These articles and blog posts crop up now and again and I loathe them because basic distros doing basic things is not a game of Russian Roulette and hasn't been for years. For most users,...
These articles and blog posts crop up now and again and I loathe them because basic distros doing basic things is not a game of Russian Roulette and hasn't been for years.
For most users, everything is in the browser anyway and no updates are breaking your browser and your bog standard parts.
Linux can be Russian Roulette if you use less common software and less common hardware, but stop trying to scare off the people that can use Linux Mint on an old Thinkpad with whatever browser installed.
I also have the feeling that since switching to a Mac (for work), I spend more time configuring that and trying out new tools and utilities, because it's so much harder to get things to work how I...
I also have the feeling that since switching to a Mac (for work), I spend more time configuring that and trying out new tools and utilities, because it's so much harder to get things to work how I expect. On Linux, most things behave mostly like I want, and those things are usually fairly configurable if I want them to behave differently. On Mac, I need to install some fancy app from somewhere (and even pay for it in some cases) to get what feels to me like very basic functionality. And even then, it often doesn't feel truly stable.
Each to their own of course, but I'm very much looking forward to when Asahi has thunderbolt support and I can seriously look at switching back to Linux there.
That experience is almost exactly mine when trying to use Linux as my primary work OS, sans having to pay for anything. Very little behaves the way I want out of the box and no amount of...
That experience is almost exactly mine when trying to use Linux as my primary work OS, sans having to pay for anything. Very little behaves the way I want out of the box and no amount of installation or configuration seems to fix it. So I know the feeling, but for a different reason haha.
Eh, I am about as tech savvy as it’s reasonable to be, having run Linux daily since probably around the 1.2.13 kernel (Slackware desktop in the 90s), and my last Ubuntu desktop upgrade still went...
hasn't been for years.
Eh, I am about as tech savvy as it’s reasonable to be, having run Linux daily since probably around the 1.2.13 kernel (Slackware desktop in the 90s), and my last Ubuntu desktop upgrade still went sideways on me last month. The only “less common” thing I’m running is a dual 3090, but I still had to dick around with kernel modules and ramdisks and forums to get it to even boot again. I regularly lose GPU support after an upgrade, even when it otherwise goes basically all right (as in I can boot). Linux is certainly better than it used to be (I haven’t built a custom kernel in a decade) but it’s a long way from osx or windows in terms of stability and user experience.
Im daily driving on an AMD APU and Ive only ever had to do one kernel rollback. I was able to safeboot, select the old kernel in a ui, and reboot. I dont have automatic updates turned on, I...
Im daily driving on an AMD APU and Ive only ever had to do one kernel rollback. I was able to safeboot, select the old kernel in a ui, and reboot.
I dont have automatic updates turned on, I deselect kernel updates unless I have the time and patience to rollback right then, and theres a ui interface for if I do need to rollback. Its absolutely wild how easy it is.
There's your problem. nVidia is notorious for bad Linux support and always has been. I've been running AMD APUs for many, many years now and the last time I had any graphics issues probably was...
The only “less common” thing I’m running is a dual 3090
There's your problem. nVidia is notorious for bad Linux support and always has been. I've been running AMD APUs for many, many years now and the last time I had any graphics issues probably was when I had to mess with X11 modelines to get my CRT monitor working correctly. I bought the first AMD APU when it was brand new in 2011 and I got it working on Debian (of all distros) by installing a newer kernel from backports.debian.org.
It's definitely possible to get into all kinds of hairy problems in Linux, but that's because you are in control. You can compile your own kernel, install software from other distros and mess with boot parameters that are supposed to be used by kernel developers. And it's easy to avoid this: Stick to packages from your distro and do your research before you run sudo commands and edit configuration files.
Nha. I have nvidia, and it has been a long time since I had a boot related nvidia issue and it has been like a year or two since the last time I had an issue with Wayland
Nha. I have nvidia, and it has been a long time since I had a boot related nvidia issue and it has been like a year or two since the last time I had an issue with Wayland
This seems to be your issue. Ubuntu has to be the distro that has had the most frequent breaks for me. I don’t like it that much, but fedora is what I would recommend, openSUSE, even Debian. I...
and my last Ubuntu desktop upgrade
This seems to be your issue. Ubuntu has to be the distro that has had the most frequent breaks for me. I don’t like it that much, but fedora is what I would recommend, openSUSE, even Debian. I love Debian but it is too stable for me haha
I used Debian for like three months like one year ago and for desktop use and it is fine... but I am kinda weird and like to have updated packages as soon as they get released, tried to use sid...
I used Debian for like three months like one year ago and for desktop use and it is fine... but I am kinda weird and like to have updated packages as soon as they get released, tried to use sid repo and sometimes this caused some issues.
For normal people I would say that Debian is enough, specially if you use gnome as DE.
Ubuntu is not so close to Debian now, I would see that Linux Mint Debian edition is closer to Debian now, and I would recommend for you to try it.
I recommend against Ubuntu, not because is a corpo distro or whatever, but because it offers a subpar linux experience, used in different periods and the only constant with them is that most of the time something breaks, with or without your participation.
I hop between Arch based distros, fedora and openSUSE. They are kinda okay too.
I think most people with any technical inclination coming from proprietary OSes are probably going to be annoyed with the age of Debian’s packages, especially if they continue to use those OSes...
I think most people with any technical inclination coming from proprietary OSes are probably going to be annoyed with the age of Debian’s packages, especially if they continue to use those OSes alongside Linux. It’s weird for a single machine to be stuck in the past.
Haven’t seriously used SUSE in ages but Fedora has been solid with packages that are new-enough.
Old packages are not that big of a deal nowadays. For CLI tools I used a bit of homebrew and worked kinda okay for that, for gui flatpaks work fine and distrobox is okay to use, issue with this...
Old packages are not that big of a deal nowadays. For CLI tools I used a bit of homebrew and worked kinda okay for that, for gui flatpaks work fine and distrobox is okay to use, issue with this approach is that one layer of “complexity” but I would say you are going to have a reliable system. I also tested universal blue images and they offer a nice experience, just that I don’t like fedora that much for some reason, I just cannot explain why haha. I wish that something similar could be done with Debian so I could build something on top of Debian Sid
openSUSE is one of the best disteis I have used, however the issue with them is that they don’t distribute some codecs and you have to use a third party repo and that cause some issues, not frequent but they are present. Also their nvidia drivers sometimes get left behind, because they only use the stable branch or something, so I don’t use them as my daily driver because of that
My 90 year old grampa who definitely does not know how computers work uses Linux Mint on his old all-in-one Samsung from like 2009 that shipped with win8 on it and has like 4g ram. All he does is...
My 90 year old grampa who definitely does not know how computers work uses Linux Mint on his old all-in-one Samsung from like 2009 that shipped with win8 on it and has like 4g ram.
All he does is read email and use facebook on it because he doesnt want to randomly browse the internet on his nice Win11 laptop where he keeps financial spreadsheets and does taxes.
This worked out really well for us because when he fell for a facebook ms support scam they couldnt connect to his computer because its running Linux.
Desktop Linux has a hit of a horseshoe thing going on, where people with the most basic needs on one end and people who live in the command line on the other are both very well served. It’s mostly...
Desktop Linux has a hit of a horseshoe thing going on, where people with the most basic needs on one end and people who live in the command line on the other are both very well served. It’s mostly those of us falling somewhere in between who run into problems.
To be fair I run into similar issues on windows. I dont think many people are going to argue that macos isnt the way to go if you really just want everything to work all the time, even...
To be fair I run into similar issues on windows.
I dont think many people are going to argue that macos isnt the way to go if you really just want everything to work all the time, even development, its just that macos is expensive.
The real comparison should be against windows, and linux knocks windows out of the water on almost all points.
I’ll take Linux over Windows in most situations any day. As far as costs go, it depends. For desktops costs can be lower, though as long as you don’t have need for a lot of RAM the base model Mac...
