10 ms·

I just "use linux" and I get all the benefits with much better hardware (more memory, disk storage, speed for compilation), better drivers (important especially

I just "use linux" and I get all the benefits with much better hardware (more memory, disk storage, speed for compilation), better drivers (important especially for GPU support for either graphics/rendering work or machine learning) and my downsides are... what exactly? Itunes, Mail, etc, none of the software shipping with MacOS is actually any good. I don't use Safari. From your perspective, what aspect of the "customer focus" materially improves anything? ICloud? The thing that lost a ton of my data over the years? Safari? The thing that doesn't even support WebGL 2 or other standards that are a decade old? (seriously, safari is the new internet explorer).

davedx 6y ago
I use Safari as my main browser now due to the password generation/sharing with my iPhone. It's a killer feature for me.
- faemir 6y ago
  Firefox does this too FYI
  - IOT_Apprentice 6y ago
    As does chrome and edge.
  - davedx 6y ago
    I like Firefox but I don't use it on my iPhone. I use the Apple pw manager to log into websites on both phone/laptop a lot. The syncing to my iPhone is great.
- viklove 6y ago
  Almost every browser has this feature...
  - danaris 6y ago
    But "almost every browser" doesn't sync your saved passwords seamlessly between devices (mobile and desktop) with an end-to-end encrypted database, and automatically offer to autofill them, with the autofill itself protected by Touch ID/Face ID on the devices that support those.
    - edjrage 6y ago
      For one, Bitwarden does all of that and more (I guess except the Face ID thing, but I don't really want that so I'd disable it anyway). It has web, mobile and desktop apps, and browser extensions. All available in the free plan. Oh, and it's open source and self-hostable. https://bitwarden.com/ https://bitwarden.com/ (Not affiliated with it, just a pretty happy (free) user!)
      - danaris 6y ago
        Neat, and glad to know about it! I've actually been surprised (and a little frustrated) that there haven't been any alternatives to iCloud Keychain for genuine seamless, e2e encrypted, password management. Does it actually work the same as Mobile Safari's interface on iOS? Automatically presenting options both for creating and autofilling passwords on webpages? (If it can do that in iOS Firefox, I might consider it...I've been using desktop Firefox for a while because of some bizarre idiosyncratic issues I have with Safari on my laptop, that I can't reproduce anywhere else, but are extremely irritating where they do happen...)
        darkteflon 6y ago
        Yes, it does. The integration with both Safari and Firefox on iOS is excellent. In Settings -> Passwords & Accounts -> Autofill Passwords you just change the backend from iCloud Keychain to Bitwarden, then it otherwise behaves substantially the same. A big benefit of switching to Bitwarden is that you can also get it up and running on non-Apple machines. Kicking myself for not doing it earlier. Just be aware that bulk exporting your passwords from iCloud Keychain is non-trivial.
- jnwatson 6y ago
  That's a commodity feature at this point.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  Use a password manager. It's safer than trusting Apple or Google who are after your personal data.
  - kn0where 6y ago
    Also worth noting is that with recent iOS versions, third party password managers are recognized at the OS level, and can be used with the same seamlessness as iCloud Keychain.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Apple and Google aren't going to sell users' login credentials, and if law enforcement is requesting information, they will go directly to the provider who contains your data they're seeking.
  - danaris 6y ago
    Apple never gets your saved login credentials. iCloud Keychain is end-to-end encrypted, and Apple hasn't been shy about advertising that fact.
    - webmobdev 6y ago
      > Apple never gets your saved login credentials. Yeah, keep telling yourself that. They are a part of PRISM.
- darkteflon 6y ago
  Pray you never have to bulk export your passwords. It is extremely painful.
- Diesel555 6y ago
