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The one thing keeping me on MacOS is that it is "*nix that works". I have never found Ubuntu / Linux to be as stable; worrying about updates breaking things, up

The one thing keeping me on MacOS is that it is "*nix that works". I have never found Ubuntu / Linux to be as stable; worrying about updates breaking things, updates indeed breaking things, drivers randomly stopping working, googling in desperation for half-baked fixes online, randomly trying different options in some dotfile until stuff works etc. Mac just works; maybe there are features that Linux would give me, but as I spend my time between the terminal and the browser, I'm not sure I'd notice much. I think I'm not alone in this approach; I wonder if this project has the change to be as rock-solid as Apple's offerings. If not, I'm guessing it's not for me.

croh 4y ago
I don't know what is the last time you used linux but lately there is great improvements in user experience. I know non-techie people using Linux Mint/ubuntu without any hassels.
- butterNaN 4y ago
  I'm the de facto IT support for my family and neighbours. They are using Pop OS for about 3 years now. It has been great from both their UX and my maintenance perspective. My father even did the 20.10 to 21.04 LTS upgrade himself! I highly doubt if windows would've been as smooth an experience. (Macs are out of question for us since none of us are rich!)
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Windows upgrades go so smoothly they've been repackaged as updates. They're also highly fault resistant by default with automated rollbacks out of the box. I'm not saying Pop is bad, but Windows upgrades are super easy and user friendly (if you ignore the privacy risks that come with using Windows). I wish common Linux distros would pack something like system restore by default already! I know these tools (based on BTRFS/ZFS snapshots) exist and work great, but they need to be set up manually and most people won't.
- rich_sasha 4y ago
  I'm writing this from my Ubuntu desktop (LTE). Just a few months ago some update broke everything (graphics). Then somehow I fixed it, but it broke again on restart. It took best part of a week for me to fix. You might say it wasn't the best distribution for reliability, or that graphics with NVidia are always an issue etc. but the fact remains that, for me, for an OS to "just work out of the box", MacOS is much better. [I'm also not a Linux n00b, been using it for over a decade, though not an expert for sure]
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    So basically you played with fire(nvidia) and got burned. There is one way to run nvidia stuff on Linux and have a decent experience: run a distro that actually support and has partnership with nvidia, which mean a distro like Redhat Enterprise Linux. It has long term support too. It is the same with Apple or windows if you start using shitty drivers from a shady brand you will run into issues at some point.
    - rich_sasha 4y ago
      Well, that's one way to look at it: you need to carefully pick your distro, make sure it's compatible with your hardware, and so on. My way is rather: I don't want to even pollute my brain cache with that. I want a Computer with an Operating System that Just Work. Because for me tinkering with the setup of my desktop is not fun, the fun bit is what I do with a properly working computer. I'll pay a premium to Apple for that (though, mind you, MBP is competitively priced with similarly-performant laptops), and I'd pay that same premium to a laptop+Linux provider. Except... my confidence in the latter working well is lower. Because apart from fixing broken graphics drivers, I've also had to, in my days, debug: - package managers that somehow got themselves into a bad state - fight with linkers when trying to build fairly benign stuff on my desktop - don't even mention printing and many other things I don't even remember anymore.
      - prmoustache 4y ago
        >Well, that's one way to look at it: you need to carefully pick your distro, make sure it's compatible with your hardware, and so on. > >My way is rather: I don't want to even pollute my brain cache with that. I That is exactly what you did by choosing Apple. If you go on the redhat website and choose certified system you can pick your hardware from any vendor the same way you choose your Apple machine on the Apple store.
stolen_biscuit 4y ago
Interesting - my experience has actually been the exact opposite. I always hesitate to update my Mac OS machine as it will inevitably break or misbehave, whereas I rarely run into issues upgrading my Ubuntu machine.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Crazy how much experiences vary… been riding the wave of macOS updates for years, always running the latest and breakage is rare, temporary, third party in nature, and is usually a result of the dev of the app in question not moving off of some deprecated API despite warnings that it would be getting removed in the near future.
  - themadturk 4y ago
    In my experience, even betas are generally well-behaved. My MBA is only a "personal" machine, but none of the beta bugs I've encountered in either Monterey or Ventura have been debilitating. Standard OS updates have been virtually unnoticeable for me.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
prmoustache 4y ago
I hear a lot of people saying that. What I find out mostly is their last experience of linux on a desktop dates back to the early 2000 and or crappy distros like ubuntu.
- adastra22 4y ago
  What distro works more reliably than ubuntu?
  - kristjank 4y ago
    Literally every one, including Fedora, openSUSE (both Leap and Tumbleweed), Debian, Linux Mint, Manjaro, Void, Arch and Gentoo with their respective derivatives. Ubuntu is a mess that introduces config-breaking changes every release and rides the already existing market. If Canonical tried to release their products nowadays without their track record and existing user base, they would never succeed. The peak Linux experience for a Just Werx focused end user is probably openSUSE Tumbleweed on KDE or XFCE. Batteries included, fast and extremely hard to break package manager, YaST2 configuration manager, and lots of user repositories.
    - adastra22 4y ago
      Definitely not my experience. I install an Ubuntu LTS release and I get 5 years of support with updates that never break anything. No doubt people have issues, but I've never encountered a problem during a security update that was not caused by my own previous mucking around. Rolling releases, on the other hand, are a nightmare for this, and smaller distros never work out of the box in my experience. If you're saying upgrading between releases causes problems.. well that's true but not how I read the original statement, and not something I particularly care about. Each release is a different product and there's no reason to update until support is dropped on the one you're currently using.
    - trebbble 4y ago
      Linux was my main desktop OS for about a decade. About four years of that on Gentoo, so yes, I do actually know what I'm doing, didn't just pointy-clicky install to an Ubuntu desktop and never learn how to actually use or configure it. I dropped Linux around 2012 for macOS (OSX, at the time) after I was forced to use that at work and, after about a month of getting used to it, realized what I'd been missing. I try desktop Linux again every year or two[0]. It's always just as bad as it's always been. Way more application crashes than I'm used to on macOS, jankiness galore, all the stuff I used to avoid doing out of habit because it often breaks things on Linux (and to some extent also on Windows) but am now used to doing because it's fine on macOS is still often a bad on Linux (e.g. drag-n-drop actions). Lots of little annoyances like the default US English keyboard layout being crap for no reason on most distros, which, sure, I can change it, but why not have a good default? Still nothing as good as Preview on any platform other than macOS, AFAIK, which hurts quite a bit. I think there was about a two-year high point in the late '00s when Ubuntu was just curating good defaults and smoothing things out and the future looked really bright, then Ubuntu rapidly deteriorated and it's back to how it had been before then, now, just shinier because of all the mostly-mediocre-or-bad GUI changes in the major DEs since then. My next attempt, I'll probably just shoot for the holy grail of FreeBSD on the desktop. Linux seems like a lost cause at this point. May not be any better but a lot about it sure is way saner than Linux-land, so, worth a shot. Great on servers, certainly. Not expecting much because it's mostly the same as Linux in the GUI department, though. [0] Last time: Ubuntu and Fedora (I don't like rpm-based distros, but thought I'd give them another shot), plus tried Void for the first time which was pretty great actually but I just don't enjoy fiddling with configs anymore so, it's a no for me.
sharikous 4y ago
I agree but the *nix part became less and less significant. Bundled Unix tools are ancient. Compiling your own kernel is almost an anathema (it is possible but you will have nonstop hurdles, you will lose a lot of features and you will have to fight the security system too many times to remain sane). Even the UI conventions that let you use the keyboard instead of the mouse are now often broken by Apple itself (it impacts power users more than impaired people since accessibility features are still good). And no containers - those require you to run a different kernel on a VM. Frankly I feel that macOS went back to being like Mac OS 9 in a lot of aspects - it's just enormously bigger and has a proper foundation but the UI is again mouse centric and proprietary and the system is more tightly coupled than ever with the hardware