I’ll take Linux over Windows in most situations any day.
As far as costs go, it depends. For desktops costs can be lower, though as long as you don’t have need for a lot of RAM the base model Mac mini packs a lot of punch for a low price. For laptops, if you want anything with a high level of build quality and/or battery life and doesn’t cut too many corners, you’re looking at options that cost as much or more than MacBooks do. Everything below the US$800-1k line has some kind of major deficiency, which has been frustrating when shopping for something MacBook-adjacent yet Linux friendly.
I think I spent about $500 on my build in 2020ish and it’ll go for another five years at least without any upgrades. I think pc builds get kinda crazy when you’re trying to do video editing or...
I think I spent about $500 on my build in 2020ish and it’ll go for another five years at least without any upgrades.
I think pc builds get kinda crazy when you’re trying to do video editing or heavy simulators and gaming but for most people <500 + linux will get you what you need for 10 years.
I mean if we’re talking meeting the needs of the average individual, a lightweight Linux on a decent mid-2015 laptop with an SSD and 16GB or RAM is more than adequate. The only reason I wouldn’t...
I mean if we’re talking meeting the needs of the average individual, a lightweight Linux on a decent mid-2015 laptop with an SSD and 16GB or RAM is more than adequate. The only reason I wouldn’t say the same about a machine of the same vintage with 8GB of RAM is due to how darned heavy browsers and web apps have become.
With the new Mac minis and MacBook Airs I don’t think this is the case anymore. They don’t have any extremely cheap options. But it’s certainly not an expensive platform anymore.
its just that macos is expensive.
With the new Mac minis and MacBook Airs I don’t think this is the case anymore. They don’t have any extremely cheap options. But it’s certainly not an expensive platform anymore.
Depends what you mean by that. On the lower end the M4 is actually a pretty good chip. And on the high end lots of computing power is expensive no matter where you get it from. Relative to...
Depends what you mean by that. On the lower end the M4 is actually a pretty good chip. And on the high end lots of computing power is expensive no matter where you get it from.
Relative to Nvidia's offerings the top of the line Mac Studio is a steal. For $10k you get 512GB of homogeneous memory accessible to a pretty powerful chip. Trying to get that much VRAM from Nvidia will cost over $100k. Although Nvidia's solution will have a lot more FLOPs.
The MacBook Pros however are too expensive for me. But again - if you want a lot of VRAM they actually become a really good deal.
I read that in the same way you're pointing it out. If you only want to go A to B (use the browser for everything) most Linux distros are fine. But if you want to go from C to A big chance you'll...
All I’m saying is that not everyone wants to know how a car functions to drive one. We need to get from A to B, but also sometimes from C back to A, and it feels like on Linux or really any open platform, I need to plan ahead for major fuckups by the system that would be my problem to solve. I simply didn’t and don’t have the time for any of that and I would bet that most people would just be too frustrated to even attempt fixing these things which I stupidly did, time and time again.
I read that in the same way you're pointing it out. If you only want to go A to B (use the browser for everything) most Linux distros are fine.
But if you want to go from C to A big chance you'll have to do some tinkering.
Following from this the tinkering in itself might become a hobby/time sink.
Is this marketing for Apple, or Linux-nerd rage-bait? Because it feels like it could be either. Feels like a literal marketing line. Its also comparing Android with desktop Linux, which while...
Is this marketing for Apple, or Linux-nerd rage-bait? Because it feels like it could be either.
It’s great that Linux and Android exist, but I would never run them on my main devices that I use for actual work.
Feels like a literal marketing line. Its also comparing Android with desktop Linux, which while sharing a kernel, functionally have nothing else in common. Its fine to try Linux and realize you don't like it, but no every update is not Russian Roulette, like what do you mean? I've had an update "break" my Linux install once over 10 years (it was Arch adding systemd-homed).
It's eerie how much Apple fans echo the same talking points nearly verbatim in a way that I never see from other strong brand loyalty like cars or consoles.
It's eerie how much Apple fans echo the same talking points nearly verbatim in a way that I never see from other strong brand loyalty like cars or consoles.
I think it’s at least partially because there’s a larger sum of differences (both technical and user-visible) between most Apple products and their Windows/Android/etc counterparts than there are...
I think it’s at least partially because there’s a larger sum of differences (both technical and user-visible) between most Apple products and their Windows/Android/etc counterparts than there are for most categories of electronics.
If we take consoles for an example, most of the differences between a Playstation and Xbox are superficial. The only substantially different option on the market is the Switch, and similarly to Macs, Switches have a pretty fervent and opinionated fanbase.
And honestly: I don't really think that's the case. I can see a case for the desktop product, as that's pretty much a shitshow on Windows. But the iPhone isn't really any easier to use or more...
And honestly: I don't really think that's the case. I can see a case for the desktop product, as that's pretty much a shitshow on Windows.
But the iPhone isn't really any easier to use or more intuitive than an Android phone. Hasn't really been since roughly 2014 or so. It's just that it's marketed as such and the group refrain makes it so.
Doesn’t necessarily need to be universally easier or more intuitive, just different, and iOS is still a good deal different from Android. It’s also the only other option if Android doesn’t do it...
Doesn’t necessarily need to be universally easier or more intuitive, just different, and iOS is still a good deal different from Android. It’s also the only other option if Android doesn’t do it for you.
And that's why in my top-level I said that people aren't savvy enough if it doesn't occur to them why that is a very bad thing. Most everyone should understand why we should support adjusting the...
It’s also the only other option if Android doesn’t do it for you.
And that's why in my top-level I said that people aren't savvy enough if it doesn't occur to them why that is a very bad thing. Most everyone should understand why we should support adjusting the legal landscape to fix it (ala things like the DMA), without their eyes glazing over 30 seconds in.
The primary reason there is only iPhone and Android is because phone carriers had too much power to lock out competition.
While I’m supportive of the DMA (in principle, some bits of implementation are dodgy), I have little confidence that it will move the needle at all in terms of competition in the mobile OS space....
While I’m supportive of the DMA (in principle, some bits of implementation are dodgy), I have little confidence that it will move the needle at all in terms of competition in the mobile OS space. That ship sailed when Microsoft shot itself in the foot by allowing warring internal factions to reboot the Windows Mobile dev story multiple times in a short timeframe.
It will bring more flexibility to the incumbents but that’s not nearly as good as having a proper third or fourth option.
When I say "things like the DMA," I'm referring more broadly to consumer protection laws which limit anticompetitive tactics. Phone carriers in the USA are basically allowed to blacklist or...
When I say "things like the DMA," I'm referring more broadly to consumer protection laws which limit anticompetitive tactics.
Phone carriers in the USA are basically allowed to blacklist or whitelist any device they choose, regardless of actual compatibility. And many won't let you activate a new SIM without an app.
There's a ton of astroturfing as well, I would go so far as to say a good deal of Apple users would never be involved in online Apple discussions or fanboyist gushing. They are my main devices and...
There's a ton of astroturfing as well, I would go so far as to say a good deal of Apple users would never be involved in online Apple discussions or fanboyist gushing. They are my main devices and platform but they annoy the hell out of me just as much for every awesome thing they create or innovate in that I actually like and implement
Is it really that hard to believe that some people have different priorities than you do? Maybe try to step into someone else’s shoes for a few minutes. Nobody said you need to buy an iPhone, or...
Is it really that hard to believe that some people have different priorities than you do? Maybe try to step into someone else’s shoes for a few minutes. Nobody said you need to buy an iPhone, or that Android should go away. Maybe it’s just someone expressing a belief.
I would agree that the author sells Android a little short. Both Android and iOS are extremely mature operating systems with a lot to offer.
Honestly I think the anti-Apple fanboy crowd can be worse than the pro-Apple fanboy crowd.