  Assumptions: 1) All my devices are Apple 2) I'm not planning on leaving Apple For all the negative replies I wonder how many people actually have used Keychain. It's very good. I tried onePassword, google's, and firefox's, but none integrates as well among all my devices and with zero effort in the OS as keychain. Anyone leaving negative comments about keychain, at least point out that you've given it the ol' try in the Apple Ecosystem. Or we have different assumptions and you have devices outside the Apple ecosystem or don't want to be tied to it therefore the benefits I see to keychain don't apply to you. Also the WWDC yesterday has some cool new features about bad passwords (But I think other password managers already do this).
submeta 6y ago
Software that is unique to MacOS: - HoudahSpot (search files / documents) - DEVONthink (document management system) - Ulysses app (a markdown writing app; I know there are many, on many platforms) - iA Writer (another markdown writer) - Alfred App (automating) - Keyboard Maestro (automating) - AppleScript (automating) - MailMate - Things3 (task management) - OmniOutliner - OmniFocus - OmniGraffle - PDF Expert (reading / annotating pdfs) - iTerm - aText (text macros) - Timing App (auto time tracking) and many more. Many of those apps have their equivalents in the Linux / Windows world, but their Mac pendents are imho much better. Finally, it's the overall experience. Everyting is streamlined, everything works across iDevices, everything (mostly) works. I can't say it in a few sentences. Sitting in front of this machine, coding, writing, listening to music, that's a joy. I didn't have this feeling with a Windows machine (was a Windows and Ubuntu user until 2015).
- TwoBit 6y ago
  Agreed about the Windows feeling, though the reason I have a Windows laptop (which I use personally more than my MacBook) is that outside of development tools it does far more than Mac or Linux machines.
slmjkdbtl 6y ago
Apps shipped with macOS are actually good imo, or there's just not a lot of better alternatives. Never found a better alternative for itunes or mail (used Thunderbird and mutt for a while and they're either bloat or have bad UX). macOS designers seem to be good at cramming functionalities (i know it's not unix philosophy) while making it not look bloat at all.
- qeternity 6y ago
  Mail is a pretty awful client imo, but still better than most other. Canary and Airmail however are absolutely amazing (I recently switched to Canary from Airmail) and there really isn't anything comparable on other platforms.
  - phs318u 6y ago
    Mail.app is an appalling client. Having recently switched email providers, I tried copying several thousand emails from one mailbox to another. Mail would invariably crash after moving several hundred, and then could not be restarted without immediately crashing. I lost count of how many crashes I reported to Apple (aside: has anything ever come of these reports?). Mail is so bad, it did what I didn’t think was possible - I switched to Outlook. And guess what? Outlook handled me email-moving task faster and without error. Internal quality control for macOS and built-in Apple apps has fallen off a cliff in recent times. Catalina has been disastrous in that regard. Having used Macs since OS/X Leopard, I’m not jumping to Big Sur. I switched from Windows because it was a buggy, hot mess. I’m not hanging around and risking my work as macOS quality control keeps falling. Apple’s developers have lost my trust.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - slmjkdbtl 6y ago
      I once had a similar need but outlook failed me hard, never tried with Mail.app but I'm sure it won't go well. In an ideal world i would just make all software i use myself cuz I've only seen like <10 actual good softwares in my life
y7 6y ago
Applications and hardware drivers on Mac just work. Even Homebrew works pretty nicely. The visuals of Mac are vastly superior to any flavor of Linux I've tried: smooth graphics, font rendering, HiDPI support, etc. Some aspects of Mac hardware (screen, touchpad) are very hard to come by with other manufacturers. At this point I'll probably switch to Linux as soon as my 2015 Macbook stops working, but I would've really liked to stay with Apple.
- pcwalton 6y ago
  At this point FreeType is generally better (faster, more featureful) than Apple's Core Graphics, although FT is very customizable and I prefer Apple-like defaults to the ones most Linux distros use. You can definitely get Apple-like rendering out of FreeType; disabling hinting and making sure stem darkening is on gets you most of the way there.
- fsflover 6y ago
  > hardware drivers on Mac just work Same for GNU/Linux if you choose the hardware for it (or buy preinstalled).
