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I did the exact opposite. I was on MacOS since 10.2. But lately I felt things have become way too locked down (both hardware and software), too dumbed down (to

by _abox 5y ago

I did the exact opposite. I was on MacOS since 10.2. But lately I felt things have become way too locked down (both hardware and software), too dumbed down (too many apps resemble mobile apps with limited functionality) and too opinionated. Sometimes I just want things differently. Another reason was that many new features are specific to iCloud integration and as I use many OSes (both computer and mobile) I could not take advantage of those anyway. I need cross platform. So a lot of selling points became irrelevant. I moved to FreeBSD with KDE on top and it felt like a breath of fresh air finally being able to set up my system the way I want it. This is so empowering. It became my daily driver about a year ago and I haven't looked back though I still use Mac and Windows for work, Windows personally for gaming and Linux for some servers. Of course I lost some stuff too like Apple's excellent multi DPI and great hardware integration. And many apps that were great like pixelmator. But I gained a lot of configurability and the ability to upgrade my hardware again.

lytedev 5y ago
Interesting! Why FreeBSD over Linux out of curiosity?
- _abox 5y ago
  Good question. I had several reasons. - I had used it until 7.0 in the past and missed the simplicity of having one single platform (rather than Linux with its kernel and the many distributions all doing things differently). - The excellent handbook - Almost devoid of corporate influence. Linux is being steered into the warm and fuzzy corporate domain. Many big players try to get their IP adopted by the Linux mainstream. Canonical with Snaps for example, Redhat with Gnome, etc. The big tech players are the biggest kernel contributors now. It moves from choices good for customers to the ones that are good for big tech. - Non-opinionated platform. Some distros are also becoming quite opinionated like Mac. I did try to play the Apple game for a while (like I said it was my daily driver since 10.2) but they kept annoying me more and more by deprecating things I used. I want choices again. - Stable platform but with rolling app packages. For example if KDE comes out with a new version I will see it usually a day or 2 later. - Couldn't find a Linux distro I really liked. I like minimalism but without Arch's elitism. Debian would have been the closest but I have bad experiences with major upgrades. What I would have preferred would be something like Alpine for the desktop. I looked at Adelie Linux which is exactly that but it was too premature. - The ports tree is really amazing. You're always able to change default package settings and recompile them - Jails are more powerful than linux containers, though they lack a framework a la docker. This is why I still use Linux on servers. So this was mainly it :) Unfortuantely running KDE did require installing some linuxisms like Dbus but overall it's not too bad.
  - dschuessler 5y ago
    I am curious about your third point. Why do you consider project choices that are good for "big tech" to be a reason to turn away from Linux? I would have assumed that many contributions by corporations are in the end a net benefit for both corporations and customers or at least not detrimental to customers. Do you consider some corporate contributions to Linux to be harmful towards consumers? Or is it more a decision of principle?
    - _abox 5y ago