No? I don't care what OS a random person uses, but I do care about bad-faith representations of a thing I like and this post felt bad-faith to me. It claims that Linux breaks frequently after...
No? I don't care what OS a random person uses, but I do care about bad-faith representations of a thing I like and this post felt bad-faith to me. It claims that Linux breaks frequently after updates, which is a factual argument I disagree with. Personally, the conflation with Desktop Linux and Android is what convinced me that they weren't writing in good faith, because they have close to nothing in common for the end-user.
Are they really conflating Linux and Android? To me it reads like the author was intending, “Linux and Android, as opposed to macOS and iOS”, or in other words, “I’m glad there’s alternatives to...
Are they really conflating Linux and Android? To me it reads like the author was intending, “Linux and Android, as opposed to macOS and iOS”, or in other words, “I’m glad there’s alternatives to Apple’s computers and mobile devices, but they’re not for me” rather than saying that Linux and Android are the same thing.
As far as breaking after updates, in my experience it varies a lot between distros and hardware. I have a laptop that’s consistently solid under Fedora for example, but my dual booting desktop with an Nvidia card has a bit more of a spotty history, and I’ve definitely seen Arch break after a big pile of backlogged updates.
It didn't cross my mind that they could have meant it like that, but that's a fair reading. I have always kept my installs pretty up to date, so that could play into it.
It didn't cross my mind that they could have meant it like that, but that's a fair reading. I have always kept my installs pretty up to date, so that could play into it.
Seriously. In what world is Android comparable to a desktop distro, when countless businesses use Android devices in production for real work every day? Even throwing shade on desktop Linux is...
Seriously. In what world is Android comparable to a desktop distro, when countless businesses use Android devices in production for real work every day?
Even throwing shade on desktop Linux is misguided, as if RHEL and SUSE Enterprise don't exist. Lowe's even spins their own custom in-house Linux distro that runs on everything the business uses. I worked for them in college, and the two Windows machines in the whole store were in the department that did custom kitchen and bath orders and the paint mixing machine, as they used software that was Windows-only and did not run well on WINE (and I think the mixer had hardware driver issues too, as the computer was embedded in the whole machine and was not networked).
I have loads of non tech-savvy coworkers who have zero issue using the Zebra devices (running Android) we do lots of our jobs through, and on a personal level, my mother is about as tech-inept as it gets, and she's had no problems running Android phones (and has not had any malware issues or non-hardware related failures, and I, like many of us, act as family tech support) since she first switched to one from a Blackberry (which she did have a few issues with over the years).
Gaminger? Small world. Unfortunately I am tech-savvy enough. I'm not judging anyone who wants things that just work for them, but most of the time what I am personally trying to accomplish is the...
Gaminger? Small world.
Unfortunately I am tech-savvy enough. I'm not judging anyone who wants things that just work for them, but most of the time what I am personally trying to accomplish is the creation of new solutions for others, which is directly tied to my having a deep understanding of how things work. It can be quite frustrating and time consuming, though.
Is this still a problem on Linux for the kind of user who doesn't actually tinker with their system at all? I remember running into this maybe as recently as 15 years ago, especially when doing...
Updates on Linux were always like Russian Roulette. I would restart and pray to every deity in human history for nothing to break.
Is this still a problem on Linux for the kind of user who doesn't actually tinker with their system at all? I remember running into this maybe as recently as 15 years ago, especially when doing distro upgrades between major versions, but since moving to rolling release distros (Arch and then Void) I can't remember having a single issue resulting from an upgrade. Of course that could just be me misremembering problems that did crop up because they were trivial to me...
Even on Ubuntu flavors updating hasn't been Russian roulette since before I switched. I've run into occasional issues updating before, but they've tended to be due to my own tinkering (installing...
Even on Ubuntu flavors updating hasn't been Russian roulette since before I switched. I've run into occasional issues updating before, but they've tended to be due to my own tinkering (installing multiple Python versions without anaconda sucks ass, but it sucks ass on every platform).
It hasn’t been too much of an issue for me recently, but drivers for Nvidia and Broadcom wireless used to be consistent pains, especially the latter. That’s mostly fixed to sticking to Intel/AMD...
It hasn’t been too much of an issue for me recently, but drivers for Nvidia and Broadcom wireless used to be consistent pains, especially the latter. That’s mostly fixed to sticking to Intel/AMD for graphics and other chipsets though.
I'm on debian for my gaming PC and I haven't had any driver issues besides the initial installation. It did take me 5 hours to figure out how to get the correct Nvidia drivers installed and...
I'm on debian for my gaming PC and I haven't had any driver issues besides the initial installation. It did take me 5 hours to figure out how to get the correct Nvidia drivers installed and configure them properly so my resolution was correct, but I don't think about them anymore.
Steam's Proton software is also a game changer for gaming on Linux. A year ago, I had to install various compatibility layers to make various games run. Even then, anticheat software just made many games unplayable on Linux. Now, I just run my games through Steam and they work. No performance issues or lag compared to my Windows performance and no setup on my end.
Yeah, I actually switched to Linux once the Steam deck was announced and going to be on Linux, since that gave me the confidence that it would work more reliably. While there are some edge cases...
Yeah, I actually switched to Linux once the Steam deck was announced and going to be on Linux, since that gave me the confidence that it would work more reliably. While there are some edge cases with Proton, for everything I usually play, it's pretty much seamless.
Proton actually allows me to play a couple of my Steam games that always crashed upon loading on the various Windows machines I had most recently, so to me it's a step up!
Proton actually allows me to play a couple of my Steam games that always crashed upon loading on the various Windows machines I had most recently, so to me it's a step up!
Happened to me not that recently. The problem mostly revolves around the "russian roulette" with common required tools/apps. Discord dying being my most recent example, but I wouldn't be shocked...
Happened to me not that recently. The problem mostly revolves around the "russian roulette" with common required tools/apps. Discord dying being my most recent example, but I wouldn't be shocked if things beyond the browser get secondary support from companies and thus lag on linux updates.
For me Linux has always been easier than Windows, but I use Mac for work and Ive also never had any issue with that. The biggest thing Ive run into is gaming support. I cant take advantage of a...
For me Linux has always been easier than Windows, but I use Mac for work and Ive also never had any issue with that.
The biggest thing Ive run into is gaming support. I cant take advantage of a security feature my game released because they specifically excluded linux support for it. I fear they’ll eventually require it and I wont be able to play any more.
Occasionally I’ll run into a website that doesn’t work on Firefox, but thats not a linux problem.
Oh, and many sites think I’m a robot. That gets annoying, but I understand.
This article is… really weird to me. Like, okay, the guy clearly values stability. But then he says: I… just don't believe him. If he's having that much trouble with routine updates on any of...
This article is… really weird to me. Like, okay, the guy clearly values stability. But then he says:
Updates on Linux were always like Russian Roulette. I would restart and pray to every deity in human history for nothing to break. Mind you I didn’t use Arch, that was my experience on Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE.
I… just don't believe him. If he's having that much trouble with routine updates on any of those three, then either his install or his hardware (or both, I guess) are super fucked up. But even if it were true, if you care about stability, why wouldn't you try a distro with a reputation for stability? I've been using Debian since 2010 or so, and it has broken itself under me zero times.¹
In contrast, the consensus on MacOS version upgrades these days seems to be somewhere between "don't" and "at least give it a month for the critical bugs to shake out". And my personal experience with MacOS is almost entirely negative: basically nothing just works! My work Macbook's battery won't last a weekend on standby!²
Any assertion about why Apple's products are popular that doesn't address their titanic marketing budget immediately falls flat on its face, to be honest. So here's my equally-evidenced counterargument to the article's thesis: Apple's products are popular because of their titanic marketing budget, and the author has drunk their kool-aid.
¹ Not to say that I haven't broken it, of course. But it's always been very clear that I was doing something ill-advised, and the breakage was on me. And, of course, it's hardly difficult to utterly fuck up a MacOS install if you put your mind to it.
