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I really hope this project continues to gain momentum. Apple Hardware + Linux is the least fscked OS running on the best hardware. MacOS continues to be a tir

I really hope this project continues to gain momentum. Apple Hardware + Linux is the least fscked OS running on the best hardware. MacOS continues to be a tire fire with endless bugs and churn between versions.

mapleleaf1921 6mo ago
I've run all 3 major OSes before. MacOS by far has the least bugs and kinda just works. My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility. My windows days were plagued with battery issues. I feel like most Linux ricers wishs for a MacOS-like experience, except with more customisation. (Which is entirely possible now with the ricing on Mac)
- TingPing 6mo ago
  In my personal experience macOS is fine but updates are often buggy or regress performance. Linux has just been the more polished option. Plus it just has a nicer desktop and apps.
  - alemanek 6mo ago
    I stay 1 major version behind with MacOS. If you do that you should have a pretty stable experience. You still get all the security patches but skip most bugs/regressions.
    - jijijijij 6mo ago
      Linux got this philosophy made distribution called Debian. What kind of argument is that for OS experience and stability?
    - albedoa 6mo ago
      I stay 0 major versions behind with macOS and have a pretty stable experience.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 6mo ago
  Ricing is big, but I also like the hackability and development friendly environment of Linux that isn't there on Macbooks (been running MacOS as a secondary for ~5yrs now)
- dangus 6mo ago
  Liquid Ass enters the chat, Apple can’t even make rounded corners anymore. I was burned by the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard, and once Liquid Ass was announced I knew it was time to get out. Sold my MacBook Pro M2 Pro, which has a stupid gigantic notch that blocks the menu bar items with no built-in mechanism for getting to them when they overflow. Now I’m on a Framework 13” and I’ve had zero issues with Linux. Everything just works. KDE Plasma is way more customizable than macOS or Windows. I’m finally able to ditch slow Homebrew and use a real package manager. I can finally play light PC games on my laptop without dealing with streaming or Crossover. My preorder is in for the Framework 13 Pro, which looks to get even closer to delivering a MacBook Pro for Linux. Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t changed their chassis design in 5 years, while Framework updates their hardware constantly while maintaining cross-compatibility. A company with less than 500 employees is catching up to a trillion dollar corporation. I’ve already got my fully modular LPCAMM RAM delivered and ready with no Apple tax. I’ll get better battery life watching YouTube videos than a MacBook Pro and the graphics are just as powerful as the M5 base chip. And if something breaks I won’t have to deal with the nightmare I went through with my 2016 MacBook Pro.
- graemep 6mo ago
  Not a problem I have had on Linux. Some people seem to get better battery life with Windows than with Linux. Most users on any OSes are not ricers. Most of my customisation is functional - panels and widgets placed for practical reasons. A lot of people do not seem to customise at all, or barely.
- ifwinterco 6mo ago
  MacOS is also optimised for M series chips in a way that realistically no linux distribution ever will be. Definitely good to have the option, but you'll most likely never get quite the same performance or battery life on linux
- exe34 6mo ago
  > My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility. Is that on Mac hardware? I run a 14 year old Mac Book Air, and it works flawlessly with the latest Nixos, and has done for the last 11 years. If you have issues on random PCs, it's because there are an enormous variety of them out there, with all kinds of incompatibilities that have to be worked around. On Mac hardware, there tends to be a more restricted number of variants, and after a few years, Linux becomes rock solid on them. So the OP is correct, Linux on Mac hardware is the best combo.
  - CamouflagedKiwi 6mo ago
    A 14 year old Macbook Air is an Intel Mac, AFAIK most hardware is pretty well supported. M series Macs are still very much a work in progress. I'm typing this on one, in Linux, so plenty of things work, but not for example USB-C output to an external display, and a lot of the processor power level / suspend stuff is still not fully there so battery life is quite a bit worse, especially when suspended. I think the situation is rather worse on the latest generation hardware, too.
  - normie3000 6mo ago
    Did wifi work out of the box? I really struggled with a 2013 Air.
    - exe34 6mo ago
      I think I might have used a usb ethernet to install it? It was 2017 the last (and first) time I had to re-install, so I don't remember.
