lot of interaction on the frontend. > Nominally "perfect" hardware support Linux has way better hardware support than Mac. I'm not sure what you're referring to here. > Robust colorimetry Agreed, this is one area that needs some improvement, but last I checked it is pretty well supported: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ICC_profiles https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ICC_profiles > Millisecond audio latency Already exist: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Professional_audio https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Professional_audio

msbarnett 8y ago
> There are consistent themes across both GTK+ and Qt. And then you open an app that’s neither GTK+ nor Qt, and you’re back to square one. Besides, there’s more to UI than “theme”. I have ^w mapped to delete word on OS X. One line in one config file. It works universally in every text box on the system. I tried setting that up in Linux. Eventually got it working through some gnome setting or some such. In some apps. Firefox didn’t respect it and wanted its own setting iirc. Then it would forget it every few months and trying to delete a word while I was typing would unconditionally close the browser. Fucking ridiculous stuff like that abounded. Life’s too short. > Pretty much all my apps share a similar theme and UI. There are Mac Apps as well that deviate from whatever "standardization" you're referring to. A few (very few anymore, in my experience) might deviate in terms of widget styling. Essentially none ignore system wide keybindings, or fail to integrate with system wide services, etc. In terms of inconsistency it’s night and day vs what I’ve had to put up with from Linux desktops.
- flukus 8y ago

bayindirh 8y ago

As a long time (10+ years) Linux and macOS user, I accept most of the things you say, and macOS is an extremely time efficient platform to do work. However, the lack of unifying vision is not an Achilles heel of the open source community. It's the essence of it. I like how any two installations of two distributions are never the same, and this broad ecosystem just works, tumbles, fights and creates new stuff. I've created a compression algorithm [0] for my graduation project. It was a novel approach, but performed worse due to some technical reasons. One of my professors asked why I didn't compare it to a similar algorithm instead of plain old Zip. I said that our algorithm is never tried before, and it's pretty novel, so we had no equal to compare. Then, one of my other professors replied to other professor asking the question. "There's no need to find an equal to compare. They did something new and untried. This is research". Equally, Darling doesn't need to surpass macOS to be useful, because "this is research" too. Maybe they will learn something useful from this endeavor and incorporate it into Linux or their future development career. This Katamari Damacy nature of GNU, Linux and free software community makes it so powerful and unique. Let Microsoft, Apple and Google have a top-down approach and others play as they feel and everyone improves the world as they wish. [0]: https://www.academia.edu/20575315/Lossless_Text_Compression_Technique_Using_Syllable_Based_Morphology https://www.academia.edu/20575315/Lossless_Text_Compression_...

sjwright 8y ago
I don't disagree with anything you've said, and I don't think that my post—if read in full—disagrees with it either. The lack of unifying vision in open source can be both an Achilles heel and its most valuable asset. The lack of a community-led ethos in macOS can be be both its Achilles heel and its most valuable asset.
- bayindirh 8y ago
  Honestly, I missed your last footnote only. Possibly I got distracted by something. My fault. When read in full, we're on the same page. OTOH, I also didn't disagree with you on anything it seems. So, the two comments can be nicely summed up as a look to same lawn from a opposing vantage points, since I use Linux more often than macOS (albeit I have a MacBook Pro that I use pretty regularly). If my tone sounds a bit harsh, sorry for that. English is not my mother tongue. Also, if you can tell me where it's rude(ish), I can work on it.