² Because I am tech-savvy enough, I actually know why: it's far, far too sensitive to various inputs while in sleep mode. So I bump my desk and it jiggles the mouse by two pixels, or turn my bluetooth headphones on across the house, and it wakes up and then happily idles until the battery dies, which takes a lot less than the 60 hours between Friday night and Monday morning. But Apple doesn't get any benefit of the doubt for making deliberate design decisions which make their products behave badly!
I’d say it just goes to show just how variable experiences are between users. Everybody’s usage patterns, hardware, etc are a unique combination that make for a wide gamut of results. Someone else...
I’d say it just goes to show just how variable experiences are between users. Everybody’s usage patterns, hardware, etc are a unique combination that make for a wide gamut of results. Someone else might trigger behaviors in just a few minutes of usage that I wouldn’t in years, and vice versa.
I honestly think there is something wrong with your MacBook. Regardless of why it turns on it should go back to sleep after a period of non-use with the default power settings. Perhaps you have...
I honestly think there is something wrong with your MacBook. Regardless of why it turns on it should go back to sleep after a period of non-use with the default power settings. Perhaps you have changed them?
You've got something else going on and you're doing the same thing linux detractors do. My personal macbook can unplugged (closed but not off) for at least a month without draining its battery.
Because I am tech-savvy enough, I actually know why: it's far, far too sensitive to various inputs while in sleep mode. So I bump my desk and it jiggles the mouse by two pixels, or turn my bluetooth headphones on across the house, and it wakes up and then happily idles until the battery dies, which takes a lot less than the 60 hours between Friday night and Monday morning. But Apple doesn't get any benefit of the doubt for making deliberate design decisions which make their products behave badly!
You've got something else going on and you're doing the same thing linux detractors do. My personal macbook can unplugged (closed but not off) for at least a month without draining its battery.
I have wasted countless hours of my short and fruitless life trying to explain to the very many tech-savvy people in my social circle why I choose to exclusively buy Apple hardware, “when there...
I have wasted countless hours of my short and fruitless life trying to explain to the very many tech-savvy people in my social circle why I choose to exclusively buy Apple hardware, “when there are so much cheaper, open, and consumer-friendly alternatives” out there.
Well, would you believe it? I literally just stumbled on a blog post from someone who somehow gets me.
I do have several years under my belt tinkering with Windows and Linux. I liked the latter the most. Funny that I also had the same experience as the author did: my general knowledge grew considerably when I used it.
I guess it comes with the territory. When the hardware and the software are a box full of Legos, and the manuals are hard to comprehend, then you need to make a greater effort to build them yourself, but you also have more freedom to arrange them to your liking.
With Apple, the set is already built and tightly glued together. All you can do is play, and mostly only in the way that the set designer expected you to.
The author also used an illustration around toying vs. tinkering:
...most people don’t care about that stuff. They may want to draw, write, design, communicate with others or play their games. For these people, computers are tools – not toys.
And that’s what it has always boiled down to for me.
If I had all the money and the time in the world, I would probably have an office with a desk where random PC hardware sits around that I would toy (tinker) on occasion with.
When I need to Get Stuff Done™ though, I just don’t want to have to troubleshoot my tool though.
And most of the time, I just want to Get Stuff Done™.
Can I ask how long it has been since you used Windows and to a lesser degree Linux? Because I can't remember the last time I had to reinstall or troubleshoot something on windows. The experience...
Can I ask how long it has been since you used Windows and to a lesser degree Linux? Because I can't remember the last time I had to reinstall or troubleshoot something on windows.
The experience of course is different per person, so it is just honest curiosity.
Probably around 2019? I didn’t have the update issue that the author wrote about though. My “issue” was that I got addicted to customizing everything about my experience on Linux, to the point...
Probably around 2019? I didn’t have the update issue that the author wrote about though. My “issue” was that I got addicted to customizing everything about my experience on Linux, to the point that I wasn’t doing any work on it anymore. Like I said, if I had the time and the money, then I’d have a separate machine to tinker around with Linux, because I do enjoy the tinkering for the sake of it.
Yeah i'm curious about the windows answer as well. I've only been bitten by windows when i'm screwing around, and even then it's been pretty stable for a long time. It is annoying how the update...
Yeah i'm curious about the windows answer as well. I've only been bitten by windows when i'm screwing around, and even then it's been pretty stable for a long time.
It is annoying how the update frequency and "no stop asking me to sync my phone, you fucking can't" stuff pops up, but it's hardly the frustration of past years.
Okay, but you also quite strongly stated an opinion about Windows. Which I specifically asked about ;) Honestly not out to catch you off guard or anything, I am just trying to place it all in context.
Okay, but you also quite strongly stated an opinion about Windows. Which I specifically asked about ;) Honestly not out to catch you off guard or anything, I am just trying to place it all in context.
Haha. No problem. Sorry. My bad. I went back to read what I wrote and realized that I didn’t give you a complete answer. With Windows I basically experienced everything from XP and up. I had...
Haha. No problem. Sorry. My bad. I went back to read what I wrote and realized that I didn’t give you a complete answer.
With Windows I basically experienced everything from XP and up. I had several desktops and laptops. I bought my last Windows machine in 2018, a Lenovo laptop. I held onto it until last year. I sold it because I was basically not using it for anything (since I had fully migrated to Apple). That’s the machine that I experimented with Linux on.
My “tinkering” on Windows was limited to installing random programs for very niche uses, messing something up to the point where the system feels (very subjectively) like it isn’t working properly anymore (random crashes, and errors, and whatnot), and factory resetting the machine. 😂 I am pretty sure that I did that more than a hundred times across all the Windows versions that I used throughout the years. I just became really proficient at breaking the system.
I had less experience with Linux, tried out just few distros (mostly between 2005 and 2008), and only seriously invested myself into Ubuntu during 2019. I went all out with it, trying to customize just about everything. I was trying to see how far I could take it by asking myself: “This minor thing here. Can I tweak it to make it work 100% the way that I want it to?” Surprisingly, the answer was almost always yes. I was really impressed. And that’s coming from someone who is not tech savvy. I wasted hours reading documentation to figure out how to achieve these very niche tweaks.
Then I got an M1 Mac Mini in 2020, and that was when I truly began to shift towards Apple.
I should add that I had a mid-2010, 13" MacBook Pro between, well, 2010 and 2018. Miss it dearly. It literally lived with me trough some of the most important years of my life. It was even streaming my wedding to my family. 🥹
I tried Linux a year ago with an out of the box PopOS install and I tried again recently with a very customized Debian install. It did take me about 8 hours to get everything configured properly,...
I tried Linux a year ago with an out of the box PopOS install and I tried again recently with a very customized Debian install. It did take me about 8 hours to get everything configured properly, but software compatibility issues and day to day tinkering is almost nonexistent.
I also run macOS for my productivity stuff for the most part because I like the ecosystem and find that terminal gives me an easy way to go behind the locked down nature of Apples GUI. I wouldn't use Linux for my main productivity machine, but I find it's much better than Windows for the "fun" computer.
I am not OP, but I have had a similar experience with windows. I last used windows in August 2024 for my work, and I still act as tech support for my family. Just two weeks ago, a windows update...
I am not OP, but I have had a similar experience with windows. I last used windows in August 2024 for my work, and I still act as tech support for my family. Just two weeks ago, a windows update broke the fingerprint sensor on my sister’s framework. Apple has bungled updates before, but I don’t think any were bad enough to break Touch ID.
And for Linux, I still dabble for my servers. I have everything I host setup using docker, partly so I can burn it down and set it up again easily. I am currently trying to get flatcar Linux working with scale way. Linux is pretty great as a server, but I would much rather use macOS on a daily basis.
With moderate frequency (daily or close to it) I use Windows for a variety of things. It is better now than it was even 5 years ago, but there are still times that I encounter issues that are not...