- rglullis 6mo ago
  > My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility. This is the kind of dated argument that really makes me dismiss most of the critics. I was running xubuntu as my main desktop since 2010 at least, switched to Debian + nix + XFCE in 2022 and switched to full-on nixOS in 2024. I never had issues with audio then and had to go out of my way to "break" audio on NixOS when I wanted to try pipewire instead of pulse. > feel like most Linux ricers wises for a MacOS-like experience I've put together a Hackintosh once, tried for a few weeks as the daily driver. Aside from being able to use tools that dealt with real-time audio processing, there was nothing else I wanted to copy or bring to my Linux system. It cemented my opinion that most software developers that keep touting the "superiority of MacOS" never gave a fair shot at Linux on decent hardware and were just rationalizing their prior choice.
  - eightysixfour 6mo ago
    Earlier this year I built a new desktop and installed my normal Linux distro and the screen wouldn’t work after login. I worked on it for a day, still couldn’t get any desktop except a terminal.Tried a different distro, it booted but no matter what resolution or refresh rate, the display showed severe artifacts when scrolling. Tried to fix it for a few days, gave up. I am not a Linux novice, I have been using every major OS for decades at this point, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t install Windows, decrapify it, and everything just worked. You can say I should have done more research on hardware compatibility or whatever, but I didn’t have to for Windows. And I like how you complain most devs never give Linux a fair shot on decent hardware right after describing that you MacOS experience is a hackintosh. That makes a lot of sense.
    - rglullis 6mo ago
      > And I like how you complain most devs never give Linux a fair shot on decent hardware right after describing that you MacOS experience is a hackintosh. I'm not saying that I was expecting to run a Hackintosh and suddenly get the advantages of Apple hardware. I am doing a pure software-to-software comparison. There was no application in the MacOS desktop that made me feel like I was missing out on something. Of all the tools that I am used to use - emacs + developer tools, email clients, messaging clients, media players, media managers, browsers, the occasional office productivity - none of the MacOS counterparts had any significant advantage over what I have in a Linux desktop.
- Escapado 6mo ago
  "entirely possible" is a bit of a stretch. You can install some hacky WM and sketchybar but system settings, workspace three finger scroll speed, the finder app, window chrome, login screen etc are not something that can easily be changed. And the default apps are really not that great for power users. Calendar, Mail and Finder are all slow, dumbed down and only very superficially customizable. I daily drive an M2 Pro MBP and I was running a Linux desktop up until 2 years ago and I felt like there were barely any limits to customizing the latter while I have to fight macOS at every step if I want to do something that apple does not want me to do.
- dwedge 6mo ago
  I use macos because of the battery life and because I want a Linux like experience without wondering if some weird software a company update forces on us will work, like citrix desktop or their random vpn client. But for someone who spends most of their time in the terminal, and the rest of the time in a browser, macos has some really annoying quirks especially when it comes to window management
- Matl 6mo ago
  Can macOS snap windows to the side yet without external plugins?
  - saagarjha 6mo ago
    Yes.
    - Matl 6mo ago
      Oh, nice, when I last tried it about the M1 timeframe, it still didn't. What that convinced me of is that macOS is just not for power users.
      - saagarjha 6mo ago
        They added it a few years back
- eikenberry 6mo ago
  The difficult thing with Linux has always been finding well supported hardware. People always try to get it running on whatever random collection of hardware they have on hand and then are surprised that they have some problems. If you buy with Linux in mind you can get hardware that just works.
- nine_k 6mo ago
  I'm likely not "most Linux ricers", but as a long-term desktop Linux user, I'm very bothered when I have to use macOS GUI, and explicitly want a non-macOS experience. (This is why I avoid Gnome, for instance.)
- ezst 6mo ago
  > MacOS by far has the least bugs and kinda just works. MacOS is sometimes so weird and inconsistent that it's hard to tell whether it's a bug of Apple usual's "you are not smart/cool-enough to understand" kind of feature.
- apatheticonion 6mo ago
