6 ms·

Just get a MacBook Air. It won’t constantly try and stop you from doing work, unlike windows or Linux (on a laptop). Dollar for dollar, the M-series chips are

Just get a MacBook Air. It won’t constantly try and stop you from doing work, unlike windows or Linux (on a laptop). Dollar for dollar, the M-series chips are quite powerful.

christophilus 4y ago
Linux hasn’t gotten in the way of my work at all. When did you last use it?
thefz 4y ago
"Just get a Macbook" isn't really a solution. Sub-1000€ customer grade hardware is plenty capable for a lot of tasks people might want, and some other users want the ability to run the OS of their choice too. Personally I consider the modern OSX interface a huge hindrance to get any decent work done, compared to Windows or any Linux with a DE.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  If you just need a computer to connect to the internet and occasionally entertain yourself, you can get an OK looking laptop for $500AUD or about $300USD/300EUR. Never mind sub 1000EUR. That’s kind of an insane price when you think about it. And it is too good to be true, because they load it up with junk. But people aren’t thinking about the software. They see a half decent looking machine for very little money and bite because they don’t want to spend more.
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    I bought Dell Latitude 3410 for $600. It was loaded with Ubuntu with zero bloatware as far as I can judge. Just some Dell logos and some module blacklists. I upgraded it with SSD and RAM, replaced Ubuntu with Fedora and now it's a little beast which can back me up if my main laptop would die.
- sbuk 4y ago
  In order for that consumer-grade hardware to be that cheap, the vendors add bloatware from other vendors to augment the loss of profits by selling at close to cost, or at least a severely limited margin. This has a knock on effect of making what would be decent enough as a simple daily driver have extremely poor performance.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
GP's comment specifically says, > 1. I want to be able to run my preferred free software. and Apple in general is the chief abuser of this user freedom, less so on Mac devices, but extremely so on iPhone/iOS devices: it allows to run only vetted software, often against the interests of the users, and, in some cases, retroactively altering the deals [0], so "doing a market research" prior to buying the device, as many regular HN users suggest, won't really help. [0]: Pray they don't alter it any further.
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  Apple just recently removed from AppStore one of the most popular map application (2GIS). It contains absolutely unique information for my city, lots of reviews, etc. It's hard to imagine my life without this app nowadays. Now I'm thinking about Android phone, as my iPhone 8 started to throttle and I think it's time to upgrade.
  - maratc 4y ago
    To put this in context: the developer of 2GIS is a Russian company with headquarters in Novosibirsk, owned mostly by Sberbank. They have most likely been sanctioned due to Russian invasion of Ukraine. I don't think Apple had any choice in the matter of removing it.
    - wink 4y ago
      True, but on any other platform you'd just sideload it. State sanctions do not apply to people doing things in private, for the most part.
    - vbezhenar 4y ago
      Apple has had choice to allow side-loading. And some rumors that they're working on it is the only thing that keeps me interested in this platform, honestly. That's not the problem with Android, for example. Google can remove all they want from their Play Store, installing APK is easy. PS it's funny that Europe pushing for side-loading could potentially help with by-passing sanctions.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hjgjhyuhy 4y ago
Linux on laptop works really well on older devices in particular. Zero problems so far with Mint on old Thinkpad.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  Got a 12th gen LG gram, literally everything just works out of the box with Fedora. Old hardware not necessary for Linux.
  - chickenimprint 4y ago
    Arch on a 5000 series AMD 2in1. Even the pen works.
flohofwoe 4y ago
Macs just have different annoyances. Ever since the notarization crap was added, programs randomly either start instantly or take several second. For some reason this randomness is even more infuriating to me than being constantly slow. Another probably unrelated thing: It takes up to 10 seconds on my new M1 Mac for the first debug session to start in Xcode. Of course this is not the sort of evil malware the article is about, but for me as a user it's just as frustrating to wait for anything on a 21st century computer. An M1 Mac is so fast compared to a 30 years old computer that everything should always happen instantly. All in all I like my Mac better than my Windows PC or Linux laptop, but Apple software is just regressing a bit slower than the others.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  While I broadly agree that modern Macs "have other annoyances", if this is the one causing you grief, you can get rid of it in 30 seconds. `sudo spctl --master-disable` Turning off Gatekeeper also turns off the notarization checks.
- josephg 4y ago
  I have a running theory about software developers: the average programmer makes code just fast enough that it doesn’t feel slow on their own machine. Of course, us software engineers usually buy very expensive computers! The end result is that the average software will always run slowly on the average hardware, forever, no matter how fast hardware gets. It’s a tragedy and I hate it. I feel like software engineers need “slow CPU thursdays” or something, where every Thursday your cpu is intentionally throttled down to run at the speed of a below average user’s computer. If we don’t feel our user’s pain, we will never understand it. (Though this would only take off if we could whitelist the compiler somehow. Hm! I wonder how you’d implement that!)