With moderate frequency (daily or close to it) I use Windows for a variety of things. It is better now than it was even 5 years ago, but there are still times that I encounter issues that are not easy to fix, and result in reinstalling or even just wiping the computer and starting again. Recently I had issues with my VR headset connecting, and fixing it was not trivial or pleasant.
I've had various other issues from a "it works in other OSes, but not in Windows" issues professionally. Adobe stuff tends to work better on OSX than Windows, in my experience. There are various other examples, like Docker, that are easier to deal with in a Windows setting. Much of this is better than it was, but still not as good.
Of course, YMMV, but that has been my experience. Whenever I have to do something other than video games on my windows machine, I am often grumpy at the results. And also sometimes for video games, as noted above.
Knowing this was a thing is partly why I bought the Quest 3 as my first VR headset. Admittedly mostly the price, but partly because even if connecting to the computer failed or was too fiddly, I...
Recently I had issues with my VR headset connecting, and fixing it was not trivial or pleasant.
Knowing this was a thing is partly why I bought the Quest 3 as my first VR headset. Admittedly mostly the price, but partly because even if connecting to the computer failed or was too fiddly, I would have the fallback of a device that’s intending to be standalone.
That said, my experience so far with just letting Steamlink handle everything has been pretty fantastic! Bless valve (and all their cs casino money) for putting in the effort to have stuff just work!
Discord just randomly doesn't do voice chat right on Windows 11. Device shows correct, you see people's talking indicator, they hear you, but no sound output. Three different people I know have...
Discord just randomly doesn't do voice chat right on Windows 11. Device shows correct, you see people's talking indicator, they hear you, but no sound output. Three different people I know have been affected by this at one point or another. Sometimes restarting Discord fixes it, most of the time needs a full machine restart.
I was about to reply “yeah but windows 11 is still in beta” but I don’t know if that’s true, and even if it is, windows 10 is being deprecated this year, so they really shouldn’t still have this...
I was about to reply “yeah but windows 11 is still in beta” but I don’t know if that’s true, and even if it is, windows 10 is being deprecated this year, so they really shouldn’t still have this reputation today
On top of all of this, macOS does actually work for people who want to tinker a little bit. It won’t satisfy the people compiling their kernel from scratch, but it still has a ton of...
On top of all of this, macOS does actually work for people who want to tinker a little bit. It won’t satisfy the people compiling their kernel from scratch, but it still has a ton of customizability. I think people assume macOS is just as locked down as iOS, but it isn’t. You can install any software you want, including unsigned software. You can disable system integrity protection and modify every single part of the system.
macOS is perfect for someone who wants a desktop with sensible defaults (for the most part), but can be modified for the small handful of things you do want to change.
Another fantastic thing is having a complete Unix shell that is well supported by the developer community. Sure, it isn’t true Unix unless you change some obscure settings, and it isn’t Linux, but most developer software works perfectly on the Mac. Windows is closing the gap with WSL, but that is a VM running on top of windows.
It absolutely is a true Unix environment out of the box. This next point is admittedly pointless, but still illustrative: macOS is POSIX certified and all Linux distros are not, and GNU tools have...
Sure, it isn’t true Unix unless you change some obscure settings, and it isn’t Linux, but most developer software works perfectly on the Mac
It absolutely is a true Unix environment out of the box. This next point is admittedly pointless, but still illustrative: macOS is POSIX certified and all Linux distros are not, and GNU tools have non-unix defined behavior. GNU find works quite differently, for instance, whereas it’s the same on macOS and freeBSD.
You can also argue that the non-monolithic kernel of macOS is more in the Unix spirit of composable pieces. Launchd is also much more lightweight and composable compared to systemd Linux distros.
In that aspect, macOS is more of a pure Unix OS than Linux is. Not that it really matters.
I was referring to this article that came out a bit ago : Apple’s macOS UNIX certification is a lie. You do have to change a handful of settings to make it pass the UNIX compliance tests. If you...
I was referring to this article that came out a bit ago : Apple’s macOS UNIX certification is a lie. You do have to change a handful of settings to make it pass the UNIX compliance tests. If you take a look through the settings they change, it isn’t things that really matter that much. I would argue that the macOS default settings are better than what UNIX expects. For example, the root user should absolutely be disabled by default. Time coalescing to 5 seconds probably makes things better. File indexing is a good thing, even if it means file open times are slightly unpredictable. Updating file access time lazily is almost certainly better.
Like you say, this doesn’t really matter. It’s mostly an academic discussion. These are things that likely won’t affect programs designed for UNIX compliant systems. On top of that, just take a look at your alternatives for a Unix compliant OS. There is a single OS on that list that is consumer targeted. If you want to buy a Unix OS for daily use, your option is macOS, flaws and all.
The thing about desktop Linux that gets me, even as someone who uses desktop Linux (even if the bulk of my usage is macOS), is that despite it being a full box of Legos as well as full box of...
The thing about desktop Linux that gets me, even as someone who uses desktop Linux (even if the bulk of my usage is macOS), is that despite it being a full box of Legos as well as full box of K’Nex and adapters to make the two work together, you can’t really build anything meaningfully similar to macOS, even if you try.
You can build Windows-likes all day or tweak your way to the tiling setup of your dreams, but you can’t build a Mac-like environment. The best you can do is something that only superficially looks kinda-mac-like (and even then, still gets loads of aesthetic details wrong).
This is incredibly frustrating to me. If I could build a high quality macOS replica on top of Linux, it’d substantially increase my chances of switching, but I can’t, which means I’ll be pouring countless hours into refining a desktop that will never suit my tastes and mental models all that well, which sounds like the worst value proposition ever.
And so my usage of desktop Linux is restricted to single-purpose machines, like Steam Decks and study laptops where the desktop environment makes practically no difference. “Real work” on the other hand remains firmly planted on my Macs.
I think that I understand what you mean, but I want to make sure. You see, I have this thing where “user interface consistency” is really important to me. I am very sensitive to visual...
I think that I understand what you mean, but I want to make sure.
You see, I have this thing where “user interface consistency” is really important to me. I am very sensitive to visual “inconsistency” of any kind on the screen.
So, one of the many reasons why I locked myself up in the Apple ecosystem and threw the key away, is because across all of my current devices (a Series 3 Apple Watch, an iPhone Xr, a 2020 Mac Mini, and a 2022 iPad), there is that coveted “user interface consistency”.
Even between macOS and iOS I rarely feel like my brain needs to switch between how I use one or the other. When I was using Windows + Android for several years ago though, I felt like I was being tortured.
This is purely a me thing. To use a real world example: I used to live in an old studio apartment where every room had a different style of wallpaper and it drove me up the wazoo.
I’m, of course, not saying that macOS/iOS UI is perfectly consistent, but it gets a lot closer than anything else, for obvious reasons.
Consistency is a factor for me too, though that can be found to a considerably reduced degree under Linux by trying to stick to apps designed for GNOME or KDE Plasma. What’s bigger for me is...
Consistency is a factor for me too, though that can be found to a considerably reduced degree under Linux by trying to stick to apps designed for GNOME or KDE Plasma.
What’s bigger for me is irreconcilable differences in philosophy and functionality.
If we take GNOME for example, which I’ve seen many suggest is “Mac-like”, it takes an entirely different approach to among many other things menus and power user functionality. Where under macOS, the menubar is the domain of the system and inviolable by apps, under GNOME it rarely even exists and instead is replaced by a headerbar and hamburger menu containing only the bare minimum of functionality expected of the class of app in question. Where under macOS, niche and power user functions are placed in a submenu or hidden behind a modifier key to enable progressive disclosure (functionality revealing itself as the user becomes more technically adept), GNOME just tosses them.
There’s a boatload of things like this, some more significant than others, but it all adds up to make for a radically different experience.
I haven’t yet tried it, but a quick search suggests that its desktop is a set of tweaks on top of either GNOME or XFCE (user’s choice) which places some heavy limits on how closely it can resemble...
