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The catch is, with enough 3rd party apps MacOS can do all that stuff but no amount of 3rd party apps and utilities can make Ubuntu match the MacOS experience. T

by mrtksn 5y ago

The catch is, with enough 3rd party apps MacOS can do all that stuff but no amount of 3rd party apps and utilities can make Ubuntu match the MacOS experience. To match macOS on Ubuntu you will need a full time Linux guru as PA to smooth things out for your. You will need another one for the after hours. Therefore, Ubuntu is great for really rich people or people who need that one thing that Ubuntu excels at and nothing else. It's essentially the same issue with iPhone v.s. Android. There's always some Android phone that can do one thing better than the best iPhone out there and to have an overall better-than-iPhone experience you need to use a dozen Android devices all the time(buying and maintaining multiple devices is unrealistic for most of the people, you need to be really rich and have a PA to manage all that for your. Another PA for the extra hours).

Matl 5y ago
As someone who uses both, I have to say I am not sure what's so special about the 'macOS experience'. I mean the desktop is not even a decent window manager imo, I have to get something like PathFinder for a decent file manager etc, yes there are some nice apps for macOS but it's not like the OS experience itself is some unbeatable benchmark.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Good for you. Good experience essentially means good defaults, stuff work reliably as expected and when things break you fix them easily. That usually require good edge case handling and justified restrictions. Notice how OP complains about not being able to change the default font and text size? Well, he is technically right but the thing is that Apple has already addressed the reason behind changing fonts by designing a UI that works well with all kind of resolutions. You don't have instances of extremely large or extremely small text or buttons, for example. It's all polished very well so there's no reason for someone to need to tune font size or font face. Sure, some people have visual impairments or use their computers differently therefore they can choose a "UI zoom level" instead of resolution and font sizes. This works very well for most people and that's why most people are very happy with their device. For people who don't find this behaviour useful for them, there's Ubuntu, Windows, ChromeOS etc. I see a lot of Android screenshots with barely legible fonts as system font. Some things are better when left to professionals and for those who disagree, there's Android of course.
  - Matl 5y ago
    Yes, some of these make sense. I agree with you on fonts. On the other hand what makes the windows snapping behavior/lack of thereof without fiddling a good default?
    - mrtksn 5y ago
      Yep, I also think that macOS can use some improvements on the window management department but there are very good tools to fix that.
aulin 5y ago
> no amount of 3rd party apps and utilities can make Ubuntu match the MacOS experience What kind of experience are we talking about?
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Stuff designed with workflows in mind and work well almost all the time in a consistent fashion and when they don't, there's an easy fix kind of experiences.
peatmoss 5y ago
Different strokes for different folks. I run a pretty vanilla Ubuntu on a desktop at home, and macOS on an M1 laptop at work. The out of the box experience on Ubuntu / Gnome these days feels better to me for the things I do: web browser, terminal, emacs, and perhaps an unfair addition-Steam games. The macOS experience out of the box turns out to be pretty rough in some places, and is untweakable. I recently gave up on my ergonomic trackball and bought a generic mouse because making the scroll buttons work in macOS was impossible. I took a long hiatus from Linux to run exclusively macOS until just a few years ago, then I started running a mix again. If I have to run a laptop, nobody beats Apple on hardware. But macOS is the price I pay to have a portable that gets good battery life. It's a compromise. By contrast, if I could had a permanent desk at work that I could have a desktop computer at, I'd much prefer that.

by mrtksn 5y ago

Matl 5y ago

As someone who uses both, I have to say I am not sure what's so special about the 'macOS experience'. I mean the desktop is not even a decent window manager imo, I have to get something like PathFinder for a decent file manager etc, yes there are some nice apps for macOS but it's not like the OS experience itself is some unbeatable benchmark.

mrtksn 5y ago
Good for you. Good experience essentially means good defaults, stuff work reliably as expected and when things break you fix them easily. That usually require good edge case handling and justified restrictions. Notice how OP complains about not being able to change the default font and text size? Well, he is technically right but the thing is that Apple has already addressed the reason behind changing fonts by designing a UI that works well with all kind of resolutions. You don't have instances of extremely large or extremely small text or buttons, for example. It's all polished very well so there's no reason for someone to need to tune font size or font face. Sure, some people have visual impairments or use their computers differently therefore they can choose a "UI zoom level" instead of resolution and font sizes. This works very well for most people and that's why most people are very happy with their device. For people who don't find this behaviour useful for them, there's Ubuntu, Windows, ChromeOS etc. I see a lot of Android screenshots with barely legible fonts as system font. Some things are better when left to professionals and for those who disagree, there's Android of course.
- Matl 5y ago
  Yes, some of these make sense. I agree with you on fonts. On the other hand what makes the windows snapping behavior/lack of thereof without fiddling a good default?
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    Yep, I also think that macOS can use some improvements on the window management department but there are very good tools to fix that.

aulin 5y ago

> no amount of 3rd party apps and utilities can make Ubuntu match the MacOS experience What kind of experience are we talking about?

mrtksn 5y ago
Stuff designed with workflows in mind and work well almost all the time in a consistent fashion and when they don't, there's an easy fix kind of experiences.

peatmoss 5y ago

Different strokes for different folks. I run a pretty vanilla Ubuntu on a desktop at home, and macOS on an M1 laptop at work. The out of the box experience on Ubuntu / Gnome these days feels better to me for the things I do: web browser, terminal, emacs, and perhaps an unfair addition-Steam games. The macOS experience out of the box turns out to be pretty rough in some places, and is untweakable. I recently gave up on my ergonomic trackball and bought a generic mouse because making the scroll buttons work in macOS was impossible. I took a long hiatus from Linux to run exclusively macOS until just a few years ago, then I started running a mix again. If I have to run a laptop, nobody beats Apple on hardware. But macOS is the price I pay to have a portable that gets good battery life. It's a compromise. By contrast, if I could had a permanent desk at work that I could have a desktop computer at, I'd much prefer that.