  - reidjs 6y ago
    Until you have to connect to a 12 year old printer at work
    - brianguertin 6y ago
      Mac and Linux actually use the same printer stack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS
    - IntelMiner 6y ago
      Most corporate printers are network attached, many also run under CUPS
  - TwoBit 6y ago
    In my experience this argument is BS. Maybe the computer on day one works OK, but it's downhill from there as you maintain and update.
oneplane 6y ago
Have you noticed how all your arguments are fine yet only personal preferences? (except dataloss) The UX, UI and 'feel' is what makes people use one thing over another. Unless you can replicate that, or can do better, nobody's getting swayed either way (and that's fine, do what you want). There is no objective 'my pc is better than your pc' because you're not the same person as the one you'd be attempting to compare against. Better hardware and better drivers are useless arguments if someone wants to go to a shop, take a device home, plop it down and do some work. None of the betterness of the other stuff is going to undo the work, or undo the experience. It's like telling someone their 24-pack of toilet paper is stupid because your shipping container full of toilet paper is cheaper and you have more than they have. (especially when all they wanted to do was wipe their butt)
- banachtarski 6y ago
  How is better hardware-to-price ratio and driver performance a "personal preference?" Do you not want those things? If you're saying that having a particular UI is important, that's another matter. I'm just explaining what it is that caused me to ditch the Mac ecosystem.
  - oneplane 6y ago
    No, those things aren't the main driver for my choices. Say you have two options, same price, different vendor. And the main difference (for the sake of the argument) is that one comes with a mobile i5 and the other one with a mobile i7. Technically the price-to-performance ratio is better for the i7 model. But the driver for me to buy any device at all is wether the device can do the task I need it to do. If the i5 does the task the same way the i7 does the task, what is the extra value that the i7 supposedly brings? Often people will make a 'what if' argument here, because "what if you need to do something different" sounds like a nice argument to get more than what you need. In reality, I don't often see anyone changing their tasks mid-lifecycle and then have a sudden requirements change. It hasn't happend for me at all. The same parallel can be made with cargo capacity of a vehicle; technically every Lamborghini ever is a stupid choice because you can't move your furniture with it. Or every Fiat Panda is stupid because you can't drive at 200 Km/h speeds. Make it more absurd: every boat is stupid because it doesn't fly like a rocket.
chaostheory 6y ago
Linux is great for development work and casual web browsing, but imo it doesn't feel polished enough for most people's personal stuff. > Itunes, Mail, etc, none of the software shipping with MacOS is actually any good. I It's better than the open source stuff on Linux. While it has gotten much better over the years, it's still not good enough for normal people like my parents or my sisters who are not techies. That's just reality for now at least. It's pointless as to whether or not you agree with it.
iso947 6y ago
I maintain an old Mac for corporate purposes, but yes a Mac is just tedious. While things like printers “just work” in Linux they really struggle in OS X, requiring “drivers” like its 1999. The other benefits of Mac hardware (MagSafe for example) have all been removed leaving not-a-lot. YMMV.
Aperocky 6y ago
Does your benefit comes with battery power and portability? I couldn't care less about speed when I have a 64 vCPU box at 10ms delay.
fluffything 6y ago