I haven’t yet tried it, but a quick search suggests that its desktop is a set of tweaks on top of either GNOME or XFCE (user’s choice) which places some heavy limits on how closely it can resemble macOS. That said I’ll see if I can spin up a VM to poke at it some time.
I use Zorin as my daily driver, on PC and laptop, and do all my work and personal stuff on it. It's absolutely not a drop-in replacement for MacOS, it is as you say a tweaked up version of GNOME...
I use Zorin as my daily driver, on PC and laptop, and do all my work and personal stuff on it. It's absolutely not a drop-in replacement for MacOS, it is as you say a tweaked up version of GNOME so the UX is not the same.
But the reason I use it is similar to what I like about Macs, which to paraphrase the blog in the OP is that it "removes the possibility of tweaking". You can futz with it like any Linux, but it's more of a pain to do (on purpose) because Zorin is built to have sane, stable defaults you're not meant to mess with at a basic level. It's not as easy to tinker with the UI as just starting with Arch, say, and building out your own experience, which the blog author wants to avoid.
If you don't like the default experience, you're going to have a bad time and should look at another distro, because like Mac it's meant to stay as it is in most respects. But I do like the default experience, a lot, and it's the closest in Linux I've ever seen to the "it just works" of Apple. I've found it to be extremely stable, everything worked out of the box with no setup beyond installing my apps and turning Proton on in Steam, and I've had zero issues in the year I've been running it since I moved off Fedora, which I unfortunately can't say the same about.
That's kind of what I was referring to. No system is gonna be able to reasonably make a drop-in MacOS without rewriting MacOS. Especially if Apple has any active UI patents.
That's kind of what I was referring to. No system is gonna be able to reasonably make a drop-in MacOS without rewriting MacOS. Especially if Apple has any active UI patents.
My wife has been using the GNOME version. They brand everything close to the OS (like KDE Connect) to avoid confusion for casuals. They configure the QT<--> GTK theming well which helps with...
My wife has been using the GNOME version. They brand everything close to the OS (like KDE Connect) to avoid confusion for casuals. They configure the QT<--> GTK theming well which helps with consistency.
I'm not deep in the Mac space, but from what I've seen of my coworkers setups its pretty comparable.
I think the answer is "you're not tech savvy enough until you can tell when you're having the wool pulled over your eyes." I don't expect everyone to want or be able to compile software from...
I think the answer is "you're not tech savvy enough until you can tell when you're having the wool pulled over your eyes."
I don't expect everyone to want or be able to compile software from scratch. I want them to understand at some level why it is important for people to be able to do so on any device they own.
I want everyone to be savvy enough that a change in interface or program is not a world-ending event. There is an entire generation of people who freak out if their desktop icons get re-arranged for one reason or another.
Without reference to Wikipedia, can you tell me what the difference is between The Internet, The World Wide Web, a web-browser and a search engine?
If not, you're not savvy enough.
I think the answer is that younger people need to be exposed to the rough edges of Linux (and less locked-down computing environments) in their learning years, so they can properly appreciate what the computers that permeate every corner of our lives are capable of.
When I was 9 I was troubleshooting IRQ conflicts without internet access, just the manuals that came with the components. I wouldn't wish that hell on anyone, but nobody should be daunted by installing an operating system. Especially since most installers have abstracted all but the most basic (like choose a time zone and a disk to install to) years ago.
While I agree with this, I would also like everyone responsible for an interface or program to stop fucking churning it pointlessly like a shark tank full of chum, pleaseandthankyouverymuch....
I want everyone to be savvy enough that a change in interface or program is not a world-ending event.
While I agree with this, I would also like everyone responsible for an interface or program to stop fucking churning it pointlessly like a shark tank full of chum, pleaseandthankyouverymuch.
A/B testing and using UI as branding (thus requiring full redesigns when branding changes) are big drivers of this and it wouldn’t hurt my feelings a bit if both fell out of popularity.
A/B testing and using UI as branding (thus requiring full redesigns when branding changes) are big drivers of this and it wouldn’t hurt my feelings a bit if both fell out of popularity.
As an argument for UI changes (which @ButteredToast & @vord have also posted concerns about) - One of the big things people complain about with a lot of FOSS applications is the UI and UX. Either...
As an argument for UI changes (which @ButteredToast & @vord have also posted concerns about) -
One of the big things people complain about with a lot of FOSS applications is the UI and UX. Either inconsistent themes, applications with a very old-looking interface (like most versions of Qt), and functionality that's scattered all over the place.
A UX example I can provide is GIMP. Photoshop users play around with GIMP for an hour and quickly conclude that it does not support their workflow. It's a mess of multiple floating windows.
The UI thing applies to... most FOSS that doesn't live in the browser. There's a lot of self-hosted applications that I love, but 90% of them are things I can open in a web browser or PWA.
If you try using a Linux distribution as a desktop OS, I feel like this compounds further. I haven't tried desktop Linux in a few years now, but I previously gave most of the desktop environments a shot: Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, and probably a couple others I'm forgetting. All of them lack the polish of Windows (and probably OSX but I haven't used a Mac too much).
What I'm trying to say is that I think UI and UX refreshes can be a good thing. Frequent changes are a way to make gradual changes so you don't shock the userbase with something completely new. Are some changes excessive? Absolutely. But I would argue many are ultimately good.
There is a difference between GIMP being an utter mess from 0 changes, and Discord continually futzing with a good thing. Hear me out: The only thing that was blatantly wrong with Firefox 3.5's UI...
There is a difference between GIMP being an utter mess from 0 changes, and Discord continually futzing with a good thing.
Hear me out: The only thing that was blatantly wrong with Firefox 3.5's UI was having the bookmark toolbar visible by default. Themes could already change the "ugliness" of the icons and colors without rearranging everything. By leveraging the standard OS menubar, you haven't broken the UI patterns that the rest of the OS UIs use. Firefox 3.5 on OSX vs Firefox OSX today. Notice how Mac prevented the worst breakage of UI patterns.
I'm actually glad the 3.5 design is dead. There's so much space going to the browser container rather than the content. The 3.5 screenshot feels like its just absolutely full of clutter that is...
I'm actually glad the 3.5 design is dead. There's so much space going to the browser container rather than the content. The 3.5 screenshot feels like its just absolutely full of clutter that is eating up screen real estate that could be used for something I actually care about. I almost never need to interact with the container beyond editing the URL, tab interactions (open, change, close), and closing the whole window.
Editing in an extra hot take: I despise the persistent bar on Mac. Hate hate hate. Often I have to click an application window just to get that bar to change to the application I want to access the toolbar for even though I have floating windows for both already. This makes workflows that involve multiple applications pretty miserable for me. In other OSes without that irritating bar I can directly click the button I want because it doesn't disappear just because I changed window focus. And concrete-ish example, imagine you're reading a guide in your web browser and you need to click certain menu buttons in QuickTime or something and every time you switch back to read the guide the buttons are now gone!
For what you mention, all you would have had to do in FF 3.5 is remove the extra two icons, except the tab bar integrated into the window manager. And frankly: that was a terrible decision by...
For what you mention, all you would have had to do in FF 3.5 is remove the extra two icons, except the tab bar integrated into the window manager. And frankly: that was a terrible decision by people who didn't care about breaking UI patterns. The OS is the one that should adjust the pattern if the window manager is consuming too much space around the browser.
I used to pay for Stardock Windowblinds for that exact reason: To make the window dressing on Windows XP better.
The Ubuntu 3.5 one is insanely cluttered not because of Firefox, but because the user installed 3 extra toolbars. I left it because of Stumbleupon nostalgia.
The Modern Windows screenshot highlights the exact problem: Three applications that do the same thing, three completely different styles diverging from the OS styling.
If I shrink down VSCode to be a half-screen width window, it's almost impossible to grab the window itself without clicking on something. It is the natural conclusion of the "F it, OS styling means nothing" design pattern.
