16 ms·

Because all operating systems are terrible but the rest are so incredibly bad that Apple’s are still by far the best, once you add up time saved by features and

Because all operating systems are terrible but the rest are so incredibly bad that Apple’s are still by far the best, once you add up time saved by features and capabilities and subtract time lost to pain-in-the-ass brokenness. (Two decades on DOS/Windows home series and NT, at least for gaming and sometimes work, twelve years with Linux as my main desktop OS, started on Android for smartphones, before finally giving Apple a fair chance around 2011 or 2012… because I was issued a MacBook at work and was doing dual-platform mobile dev—FWIW I was rooting for BeOS back when it was still a thing, it was great)

MichaelZuo 2y ago
The real question is why is every other company with a consumer OS even more incompetent and/or malicious?
- idunnoman1222 2y ago
  “ Every other company “
- fsflover 2y ago
  What's incompetent about Linux? Have you tried to buy preinstalled?
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Have you ever tried to compare something like Ubuntu or RHEL on a per feature per function basis with Mac OS? There are literally thousands of possible combinations of accessibility features alone, that are vastly more difficult to impossible to access. Or simply don’t exist in any form. Once you add in all the default apps and functions of Mac OS, there’s likely millions of possible combinations that would take a fortune in time and effort and knowledge to replicate maybe a quarter of, on a hypothetical laptop installed with Linux. Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years. Edit: Of course 99% of these combinations are irrelevant to any particular individual, but they are all relevant to at least a few small groups. Linux promoters don’t seem to understand that alienating a few thousand users each time is a big deal if that alienation process happens thousands of times…
    - talldayo 2y ago
      > Have you ever tried to compare something like Ubuntu or RHEL on a per feature per function basis with Mac OS? Yes? Why would people recommend it as an alternative otherwise? I used MacOS for 5 years, left after Mojave and came back when an employer made me support MacOS. The current software experience on Mac is genuinely insufferable. Advertisements in your news, notifications begging you to try Safari, zero support for common and Open Source filesystems, constantly broken software packaging, zero useful APIs (what am I supposed to do with Metal???) and a $99/year tax to compensate for the displeasure of supporting developers. You really want to argue Apple cares about you? As a software developer, what pushed me over the edge was Docker. It runs absolutely terrible on MacOS, consumes resources/battery and makes your CPU hot as satan's taint. Native development is a nightmare on MacOS and you just have to settle with that if you want to defend it as your home. Don't even get me started on how bad Brew is. > Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years. If your peripheral manufacturer can't support USB class compliance, they do not deserve money in the first place. I produce music on Linux and haven't ever had a MIDI device or DAC fail to register. It's a standard that even Apple isn't "courageous" enough to reject.
      - vundercind 2y ago
        Yeah Docker’s non-native and runs under a virtualized Linux everywhere but… on Linux, so that’s a little rough. I’ve found some of the alternative VM hosts for that to be a ton faster and more power efficient, as they make better use of MacOS’ built-in virtualization system, but YMMV. I’ve also found that Apple’s lead on power management is so great that I can be using a power-sucking thing like Docker and still come out ahead, which is really lame :-/ I hear that “Docker Desktop” is especially bad on MacOS, but I’ve used docker almost as long as it’s existed and still haven’t used that (I don’t really even know what the point of it is?) so dunno about that part.
      - airstrike 2y ago
        > As a software developer, what pushed me over the edge was Docker. It runs absolutely terrible on MacOS, consumes resources/battery and makes your CPU hot as satan's taint. Thanks for saying this. I own an M2 Max Macbook, which is my very first Macbook, and I tried Docker the other day only to find it was literally unplayable. I then recalled running Docker forever ago on a much shittier Windows laptop and it was sort of a breeze? I was confused as to why I couldn't have the same experience now. Thanks to you, at least I know this is unlikely to be a case of PEBKAC
  - justin66 2y ago
    Power management.
    - vundercind 2y ago