croh 4y ago

I don't know what is the last time you used linux but lately there is great improvements in user experience. I know non-techie people using Linux Mint/ubuntu without any hassels.

butterNaN 4y ago
I'm the de facto IT support for my family and neighbours. They are using Pop OS for about 3 years now. It has been great from both their UX and my maintenance perspective. My father even did the 20.10 to 21.04 LTS upgrade himself! I highly doubt if windows would've been as smooth an experience. (Macs are out of question for us since none of us are rich!)
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Windows upgrades go so smoothly they've been repackaged as updates. They're also highly fault resistant by default with automated rollbacks out of the box. I'm not saying Pop is bad, but Windows upgrades are super easy and user friendly (if you ignore the privacy risks that come with using Windows). I wish common Linux distros would pack something like system restore by default already! I know these tools (based on BTRFS/ZFS snapshots) exist and work great, but they need to be set up manually and most people won't.
rich_sasha 4y ago
I'm writing this from my Ubuntu desktop (LTE). Just a few months ago some update broke everything (graphics). Then somehow I fixed it, but it broke again on restart. It took best part of a week for me to fix. You might say it wasn't the best distribution for reliability, or that graphics with NVidia are always an issue etc. but the fact remains that, for me, for an OS to "just work out of the box", MacOS is much better. [I'm also not a Linux n00b, been using it for over a decade, though not an expert for sure]
- prmoustache 4y ago
  So basically you played with fire(nvidia) and got burned. There is one way to run nvidia stuff on Linux and have a decent experience: run a distro that actually support and has partnership with nvidia, which mean a distro like Redhat Enterprise Linux. It has long term support too. It is the same with Apple or windows if you start using shitty drivers from a shady brand you will run into issues at some point.
  - rich_sasha 4y ago
    Well, that's one way to look at it: you need to carefully pick your distro, make sure it's compatible with your hardware, and so on. My way is rather: I don't want to even pollute my brain cache with that. I want a Computer with an Operating System that Just Work. Because for me tinkering with the setup of my desktop is not fun, the fun bit is what I do with a properly working computer. I'll pay a premium to Apple for that (though, mind you, MBP is competitively priced with similarly-performant laptops), and I'd pay that same premium to a laptop+Linux provider. Except... my confidence in the latter working well is lower. Because apart from fixing broken graphics drivers, I've also had to, in my days, debug: - package managers that somehow got themselves into a bad state - fight with linkers when trying to build fairly benign stuff on my desktop - don't even mention printing and many other things I don't even remember anymore.
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      >Well, that's one way to look at it: you need to carefully pick your distro, make sure it's compatible with your hardware, and so on. > >My way is rather: I don't want to even pollute my brain cache with that. I That is exactly what you did by choosing Apple. If you go on the redhat website and choose certified system you can pick your hardware from any vendor the same way you choose your Apple machine on the Apple store.