  I agree that MacOS is more polished. However overall, Linux is a better complete package - especially for power users, gamers and engineers. Linux GUIs are _fine enough_ though the jank is still present. The good news is they will get better with more users entering the chat. The thing to note is that, we don't want to confuse "it's not as good right now" with "It's bad so I will never use it" because that signals a lack of interest. There is a non-zero chance that Apple could be compelled to support it if enough people express interest (historically, they have with bootcamp). Competition is good, even if the competition is bad right now. We must encourage it.
freedomben 6mo ago
You should give Framework a try. It's been a flawless experience with Fedora. And with the upcoming Framework 13 Pro, battery life and trackpad are expected to be on par (or in the case of battery, even better than macos)
- jorvi 6mo ago
  No, battery life isn't on par. The only way to get the battery life Framework advertised is on Windows' 'Ultra Efficiency' mode which cuts CPU performance by 25-50%, lowers brightness by 30% and deprioritizes everything in the background to such an extreme that responsiveness of those is measured in seconds. It is not comparable at all to M-series or Snapdragon laptops happily chugging along at full capability and getting (compared to AMD / Intel) stellar battery life.
  - bogzz 6mo ago
    They're talking about the new model announced, with a larger battery and ARM architecture. Not released yet, I don't think.
    - dwedge 6mo ago
      The new model is Intel or amd unless I missed something. They said in the video the battery life was entirely from video playback, which can be run on efficiency mode
      - bogzz 6mo ago
        My apologies, I don't know where I got the ARM architecture part from. I really want one of those machines, but I guess if they can't approach MacBook battery life yet I'm stuck on MacOS for now.
        dwedge 6mo ago
        I think they said 22 hours of video playback in the video. If it even gets half of that for normal usage I'd be sold, the only thing stopping me giving it a shot is they are currently more expensive than the MBP and I'm not sure if they are worth it until the first reviews come in
jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
Generally yes, but the community around MLX has rallied pretty strong. Sure your disk io is awful, and your OS is buggy, but at least ML compiles and works on a modern OS. Works like rocm seem so close. But you need either the pre-compiled packages or 2+ year old Ubuntu to compile them. https://github.com/ROCm/TheRock/issues/3477 https://github.com/ROCm/TheRock/issues/3477
- com2kid 6mo ago
  I'm still on Ubuntu 22 because everything works. Got enough packages that still request I don't use wayland that I don't want to risk an upgrade. Sad because I really want the better One drive integration that Ubuntu 24+ comes with.
  - jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
    I sympathize. But it seems so weird to me to be a Linux open source adopter, who is also so am conservative. Heck yes KDE, sway, Niri, and so many other new desktops are so so so nice. I can't imagine staying in the old world. But who should AMD for example target? It seems obvious to me. Personally I think if you are trying to make tools like ai acceleration software, you should 100% be focused on the alpha geeks. The people who want bleeding edge new stuff, the people who will take that and roll with it and expand your ecosystem are almost entirely the early adopters. The progressives are the social tastemakers, are the point on the adoption curve where cool and good happens. It's infuriating watching AMD bungle their chances by targeting people interested in ancient technology, for their incredibly advanced powerful rich new stack. What are you doing?!?! There needs to be a starting point for the alpha geeks, those who are willing.
    - jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
      I like this quote from warp people, on why they are open sourcing. Parallels to what I'm saying above even though it's a different matter: > * we need to build our business by offering the best possible product to the most excited community.* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936612 TheRock is so close but there just doesn't seem to be an eye on the ball for actually making this usable. This stack of issues blocking even vaguely modern systems has been sitting untouched for months.
LtWorf 6mo ago
Having used a macbook air for work just recently… not the best hardware at all. I think I can spend 5€ and get a better keyboard.
- iknowstuff 6mo ago
  There are fringes that have wacky and particular priorities, but not recognizing that you are such a niche and asserting that your silly requirement makes them “not the best” for the vast majority of people is silly
  - LtWorf 6mo ago
    Sorry I wanted to mention a few hundreds other reasons but I thought it'd be too long.