> and my downsides are... what exactly? I've spent zero days, zero hours, zero minutes, and zero seconds fiddling with setting anything up in macOSX over the last 15 years. I manage a bunch of Linux systems, from laptops to desktop to servers, and over the last 15 years I've probably spent months of my life setting up stuff that should have just worked. I use a mac at home and as my dev machine, because I charge quite a bit of money for doing that for Linux, and I don't want to throw my own money like that during my free time. > Itunes, Mail, etc, none of the software shipping with MacOS is actually any good. I use many Microsoft Office Apps, Adobe suite apps (mainly photoshop, lightroom and illustrator), and all of them just work. VNC clients, VPN clients, Samba, they all just work. External devices, no issues. Do I want to stream my display over wifi to my television, or my audio to the stereo? Just one click away. Do I want to restore the back up of one directory from 2 years ago ? Its three clicks away. On Linux, half the steps to each of these things are filled with hours and hours of research in the Arch wiki. Do you want to stream your monitor to your TV? Start by setting up a media server, and then 200 steps. Do you want to restore a partial backup of some folder in a BTRFs drive, a dozen steps that I cannot remember. Like no way. I don't want to remember how to do these things, and I don't want to have to look it up. If nobody is paying me to do these things it should be completely obvious how to do them and it should just work. But hey, do convince your employers to use Linux everywhere, its great for the business.
- willtim 6y ago
  This is anecdotal. My own anecdote is that we've had far more trouble with my wife's MacBook than my NixOS ThinkPad which just works, even after upgrades. The Linux experience depends on the distribution, software and hardware you choose. You need to choose carefully.
  - enjeyw 6y ago
    > you need to choose carefully. So here’s the interesting part; can you recommend a distro that is universally the right choice for dev work? If yes, please tell - I’d love to know! If the answer is “well it depends a lot on your needs” that’s kinda the point of MacOS right? The fact that making the right distro choice requires serious thought is already problematic (hypothetically)
ytch 6y ago
I rely on TimeMachine to backup my MAC. AFAIK, windows and linux still don't have suctions tool that can backup/restore without pain.
coldtea 6y ago
>and my downsides are... what exactly Less cohesion, competing GUI libs/configuration systems/etc, still not 100% GPU support, the Wayland situation, almost non-existent multimedia (video, audio) options (not to mention support for peripherals like audio interfaces), and being at the worse than Apple's arbitrary mercy of your favourite desktop environment programmers (e.g. abrupt transitions and bizarro decisions in Gnome and KDE major versions).
- banachtarski 6y ago
  > still not 100% GPU support I'm a graphics engineer so I'm not sure I understand this argument. When I talk about weaker and worse-performing hardware options and drivers on Mac, I'm referring _mainly_ to GPUs. > Non-existent multimedia (video, audio) options This... is simply not true (?) Also, regarding Gnome/KDE, I dislike both and don't use either. Something like i3 with zero-to-know configuration is already pretty great out of the box.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >When I talk about weaker and worse-performing hardware options and drivers on Mac, I'm referring _mainly_ to GPUs. And when I talk about weaker support for GPUs on Linux, I mean the Wayland / compositor situation, getting 3D to work without planning what specific model of laptop to buy to use with what specific distro, and so on... >This... is simply not true (?) This is simply true. It can't run Cubase, Logic (ok, that's expected), Pro Tools, Studio One, Reason, FL Studio, Maschine, and tons of other things besides. Your best bet is some niche players like BitWig and Traktion, or crossing your fingers with Wine... And let's not get started for drivers for professional audio interfaces and peripherals... Same for NLEs...
danudey 6y ago
There are no good mail clients for Linux that I can find. All of them are great, except for one or two things that makes them completely awful. > (seriously, safari is the new internet explorer). I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Safari is holding back the web because despite its monopoly on users it doesn't support new technologies? That's not true at all. Especially because it's got such a small market share, it should be up to them to deliver what they feel makes the most sense, and let the market decide the rest (though sadly the market seems to keep using Chrome, which is terrible). Honest question though: as a Safari user almost exclusively for the past 15 years, what I missing out on that I could have experienced if Safari had supported WebGL2? I don't know that I've encountered any sites or use cases where Safari was holding me back in that regard, but I'm curious to know what was out there that I couldn't see before.

