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I used Mac for 10 years and started feeling the same irritation around 2017. In 2020 I finally bit the bullet and switched to Linux. The initial investment into

I used Mac for 10 years and started feeling the same irritation around 2017. In 2020 I finally bit the bullet and switched to Linux. The initial investment into getting a usable Arch desktop was horrible. It took several days just to get to the point of something that I could boot into and be productive. It takes me a long time to get things working the way I want, but I kind of enjoy that aspect of total customization. The best part is, though, nothing ever changes. I get things working the way I want, and it just stays that way year after year. No UI language updates, no replacing my default shell, nothing. It just keeps working the way I like. Now if they could just produce a touchpad as good as a MacBook's, give me 8-10 hours of battery life, and make the construction feel slim and solid, and not like it's going to get crushed in my backpack, and I'd be satisfied.

Citizen_Lame 1y ago
Out of curiosity, what kind of work do you do on Linux. Because, some workflows are simply not possible on Linux due to missing applications.
- pelagicAustral 1y ago
  I exclusively used macOS for about 8 years and now I'm on Bluefin, work generic web development stacks... The last bit of software I'm missing on Linux is the Serif apps... gaming (in my particular case) is sorted, I was shocked to install Steam on Blufin and have almost my entire library available.
- iLemming 1y ago
  Some workflows not possible on Windows. I avoid using Windows thus I don't care about the pain of having to depend on it - have zero interest in what's not possible somewhere else. What's your point? The only thing from macOS I truly miss when in Linux is JXA/Applescript automation engine. That's the only thing I miss.
- eloisius 1y ago
  I work on computer vision stuff. Most of my time is in the browser, or on the terminal (Alacritty, tmux, neovim). I've actually become more of a GUI user since switching from macOS to Linux. I used to be way more die-hard about CLI-everything, but I love using `git gui` now. I think Dolphin is the superior file manager experience available to mankind. Okular is an excellent PDF reader, but leaves a tiny bit to be missed about Preview. I'm fairly serious about photography and spend a lot of time editing and post-processing photos. This is a major shortcoming of my desktop and I may end up getting a MacBook just for this purpose. digiKam is just okay for organizing photos, and RawTherapee is barely okay. I don't mind it's ugly UI, but I'm discovering that even aside from UI considerations it just can't produce the results that Adobe can. Things like noise reduction are just not there.
massysett 1y ago
> The best part is, though, nothing ever changes. Wasn’t true when they switched to systemd, or when KDE 4 came out, or when the new Gnome came out, or when the kernel renamed Ethernet interfaces to enps-whatever.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Those things are changes that are announced years before they happens and you would some distributions where they’re still using the old stuff. It’s not that unavoidable changes we you only have three years of holding on to the old stuff before being abandoned.
- jakogut 1y ago
  Or when they switched from applications requesting exclusive access to ALSA audio devices to using sound servers for mixing, or when Xorg autoconfiguration was introduced (obviating manual Xorg.conf creation), or when the modesetting DDX replaced vendor specific DDX packages, or when Wayland was introduced with full backward compatibility with Xorg via XWayland. I suppose that last one is more of a lack of change.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > when Wayland was introduced with full backward compatibility with Xorg you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.
- hulitu 1y ago
  Some of us use Slackware, with fvwm.
- goosedragons 1y ago
  You can still use the old Sysv init on modern distros if you want. KDE3 is sorta still around (TrinityDE), ditto Gnome 2 (MATE).
sgt 1y ago
I fully get that macOS is not perfect, but checking out "modern" Linux (like a customized Arch) is a bit underwhelming. It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago. And I started with Linux in the mid 90s. Not much has changed or improved on the pure fundamentals. I guess it's fine if all you do is sit doing CLI or spending your day in web browsers. Day to day macOS driving to me is an absolute joy (granted, I'm still on Sonoma). I do a lot of work in terminals but I also enjoy other apps, where that uniformity of Cocoa comes into play. And if you go deeper into Mach/Darwin, it's extremely powerful. On the userland .. from the launcher to dtrace and dynamic linker tricks and low level hooks. A lot of cool macOS APIs to experiment with, public or private. AppleScript/Automater, private frameworks like SkyLight (nifty!) Oh and don't get me started on MLX... To me, as a developer and as a power user, macOS delivers everything - and more.
- darknavi 1y ago
  > It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago. I know this seems like a down side to you but the person you are replying to notes this as something they love about the platform. It not changing over time "just to change" is the point.
- jsemrau 1y ago
  Depends on the role. I build AI Agents for a living and Linux is for this edge case better.
- leidenfrost 1y ago