mapleleaf1921 6mo ago

I've run all 3 major OSes before. MacOS by far has the least bugs and kinda just works. My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility. My windows days were plagued with battery issues. I feel like most Linux ricers wishs for a MacOS-like experience, except with more customisation. (Which is entirely possible now with the ricing on Mac)

TingPing 6mo ago
In my personal experience macOS is fine but updates are often buggy or regress performance. Linux has just been the more polished option. Plus it just has a nicer desktop and apps.
- alemanek 6mo ago
  I stay 1 major version behind with MacOS. If you do that you should have a pretty stable experience. You still get all the security patches but skip most bugs/regressions.
  - jijijijij 6mo ago
    Linux got this philosophy made distribution called Debian. What kind of argument is that for OS experience and stability?
  - albedoa 6mo ago
    I stay 0 major versions behind with macOS and have a pretty stable experience.
OsrsNeedsf2P 6mo ago
Ricing is big, but I also like the hackability and development friendly environment of Linux that isn't there on Macbooks (been running MacOS as a secondary for ~5yrs now)
dangus 6mo ago
Liquid Ass enters the chat, Apple can’t even make rounded corners anymore. I was burned by the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard, and once Liquid Ass was announced I knew it was time to get out. Sold my MacBook Pro M2 Pro, which has a stupid gigantic notch that blocks the menu bar items with no built-in mechanism for getting to them when they overflow. Now I’m on a Framework 13” and I’ve had zero issues with Linux. Everything just works. KDE Plasma is way more customizable than macOS or Windows. I’m finally able to ditch slow Homebrew and use a real package manager. I can finally play light PC games on my laptop without dealing with streaming or Crossover. My preorder is in for the Framework 13 Pro, which looks to get even closer to delivering a MacBook Pro for Linux. Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t changed their chassis design in 5 years, while Framework updates their hardware constantly while maintaining cross-compatibility. A company with less than 500 employees is catching up to a trillion dollar corporation. I’ve already got my fully modular LPCAMM RAM delivered and ready with no Apple tax. I’ll get better battery life watching YouTube videos than a MacBook Pro and the graphics are just as powerful as the M5 base chip. And if something breaks I won’t have to deal with the nightmare I went through with my 2016 MacBook Pro.
graemep 6mo ago
Not a problem I have had on Linux. Some people seem to get better battery life with Windows than with Linux. Most users on any OSes are not ricers. Most of my customisation is functional - panels and widgets placed for practical reasons. A lot of people do not seem to customise at all, or barely.
ifwinterco 6mo ago
MacOS is also optimised for M series chips in a way that realistically no linux distribution ever will be. Definitely good to have the option, but you'll most likely never get quite the same performance or battery life on linux
exe34 6mo ago
> My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility. Is that on Mac hardware? I run a 14 year old Mac Book Air, and it works flawlessly with the latest Nixos, and has done for the last 11 years. If you have issues on random PCs, it's because there are an enormous variety of them out there, with all kinds of incompatibilities that have to be worked around. On Mac hardware, there tends to be a more restricted number of variants, and after a few years, Linux becomes rock solid on them. So the OP is correct, Linux on Mac hardware is the best combo.
- CamouflagedKiwi 6mo ago
  A 14 year old Macbook Air is an Intel Mac, AFAIK most hardware is pretty well supported. M series Macs are still very much a work in progress. I'm typing this on one, in Linux, so plenty of things work, but not for example USB-C output to an external display, and a lot of the processor power level / suspend stuff is still not fully there so battery life is quite a bit worse, especially when suspended. I think the situation is rather worse on the latest generation hardware, too.
- normie3000 6mo ago
  Did wifi work out of the box? I really struggled with a 2013 Air.
  - exe34 6mo ago
    I think I might have used a usb ethernet to install it? It was 2017 the last (and first) time I had to re-install, so I don't remember.
rglullis 6mo ago
