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I switched to Mac in summer of 2021--right to an M1, never had an x86 Mac--after running desktop Linux in various flavours for the previous 23 years: RedHat 4.0

I switched to Mac in summer of 2021--right to an M1, never had an x86 Mac--after running desktop Linux in various flavours for the previous 23 years: RedHat 4.0, then Mandrake, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch. It's fair to say I've been a developer for that long, too, if you take seriously the notion of a 10 year-old mucking around with C socket code on a 486. Pluses and minuses, but overall very happy with the switch. - Biggest con: I miss the raw efficiency, unparalleled speed and superior ergonomics of my i3wm bushido, and will never match that in any conceivable fashion on OSX (yes, I've gone through the whole Yabai/Amethyst/etc journey, and ended up ditching it all and just going back to vanilla. Those half-hearted efforts at a tiling window manager just kept hard things hard and made easy things hard, too.) - Biggest pro: better hardware (which I realise isn't an OS attribute), never having to care about how my computer works or fix much of anything, lots of seamless and turn-key behaviours that just make sense (particularly vis-a-vis suspend and multi-monitor stuff), and (surprisingly to some), it's refreshing to be able to inhabit a common universe with other computer users and talk about the same sorts of stuff. Nobody really ever understood my Linux gibberish while I had only a distant idea of what a 'Finder' was that went back to System 7.5.5. It's nice to have more friends. - Biggest misconception going into OSX: that one actually has to use GUI stuff for much of anything. Nah. The browser, iTerm2, VS Code, and Mail is where I live, same as under Linux. Mostly just the first two. - Biggest misconception about desktop Linux from Mac users: that it requires so much care and feeding. I ran Arch, of all things, with its continuous rolling releases, from 2016-2021 and although the initial setup had a long tail and was ultimately an investment of a few days, nothing I can remember ever broke for me afterward -- not on desktop, not on laptop. Mac users tell me they're sure things did break for me, and that I just internalised my Linux trauma. No, they really didn't. It was shockingly stable. It was just kind of mediocre in other ways that start to have more meaning only after you've spent enough of your life tweaking your desktop experience. Edit: I didn't look at the survey in detail, but I hope they make a distinction between desktop use and server use. Sure, I use Linux for development. I'd even say predominantly. I think of my MacBook as a nicer GUI for all my Linux work.

jamesbfb 4y ago
> I miss the raw efficiency, unparalleled speed and superior ergonomics of my i3wm bushido I'm in the same vein as you. I tried to be productive on my m1, but as a 10+ year rusted on i3 user, I cannot for the life of me ween myself off it.
- abalashov 4y ago
  It's very hard, and remains a vexing problem -- one that also has to be weighed against creeping RSI. Late 30s me needs i3wm more than younger me did. This also gets to me to my one big hardware grievance against MBPs, which I think is commonplace: the keyboards. They're just terrible on so many levels, and worse yet for those with emergent RSI. They're also hard not to rapidly devalue if you're used to more clicky keyboards, even if you have moderated your typing intensity considerably. All the Macbooks I've had develop the dreaded "shiny key caps" within 3 months, and I assure you, I've worked very hard to become a gentle typist.
alerighi 4y ago
To me the biggest limitation of Linux for the laptop world is the hardware. Apple hardware is superior, even if some choices to me are not great (for example having all type-C ports). Especially M1 architecture is great, consumes nothing of power, so it can run fanless, battery lasts longer, and it is nearly as powerful as an Intel machine. Of course the reason is not Linux itself but hardware manufacturers, that focus only on Windows support (at least 99%) and don't care about other operating systems. Thus they make choices that make sense for Windows (such as using an x86_64 architecture, since Windows support for ARM is not great, or implementing things like modern standby) but that are not optimal for Linux. Also driver support is sometimes not the greatest. Beside all these things, using both macOS and Linux (specifically ArchLinux with GNOME) I have to say that to me Linux works better. Take for example the user experience of GNOME, to me is superior to the one of macOS. In macOS you lack of basic things that on Linux are present since forever, such as the ability to fix a window on top of all other windows. Or other nonsense things that hurt user experience, such as the inability to view hidden files from the Finder. Another thing that I miss when I use a mac it's a good package manager. Homebrew works fairly well, but it's not integrated with the system. You have some software shipped with the operating system, some other installed with Homebrew, other installed from the App Store, other programs that are bundles (.app), other that have an installer (.pkg), and unlike Windows you don't even have an unified way to uninstall a program, you have most of the times remove them manually leaving a ton of stuff in the system that accumulates over the years. On Linux I type `pacman -Syu` and everything updates to the latest version. On Linux I don't fear installing a new program, since I'm 100% sure that uninstalling it will remove every trace of the program. Finally, macOS is POSIX compatible but to me Linux is superior. GNU utilities are usually more feature rich and provide a better user experience than macOS ones (a stupid but essential things: the ability to put command line options after the positional arguments, how many times you do cp a b for it to fail because it's a directory, and then add -r at the end? On mac you can't and you have to add it before the first argument, annoying). Sure you can install GNU utilities on macOS, but it's not safe to add them to your path (I spent a day figuring out why a React build was failing only to know it was because I had GNU utilities in the path and a script did do something different), and you have to use the `g` prefix on anything.
sircastor 4y ago
> they're sure things did break for me, and that I just internalised my Linux trauma. No, they really didn't. It was shockingly stable. This is super frustrating to me, as my installs (which were quite vanilla) would not last 3 months without catastrophic failure (typically some kernel update would hose something, or a video driver would not be compatible) and I’d lose a day trying to get back to functional.