We just have very different preferences. The one I was actually looking at when I was calling it cluttered was the Windows one. I'm both glad that there's no longer a bunch of space to reminding...
We just have very different preferences. The one I was actually looking at when I was calling it cluttered was the Windows one. I'm both glad that there's no longer a bunch of space to reminding me of the name of the application and I'm glad to not have File, Edit, View, etc. as I click them so rarely that they don't deserve to be a constant presence.
Admittedly the OSX one looks almost okay, but that's just because they hoisted half of the same junk into a different persistent location that happens to be outside the screenshot.
OSX has 4 vertical sections, plus one outside the screenshot for a total of 5. They could easily get rid of bookmarks to bring it down to 4, but I only really use 2 (tabs and URL/search). I'm not using a Mac these days, but was up until a few months ago, and I honestly cannot remember a single time I ever used the out-of-screenshot menu items with Firefox. Maybe once in Safari to enable F12 since they don't let the dev tools be turned on by default?
Windows has basically the same 5, which again could be easily reduced to 4, but I again only want 2 of them.
So I guess I'm saying that I'm glad they changed it because I don't think that keeping with standard patterns is necessarily a great reason to leave a worse design. I think that getting rid of the title in the title bar and using it for just about anything else is a strict improvement over wasting space on text I don't need. If the standard had been to put the menu bar in the title area (ie. icon, menu bar, padding until right side, minimize, maximize, close) my guess is that browsers would've settled on 3, but the standard was bad. Every application eating up a bunch of vertical space with a title and then a menu of rarely-used options was just, at least in my opinion, a bad standard.
Additional note on the dragging since I didn't respond to that originally: I bound super key + drag to drag whatever window its over without interacting with the Window itself. I didn't actually do this for applications like VsCode (I was trying just now and found it difficult to produce a size that was problematic, but some definitely exist unless you're willing to use the icon itself as a persistently available location), but instead because it also lets me move stuff that never would've had a title bar in the first place. For example, I can get back windows that I somehow pushed too high (title bar above screen) and a game running in borderless full screen can now be dragged between monitors. For this reason I wish something more like this had been the initial standard rather than depending on titles that may or may not be present.
Just a note: GIMP has had single window interface as a feature for probably at least a decade now. There was a time when GIMP really did well as an alternative to Photoshop, but to Adobe’s credit,...
Just a note: GIMP has had single window interface as a feature for probably at least a decade now.
There was a time when GIMP really did well as an alternative to Photoshop, but to Adobe’s credit, they have really added a lot of functionality since then. From my understanding many of them are patented so GIMP is not legally able to reproduce them.
I can get behind this. Change when change needs made to make thing better. Not because you need to hyperoptimize eyeball retention regardless of usability.
I can get behind this. Change when change needs made to make thing better. Not because you need to hyperoptimize eyeball retention regardless of usability.
I know this is kind of snarky, but I always found some truth in the line: "Linux is only free if you don't value your time". Having said that, macOS brings with it a whole other can of worms:...
I know this is kind of snarky, but I always found some truth in the line:
"Linux is only free if you don't value your time".
Having said that, macOS brings with it a whole other can of worms: namely the worst window management in any modern OS. Still, I'm at an age with a house to manage, loving wife, two small children, dog, full-time job, and etc. that I want the peace of mind of knowing that if some Apple product I own breaks, I can drive 20-30 minutes to an Apple Store and have it fixed relatively quickly and pain-free.
I dunno... I've been running the same Linux install for the better part of a decade across three different hardware platforms (ship of Theseus style). I have my entire setup including all...
I dunno... I've been running the same Linux install for the better part of a decade across three different hardware platforms (ship of Theseus style). I have my entire setup including all configuration tracked and managed under version and pick up my entire work life and plonk it on any pc hardware and be where I left off in ~ 20 minutes. If a software update is bad I have 6 generations of previous configurations to rollback to. I really value my time. I value it way too much to have my shit wrecked by some vendors timeline for software updates or deciding that my hardware is unsupported so no security fixes.
The number one thing for me is that if anything other than the hard drive breaks, I can yank it out and put it in any other x86 machine and it'll work. It also means restoring a disk image to any...
The number one thing for me is that if anything other than the hard drive breaks, I can yank it out and put it in any other x86 machine and it'll work. It also means restoring a disk image to any sufficiently large drive gets me operational from total loss quickly.
I can directly copy the EFI and root partition to a large enough USB and have a portable backup.
Windows will freak out at you for changing hardware and a portable install is not officially possible.
My home server is currently hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4, booting from a USB 3 SSD via EFI. My goal when I have (unwasted) free time is to shrink the root partition enough to get a second one in...
My home server is currently hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4, booting from a USB 3 SSD via EFI.
My goal when I have (unwasted) free time is to shrink the root partition enough to get a second one in there, then install an x86 install, and then migrate the non-binary configs to a shared partition that gets mounted and symlinked in place.
Thus could boot off ARM or x86, and just run a system update on the given architecture and be operational again.
If I spoof the MAC address for Ethernet in the config, wouldn't even need to adjust the firewall settings on the router.
The “stuff’s broken, how do I fix it” experience is also worse with macOS IMO. With macOS you’re going to get either Apple Support Forum posts with 1000 people with the same issue, no official...
The “stuff’s broken, how do I fix it” experience is also worse with macOS IMO.
With macOS you’re going to get either Apple Support Forum posts with 1000 people with the same issue, no official solution, and lots of “reset these settings, clear this, reinstall that” that randomly work for some people but not others. Or you’ll get a spammy clickbait article that has most of the same “reset settings” steps. Half the time nothing ends up working but the problem will just go away at some point.
With Linux you’ll get a bunch of more technical discussions on Q&A sites or distro forums which may be harder for less savvy users to follow, but also offer real troubleshooting steps because unlike macOS there is probably a log somewhere that explains the problem, if you can figure out where to look and how to decipher it. Forum convos are often a back and forth of “look here” then “look there.”
Don't forget the contingent of folks being out there solely to tell you that you are using MacOS wrong and should just use it as intended :P
With macOS you’re going to get either Apple Support Forum posts with 1000 people with the same issue, no official solution, and lots of “reset these settings, clear this, reinstall that” that randomly work for some people but not others. Or you’ll get a spammy clickbait article that has most of the same “reset settings” steps. Half the time nothing ends up working but the problem will just go away at some point.
Don't forget the contingent of folks being out there solely to tell you that you are using MacOS wrong and should just use it as intended :P
I definitely sympathize with the author's desire to "just do stuff", as someone who has spent an inordinate amount of time tweaking Linux (and XP) to get everything just right and end up spending...
I definitely sympathize with the author's desire to "just do stuff", as someone who has spent an inordinate amount of time tweaking Linux (and XP) to get everything just right and end up spending more time on that than actually getting anything done, though I did all the tinkering because I genuinely found it enjoyable to do.
I don't get the "Russian Roulette" thing, at all, unless you're using a non-mainstream Linux distro or truly getting your elbows into tinkering with the system. I assure you that MacOS will orphan its phone and laptop hardware with point releases sooner than any given update will completely break my Zorin install.
Macs are great at what they do (I used them for years), and there are legitimate reasons to not use Linux, but if you just want to get things done on your computer, pretty much no OS holds you back from that these days--not even mobile OSes now, really--barring some very specific software needs and those gaps keep closing every day.
I immediately flashed back to an old Dilbert cartoon. Dilbert (looking over dinosaur's shoulder as he works on a computer): What are you doing? Dinosaur: Using my computer. Dilbert: Why are you...
I immediately flashed back to an old Dilbert cartoon.
Dilbert (looking over dinosaur's shoulder as he works on a computer): What are you doing?
Dinosaur: Using my computer.
Dilbert: Why are you using your computer?
Dinosaur: It saves me time.