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    > would only take off if we could whitelist the compiler somehow Well, a slow compiler means you write less code and pull in fewer dependencies to solve a problem, win-win ;)
- 4y ago
dariosalvi78 4y ago
Mac also comes with all sort of crap installed you cannot get rid of. It may be a bit less intrusive than Microsoft, but it's basically the same strategy, just that they control the hardware and you don't notice it that much. Linux gives you full customizability on the other hand, but it's not for everybody (yes, in theory there are some very simple and usable distros, but in practice users often need software that is not available on them, like Office).
- josephg 4y ago
  At least a modern Mac is smooth and usable out of the box - which is more than I can say for just about any big brand windows laptop you can buy today. It feels like theft when a windows laptop is advertised based on its CPU, except when you take it out of the box 60% of that cpu is consumed all the time with some terrible HP bloatware or something. What an utterly terrible experience.
- aikinai 4y ago
  What crap that you can’t get rid of does a Mac come with?
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    Most of the preinstalled apps (Home, Maps, Siri, Stocks, ...) cannot be uninstalled by dragging them from the Applications folder to the Trashcan. I don't have any use for any for those apps, so I would really like to get rid of them instead of cluttering up my Applications folder. For some others it works (for instance Numbers and GarageBand). The randomness (why can some preinstalled apps be uninstalled, but other not) is pretty close to a dark pattern.
    - yurishimo 4y ago
      I don't think you can uninstall Cortana or Calculator from Windows. The stocks app I will grant is a little weird. The uninstallable apps on macOS also are never required to have open and running. So yea, it's 4 or 5 extra items in your main ~/Applications folder, but that seems like a small price to pay for all of the other benefits.
vbezhenar 4y ago
My Macbook spends first 10 minutes after boot by trashing CPU and disk with some sketchy mds_stores process. I have no idea what it does it do. Every single time. Looks like some kind of indexing for me which I didn't ask for (and I tried to turn related options off which didn't help al all).
- mtwshngtn 4y ago
  Spotlight indexing (for Spotlight search: ⌘+Space). In System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, you can add folders or disks to prevent Spotlight from indexing them.
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    I turned it off, it did not help. It still starts on boot and spends minutes indexing who knows what. I never use this Spotlight feature. I guess it looks for forbidden files on my disk, I heard that Apple does that and you need CPU to compute hashes.
    - sbuk 4y ago
      I'd get that checked out. It's definitely not normal behaviour.
      - ryandrake 4y ago
        FWIW my very expensive 2017 iMac has the same behavior. CPU pegged 24/7 by "mds" and "mdworker_shared". Just opening Activity Manager right now, I see about 20 mdworker_shared processes, each claiming ~11% CPU. I think disabling Spotlight get this under control, but then again, I like and use Spotlight. Surely Apple is capable of writing software that doesn't need to run full blast constantly.
        sbuk 4y ago
        Just checked mine - 13" MPB 2018 - just booted no mds, mdworker_shared initially at 1.7% cpu now process has exited.
jonjon16 4y ago
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
I hate to say it, but this is the correct answer. iPhone's are great as well. I used to not understand why people loved Apple so much. Now I understand that Apple just works when Windows/Android often don't, and iOS/MacOS are generally more user-friendly for non-tech people.
- MaKey 4y ago
  Except that in cases where Apple devices don't just work you are screwed. A few years back a friend of mine had her MacBook Air's system language suddenly change and wasn't able to change it back as the option panel to do so just froze each time. I had to do an extensive Google search as most answers I found were generic variations of "bring it to an Apple shop" or "reinstall and use a backup" (which we did, didn't fix the issue). In the end I had to edit some config file to switch the language back. Safari's language was still wrong afterwards, but she could live with that.
  - christophilus 4y ago
    That does suck, but one of Apple’s strengths is that you can walk into an Apple Store and have stuff like that fixed- usually quickly and often for free.
hocuspocus 4y ago
You must not use macOS a lot if you think it doesn't get in the way.
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  Every single workday for over a decade. Mac is never the issue. The butterfly keyboards were a disaster but I got those replaced with overnight shipping both ways.
  - hocuspocus 4y ago
    Well, good for you. Not my experience. Last thing that bit me, in a long list of annoyances and bugs: https://www.reddit.com/r/macbook/comments/ehcjya/comment/fcm03xn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/macbook/comments/ehcjya/comment/fcm... As for hardware failures, again, good for you. Here it's more like 3-4 days before getting it fixed or replaced.