> My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility. This is the kind of dated argument that really makes me dismiss most of the critics. I was running xubuntu as my main desktop since 2010 at least, switched to Debian + nix + XFCE in 2022 and switched to full-on nixOS in 2024. I never had issues with audio then and had to go out of my way to "break" audio on NixOS when I wanted to try pipewire instead of pulse. > feel like most Linux ricers wises for a MacOS-like experience I've put together a Hackintosh once, tried for a few weeks as the daily driver. Aside from being able to use tools that dealt with real-time audio processing, there was nothing else I wanted to copy or bring to my Linux system. It cemented my opinion that most software developers that keep touting the "superiority of MacOS" never gave a fair shot at Linux on decent hardware and were just rationalizing their prior choice.
- eightysixfour 6mo ago
  Earlier this year I built a new desktop and installed my normal Linux distro and the screen wouldn’t work after login. I worked on it for a day, still couldn’t get any desktop except a terminal.Tried a different distro, it booted but no matter what resolution or refresh rate, the display showed severe artifacts when scrolling. Tried to fix it for a few days, gave up. I am not a Linux novice, I have been using every major OS for decades at this point, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t install Windows, decrapify it, and everything just worked. You can say I should have done more research on hardware compatibility or whatever, but I didn’t have to for Windows. And I like how you complain most devs never give Linux a fair shot on decent hardware right after describing that you MacOS experience is a hackintosh. That makes a lot of sense.
  - rglullis 6mo ago
    > And I like how you complain most devs never give Linux a fair shot on decent hardware right after describing that you MacOS experience is a hackintosh. I'm not saying that I was expecting to run a Hackintosh and suddenly get the advantages of Apple hardware. I am doing a pure software-to-software comparison. There was no application in the MacOS desktop that made me feel like I was missing out on something. Of all the tools that I am used to use - emacs + developer tools, email clients, messaging clients, media players, media managers, browsers, the occasional office productivity - none of the MacOS counterparts had any significant advantage over what I have in a Linux desktop.
Escapado 6mo ago
"entirely possible" is a bit of a stretch. You can install some hacky WM and sketchybar but system settings, workspace three finger scroll speed, the finder app, window chrome, login screen etc are not something that can easily be changed. And the default apps are really not that great for power users. Calendar, Mail and Finder are all slow, dumbed down and only very superficially customizable. I daily drive an M2 Pro MBP and I was running a Linux desktop up until 2 years ago and I felt like there were barely any limits to customizing the latter while I have to fight macOS at every step if I want to do something that apple does not want me to do.
dwedge 6mo ago
I use macos because of the battery life and because I want a Linux like experience without wondering if some weird software a company update forces on us will work, like citrix desktop or their random vpn client. But for someone who spends most of their time in the terminal, and the rest of the time in a browser, macos has some really annoying quirks especially when it comes to window management
Matl 6mo ago
Can macOS snap windows to the side yet without external plugins?
- saagarjha 6mo ago
  Yes.
  - Matl 6mo ago
    Oh, nice, when I last tried it about the M1 timeframe, it still didn't. What that convinced me of is that macOS is just not for power users.
    - saagarjha 6mo ago
      They added it a few years back
eikenberry 6mo ago
The difficult thing with Linux has always been finding well supported hardware. People always try to get it running on whatever random collection of hardware they have on hand and then are surprised that they have some problems. If you buy with Linux in mind you can get hardware that just works.
nine_k 6mo ago
I'm likely not "most Linux ricers", but as a long-term desktop Linux user, I'm very bothered when I have to use macOS GUI, and explicitly want a non-macOS experience. (This is why I avoid Gnome, for instance.)
ezst 6mo ago
> MacOS by far has the least bugs and kinda just works. MacOS is sometimes so weird and inconsistent that it's hard to tell whether it's a bug of Apple usual's "you are not smart/cool-enough to understand" kind of feature.
apatheticonion 6mo ago
I agree that MacOS is more polished. However overall, Linux is a better complete package - especially for power users, gamers and engineers. Linux GUIs are _fine enough_ though the jank is still present. The good news is they will get better with more users entering the chat. The thing to note is that, we don't want to confuse "it's not as good right now" with "It's bad so I will never use it" because that signals a lack of interest. There is a non-zero chance that Apple could be compelled to support it if enough people express interest (historically, they have with bootcamp). Competition is good, even if the competition is bad right now. We must encourage it.