  Sometimes it does change and when that happens is for the worse. Some developers suddenly realize that X system is old, and then they try to redo it from zero. And when they do that, they throw decades of feature development down the drain: - Xorg: Was Wayland worth the 10+ years of manpower needed to catch up? - Synaptics: Now we have libinput, less configurable and with way fewer features - Gnome: Something that happens when the devs think "If Apple can, then we can too" but without the money to invest in good UX (Gnome2 had actual UX research done by Sun) - Systemd: I'll concede that nobody liked SystemV. But we also had OpenRC and strangely got ignored. Sometimes "developercracy" is terrible, and we spend years arguing if Rust or Not, instead of trying to make good software
tjpnz 1y ago
>The best part is, though, nothing ever changes. I get things working the way I want, and it just stays that way year after year. No UI language updates, no replacing my default shell, nothing. It just keeps working the way I like. While Arch might make you safer by virtue of choice, some of the more "beginner friendly" distros aren't immune to changing things seemingly overnight. Ubuntu for instance dropped GNOME for Unity which I still have bad memories of to this day.
- eloisius 1y ago
  Yeah, I didn't mean to write a "Linux is better" polemic, just that building my own Linux desktop works better for me. I also haven't used Gnome since ~2009 except briefly to discover that Gnome 3 was trash. Unity was a travesty and I also hated it when Ubuntu force fed me that. You're right. Locking yourself into a distro, especially the more user-friendly ones, can get you into just as much of a dictatorship as macOS. I use i3 on X11 like a neanderthal and mostly Qt/KDE apps. I'll switch to Sway and Wayland when things stop working.
  - OJFord 1y ago
    I'd switch if I were you - well, I did, after holding out for what I thought was a long time. A lot of minor nuisances I hadn't gotten around to investigating with X just disappeared, I think you'd find that by comparison you were/are actually nearer 'not working' than you realise, my sway experience has been much smoother.
    - eloisius 1y ago
      Last sticking point when I tried was fractional scaling
iLemming 1y ago
My biggest gripe with macOS vs. Linux is that the former allows IT departments to completely control them. They overload these otherwise very capable machines with so much crap that things start to crawl; they enable FileVault and install antivirus and NGFW clients; forcefully diminish the admin role to be a regular user, forcing users to use Admin-by-Request whenever they need to fart out anything sudo in the terminal. I tried so hard to find reasons to like macOS, but frankly, if workspaces didn't force Macs, I would've totally chosen to use Linux. The only thing I miss in Linux is JXA/Applescript automation engine and Hammerspoon, nothing else - I don't use their web browser, or their mail app, GarageBand, and other crap like iTunes because frankly, they never felt to me like good solutions to solve specific problems, more like freeware before transitioning to better alternatives. Even the built-in terminal I use only to bootstrap Homebrew. Another good thing I should mention is that macOS really does set a good standard for accessibility features, even though I'm lucky not to have to rely on them, I'm sure many people do. I honestly don't know how Apple has been getting away with so much crap for years - software developers are probably one of the biggest demographics of Mac users, and Apple keeps screwing them over, yet they stay loyal - partly because businesses force them to use Macs, partly because the alternatives suck even more - Linux ain't perfect and Windows is outright evil (really, I can't even rebind Win+L key on my computer? Fuck you MSFT!).
mikae1 1y ago
> The initial investment into getting a usable Arch desktop was horrible. It is my conviction that very few should go down the Arch route. If you want to sysadmin Linux or learn how to do so, fine. But if you want to do something else with your computer I'd strongly recommend looking into one of the https://universal-blue.org https://universal-blue.org images (I use https://getaurora.dev https://getaurora.dev btw). These are based on atomic Fedora and my experience is that they offer extreme stability while still staying on the edge of development. Could we call it NixOS for mere mortals? Probably not if you ask the Nix peeps. :)
- konart 1y ago
  >These are based on atomic Fedora and my experience is that they offer extreme stability These were my hopes. Up until a new update introduced something that broke my nvidia drivers "integration". After a few days I decided to try to update the system once more (which killed the oldest snapshot) and I was left with the system that can only be run in 1024 mode. I've tried every suggestion from the web to no avail.
  - mikae1 1y ago
    It's been working well with my NVIDIA equipped laptop and desktop machine with a Radeon GPU. I would never buy NVIDIA for Linux use again though. GPU support needs to be in the kernel, So Arc or Radeon it is.
- eloisius 1y ago
  For better or worse, I'm exactly the person who should go down this route.
  - mikae1 1y ago
    :D If you gotta do it, you gotta do it.
- OJFord 1y ago
  > It is my conviction that very few should go down the Arch route. If you want to sysadmin Linux or learn how to do so, fine. I don't think sysadmin is fair, but certainly it's true that a lot of 'how do I do the equivalent of Windows/macOS built-in foobar' questions will have the answer 'well this is a non-exhaustive list of possible things you could install to do that'. Which is to say that first time around it's almost inevitably going to be a lot of setup. But then it won't change, or when it does it will just be whichever puzzle piece changed - not 'Arch reimagined everything with Liquid Glass'.