Just get a MacBook Air. It won’t constantly try and stop you from doing work, unlike windows or Linux (on a laptop). Dollar for dollar, the M-series chips are quite powerful.

christophilus 4y ago

Linux hasn’t gotten in the way of my work at all. When did you last use it?

thefz 4y ago

"Just get a Macbook" isn't really a solution. Sub-1000€ customer grade hardware is plenty capable for a lot of tasks people might want, and some other users want the ability to run the OS of their choice too. Personally I consider the modern OSX interface a huge hindrance to get any decent work done, compared to Windows or any Linux with a DE.

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
If you just need a computer to connect to the internet and occasionally entertain yourself, you can get an OK looking laptop for $500AUD or about $300USD/300EUR. Never mind sub 1000EUR. That’s kind of an insane price when you think about it. And it is too good to be true, because they load it up with junk. But people aren’t thinking about the software. They see a half decent looking machine for very little money and bite because they don’t want to spend more.
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  I bought Dell Latitude 3410 for $600. It was loaded with Ubuntu with zero bloatware as far as I can judge. Just some Dell logos and some module blacklists. I upgraded it with SSD and RAM, replaced Ubuntu with Fedora and now it's a little beast which can back me up if my main laptop would die.
sbuk 4y ago
In order for that consumer-grade hardware to be that cheap, the vendors add bloatware from other vendors to augment the loss of profits by selling at close to cost, or at least a severely limited margin. This has a knock on effect of making what would be decent enough as a simple daily driver have extremely poor performance.

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

GP's comment specifically says, > 1. I want to be able to run my preferred free software. and Apple in general is the chief abuser of this user freedom, less so on Mac devices, but extremely so on iPhone/iOS devices: it allows to run only vetted software, often against the interests of the users, and, in some cases, retroactively altering the deals [0], so "doing a market research" prior to buying the device, as many regular HN users suggest, won't really help. [0]: Pray they don't alter it any further.

vbezhenar 4y ago
Apple just recently removed from AppStore one of the most popular map application (2GIS). It contains absolutely unique information for my city, lots of reviews, etc. It's hard to imagine my life without this app nowadays. Now I'm thinking about Android phone, as my iPhone 8 started to throttle and I think it's time to upgrade.
- maratc 4y ago
  To put this in context: the developer of 2GIS is a Russian company with headquarters in Novosibirsk, owned mostly by Sberbank. They have most likely been sanctioned due to Russian invasion of Ukraine. I don't think Apple had any choice in the matter of removing it.
  - wink 4y ago
    True, but on any other platform you'd just sideload it. State sanctions do not apply to people doing things in private, for the most part.
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    Apple has had choice to allow side-loading. And some rumors that they're working on it is the only thing that keeps me interested in this platform, honestly. That's not the problem with Android, for example. Google can remove all they want from their Play Store, installing APK is easy. PS it's funny that Europe pushing for side-loading could potentially help with by-passing sanctions.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hjgjhyuhy 4y ago

Linux on laptop works really well on older devices in particular. Zero problems so far with Mint on old Thinkpad.

formerly_proven 4y ago
Got a 12th gen LG gram, literally everything just works out of the box with Fedora. Old hardware not necessary for Linux.
- chickenimprint 4y ago
  Arch on a 5000 series AMD 2in1. Even the pen works.

flohofwoe 4y ago

Macs just have different annoyances. Ever since the notarization crap was added, programs randomly either start instantly or take several second. For some reason this randomness is even more infuriating to me than being constantly slow. Another probably unrelated thing: It takes up to 10 seconds on my new M1 Mac for the first debug session to start in Xcode. Of course this is not the sort of evil malware the article is about, but for me as a user it's just as frustrating to wait for anything on a 21st century computer. An M1 Mac is so fast compared to a 30 years old computer that everything should always happen instantly. All in all I like my Mac better than my Windows PC or Linux laptop, but Apple software is just regressing a bit slower than the others.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
While I broadly agree that modern Macs "have other annoyances", if this is the one causing you grief, you can get rid of it in 30 seconds. `sudo spctl --master-disable` Turning off Gatekeeper also turns off the notarization checks.
josephg 4y ago
I have a running theory about software developers: the average programmer makes code just fast enough that it doesn’t feel slow on their own machine. Of course, us software engineers usually buy very expensive computers! The end result is that the average software will always run slowly on the average hardware, forever, no matter how fast hardware gets. It’s a tragedy and I hate it. I feel like software engineers need “slow CPU thursdays” or something, where every Thursday your cpu is intentionally throttled down to run at the speed of a below average user’s computer. If we don’t feel our user’s pain, we will never understand it. (Though this would only take off if we could whitelist the compiler somehow. Hm! I wonder how you’d implement that!)
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  > would only take off if we could whitelist the compiler somehow Well, a slow compiler means you write less code and pull in fewer dependencies to solve a problem, win-win ;)
4y ago

