4 ms·

This doesn't feel terribly surprising to me. MacOS has always had impressively performant parts, but their upgrades always generally lower responsiveness. On mo

This doesn't feel terribly surprising to me. MacOS has always had impressively performant parts, but their upgrades always generally lower responsiveness. On modern hardware it's less perceptible obviously, and they want to sell machines, not software. But the last iteration that felt like it prioritized performance and snappiness was Snow Leopard, now twenty years ago. I will say the problem was a lot worse before the core explosion. It was easy for a single process to bring the entire system to a drag. These days the computer is a lot better at adapting to variable loads. I love my macs, and I'm about 10x as productive as on a windows machine after decades of daily usage (and probably a good 2x compared to linux). Performance, however, is not a good reason to use macos—it's the fact that the keybindings make sense and are coherent across an entire OS. You can use readline (emacs) bindings in any text field across the OS. And generally speaking, problems have a single solution that's relatively easy to google for. Bad-behaved apps aside (looking at you zoom and adobe) administering a mac is straightforward to reason about, and for the most part it's easy to ignore the app store, download apps, and run them by double clicking. I love linux, but I will absolutely pay to not have to deal with X11 or Wayland for my day-to-day work. I also expect my employer to pay for this or manage my machine for me. I tried linux full-time for a year on a thinkpad and never want to go back. The only time that worked for me was working at google when someone else broadly managed my OS. macs the only unix I've ever used that felt designed around making my life easier and allowing me to focus on the work I want to do. Linux has made great strides in the last two decades but the two major changes, systemd and wayland, both indicate that the community is solving different problems than will get me to use it as a desktop. Which is fine; I prefer the mac-style to the ibm pc-style they're successfully replacing. Like KDE is very nice and usable, but it models the computer and documents and apps in a completely different way than I am used to or want to use.

jamesy0ung 2y ago
I love Linux and run it on my servers, but on the desktop, it requires too much tinkering—I often spend more time troubleshooting than working. Laptops are especially problematic, with issues like Wi-Fi, sleep, and battery life. Windows is a mess—I hate the ads, bloat, and lack of a Unix-like environment. WSL2 works but feels like a hack. macOS, on the other hand, gives me full compatibility with Unix tools while also running Office and Adobe apps. Also Command+C for copy, Command+V for paste is much nicer than Control+Shift+C and Control+Shift+V. macOS does have absolutely terrible screen snapping though in comparison to Windows 11. The hardware is solid—great screen, trackpad, speakers, and battery life. I considered getting a high-end PC laptop (based on Rtings’ recommendations), but every option had compromises, either a terrible screen, terrible processor or terrible battery life. By the time I configured it to a non crappy config, it would’ve cost more than a MacBook Pro 16.
- caleblloyd 2y ago
  > Laptops are especially problematic, with issues like Wi-Fi, sleep, and battery life. 100% true, but I love Linux as a daily driver for development. It is the same os+architecture as the servers I am deploying to! I have had to carefully select hardware to ensure things like WiFi work and that the screen resolution does not require fractional scaling. Mac is definitely superior hardware but I enjoy being able to perf test the app on its native OS and skip things like running VMs for docker.
  - amarant 2y ago
    Same! That's One less OS that I have to remember how it works! I'm not sure I understand the whole tinkering thing. Whenever I tinker with my Linux, it's because I decided to try something tinkery, and usually mostly because I wanted to tinker. Like trying out that fancy new tiling Wayland WM I heard about last week...
    - kelnos 2y ago
      I feel like the main times Linux requires tinkering are: 1. You're trying to run it on hardware that isn't well-supported. This is a bummer, but you can't just expect any random machine (especially a laptop) to run Linux well. If you're buying a new computer and expect to run Linux on it, do your research beforehand and make sure all the hardware in it is supported. 2. You've picked a distro that isn't boring. I run Debian testing, and then Debian stable for the first six months or so after testing is promoted to stable. (Testing is pretty stable on its own, but then once the current testing release turns into the current stable release, testing gets flooded with lots of package updates that might not be so stable, so I wait.) For people who want something even more boring, they can stick with Debian stable. If you really need a brand-new version of something that stable doesn't have, it might be in backports, or available as a Snap or Flatpak (I'm not a fan of either of these, but they're options). 3. You use a desktop environment that isn't boring. I'm super super biased here[0], but Xfce is boring and doesn't change all that much. I've been using it for more than 20 years and it still looks and behaves very similarly today as it did when I first started using it. If you use well-supported hardware, and run a distro and desktop environment that's boring, you will generally have very few issues with Linux and rarely (if ever) have to tinker with it. [0] Full disclosure: I maintain a couple Xfce core components.

jamesy0ung 2y ago

I love Linux and run it on my servers, but on the desktop, it requires too much tinkering—I often spend more time troubleshooting than working. Laptops are especially problematic, with issues like Wi-Fi, sleep, and battery life. Windows is a mess—I hate the ads, bloat, and lack of a Unix-like environment. WSL2 works but feels like a hack. macOS, on the other hand, gives me full compatibility with Unix tools while also running Office and Adobe apps. Also Command+C for copy, Command+V for paste is much nicer than Control+Shift+C and Control+Shift+V. macOS does have absolutely terrible screen snapping though in comparison to Windows 11. The hardware is solid—great screen, trackpad, speakers, and battery life. I considered getting a high-end PC laptop (based on Rtings’ recommendations), but every option had compromises, either a terrible screen, terrible processor or terrible battery life. By the time I configured it to a non crappy config, it would’ve cost more than a MacBook Pro 16.

caleblloyd 2y ago
> Laptops are especially problematic, with issues like Wi-Fi, sleep, and battery life. 100% true, but I love Linux as a daily driver for development. It is the same os+architecture as the servers I am deploying to! I have had to carefully select hardware to ensure things like WiFi work and that the screen resolution does not require fractional scaling. Mac is definitely superior hardware but I enjoy being able to perf test the app on its native OS and skip things like running VMs for docker.
- amarant 2y ago
  Same! That's One less OS that I have to remember how it works! I'm not sure I understand the whole tinkering thing. Whenever I tinker with my Linux, it's because I decided to try something tinkery, and usually mostly because I wanted to tinker. Like trying out that fancy new tiling Wayland WM I heard about last week...
  - kelnos 2y ago
    I feel like the main times Linux requires tinkering are: 1. You're trying to run it on hardware that isn't well-supported. This is a bummer, but you can't just expect any random machine (especially a laptop) to run Linux well. If you're buying a new computer and expect to run Linux on it, do your research beforehand and make sure all the hardware in it is supported. 2. You've picked a distro that isn't boring. I run Debian testing, and then Debian stable for the first six months or so after testing is promoted to stable. (Testing is pretty stable on its own, but then once the current testing release turns into the current stable release, testing gets flooded with lots of package updates that might not be so stable, so I wait.) For people who want something even more boring, they can stick with Debian stable. If you really need a brand-new version of something that stable doesn't have, it might be in backports, or available as a Snap or Flatpak (I'm not a fan of either of these, but they're options). 3. You use a desktop environment that isn't boring. I'm super super biased here[0], but Xfce is boring and doesn't change all that much. I've been using it for more than 20 years and it still looks and behaves very similarly today as it did when I first started using it. If you use well-supported hardware, and run a distro and desktop environment that's boring, you will generally have very few issues with Linux and rarely (if ever) have to tinker with it. [0] Full disclosure: I maintain a couple Xfce core components.