stolen_biscuit 4y ago

Interesting - my experience has actually been the exact opposite. I always hesitate to update my Mac OS machine as it will inevitably break or misbehave, whereas I rarely run into issues upgrading my Ubuntu machine.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
Crazy how much experiences vary… been riding the wave of macOS updates for years, always running the latest and breakage is rare, temporary, third party in nature, and is usually a result of the dev of the app in question not moving off of some deprecated API despite warnings that it would be getting removed in the near future.
- themadturk 4y ago
  In my experience, even betas are generally well-behaved. My MBA is only a "personal" machine, but none of the beta bugs I've encountered in either Monterey or Ventura have been debilitating. Standard OS updates have been virtually unnoticeable for me.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

prmoustache 4y ago

I hear a lot of people saying that. What I find out mostly is their last experience of linux on a desktop dates back to the early 2000 and or crappy distros like ubuntu.

adastra22 4y ago
What distro works more reliably than ubuntu?
- kristjank 4y ago
  Literally every one, including Fedora, openSUSE (both Leap and Tumbleweed), Debian, Linux Mint, Manjaro, Void, Arch and Gentoo with their respective derivatives. Ubuntu is a mess that introduces config-breaking changes every release and rides the already existing market. If Canonical tried to release their products nowadays without their track record and existing user base, they would never succeed. The peak Linux experience for a Just Werx focused end user is probably openSUSE Tumbleweed on KDE or XFCE. Batteries included, fast and extremely hard to break package manager, YaST2 configuration manager, and lots of user repositories.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Definitely not my experience. I install an Ubuntu LTS release and I get 5 years of support with updates that never break anything. No doubt people have issues, but I've never encountered a problem during a security update that was not caused by my own previous mucking around. Rolling releases, on the other hand, are a nightmare for this, and smaller distros never work out of the box in my experience. If you're saying upgrading between releases causes problems.. well that's true but not how I read the original statement, and not something I particularly care about. Each release is a different product and there's no reason to update until support is dropped on the one you're currently using.
  - trebbble 4y ago
    Linux was my main desktop OS for about a decade. About four years of that on Gentoo, so yes, I do actually know what I'm doing, didn't just pointy-clicky install to an Ubuntu desktop and never learn how to actually use or configure it. I dropped Linux around 2012 for macOS (OSX, at the time) after I was forced to use that at work and, after about a month of getting used to it, realized what I'd been missing. I try desktop Linux again every year or two[0]. It's always just as bad as it's always been. Way more application crashes than I'm used to on macOS, jankiness galore, all the stuff I used to avoid doing out of habit because it often breaks things on Linux (and to some extent also on Windows) but am now used to doing because it's fine on macOS is still often a bad on Linux (e.g. drag-n-drop actions). Lots of little annoyances like the default US English keyboard layout being crap for no reason on most distros, which, sure, I can change it, but why not have a good default? Still nothing as good as Preview on any platform other than macOS, AFAIK, which hurts quite a bit. I think there was about a two-year high point in the late '00s when Ubuntu was just curating good defaults and smoothing things out and the future looked really bright, then Ubuntu rapidly deteriorated and it's back to how it had been before then, now, just shinier because of all the mostly-mediocre-or-bad GUI changes in the major DEs since then. My next attempt, I'll probably just shoot for the holy grail of FreeBSD on the desktop. Linux seems like a lost cause at this point. May not be any better but a lot about it sure is way saner than Linux-land, so, worth a shot. Great on servers, certainly. Not expecting much because it's mostly the same as Linux in the GUI department, though. [0] Last time: Ubuntu and Fedora (I don't like rpm-based distros, but thought I'd give them another shot), plus tried Void for the first time which was pretty great actually but I just don't enjoy fiddling with configs anymore so, it's a no for me.

sharikous 4y ago

I agree but the *nix part became less and less significant. Bundled Unix tools are ancient. Compiling your own kernel is almost an anathema (it is possible but you will have nonstop hurdles, you will lose a lot of features and you will have to fight the security system too many times to remain sane). Even the UI conventions that let you use the keyboard instead of the mouse are now often broken by Apple itself (it impacts power users more than impaired people since accessibility features are still good). And no containers - those require you to run a different kernel on a VM. Frankly I feel that macOS went back to being like Mac OS 9 in a lot of aspects - it's just enormously bigger and has a proper foundation but the UI is again mouse centric and proprietary and the system is more tightly coupled than ever with the hardware