dariosalvi78 4y ago

Mac also comes with all sort of crap installed you cannot get rid of. It may be a bit less intrusive than Microsoft, but it's basically the same strategy, just that they control the hardware and you don't notice it that much. Linux gives you full customizability on the other hand, but it's not for everybody (yes, in theory there are some very simple and usable distros, but in practice users often need software that is not available on them, like Office).

josephg 4y ago
At least a modern Mac is smooth and usable out of the box - which is more than I can say for just about any big brand windows laptop you can buy today. It feels like theft when a windows laptop is advertised based on its CPU, except when you take it out of the box 60% of that cpu is consumed all the time with some terrible HP bloatware or something. What an utterly terrible experience.
aikinai 4y ago
What crap that you can’t get rid of does a Mac come with?
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  Most of the preinstalled apps (Home, Maps, Siri, Stocks, ...) cannot be uninstalled by dragging them from the Applications folder to the Trashcan. I don't have any use for any for those apps, so I would really like to get rid of them instead of cluttering up my Applications folder. For some others it works (for instance Numbers and GarageBand). The randomness (why can some preinstalled apps be uninstalled, but other not) is pretty close to a dark pattern.
  - yurishimo 4y ago
    I don't think you can uninstall Cortana or Calculator from Windows. The stocks app I will grant is a little weird. The uninstallable apps on macOS also are never required to have open and running. So yea, it's 4 or 5 extra items in your main ~/Applications folder, but that seems like a small price to pay for all of the other benefits.

vbezhenar 4y ago

My Macbook spends first 10 minutes after boot by trashing CPU and disk with some sketchy mds_stores process. I have no idea what it does it do. Every single time. Looks like some kind of indexing for me which I didn't ask for (and I tried to turn related options off which didn't help al all).

mtwshngtn 4y ago
Spotlight indexing (for Spotlight search: ⌘+Space). In System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, you can add folders or disks to prevent Spotlight from indexing them.
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  I turned it off, it did not help. It still starts on boot and spends minutes indexing who knows what. I never use this Spotlight feature. I guess it looks for forbidden files on my disk, I heard that Apple does that and you need CPU to compute hashes.
  - sbuk 4y ago
    I'd get that checked out. It's definitely not normal behaviour.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      FWIW my very expensive 2017 iMac has the same behavior. CPU pegged 24/7 by "mds" and "mdworker_shared". Just opening Activity Manager right now, I see about 20 mdworker_shared processes, each claiming ~11% CPU. I think disabling Spotlight get this under control, but then again, I like and use Spotlight. Surely Apple is capable of writing software that doesn't need to run full blast constantly.
      - sbuk 4y ago
        Just checked mine - 13" MPB 2018 - just booted no mds, mdworker_shared initially at 1.7% cpu now process has exited.

jonjon16 4y ago

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

I hate to say it, but this is the correct answer. iPhone's are great as well. I used to not understand why people loved Apple so much. Now I understand that Apple just works when Windows/Android often don't, and iOS/MacOS are generally more user-friendly for non-tech people.

MaKey 4y ago
Except that in cases where Apple devices don't just work you are screwed. A few years back a friend of mine had her MacBook Air's system language suddenly change and wasn't able to change it back as the option panel to do so just froze each time. I had to do an extensive Google search as most answers I found were generic variations of "bring it to an Apple shop" or "reinstall and use a backup" (which we did, didn't fix the issue). In the end I had to edit some config file to switch the language back. Safari's language was still wrong afterwards, but she could live with that.
- christophilus 4y ago
  That does suck, but one of Apple’s strengths is that you can walk into an Apple Store and have stuff like that fixed- usually quickly and often for free.

hocuspocus 4y ago

You must not use macOS a lot if you think it doesn't get in the way.

geraldwhen 4y ago
Every single workday for over a decade. Mac is never the issue. The butterfly keyboards were a disaster but I got those replaced with overnight shipping both ways.
- hocuspocus 4y ago
  Well, good for you. Not my experience. Last thing that bit me, in a long list of annoyances and bugs: https://www.reddit.com/r/macbook/comments/ehcjya/comment/fcm03xn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/macbook/comments/ehcjya/comment/fcm... As for hardware failures, again, good for you. Here it's more like 3-4 days before getting it fixed or replaced.