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At least for me the reaction is largely emotional. I like using my linux desktop because I can set it up exactly how I want, and macOS just doesn't roll that wa

At least for me the reaction is largely emotional. I like using my linux desktop because I can set it up exactly how I want, and macOS just doesn't roll that way. Now, I'm not really the target market, so whatever, but there are a few things that upset me about it: 1. I could really, really love macOS if they had a "don't treat me like a child" checkbox I could hit somewhere that would turn off some of the more obnoxious default behaviors. It took me a solid 5 minutes to figure out how to navigate to the root of the filesystem on a new MBP I recently was given at a new job. The most intuitive thing I could think to do was double click the name of the folder I was in ("Recents", by default when you first open it), which seems to do nothing except make a little icon appear and grow/shrink the window in Big Sur. Neat. The left pane, by default, literally has no means of navigating to the filesystem root. OSX has seemingly always wanted to pretend the filesystem doesn't exist. I like the filesystem. Stop trying to hide things from me. 2. This point is actually more a credit to apple than anything - the rendering, touch input, display management, etc on macOS is stellar, and it makes me angry I can't have the same level of polish on my linux install. I really, really want something that is as smooth as the macOS experience but with the customize-ability of linux. Apple pisses me off because they are incredibly close to that goal but they find it philosophically objectionable (for business reasons that I understand, but it still pisses me off)

klelatti 6y ago
Thanks for a really balanced comment. Just on the ability to customise point - I've always thought that the Mac strikes a good balance - most things I want to change I can (including what is shown in the Finder sidebar) but also things that I really shouldn't be spending my time on I can't. Much as I like much of the linux distros I've tried I spend too much time tinkering!
jeffkeen 6y ago
> I like using my linux desktop because I can set it up exactly how I want, and macOS just doesn't roll that way. I'm not trying to have an argument here, but I've never really understood what is the "exactly how you want" that Mac OS doesn't provide? Would you mind sharing some details? Is it just a matter of not being familiar with the places to change the defaults to something more to your liking, or is it actually missing the ability to do something you need? I've been a Mac user since the 80s, I write software for a living, and I understand that among tech folk there is a continental divide between convention and configuration, and I think that might translate to choice in OS, too. Seems to me that most Mac users are on the convention over configuration side, and most people who are anti-MacOS are the opposite; they want to configure every bit. Just wondering if that's the case here, too, or if there's more to it specifically.
- sushisource 6y ago
  To some extent you're totally right. I can elaborate. Some of it are technical choices Apple has made that make things hard. I like tiling window managers. The best (only?) one for OSX now requires you to go disable SIP to use it: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-Integrity-Protection https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I... -- this wouldn't be the case if Apple cared at all to support these sorts of use-cases, but they don't, so it suffers collateral damage from their attempts to improve security. (Again, totally reasonable business choice. Not a ton of people in this boat, but turns me off. Why can't I do this by clicking something in system prefs like when I open a downloaded app?) Another one is, as a developer who once worked at a shop that shipped three-os software, their policies relating to macOS licensing are comical. It's almost like they don't want you to develop for Mac at all unless you're going to exclusively develop for Mac. We had moved everything to the cloud, but we still had a room full of stupid mac minis just to run our build farm. Ridiculous. The new news about mac minis in AWS is an ever-so-slight improvement. Some of it is definitely the familiarity you describe. I don't want to have to get used to all the weird bsd-ish-but-not-really versions of the common CLI tools. I have no interest in learning apple script, etc. I'm being fairly obviously hypocritical because I was willing to learn a bunch about obscure config files on linux. But, my experience has often been that things I would be willing to invest to customize on macOS are simply not customizeable. And, hey, perhaps I would've been willing to go through all that were it (reasonably) possible to run OSX on commodity hardware, but as a kid learning programming in the 90's macs were damn expensive compared to windows alternatives. So, I grew up on windows. It's still true. Today I could afford a Mac Pro, but it's a laughable value proposition (easily 3x-5x the cost for equivalent power) compared to building my own linux box (as to the 'your time is money!' counterargument people sometimes make here - it takes me about 2 hours to build a PC and my linux box hasn't panicked or booted improperly once). This used to make sense to me when the OS/hardware was more tightly integrated, but I don't really see how a macPro is any different than the equivalent PC you could build with the same CPU/GPU combos except more expensive and less flexible (admittedly, with a stunning case -- their manufacturing quality is incredible). Maybe they'll realize those benefits again with the M1, which is certainly cool. Lastly, I'll never forgive them for starting the trend of eliminating 3.5mm jacks on phones. TLDR; You're probably right. Macs aren't a great choice if you're a power user (read: control freak) with your PC.