Citizen_Lame 1y ago

Out of curiosity, what kind of work do you do on Linux. Because, some workflows are simply not possible on Linux due to missing applications.

pelagicAustral 1y ago
I exclusively used macOS for about 8 years and now I'm on Bluefin, work generic web development stacks... The last bit of software I'm missing on Linux is the Serif apps... gaming (in my particular case) is sorted, I was shocked to install Steam on Blufin and have almost my entire library available.
iLemming 1y ago
Some workflows not possible on Windows. I avoid using Windows thus I don't care about the pain of having to depend on it - have zero interest in what's not possible somewhere else. What's your point? The only thing from macOS I truly miss when in Linux is JXA/Applescript automation engine. That's the only thing I miss.
eloisius 1y ago
I work on computer vision stuff. Most of my time is in the browser, or on the terminal (Alacritty, tmux, neovim). I've actually become more of a GUI user since switching from macOS to Linux. I used to be way more die-hard about CLI-everything, but I love using `git gui` now. I think Dolphin is the superior file manager experience available to mankind. Okular is an excellent PDF reader, but leaves a tiny bit to be missed about Preview. I'm fairly serious about photography and spend a lot of time editing and post-processing photos. This is a major shortcoming of my desktop and I may end up getting a MacBook just for this purpose. digiKam is just okay for organizing photos, and RawTherapee is barely okay. I don't mind it's ugly UI, but I'm discovering that even aside from UI considerations it just can't produce the results that Adobe can. Things like noise reduction are just not there.

massysett 1y ago

> The best part is, though, nothing ever changes. Wasn’t true when they switched to systemd, or when KDE 4 came out, or when the new Gnome came out, or when the kernel renamed Ethernet interfaces to enps-whatever.

skydhash 1y ago
Those things are changes that are announced years before they happens and you would some distributions where they’re still using the old stuff. It’s not that unavoidable changes we you only have three years of holding on to the old stuff before being abandoned.
jakogut 1y ago
Or when they switched from applications requesting exclusive access to ALSA audio devices to using sound servers for mixing, or when Xorg autoconfiguration was introduced (obviating manual Xorg.conf creation), or when the modesetting DDX replaced vendor specific DDX packages, or when Wayland was introduced with full backward compatibility with Xorg via XWayland. I suppose that last one is more of a lack of change.
- hulitu 1y ago
  > when Wayland was introduced with full backward compatibility with Xorg you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.
hulitu 1y ago
Some of us use Slackware, with fvwm.
goosedragons 1y ago
You can still use the old Sysv init on modern distros if you want. KDE3 is sorta still around (TrinityDE), ditto Gnome 2 (MATE).

sgt 1y ago

I fully get that macOS is not perfect, but checking out "modern" Linux (like a customized Arch) is a bit underwhelming. It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago. And I started with Linux in the mid 90s. Not much has changed or improved on the pure fundamentals. I guess it's fine if all you do is sit doing CLI or spending your day in web browsers. Day to day macOS driving to me is an absolute joy (granted, I'm still on Sonoma). I do a lot of work in terminals but I also enjoy other apps, where that uniformity of Cocoa comes into play. And if you go deeper into Mach/Darwin, it's extremely powerful. On the userland .. from the launcher to dtrace and dynamic linker tricks and low level hooks. A lot of cool macOS APIs to experiment with, public or private. AppleScript/Automater, private frameworks like SkyLight (nifty!) Oh and don't get me started on MLX... To me, as a developer and as a power user, macOS delivers everything - and more.

darknavi 1y ago
> It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago. I know this seems like a down side to you but the person you are replying to notes this as something they love about the platform. It not changing over time "just to change" is the point.
jsemrau 1y ago
Depends on the role. I build AI Agents for a living and Linux is for this edge case better.
leidenfrost 1y ago
Sometimes it does change and when that happens is for the worse. Some developers suddenly realize that X system is old, and then they try to redo it from zero. And when they do that, they throw decades of feature development down the drain: - Xorg: Was Wayland worth the 10+ years of manpower needed to catch up? - Synaptics: Now we have libinput, less configurable and with way fewer features - Gnome: Something that happens when the devs think "If Apple can, then we can too" but without the money to invest in good UX (Gnome2 had actual UX research done by Sun) - Systemd: I'll concede that nobody liked SystemV. But we also had OpenRC and strangely got ignored. Sometimes "developercracy" is terrible, and we spend years arguing if Rust or Not, instead of trying to make good software

tjpnz 1y ago

>The best part is, though, nothing ever changes. I get things working the way I want, and it just stays that way year after year. No UI language updates, no replacing my default shell, nothing. It just keeps working the way I like. While Arch might make you safer by virtue of choice, some of the more "beginner friendly" distros aren't immune to changing things seemingly overnight. Ubuntu for instance dropped GNOME for Unity which I still have bad memories of to this day.