      I don't really believe in win-win anymore when it comes to mixing FOSS with Corporate. The need for monetisation always wins in the end for big corporations. Whether they openly admit it or not. For example: A lot of patches contributed by Microsoft are to make things run better on Azure and are irrelevant to most consumers. They view desktop Linux mainly as something that should exist under Windows (in my work there was a lot of pressure to move our development laptops to WSL2). They use their market position to push their views (think of the way they hassle third party browsers on Windows). Canonical is trying to make the snap store something they and only they control (it is not possible to run your own even now). RedHat with IBM took over CentOS just to remove it from the market as a free way to run RHEL. It's my belief that in the end they will always want something back, some kind of strings attached. The GPL is not sufficient to prevent that because it's purely about code, not about the business model behind it. Be it intellectual property, use of their services, data collection, whatever. And they will do whatever they can to gain a foothold over the competition, which is also involved in Linux. Even if a current operator is benign, they can always be taken over by a less scrupulous party, as happened many times in IT history. I don't want my OS be used as a pawn in that game. This is what I like about FreeBSD, the MIT license while being more open gives corporate interests less guarantees their contributed work won't be used by competitors and because of that they tend to ignore it. With the exception of Netflix which hasn't really done harm to the ecosystem because FreeBSD itself doesn't really factor into their products other than as a server platform. Even so, FreeBSD is not free from corporate influence nor are many of the apps I use. But it is more so than Linux. But yes it is more a personal principle than an explicit objection to some of the contributions made. I used to be a supporter of "big tech" influence a decade ago but too many things have happened. That was still in the days we believed Google really wouldn't be evil :) Now they rely on tracking and push clearly user-hostile tech like FLoC through standards bodies. As a result I've admittedly become more anti-corporate than the current situation warrants. But action = reaction. They have a lot to make up for. Apple was the best in this regard IMO because their business model was all about hardware, so they could afford to give software away for free. But they too are becoming more closed, with increased reliance on app store and iCloud revenue. They gave us stuff like OpenCL but lately everything they've come out with is closed (think Metal).
hakcermani 5y ago
Same here, but Ubunutu .. and the lack of upgradeability of storage.
Klonoar 5y ago
>and the ability to upgrade my hardware again. And... not modern wifi? I take it you must be on a Desktop in this case?
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Oh yes I use a desktop (intel NUC to be precise). I have no need for WiFi, I didn't even look at getting it going. I'm not a big fan of laptops at all for ergonomics. Most of my systems are desktops, the only laptop I have is a really minimal one for the makerspace (and I have one for work). I never said it was for everyone by the way. Just that it works for me! In general, things that work for everyone don't tend to work well for me at all, this is my biggest issue with Apple now because they make a product that is ultra-mainstream and very opinionated. You either have to go with the flow (which irritates me) or add a galore of thirdparty addon products to make it work your way which get broken in every major (and often minor) macOS release. I did try to go the second way for a while but it got too annoying with everything constantly breaking. From reading the article this thread is about, I see the author is going the same way (lots of addon products) and I wonder if they will also be caught by this in the future.
  - Klonoar 5y ago
    Heh, no hate intended by my original comment - I'd run FreeBSD if I could get away with it, but I'm too wedded to macOS for work nowadays. Just saw the comment and wifi is the only true big holdup in FreeBSD that I'm aware of nowadays, the rest can be... worked around, for whatever definition you have.
brian-armstrong 5y ago
Nitpick here - Apple actually removed support for decent font rendering on 1x DPI displays so I don't think it's fair to say they support multiple DPI anymore. Completely agree with getting out of Macos though!