      Windows is still bad at this, too, incredibly. Was initially issued a Lenovo Win10 machine at my current job, decided to give it a shot because I hadn’t used Windows for work in a long time, might have gotten better. It was using 40% of its battery while “sleeping” over night, and even at full charge wouldn’t get me through a light work day on battery—not even close. Straight back to the battery-anxiety I hadn’t felt since back when I used Windows and Linux on laptops years and years ago. Plus the touchpad is still ass (sorry, never got any good at aiming with the track point, even though I used an IBM Thinkpad for years and years) Luckily this place will issue a MacBook if you ask nicely. My god, that was a rough few weeks.
      - justin66 2y ago
        > Windows is still bad at this, too, incredibly. I couldn't agree more. And yet, Linux manages to be worse, since the "at least I can just hibernate" backup plan doesn't even work properly.
        vundercind 2y ago
        The only time I’ve ever seen Linux disk hibernation actually work about 100% of the time was on an IBM Thinkpad I used to have, and only if I did some arcane magic with a specially-sized-and-designated partition in just the right partition order, because that triggered something in the hardware that let it handle things directly.
        fsflover 2y ago
        I saw people being happy with hibernation on Librem 14 (I use Qubes OS, which doesn't support it).
freedomben 2y ago
If you've been on a MacBook since 2011 or 2012, it's definitely time to give modern Linux a try. It has come in enormously long way since then. I am not exaggerating when I say, I have a better out of the box experience with Fedora. Then I do with Mac OS. Mac OS certainly has a lot of features, and visually has a great deal of Polish, but it also increasingly has a lot of bugs.
- vundercind 2y ago
  I try every couple years. I tried KDE on Fedora last time (I hate gnome since 3) and could still crash various KDE apps with drag-n-drop operations—I’d trained myself never to use those outside narrow situations on Windows and Linux years ago because they usually broke things or did something stupid, but am now accustomed to them both working and doing something reasonable, so I spot those issues in a hurry when I use other environments now, and no longer accept that as just the way things are. Among other jank and poor stability, that’s just an example. IIRC making caps another control anywhere I was logged in—not just in KDE—was weirdly hard, too. Five or six years ago my Ubuntu tv-attached old desktop forgot how to decrypt the root disk its own installer had encrypted, after an OS upgrade. My Debian server required manual intervention (busting out my rusty Gentoo chroot grub-installing skills) to install its bootloader. The manual version went the same aa usual and had no problems so no clue WTF the installer was trying to do, but it consistently failed, and this was boring, old business-class Lenovo workstation hardware. That was four or five years ago. Basically when I try to go back I’m missing lots of features and it’s less stable than what I’m now accustomed to, so end up wasting a bunch of time and regretting it.
  - TheSkyHasEyes 2y ago
    Give XFCE a chance. > That was four or five years ago. Linux moves way faster than commercial OS IMO. Reconsider linux. Commercial OS isn't going to 'get better' for IT literate users. :/
    - vundercind 2y ago
      XFCE was my favorite back in my Gentoo days, after I started using laptop hardware fast enough that it wasn’t noticeably slower than my prior favorite, WindowMaker :-) When I used early Ubuntus on desktop machines (back when Ubuntu wasn’t terrible—before the PulseAudio fiasco and the following series of bad decisions and failed maneuvers against Red Hat) I usually just stuck with the default of Gnome2. That era’s by far the closest I’ve seen Linux get to Just Working. [edit] FWIW I do find Void with a very-light window manager pleasant to use, but I don’t want to have to self-serve every little feature these days, so it’s pleasant but impractical for my actual life. Nothing short of a full DE, so just KDE or Gnome, with a batteries-included distro, stands a chance of matching what I’m used to just being there and happening for me without my having to ask for it. Unfortunately, I strongly dislike both of those DEs for different reasons. :-/
baq 2y ago
IME macOS is easily the most broken and user hostile from a professional developer perspective. Maybe I haven't been using it enough, only 2 years. The hardware is amazing though and no other OS can predictably wake the laptop when opening the lid and not wake it when it's closed, which is kinda a deal breaker for a laptop, so I still use it. Not particularly excited about it, would prefer a Linux laptop if it could sleep reliably. (Seen pictures of a framework laptop with a kernel panic after wake, and I was seriously considering getting one.)