eloisius 1y ago
Yeah, I didn't mean to write a "Linux is better" polemic, just that building my own Linux desktop works better for me. I also haven't used Gnome since ~2009 except briefly to discover that Gnome 3 was trash. Unity was a travesty and I also hated it when Ubuntu force fed me that. You're right. Locking yourself into a distro, especially the more user-friendly ones, can get you into just as much of a dictatorship as macOS. I use i3 on X11 like a neanderthal and mostly Qt/KDE apps. I'll switch to Sway and Wayland when things stop working.
- OJFord 1y ago
  I'd switch if I were you - well, I did, after holding out for what I thought was a long time. A lot of minor nuisances I hadn't gotten around to investigating with X just disappeared, I think you'd find that by comparison you were/are actually nearer 'not working' than you realise, my sway experience has been much smoother.
  - eloisius 1y ago
    Last sticking point when I tried was fractional scaling

iLemming 1y ago

My biggest gripe with macOS vs. Linux is that the former allows IT departments to completely control them. They overload these otherwise very capable machines with so much crap that things start to crawl; they enable FileVault and install antivirus and NGFW clients; forcefully diminish the admin role to be a regular user, forcing users to use Admin-by-Request whenever they need to fart out anything sudo in the terminal. I tried so hard to find reasons to like macOS, but frankly, if workspaces didn't force Macs, I would've totally chosen to use Linux. The only thing I miss in Linux is JXA/Applescript automation engine and Hammerspoon, nothing else - I don't use their web browser, or their mail app, GarageBand, and other crap like iTunes because frankly, they never felt to me like good solutions to solve specific problems, more like freeware before transitioning to better alternatives. Even the built-in terminal I use only to bootstrap Homebrew. Another good thing I should mention is that macOS really does set a good standard for accessibility features, even though I'm lucky not to have to rely on them, I'm sure many people do. I honestly don't know how Apple has been getting away with so much crap for years - software developers are probably one of the biggest demographics of Mac users, and Apple keeps screwing them over, yet they stay loyal - partly because businesses force them to use Macs, partly because the alternatives suck even more - Linux ain't perfect and Windows is outright evil (really, I can't even rebind Win+L key on my computer? Fuck you MSFT!).

mikae1 1y ago

> The initial investment into getting a usable Arch desktop was horrible. It is my conviction that very few should go down the Arch route. If you want to sysadmin Linux or learn how to do so, fine. But if you want to do something else with your computer I'd strongly recommend looking into one of the https://universal-blue.org https://universal-blue.org images (I use https://getaurora.dev https://getaurora.dev btw). These are based on atomic Fedora and my experience is that they offer extreme stability while still staying on the edge of development. Could we call it NixOS for mere mortals? Probably not if you ask the Nix peeps. :)

konart 1y ago
>These are based on atomic Fedora and my experience is that they offer extreme stability These were my hopes. Up until a new update introduced something that broke my nvidia drivers "integration". After a few days I decided to try to update the system once more (which killed the oldest snapshot) and I was left with the system that can only be run in 1024 mode. I've tried every suggestion from the web to no avail.
- mikae1 1y ago
  It's been working well with my NVIDIA equipped laptop and desktop machine with a Radeon GPU. I would never buy NVIDIA for Linux use again though. GPU support needs to be in the kernel, So Arc or Radeon it is.
eloisius 1y ago
For better or worse, I'm exactly the person who should go down this route.
- mikae1 1y ago
  :D If you gotta do it, you gotta do it.
OJFord 1y ago
> It is my conviction that very few should go down the Arch route. If you want to sysadmin Linux or learn how to do so, fine. I don't think sysadmin is fair, but certainly it's true that a lot of 'how do I do the equivalent of Windows/macOS built-in foobar' questions will have the answer 'well this is a non-exhaustive list of possible things you could install to do that'. Which is to say that first time around it's almost inevitably going to be a lot of setup. But then it won't change, or when it does it will just be whichever puzzle piece changed - not 'Arch reimagined everything with Liquid Glass'.