by _abox 5y ago

lytedev 5y ago

Interesting! Why FreeBSD over Linux out of curiosity?

_abox 5y ago
Good question. I had several reasons. - I had used it until 7.0 in the past and missed the simplicity of having one single platform (rather than Linux with its kernel and the many distributions all doing things differently). - The excellent handbook - Almost devoid of corporate influence. Linux is being steered into the warm and fuzzy corporate domain. Many big players try to get their IP adopted by the Linux mainstream. Canonical with Snaps for example, Redhat with Gnome, etc. The big tech players are the biggest kernel contributors now. It moves from choices good for customers to the ones that are good for big tech. - Non-opinionated platform. Some distros are also becoming quite opinionated like Mac. I did try to play the Apple game for a while (like I said it was my daily driver since 10.2) but they kept annoying me more and more by deprecating things I used. I want choices again. - Stable platform but with rolling app packages. For example if KDE comes out with a new version I will see it usually a day or 2 later. - Couldn't find a Linux distro I really liked. I like minimalism but without Arch's elitism. Debian would have been the closest but I have bad experiences with major upgrades. What I would have preferred would be something like Alpine for the desktop. I looked at Adelie Linux which is exactly that but it was too premature. - The ports tree is really amazing. You're always able to change default package settings and recompile them - Jails are more powerful than linux containers, though they lack a framework a la docker. This is why I still use Linux on servers. So this was mainly it :) Unfortuantely running KDE did require installing some linuxisms like Dbus but overall it's not too bad.
- dschuessler 5y ago
  I am curious about your third point. Why do you consider project choices that are good for "big tech" to be a reason to turn away from Linux? I would have assumed that many contributions by corporations are in the end a net benefit for both corporations and customers or at least not detrimental to customers. Do you consider some corporate contributions to Linux to be harmful towards consumers? Or is it more a decision of principle?
  - _abox 5y ago
    I don't really believe in win-win anymore when it comes to mixing FOSS with Corporate. The need for monetisation always wins in the end for big corporations. Whether they openly admit it or not. For example: A lot of patches contributed by Microsoft are to make things run better on Azure and are irrelevant to most consumers. They view desktop Linux mainly as something that should exist under Windows (in my work there was a lot of pressure to move our development laptops to WSL2). They use their market position to push their views (think of the way they hassle third party browsers on Windows). Canonical is trying to make the snap store something they and only they control (it is not possible to run your own even now). RedHat with IBM took over CentOS just to remove it from the market as a free way to run RHEL. It's my belief that in the end they will always want something back, some kind of strings attached. The GPL is not sufficient to prevent that because it's purely about code, not about the business model behind it. Be it intellectual property, use of their services, data collection, whatever. And they will do whatever they can to gain a foothold over the competition, which is also involved in Linux. Even if a current operator is benign, they can always be taken over by a less scrupulous party, as happened many times in IT history. I don't want my OS be used as a pawn in that game. This is what I like about FreeBSD, the MIT license while being more open gives corporate interests less guarantees their contributed work won't be used by competitors and because of that they tend to ignore it. With the exception of Netflix which hasn't really done harm to the ecosystem because FreeBSD itself doesn't really factor into their products other than as a server platform. Even so, FreeBSD is not free from corporate influence nor are many of the apps I use. But it is more so than Linux. But yes it is more a personal principle than an explicit objection to some of the contributions made. I used to be a supporter of "big tech" influence a decade ago but too many things have happened. That was still in the days we believed Google really wouldn't be evil :) Now they rely on tracking and push clearly user-hostile tech like FLoC through standards bodies. As a result I've admittedly become more anti-corporate than the current situation warrants. But action = reaction. They have a lot to make up for. Apple was the best in this regard IMO because their business model was all about hardware, so they could afford to give software away for free. But they too are becoming more closed, with increased reliance on app store and iCloud revenue. They gave us stuff like OpenCL but lately everything they've come out with is closed (think Metal).

hakcermani 5y ago

Same here, but Ubunutu .. and the lack of upgradeability of storage.

Klonoar 5y ago

>and the ability to upgrade my hardware again. And... not modern wifi? I take it you must be on a Desktop in this case?

GekkePrutser 5y ago
Oh yes I use a desktop (intel NUC to be precise). I have no need for WiFi, I didn't even look at getting it going. I'm not a big fan of laptops at all for ergonomics. Most of my systems are desktops, the only laptop I have is a really minimal one for the makerspace (and I have one for work). I never said it was for everyone by the way. Just that it works for me! In general, things that work for everyone don't tend to work well for me at all, this is my biggest issue with Apple now because they make a product that is ultra-mainstream and very opinionated. You either have to go with the flow (which irritates me) or add a galore of thirdparty addon products to make it work your way which get broken in every major (and often minor) macOS release. I did try to go the second way for a while but it got too annoying with everything constantly breaking. From reading the article this thread is about, I see the author is going the same way (lots of addon products) and I wonder if they will also be caught by this in the future.
- Klonoar 5y ago
  Heh, no hate intended by my original comment - I'd run FreeBSD if I could get away with it, but I'm too wedded to macOS for work nowadays. Just saw the comment and wifi is the only true big holdup in FreeBSD that I'm aware of nowadays, the rest can be... worked around, for whatever definition you have.

brian-armstrong 5y ago

Nitpick here - Apple actually removed support for decent font rendering on 1x DPI displays so I don't think it's fair to say they support multiple DPI anymore. Completely agree with getting out of Macos though!