davedx 6y ago

I use Safari as my main browser now due to the password generation/sharing with my iPhone. It's a killer feature for me.

faemir 6y ago
Firefox does this too FYI
- IOT_Apprentice 6y ago
  As does chrome and edge.
- davedx 6y ago
  I like Firefox but I don't use it on my iPhone. I use the Apple pw manager to log into websites on both phone/laptop a lot. The syncing to my iPhone is great.
viklove 6y ago
Almost every browser has this feature...
- danaris 6y ago
  But "almost every browser" doesn't sync your saved passwords seamlessly between devices (mobile and desktop) with an end-to-end encrypted database, and automatically offer to autofill them, with the autofill itself protected by Touch ID/Face ID on the devices that support those.
  - edjrage 6y ago
    For one, Bitwarden does all of that and more (I guess except the Face ID thing, but I don't really want that so I'd disable it anyway). It has web, mobile and desktop apps, and browser extensions. All available in the free plan. Oh, and it's open source and self-hostable. https://bitwarden.com/ https://bitwarden.com/ (Not affiliated with it, just a pretty happy (free) user!)
    - danaris 6y ago
      Neat, and glad to know about it! I've actually been surprised (and a little frustrated) that there haven't been any alternatives to iCloud Keychain for genuine seamless, e2e encrypted, password management. Does it actually work the same as Mobile Safari's interface on iOS? Automatically presenting options both for creating and autofilling passwords on webpages? (If it can do that in iOS Firefox, I might consider it...I've been using desktop Firefox for a while because of some bizarre idiosyncratic issues I have with Safari on my laptop, that I can't reproduce anywhere else, but are extremely irritating where they do happen...)
      - darkteflon 6y ago
        Yes, it does. The integration with both Safari and Firefox on iOS is excellent. In Settings -> Passwords & Accounts -> Autofill Passwords you just change the backend from iCloud Keychain to Bitwarden, then it otherwise behaves substantially the same. A big benefit of switching to Bitwarden is that you can also get it up and running on non-Apple machines. Kicking myself for not doing it earlier. Just be aware that bulk exporting your passwords from iCloud Keychain is non-trivial.
jnwatson 6y ago
That's a commodity feature at this point.
webmobdev 6y ago
Use a password manager. It's safer than trusting Apple or Google who are after your personal data.
- kn0where 6y ago
  Also worth noting is that with recent iOS versions, third party password managers are recognized at the OS level, and can be used with the same seamlessness as iCloud Keychain.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Apple and Google aren't going to sell users' login credentials, and if law enforcement is requesting information, they will go directly to the provider who contains your data they're seeking.
- danaris 6y ago
  Apple never gets your saved login credentials. iCloud Keychain is end-to-end encrypted, and Apple hasn't been shy about advertising that fact.
  - webmobdev 6y ago
    > Apple never gets your saved login credentials. Yeah, keep telling yourself that. They are a part of PRISM.
darkteflon 6y ago
Pray you never have to bulk export your passwords. It is extremely painful.
Diesel555 6y ago
Assumptions: 1) All my devices are Apple 2) I'm not planning on leaving Apple For all the negative replies I wonder how many people actually have used Keychain. It's very good. I tried onePassword, google's, and firefox's, but none integrates as well among all my devices and with zero effort in the OS as keychain. Anyone leaving negative comments about keychain, at least point out that you've given it the ol' try in the Apple Ecosystem. Or we have different assumptions and you have devices outside the Apple ecosystem or don't want to be tied to it therefore the benefits I see to keychain don't apply to you. Also the WWDC yesterday has some cool new features about bad passwords (But I think other password managers already do this).

submeta 6y ago

Software that is unique to MacOS: - HoudahSpot (search files / documents) - DEVONthink (document management system) - Ulysses app (a markdown writing app; I know there are many, on many platforms) - iA Writer (another markdown writer) - Alfred App (automating) - Keyboard Maestro (automating) - AppleScript (automating) - MailMate - Things3 (task management) - OmniOutliner - OmniFocus - OmniGraffle - PDF Expert (reading / annotating pdfs) - iTerm - aText (text macros) - Timing App (auto time tracking) and many more. Many of those apps have their equivalents in the Linux / Windows world, but their Mac pendents are imho much better. Finally, it's the overall experience. Everyting is streamlined, everything works across iDevices, everything (mostly) works. I can't say it in a few sentences. Sitting in front of this machine, coding, writing, listening to music, that's a joy. I didn't have this feeling with a Windows machine (was a Windows and Ubuntu user until 2015).

TwoBit 6y ago
Agreed about the Windows feeling, though the reason I have a Windows laptop (which I use personally more than my MacBook) is that outside of development tools it does far more than Mac or Linux machines.

slmjkdbtl 6y ago

Apps shipped with macOS are actually good imo, or there's just not a lot of better alternatives. Never found a better alternative for itunes or mail (used Thunderbird and mutt for a while and they're either bloat or have bad UX). macOS designers seem to be good at cramming functionalities (i know it's not unix philosophy) while making it not look bloat at all.

qeternity 6y ago
Mail is a pretty awful client imo, but still better than most other. Canary and Airmail however are absolutely amazing (I recently switched to Canary from Airmail) and there really isn't anything comparable on other platforms.
- phs318u 6y ago
  Mail.app is an appalling client. Having recently switched email providers, I tried copying several thousand emails from one mailbox to another. Mail would invariably crash after moving several hundred, and then could not be restarted without immediately crashing. I lost count of how many crashes I reported to Apple (aside: has anything ever come of these reports?). Mail is so bad, it did what I didn’t think was possible - I switched to Outlook. And guess what? Outlook handled me email-moving task faster and without error. Internal quality control for macOS and built-in Apple apps has fallen off a cliff in recent times. Catalina has been disastrous in that regard. Having used Macs since OS/X Leopard, I’m not jumping to Big Sur. I switched from Windows because it was a buggy, hot mess. I’m not hanging around and risking my work as macOS quality control keeps falling. Apple’s developers have lost my trust.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - slmjkdbtl 6y ago
    I once had a similar need but outlook failed me hard, never tried with Mail.app but I'm sure it won't go well. In an ideal world i would just make all software i use myself cuz I've only seen like <10 actual good softwares in my life