- iknowstuff 2y ago
  it’s very cohesive and stable by comparison to Windows. It’s beautifully designed compared to KDE. It’s most similar to gnome. if you’re the kinda guy who sees it as user hostile, I’d wager it’s because you refuse to learn the macOS/gnome paradigm and demand things to be how they were on your windows pc 30 years ago. what os/dwm do u use
  - baq 2y ago
    I'm not talking about how it looks - I don't care. I can find settings I need when the system implements them no problem. I'm talking about the gimped OS underneath the eye candy: - docker sucks compared to native Linux (obviously) and WSL2 (less obvious) - I have to install BetterDisplay (props to the dev btw, great tool) just to make my perfectly good 25x16 144Hz monitor not look like shit - I have to install a tool to invert my mouse scroll wheel - I have to install a tool to manage windows in a sane way (sequoia only just started to know how to do that but it's a looong way ahead) - I have to install a tool to have multiple things in the clipboard - Sequoia broke the system firewall and it's still not fixed in 15.0.1 (my mac is enterprise issued and it has all the fancy security apps you've all heard about) I ran out of time to keep going, these are what I'm running into daily. Fortunately there are tools, but every major macOS release breaks some of them.
  - ActorNightly 2y ago
    >It’s beautifully designed I hope you understand that when you say this, its pretty easy to see that you are solely in the ideological camp of liking Apple, not a rational one.
not_a_bot_4sho 2y ago
[flagged]
- vundercind 2y ago
  Except I’ve personally used and written software for the big three consumer operating systems, each for many years, plus both major mobile operating systems, and have used a few minor or defunct operating systems for significant lengths of time. So entirely unlike that and more like a craftsman expressing that an entire category of tool sucks (probably due in part to market failure, in this case) but one brand is easily the best of a bad lot.
ActorNightly 2y ago
>cause all operating systems are terrible This is code words for "Im emotionally invested into my choice for non logical reasons and its very hard for me to admit I have made the wrong choice".
- nearting 2y ago
  And your response is code for "I'm unfamiliar with the concept of oligopolies, and believe that every consumption choice should be based on logic alone." Come on.
  - ActorNightly 2y ago
    There is a difference between saying "less than optimal" and "bad" if you are really trying to convey some technical point.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    One cause of the problem is that ~99% of the user-facing OS market is steered by three total companies, for sure. One difficult bit, though, is interoperability. Even absent monopolist BS (and there’s plenty of that) it makes the OS market tend toward winner-take-all.
- vundercind 2y ago
  My choice is also bad. Zero of them are good. All constantly have stupid quality problems or fail to operate as well as they should. It’s a choice between hamburgers that are 30-50% shit, and one that’s 10% shit. Every single one has way too much shit in it. All of them deserve loud, angry complaints about the amount of shit they contain. But if I must eat a hamburger…
  - ActorNightly 2y ago
    >All constantly have stupid quality problems or fail to operate as well as they should. And my guess is that your "operate as the should" is probably some very personal opinions about how an OS should function based on your personal workflow, that you assume should be the defacto standard. But for the sake of the argument, lets just assume that your standard is actually optimal from an efficiency standpoint. In that case, the argument to make in case of Mac would be this: Out of the box, Macs are closer to optimal, but technically Linux is is better because you can customize it to be exactly optimal.
itsoktocry 2y ago
>Apple’s are still by far the best MacOS may not even be the best (that's subjective), let alone "by far" the best. How can you make this claim when you haven't used Linux in a decade?
- vundercind 2y ago
  I have used it in the last decade, quite a bit. I try it on the desktop every couple of years. My home server is Debian (too lazy to switch it to FreeBSD when it’s working Ok, I rarely modify it, and the way I use it I never have to mess with Systemd anyway), and nearly all the software I write at work targets Linux one way or another. Also it’s on my Steamdeck, so I get a good dose of the usual jank any time I have to use the desktop mode for anything.