klelatti 6y ago

Thanks for a really balanced comment. Just on the ability to customise point - I've always thought that the Mac strikes a good balance - most things I want to change I can (including what is shown in the Finder sidebar) but also things that I really shouldn't be spending my time on I can't. Much as I like much of the linux distros I've tried I spend too much time tinkering!

jeffkeen 6y ago

> I like using my linux desktop because I can set it up exactly how I want, and macOS just doesn't roll that way. I'm not trying to have an argument here, but I've never really understood what is the "exactly how you want" that Mac OS doesn't provide? Would you mind sharing some details? Is it just a matter of not being familiar with the places to change the defaults to something more to your liking, or is it actually missing the ability to do something you need? I've been a Mac user since the 80s, I write software for a living, and I understand that among tech folk there is a continental divide between convention and configuration, and I think that might translate to choice in OS, too. Seems to me that most Mac users are on the convention over configuration side, and most people who are anti-MacOS are the opposite; they want to configure every bit. Just wondering if that's the case here, too, or if there's more to it specifically.

sushisource 6y ago
To some extent you're totally right. I can elaborate. Some of it are technical choices Apple has made that make things hard. I like tiling window managers. The best (only?) one for OSX now requires you to go disable SIP to use it: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-Integrity-Protection https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I... -- this wouldn't be the case if Apple cared at all to support these sorts of use-cases, but they don't, so it suffers collateral damage from their attempts to improve security. (Again, totally reasonable business choice. Not a ton of people in this boat, but turns me off. Why can't I do this by clicking something in system prefs like when I open a downloaded app?) Another one is, as a developer who once worked at a shop that shipped three-os software, their policies relating to macOS licensing are comical. It's almost like they don't want you to develop for Mac at all unless you're going to exclusively develop for Mac. We had moved everything to the cloud, but we still had a room full of stupid mac minis just to run our build farm. Ridiculous. The new news about mac minis in AWS is an ever-so-slight improvement. Some of it is definitely the familiarity you describe. I don't want to have to get used to all the weird bsd-ish-but-not-really versions of the common CLI tools. I have no interest in learning apple script, etc. I'm being fairly obviously hypocritical because I was willing to learn a bunch about obscure config files on linux. But, my experience has often been that things I would be willing to invest to customize on macOS are simply not customizeable. And, hey, perhaps I would've been willing to go through all that were it (reasonably) possible to run OSX on commodity hardware, but as a kid learning programming in the 90's macs were damn expensive compared to windows alternatives. So, I grew up on windows. It's still true. Today I could afford a Mac Pro, but it's a laughable value proposition (easily 3x-5x the cost for equivalent power) compared to building my own linux box (as to the 'your time is money!' counterargument people sometimes make here - it takes me about 2 hours to build a PC and my linux box hasn't panicked or booted improperly once). This used to make sense to me when the OS/hardware was more tightly integrated, but I don't really see how a macPro is any different than the equivalent PC you could build with the same CPU/GPU combos except more expensive and less flexible (admittedly, with a stunning case -- their manufacturing quality is incredible). Maybe they'll realize those benefits again with the M1, which is certainly cool. Lastly, I'll never forgive them for starting the trend of eliminating 3.5mm jacks on phones. TLDR; You're probably right. Macs aren't a great choice if you're a power user (read: control freak) with your PC.