y7 6y ago

Applications and hardware drivers on Mac just work. Even Homebrew works pretty nicely. The visuals of Mac are vastly superior to any flavor of Linux I've tried: smooth graphics, font rendering, HiDPI support, etc. Some aspects of Mac hardware (screen, touchpad) are very hard to come by with other manufacturers. At this point I'll probably switch to Linux as soon as my 2015 Macbook stops working, but I would've really liked to stay with Apple.

pcwalton 6y ago
At this point FreeType is generally better (faster, more featureful) than Apple's Core Graphics, although FT is very customizable and I prefer Apple-like defaults to the ones most Linux distros use. You can definitely get Apple-like rendering out of FreeType; disabling hinting and making sure stem darkening is on gets you most of the way there.
fsflover 6y ago
> hardware drivers on Mac just work Same for GNU/Linux if you choose the hardware for it (or buy preinstalled).
- reidjs 6y ago
  Until you have to connect to a 12 year old printer at work
  - brianguertin 6y ago
    Mac and Linux actually use the same printer stack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS
  - IntelMiner 6y ago
    Most corporate printers are network attached, many also run under CUPS
- TwoBit 6y ago
  In my experience this argument is BS. Maybe the computer on day one works OK, but it's downhill from there as you maintain and update.

oneplane 6y ago

Have you noticed how all your arguments are fine yet only personal preferences? (except dataloss) The UX, UI and 'feel' is what makes people use one thing over another. Unless you can replicate that, or can do better, nobody's getting swayed either way (and that's fine, do what you want). There is no objective 'my pc is better than your pc' because you're not the same person as the one you'd be attempting to compare against. Better hardware and better drivers are useless arguments if someone wants to go to a shop, take a device home, plop it down and do some work. None of the betterness of the other stuff is going to undo the work, or undo the experience. It's like telling someone their 24-pack of toilet paper is stupid because your shipping container full of toilet paper is cheaper and you have more than they have. (especially when all they wanted to do was wipe their butt)

banachtarski 6y ago
How is better hardware-to-price ratio and driver performance a "personal preference?" Do you not want those things? If you're saying that having a particular UI is important, that's another matter. I'm just explaining what it is that caused me to ditch the Mac ecosystem.
- oneplane 6y ago
  No, those things aren't the main driver for my choices. Say you have two options, same price, different vendor. And the main difference (for the sake of the argument) is that one comes with a mobile i5 and the other one with a mobile i7. Technically the price-to-performance ratio is better for the i7 model. But the driver for me to buy any device at all is wether the device can do the task I need it to do. If the i5 does the task the same way the i7 does the task, what is the extra value that the i7 supposedly brings? Often people will make a 'what if' argument here, because "what if you need to do something different" sounds like a nice argument to get more than what you need. In reality, I don't often see anyone changing their tasks mid-lifecycle and then have a sudden requirements change. It hasn't happend for me at all. The same parallel can be made with cargo capacity of a vehicle; technically every Lamborghini ever is a stupid choice because you can't move your furniture with it. Or every Fiat Panda is stupid because you can't drive at 200 Km/h speeds. Make it more absurd: every boat is stupid because it doesn't fly like a rocket.

chaostheory 6y ago

Linux is great for development work and casual web browsing, but imo it doesn't feel polished enough for most people's personal stuff. > Itunes, Mail, etc, none of the software shipping with MacOS is actually any good. I It's better than the open source stuff on Linux. While it has gotten much better over the years, it's still not good enough for normal people like my parents or my sisters who are not techies. That's just reality for now at least. It's pointless as to whether or not you agree with it.

iso947 6y ago

I maintain an old Mac for corporate purposes, but yes a Mac is just tedious. While things like printers “just work” in Linux they really struggle in OS X, requiring “drivers” like its 1999. The other benefits of Mac hardware (MagSafe for example) have all been removed leaving not-a-lot. YMMV.