MichaelZuo 2y ago

The real question is why is every other company with a consumer OS even more incompetent and/or malicious?

idunnoman1222 2y ago
“ Every other company “
fsflover 2y ago
What's incompetent about Linux? Have you tried to buy preinstalled?
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Have you ever tried to compare something like Ubuntu or RHEL on a per feature per function basis with Mac OS? There are literally thousands of possible combinations of accessibility features alone, that are vastly more difficult to impossible to access. Or simply don’t exist in any form. Once you add in all the default apps and functions of Mac OS, there’s likely millions of possible combinations that would take a fortune in time and effort and knowledge to replicate maybe a quarter of, on a hypothetical laptop installed with Linux. Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years. Edit: Of course 99% of these combinations are irrelevant to any particular individual, but they are all relevant to at least a few small groups. Linux promoters don’t seem to understand that alienating a few thousand users each time is a big deal if that alienation process happens thousands of times…
  - talldayo 2y ago
    > Have you ever tried to compare something like Ubuntu or RHEL on a per feature per function basis with Mac OS? Yes? Why would people recommend it as an alternative otherwise? I used MacOS for 5 years, left after Mojave and came back when an employer made me support MacOS. The current software experience on Mac is genuinely insufferable. Advertisements in your news, notifications begging you to try Safari, zero support for common and Open Source filesystems, constantly broken software packaging, zero useful APIs (what am I supposed to do with Metal???) and a $99/year tax to compensate for the displeasure of supporting developers. You really want to argue Apple cares about you? As a software developer, what pushed me over the edge was Docker. It runs absolutely terrible on MacOS, consumes resources/battery and makes your CPU hot as satan's taint. Native development is a nightmare on MacOS and you just have to settle with that if you want to defend it as your home. Don't even get me started on how bad Brew is. > Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years. If your peripheral manufacturer can't support USB class compliance, they do not deserve money in the first place. I produce music on Linux and haven't ever had a MIDI device or DAC fail to register. It's a standard that even Apple isn't "courageous" enough to reject.
    - vundercind 2y ago
      Yeah Docker’s non-native and runs under a virtualized Linux everywhere but… on Linux, so that’s a little rough. I’ve found some of the alternative VM hosts for that to be a ton faster and more power efficient, as they make better use of MacOS’ built-in virtualization system, but YMMV. I’ve also found that Apple’s lead on power management is so great that I can be using a power-sucking thing like Docker and still come out ahead, which is really lame :-/ I hear that “Docker Desktop” is especially bad on MacOS, but I’ve used docker almost as long as it’s existed and still haven’t used that (I don’t really even know what the point of it is?) so dunno about that part.
    - airstrike 2y ago
      > As a software developer, what pushed me over the edge was Docker. It runs absolutely terrible on MacOS, consumes resources/battery and makes your CPU hot as satan's taint. Thanks for saying this. I own an M2 Max Macbook, which is my very first Macbook, and I tried Docker the other day only to find it was literally unplayable. I then recalled running Docker forever ago on a much shittier Windows laptop and it was sort of a breeze? I was confused as to why I couldn't have the same experience now. Thanks to you, at least I know this is unlikely to be a case of PEBKAC
- justin66 2y ago
  Power management.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Windows is still bad at this, too, incredibly. Was initially issued a Lenovo Win10 machine at my current job, decided to give it a shot because I hadn’t used Windows for work in a long time, might have gotten better. It was using 40% of its battery while “sleeping” over night, and even at full charge wouldn’t get me through a light work day on battery—not even close. Straight back to the battery-anxiety I hadn’t felt since back when I used Windows and Linux on laptops years and years ago. Plus the touchpad is still ass (sorry, never got any good at aiming with the track point, even though I used an IBM Thinkpad for years and years) Luckily this place will issue a MacBook if you ask nicely. My god, that was a rough few weeks.
    - justin66 2y ago
      > Windows is still bad at this, too, incredibly. I couldn't agree more. And yet, Linux manages to be worse, since the "at least I can just hibernate" backup plan doesn't even work properly.
      - vundercind 2y ago
        The only time I’ve ever seen Linux disk hibernation actually work about 100% of the time was on an IBM Thinkpad I used to have, and only if I did some arcane magic with a specially-sized-and-designated partition in just the right partition order, because that triggered something in the hardware that let it handle things directly.
        fsflover 2y ago
        I saw people being happy with hibernation on Librem 14 (I use Qubes OS, which doesn't support it).