jamesbfb 4y ago

> I miss the raw efficiency, unparalleled speed and superior ergonomics of my i3wm bushido I'm in the same vein as you. I tried to be productive on my m1, but as a 10+ year rusted on i3 user, I cannot for the life of me ween myself off it.

abalashov 4y ago
It's very hard, and remains a vexing problem -- one that also has to be weighed against creeping RSI. Late 30s me needs i3wm more than younger me did. This also gets to me to my one big hardware grievance against MBPs, which I think is commonplace: the keyboards. They're just terrible on so many levels, and worse yet for those with emergent RSI. They're also hard not to rapidly devalue if you're used to more clicky keyboards, even if you have moderated your typing intensity considerably. All the Macbooks I've had develop the dreaded "shiny key caps" within 3 months, and I assure you, I've worked very hard to become a gentle typist.

alerighi 4y ago

To me the biggest limitation of Linux for the laptop world is the hardware. Apple hardware is superior, even if some choices to me are not great (for example having all type-C ports). Especially M1 architecture is great, consumes nothing of power, so it can run fanless, battery lasts longer, and it is nearly as powerful as an Intel machine. Of course the reason is not Linux itself but hardware manufacturers, that focus only on Windows support (at least 99%) and don't care about other operating systems. Thus they make choices that make sense for Windows (such as using an x86_64 architecture, since Windows support for ARM is not great, or implementing things like modern standby) but that are not optimal for Linux. Also driver support is sometimes not the greatest. Beside all these things, using both macOS and Linux (specifically ArchLinux with GNOME) I have to say that to me Linux works better. Take for example the user experience of GNOME, to me is superior to the one of macOS. In macOS you lack of basic things that on Linux are present since forever, such as the ability to fix a window on top of all other windows. Or other nonsense things that hurt user experience, such as the inability to view hidden files from the Finder. Another thing that I miss when I use a mac it's a good package manager. Homebrew works fairly well, but it's not integrated with the system. You have some software shipped with the operating system, some other installed with Homebrew, other installed from the App Store, other programs that are bundles (.app), other that have an installer (.pkg), and unlike Windows you don't even have an unified way to uninstall a program, you have most of the times remove them manually leaving a ton of stuff in the system that accumulates over the years. On Linux I type `pacman -Syu` and everything updates to the latest version. On Linux I don't fear installing a new program, since I'm 100% sure that uninstalling it will remove every trace of the program. Finally, macOS is POSIX compatible but to me Linux is superior. GNU utilities are usually more feature rich and provide a better user experience than macOS ones (a stupid but essential things: the ability to put command line options after the positional arguments, how many times you do cp a b for it to fail because it's a directory, and then add -r at the end? On mac you can't and you have to add it before the first argument, annoying). Sure you can install GNU utilities on macOS, but it's not safe to add them to your path (I spent a day figuring out why a React build was failing only to know it was because I had GNU utilities in the path and a script did do something different), and you have to use the `g` prefix on anything.

sircastor 4y ago

> they're sure things did break for me, and that I just internalised my Linux trauma. No, they really didn't. It was shockingly stable. This is super frustrating to me, as my installs (which were quite vanilla) would not last 3 months without catastrophic failure (typically some kernel update would hose something, or a video driver would not be compatible) and I’d lose a day trying to get back to functional.