Aperocky 6y ago

Does your benefit comes with battery power and portability? I couldn't care less about speed when I have a 64 vCPU box at 10ms delay.

fluffything 6y ago

> and my downsides are... what exactly? I've spent zero days, zero hours, zero minutes, and zero seconds fiddling with setting anything up in macOSX over the last 15 years. I manage a bunch of Linux systems, from laptops to desktop to servers, and over the last 15 years I've probably spent months of my life setting up stuff that should have just worked. I use a mac at home and as my dev machine, because I charge quite a bit of money for doing that for Linux, and I don't want to throw my own money like that during my free time. > Itunes, Mail, etc, none of the software shipping with MacOS is actually any good. I use many Microsoft Office Apps, Adobe suite apps (mainly photoshop, lightroom and illustrator), and all of them just work. VNC clients, VPN clients, Samba, they all just work. External devices, no issues. Do I want to stream my display over wifi to my television, or my audio to the stereo? Just one click away. Do I want to restore the back up of one directory from 2 years ago ? Its three clicks away. On Linux, half the steps to each of these things are filled with hours and hours of research in the Arch wiki. Do you want to stream your monitor to your TV? Start by setting up a media server, and then 200 steps. Do you want to restore a partial backup of some folder in a BTRFs drive, a dozen steps that I cannot remember. Like no way. I don't want to remember how to do these things, and I don't want to have to look it up. If nobody is paying me to do these things it should be completely obvious how to do them and it should just work. But hey, do convince your employers to use Linux everywhere, its great for the business.

willtim 6y ago
This is anecdotal. My own anecdote is that we've had far more trouble with my wife's MacBook than my NixOS ThinkPad which just works, even after upgrades. The Linux experience depends on the distribution, software and hardware you choose. You need to choose carefully.
- enjeyw 6y ago
  > you need to choose carefully. So here’s the interesting part; can you recommend a distro that is universally the right choice for dev work? If yes, please tell - I’d love to know! If the answer is “well it depends a lot on your needs” that’s kinda the point of MacOS right? The fact that making the right distro choice requires serious thought is already problematic (hypothetically)

ytch 6y ago

I rely on TimeMachine to backup my MAC. AFAIK, windows and linux still don't have suctions tool that can backup/restore without pain.

coldtea 6y ago

>and my downsides are... what exactly Less cohesion, competing GUI libs/configuration systems/etc, still not 100% GPU support, the Wayland situation, almost non-existent multimedia (video, audio) options (not to mention support for peripherals like audio interfaces), and being at the worse than Apple's arbitrary mercy of your favourite desktop environment programmers (e.g. abrupt transitions and bizarro decisions in Gnome and KDE major versions).

banachtarski 6y ago
> still not 100% GPU support I'm a graphics engineer so I'm not sure I understand this argument. When I talk about weaker and worse-performing hardware options and drivers on Mac, I'm referring _mainly_ to GPUs. > Non-existent multimedia (video, audio) options This... is simply not true (?) Also, regarding Gnome/KDE, I dislike both and don't use either. Something like i3 with zero-to-know configuration is already pretty great out of the box.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >When I talk about weaker and worse-performing hardware options and drivers on Mac, I'm referring _mainly_ to GPUs. And when I talk about weaker support for GPUs on Linux, I mean the Wayland / compositor situation, getting 3D to work without planning what specific model of laptop to buy to use with what specific distro, and so on... >This... is simply not true (?) This is simply true. It can't run Cubase, Logic (ok, that's expected), Pro Tools, Studio One, Reason, FL Studio, Maschine, and tons of other things besides. Your best bet is some niche players like BitWig and Traktion, or crossing your fingers with Wine... And let's not get started for drivers for professional audio interfaces and peripherals... Same for NLEs...

danudey 6y ago

There are no good mail clients for Linux that I can find. All of them are great, except for one or two things that makes them completely awful. > (seriously, safari is the new internet explorer). I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Safari is holding back the web because despite its monopoly on users it doesn't support new technologies? That's not true at all. Especially because it's got such a small market share, it should be up to them to deliver what they feel makes the most sense, and let the market decide the rest (though sadly the market seems to keep using Chrome, which is terrible). Honest question though: as a Safari user almost exclusively for the past 15 years, what I missing out on that I could have experienced if Safari had supported WebGL2? I don't know that I've encountered any sites or use cases where Safari was holding me back in that regard, but I'm curious to know what was out there that I couldn't see before.