freedomben 2y ago

If you've been on a MacBook since 2011 or 2012, it's definitely time to give modern Linux a try. It has come in enormously long way since then. I am not exaggerating when I say, I have a better out of the box experience with Fedora. Then I do with Mac OS. Mac OS certainly has a lot of features, and visually has a great deal of Polish, but it also increasingly has a lot of bugs.

vundercind 2y ago
I try every couple years. I tried KDE on Fedora last time (I hate gnome since 3) and could still crash various KDE apps with drag-n-drop operations—I’d trained myself never to use those outside narrow situations on Windows and Linux years ago because they usually broke things or did something stupid, but am now accustomed to them both working and doing something reasonable, so I spot those issues in a hurry when I use other environments now, and no longer accept that as just the way things are. Among other jank and poor stability, that’s just an example. IIRC making caps another control anywhere I was logged in—not just in KDE—was weirdly hard, too. Five or six years ago my Ubuntu tv-attached old desktop forgot how to decrypt the root disk its own installer had encrypted, after an OS upgrade. My Debian server required manual intervention (busting out my rusty Gentoo chroot grub-installing skills) to install its bootloader. The manual version went the same aa usual and had no problems so no clue WTF the installer was trying to do, but it consistently failed, and this was boring, old business-class Lenovo workstation hardware. That was four or five years ago. Basically when I try to go back I’m missing lots of features and it’s less stable than what I’m now accustomed to, so end up wasting a bunch of time and regretting it.
- TheSkyHasEyes 2y ago
  Give XFCE a chance. > That was four or five years ago. Linux moves way faster than commercial OS IMO. Reconsider linux. Commercial OS isn't going to 'get better' for IT literate users. :/
  - vundercind 2y ago
    XFCE was my favorite back in my Gentoo days, after I started using laptop hardware fast enough that it wasn’t noticeably slower than my prior favorite, WindowMaker :-) When I used early Ubuntus on desktop machines (back when Ubuntu wasn’t terrible—before the PulseAudio fiasco and the following series of bad decisions and failed maneuvers against Red Hat) I usually just stuck with the default of Gnome2. That era’s by far the closest I’ve seen Linux get to Just Working. [edit] FWIW I do find Void with a very-light window manager pleasant to use, but I don’t want to have to self-serve every little feature these days, so it’s pleasant but impractical for my actual life. Nothing short of a full DE, so just KDE or Gnome, with a batteries-included distro, stands a chance of matching what I’m used to just being there and happening for me without my having to ask for it. Unfortunately, I strongly dislike both of those DEs for different reasons. :-/

baq 2y ago

IME macOS is easily the most broken and user hostile from a professional developer perspective. Maybe I haven't been using it enough, only 2 years. The hardware is amazing though and no other OS can predictably wake the laptop when opening the lid and not wake it when it's closed, which is kinda a deal breaker for a laptop, so I still use it. Not particularly excited about it, would prefer a Linux laptop if it could sleep reliably. (Seen pictures of a framework laptop with a kernel panic after wake, and I was seriously considering getting one.)

