4 ms·

These issues notwithstanding, the total user experience of owning a Mac laptop is far superior to any Linux or Windows machine I've tried, at least in the past

These issues notwithstanding, the total user experience of owning a Mac laptop is far superior to any Linux or Windows machine I've tried, at least in the past 3 years or so. Two concrete examples: trackpad feels like shit on both Windows and Linux, installing or updating drivers and some apps on Windows constantly switches back to legacy modes to display the installers (with different fonts, no subpixel smoothing etc.). If it's not a deal breaker, it is annoying as hell and something that almost never happens on my Mac.

heavyset_go 5y ago
libinput with Wayland on a MacBook Pro puts its trackpad handling on par with macOS.
- doublepg23 5y ago
  I'm dailying Wayland on Ubuntu, but it feels like there's always a "it'll be really good soon" promise to Wayland.
- emkoemko 5y ago
  yea it takes time but eventually open software will be better, just look at how well Blender is doing and even Darktable is way way better then Adobe Lightroom can't understand why anyone uses that anymore while a free alternative that is better is out there.
wingworks 5y ago
^ This. It's not that I don't want to switch to a different company, it's just everything else is a worse, overall experience. I'm on Windows every week or so, and while it feels much faster than Mac, on the same hardware, there are just too many little things that annoy me. (have tried a few Linux flavours too, not really a contender for my use case)
ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
OP was describing very high-spec hardware which locks up and becomes unresponsive under their normal workload, potentially losing work or wasting their time. That seems like a much more significant issue than inconsistent font display or the feel of the input device. Your experience must differ, but if I spent $2000+ on a device only to find that was locking up (due to poor memory management in a standard component!) under my standard workload, I would be livid. I would probably return it, and then tell the next 10 people I meet about my poor experience. That said, I have run across a Windows 7 bug where the font manager would repeatedly fail and leave its cache/log on disk, only to restart and repeat until the hard disk was just about full. Complaints about the poor state of software engineering as a discipline go back to the beginning.
smt88 5y ago
As a counterpoint, I was a Linux user for ~20 years (eventually with a macOS dev machine on my desk as well). I got so sick of troubleshooting issues myself, I switched to Windows 7 and have never had to troubleshoot my OS since then. I don't google Windows issues, I don't have crashes, nothing. It's nice to have a machine that I can just work on and not constantly debug. (I 100% expect privacy advocates to admonish me for this, but I use hardware I assembled myself and block MS telemetry.)
- handrous 5y ago
  In a world without MacOS, I'd probably be running Linux on a really beefy Windows machine under virtualization, for work. Desktop Linux is so much more stable and pleasant to use in a VM with Windows or MacOS handling the actual hardware. Still a bit unstable, but not nearly as bad.
handrous 5y ago
> These issues notwithstanding, the total user experience of owning a Mac laptop is far superior to any Linux or Windows machine I've tried, at least in the past 3 years or so. That. I don't love Apple. They're a corporation, so at best our interests temporarily align. Loving them would be absurd. I really really want them to have strong competitors. I'd love to be back on an open source OS full-time, like I was for many years. Unfortunately, they're so far ahead of the competition, that they screw up, sometimes even in a few ways at the same time, and people come out saying "LOL and Apple fanboys won't switch to Linux even now", and that's true... but it's because I'd be trading a few problems for a few score problems. I ran Linux on laptops and desktops for about a decade, as my main computers. Ubuntu near the end, Gentoo for about five years, Mandrake really early on, a little time with Fedora somewhere in there, a sprinkling of Debian. I still try it out every year or two! I wish it weren't, but it's still much, much worse, and in the best case slows me down and gets in my way more than a "bad" Apple machine with a "bad" version of an OS X / MacOS, barring actual faulty hardware.

heavyset_go 5y ago

libinput with Wayland on a MacBook Pro puts its trackpad handling on par with macOS.

doublepg23 5y ago
I'm dailying Wayland on Ubuntu, but it feels like there's always a "it'll be really good soon" promise to Wayland.
emkoemko 5y ago
yea it takes time but eventually open software will be better, just look at how well Blender is doing and even Darktable is way way better then Adobe Lightroom can't understand why anyone uses that anymore while a free alternative that is better is out there.

wingworks 5y ago

^ This. It's not that I don't want to switch to a different company, it's just everything else is a worse, overall experience. I'm on Windows every week or so, and while it feels much faster than Mac, on the same hardware, there are just too many little things that annoy me. (have tried a few Linux flavours too, not really a contender for my use case)

ravel-bar-foo 5y ago

OP was describing very high-spec hardware which locks up and becomes unresponsive under their normal workload, potentially losing work or wasting their time. That seems like a much more significant issue than inconsistent font display or the feel of the input device. Your experience must differ, but if I spent $2000+ on a device only to find that was locking up (due to poor memory management in a standard component!) under my standard workload, I would be livid. I would probably return it, and then tell the next 10 people I meet about my poor experience. That said, I have run across a Windows 7 bug where the font manager would repeatedly fail and leave its cache/log on disk, only to restart and repeat until the hard disk was just about full. Complaints about the poor state of software engineering as a discipline go back to the beginning.

smt88 5y ago

As a counterpoint, I was a Linux user for ~20 years (eventually with a macOS dev machine on my desk as well). I got so sick of troubleshooting issues myself, I switched to Windows 7 and have never had to troubleshoot my OS since then. I don't google Windows issues, I don't have crashes, nothing. It's nice to have a machine that I can just work on and not constantly debug. (I 100% expect privacy advocates to admonish me for this, but I use hardware I assembled myself and block MS telemetry.)

handrous 5y ago
In a world without MacOS, I'd probably be running Linux on a really beefy Windows machine under virtualization, for work. Desktop Linux is so much more stable and pleasant to use in a VM with Windows or MacOS handling the actual hardware. Still a bit unstable, but not nearly as bad.

handrous 5y ago

> These issues notwithstanding, the total user experience of owning a Mac laptop is far superior to any Linux or Windows machine I've tried, at least in the past 3 years or so. That. I don't love Apple. They're a corporation, so at best our interests temporarily align. Loving them would be absurd. I really really want them to have strong competitors. I'd love to be back on an open source OS full-time, like I was for many years. Unfortunately, they're so far ahead of the competition, that they screw up, sometimes even in a few ways at the same time, and people come out saying "LOL and Apple fanboys won't switch to Linux even now", and that's true... but it's because I'd be trading a few problems for a few score problems. I ran Linux on laptops and desktops for about a decade, as my main computers. Ubuntu near the end, Gentoo for about five years, Mandrake really early on, a little time with Fedora somewhere in there, a sprinkling of Debian. I still try it out every year or two! I wish it weren't, but it's still much, much worse, and in the best case slows me down and gets in my way more than a "bad" Apple machine with a "bad" version of an OS X / MacOS, barring actual faulty hardware.