freedomben 6mo ago

You should give Framework a try. It's been a flawless experience with Fedora. And with the upcoming Framework 13 Pro, battery life and trackpad are expected to be on par (or in the case of battery, even better than macos)

jorvi 6mo ago
No, battery life isn't on par. The only way to get the battery life Framework advertised is on Windows' 'Ultra Efficiency' mode which cuts CPU performance by 25-50%, lowers brightness by 30% and deprioritizes everything in the background to such an extreme that responsiveness of those is measured in seconds. It is not comparable at all to M-series or Snapdragon laptops happily chugging along at full capability and getting (compared to AMD / Intel) stellar battery life.
- bogzz 6mo ago
  They're talking about the new model announced, with a larger battery and ARM architecture. Not released yet, I don't think.
  - dwedge 6mo ago
    The new model is Intel or amd unless I missed something. They said in the video the battery life was entirely from video playback, which can be run on efficiency mode
    - bogzz 6mo ago
      My apologies, I don't know where I got the ARM architecture part from. I really want one of those machines, but I guess if they can't approach MacBook battery life yet I'm stuck on MacOS for now.
      - dwedge 6mo ago
        I think they said 22 hours of video playback in the video. If it even gets half of that for normal usage I'd be sold, the only thing stopping me giving it a shot is they are currently more expensive than the MBP and I'm not sure if they are worth it until the first reviews come in

jauntywundrkind 6mo ago

Generally yes, but the community around MLX has rallied pretty strong. Sure your disk io is awful, and your OS is buggy, but at least ML compiles and works on a modern OS. Works like rocm seem so close. But you need either the pre-compiled packages or 2+ year old Ubuntu to compile them. https://github.com/ROCm/TheRock/issues/3477 https://github.com/ROCm/TheRock/issues/3477

com2kid 6mo ago
I'm still on Ubuntu 22 because everything works. Got enough packages that still request I don't use wayland that I don't want to risk an upgrade. Sad because I really want the better One drive integration that Ubuntu 24+ comes with.
- jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
  I sympathize. But it seems so weird to me to be a Linux open source adopter, who is also so am conservative. Heck yes KDE, sway, Niri, and so many other new desktops are so so so nice. I can't imagine staying in the old world. But who should AMD for example target? It seems obvious to me. Personally I think if you are trying to make tools like ai acceleration software, you should 100% be focused on the alpha geeks. The people who want bleeding edge new stuff, the people who will take that and roll with it and expand your ecosystem are almost entirely the early adopters. The progressives are the social tastemakers, are the point on the adoption curve where cool and good happens. It's infuriating watching AMD bungle their chances by targeting people interested in ancient technology, for their incredibly advanced powerful rich new stack. What are you doing?!?! There needs to be a starting point for the alpha geeks, those who are willing.
  - jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
    I like this quote from warp people, on why they are open sourcing. Parallels to what I'm saying above even though it's a different matter: > * we need to build our business by offering the best possible product to the most excited community.* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936612 TheRock is so close but there just doesn't seem to be an eye on the ball for actually making this usable. This stack of issues blocking even vaguely modern systems has been sitting untouched for months.

LtWorf 6mo ago

Having used a macbook air for work just recently… not the best hardware at all. I think I can spend 5€ and get a better keyboard.

iknowstuff 6mo ago
There are fringes that have wacky and particular priorities, but not recognizing that you are such a niche and asserting that your silly requirement makes them “not the best” for the vast majority of people is silly
- LtWorf 6mo ago
  Sorry I wanted to mention a few hundreds other reasons but I thought it'd be too long.