iknowstuff 2y ago
it’s very cohesive and stable by comparison to Windows. It’s beautifully designed compared to KDE. It’s most similar to gnome. if you’re the kinda guy who sees it as user hostile, I’d wager it’s because you refuse to learn the macOS/gnome paradigm and demand things to be how they were on your windows pc 30 years ago. what os/dwm do u use
- baq 2y ago
  I'm not talking about how it looks - I don't care. I can find settings I need when the system implements them no problem. I'm talking about the gimped OS underneath the eye candy: - docker sucks compared to native Linux (obviously) and WSL2 (less obvious) - I have to install BetterDisplay (props to the dev btw, great tool) just to make my perfectly good 25x16 144Hz monitor not look like shit - I have to install a tool to invert my mouse scroll wheel - I have to install a tool to manage windows in a sane way (sequoia only just started to know how to do that but it's a looong way ahead) - I have to install a tool to have multiple things in the clipboard - Sequoia broke the system firewall and it's still not fixed in 15.0.1 (my mac is enterprise issued and it has all the fancy security apps you've all heard about) I ran out of time to keep going, these are what I'm running into daily. Fortunately there are tools, but every major macOS release breaks some of them.
- ActorNightly 2y ago
  >It’s beautifully designed I hope you understand that when you say this, its pretty easy to see that you are solely in the ideological camp of liking Apple, not a rational one.

not_a_bot_4sho 2y ago

[flagged]

vundercind 2y ago
Except I’ve personally used and written software for the big three consumer operating systems, each for many years, plus both major mobile operating systems, and have used a few minor or defunct operating systems for significant lengths of time. So entirely unlike that and more like a craftsman expressing that an entire category of tool sucks (probably due in part to market failure, in this case) but one brand is easily the best of a bad lot.

ActorNightly 2y ago

>cause all operating systems are terrible This is code words for "Im emotionally invested into my choice for non logical reasons and its very hard for me to admit I have made the wrong choice".

nearting 2y ago
And your response is code for "I'm unfamiliar with the concept of oligopolies, and believe that every consumption choice should be based on logic alone." Come on.
- ActorNightly 2y ago
  There is a difference between saying "less than optimal" and "bad" if you are really trying to convey some technical point.
- vundercind 2y ago
  One cause of the problem is that ~99% of the user-facing OS market is steered by three total companies, for sure. One difficult bit, though, is interoperability. Even absent monopolist BS (and there’s plenty of that) it makes the OS market tend toward winner-take-all.
vundercind 2y ago
My choice is also bad. Zero of them are good. All constantly have stupid quality problems or fail to operate as well as they should. It’s a choice between hamburgers that are 30-50% shit, and one that’s 10% shit. Every single one has way too much shit in it. All of them deserve loud, angry complaints about the amount of shit they contain. But if I must eat a hamburger…
- ActorNightly 2y ago
  >All constantly have stupid quality problems or fail to operate as well as they should. And my guess is that your "operate as the should" is probably some very personal opinions about how an OS should function based on your personal workflow, that you assume should be the defacto standard. But for the sake of the argument, lets just assume that your standard is actually optimal from an efficiency standpoint. In that case, the argument to make in case of Mac would be this: Out of the box, Macs are closer to optimal, but technically Linux is is better because you can customize it to be exactly optimal.

itsoktocry 2y ago

>Apple’s are still by far the best MacOS may not even be the best (that's subjective), let alone "by far" the best. How can you make this claim when you haven't used Linux in a decade?

vundercind 2y ago
I have used it in the last decade, quite a bit. I try it on the desktop every couple of years. My home server is Debian (too lazy to switch it to FreeBSD when it’s working Ok, I rarely modify it, and the way I use it I never have to mess with Systemd anyway), and nearly all the software I write at work targets Linux one way or another. Also it’s on my Steamdeck, so I get a good dose of the usual jank any time I have to use the desktop mode for anything.