Dilbert: What do you with all the time you save?
Dinosaur: I work on my computer.
I used Windows full time until 2013. I was at a friend's place and saw her old 2008 MBP in her closet and she said it was basically a paperweight and asked if I could wipe it and recycle it....
I used Windows full time until 2013. I was at a friend's place and saw her old 2008 MBP in her closet and she said it was basically a paperweight and asked if I could wipe it and recycle it. Anyway, I wiped it and decided to play with it a bit and really liked the OS. I was still part-timing it, but when it came time for a new system, I bought a MBP and only use Windows on my HTPC / gaming tower.
Like many, I am still somewhat bound to the Adobe creative prison, so moving to Linux full time isn't in the cards. That being said, I use Linux for my servers and love it.
For me it all boils down to the best tool for the job. Windows is great for media and gaming, MacOS is good as a daily driver, and Linux is the best for server shit. MacOS is also excellent as a happy middle ground where I get all of the good stuff from Windows with the *nix stuff from Linux.
The hardware is also great (at least when I last bought this MBP.) This thing is from late-2013 and still runs everything nicely. Eventually I'll openCore it to update it, but I've been putting that off.
There has been a lot said already so I'll add just a bit. It is not that I do not value just works mentality. I am simply saying that the direction of Windows is clear and it does not end with a...
There has been a lot said already so I'll add just a bit.
It is not that I do not value just works mentality. I am simply saying that the direction of Windows is clear and it does not end with a better user experience. MacOS is likely similar if different in particulars.
Also that I personally did not have worse problems with Linux than with Windows in closer to a decade than not. I also do not use MacOS.
I get this perspective, but for me, this is part of the fun. Funny, ever since I started using Arch from scratch this problem went away entirely for me. I don't know if it was something about...
I used to be a hardcore Linux guy until I realized I was spending more time perfecting things than using them.
I get this perspective, but for me, this is part of the fun.
Updates on Linux were always like Russian Roulette. I would restart and pray to every deity in human history for nothing to break. Mind you I didn’t use Arch, that was my experience on Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE.
Funny, ever since I started using Arch from scratch this problem went away entirely for me. I don't know if it was something about Manjaro, but it used to crash randomly every once and a while. If I was extra lucky, it would crash during a system update. I started to get used to booting into a live USB and chroot-ing into my install so I could fix it. Once I switched to Arch, it's been surprisingly smooth sailing. I'm curious about anyone else's Linux experience that mirrors the article, because in general it hasn't been mine.
All I’m saying is that not everyone wants to know how a car functions to drive one. We need to get from A to B, but also sometimes from C back to A, and it feels like on Linux or really any open platform, I need to plan ahead for major fuckups by the system that would be my problem to solve.
I think this is a super fair critique of open platforms but that's also kind of what you're signing up for. I'm a technically minded person. I actually feel genuinely held back by macOS and Windows for most of what I spend my free time doing. I love the velocity that is granted to me by the particular flavor of Linux I've configured. And that's why it works for me.
I could also just be really lucky and have finally found a setup that I enjoy and doesn't need much tinkering with. After all those years!
In my experience, it's fun while you're doing it, then it just becomes part of your daily life, until 6 months later something breaks and now you've forgotten everything about it and now it's...
I get this perspective, but for me, this is part of the fun.
In my experience, it's fun while you're doing it, then it just becomes part of your daily life, until 6 months later something breaks and now you've forgotten everything about it and now it's work, because you actually need to get something done so there's time pressure.
I've been moving things from self-hosted to managed offerings by companies (e.g I swapped from vaultwarden to just paying bitwarden, I stopped trying to use nextcloud and just pay dropbox, and so forth) because the entropy was driving me insane.
Agreed. Spinning up my Linux box is akin to pouring out a puzzle or wrenching on a project car. I started with Linux about 23 years ago compiling kernels and running apache servers. I also ran NT...
Agreed. Spinning up my Linux box is akin to pouring out a puzzle or wrenching on a project car. I started with Linux about 23 years ago compiling kernels and running apache servers. I also ran NT and IIS at the time. I do like the power of Linux. But it continually gets in its own way.
Last year I had some oldish hardware and decided to spin up a server with nginx and nodejs. It was actually seamless. Except that the onboard wifi chip was one specific batch of intel chips which are not supported. Also the monitor I had didn't work so I had to pull an old vga monitor out of the basement. And then run a 100 foot ethernet cable across the house to plug the system in so that I could set it up at a desk since that wifi didn't work. Then I was an idiot and was running some git commands wrong and I thought my SSH was borked. At which point I took a break and then went back a couple weeks later and saw my obvious error.
Which is all to say, yeah sure, skill issue. I had fun, but I would not call my time very productive.
OTOH, SteamOS on the SteamDeck is awesome. Best linux system I've ever used. I also like OSX, I think the author is overstating how much a mac laptop is "locked down." You can do quite a lot in the terminal.
I love that "monitor not working" is one of these, because I have a messed up monitor that ONLY works on my linux box for reasons I don't care to figure out. My work Windows laptop, my wife's Mac,...
It was actually seamless. Except that the onboard wifi chip was one specific batch of intel chips which are not supported. Also the monitor I had didn't work so I had to pull an old vga monitor out of the basement
I love that "monitor not working" is one of these, because I have a messed up monitor that ONLY works on my linux box for reasons I don't care to figure out. My work Windows laptop, my wife's Mac, and just routing HDMI from a game console to it do not work and they all give garbled mess, but my Steam Deck and desktop work fine with it.
Somehow though, this is a failure of the monitor rather than a failure of Windows or Mac.
Yeah I've been there before. It can certainly be stressful. Over the last six or so years I've accumulated enough hardware and done enough configuration to never really be that down a creek...
Yeah I've been there before. It can certainly be stressful. Over the last six or so years I've accumulated enough hardware and done enough configuration to never really be that down a creek anymore. I understand that's a privilege!
This is my huge issue as well and something not nearly well appreciated by the self hosting crowd. If it's your hobby or your job, great. Many of us don't want it to be, and having to dive through...
This is my huge issue as well and something not nearly well appreciated by the self hosting crowd.
If it's your hobby or your job, great. Many of us don't want it to be, and having to dive through 5 config files to figure out where something broke is not helpful.
I'm also currently on Arch, but not really because I wanted to customize things. In some ways almost the opposite. Every couple years I back up my files, but not my configurations, and try a few...
I'm also currently on Arch, but not really because I wanted to customize things. In some ways almost the opposite. Every couple years I back up my files, but not my configurations, and try a few different distro out of box experiences. I then tend to stick with whatever default experience I liked the best, figuring it'll probably continue to be developed in a direction that already suits my preferences. For example, my desktop environment is KDE Plasma with almost no changes. I think I changed one super key behavior, but I haven't even changed the background.
Maybe weirdly, my push to give Arch a try was Valve. Seeing that they were funding parts of upstream Arch rather than building stuff directly into SteamOS was showing that it was probably going to stay pretty close to "just working" without a ton of tinkering because they obviously want SteamOS to "just work".
I'll also throw in that because I don't care about my configurations I just YOLO all my updates without backups since no update, no matter how botched, should prevent me from mounting the drive into a live USB and copying out the documents I care about. To date, this has never bit me in Arch. I periodically just update everything using yay and it always seems to be fine.
But the wiki explicitly says to not do that! I do it too.
I'll also throw in that because I don't care about my configurations I just YOLO all my updates without backups since no update, no matter how botched, should prevent me from mounting the drive into a live USB and copying out the documents I care about. To date, this has never bit me in Arch. I periodically just update everything using yay and it always seems to be fine.
The wiki was written by cowards. Real talk though: the Arch wiki is one of the best wikis I've ever used. The maintainers of it do legitimately great work.
The wiki was written by cowards.
Real talk though: the Arch wiki is one of the best wikis I've ever used. The maintainers of it do legitimately great work.
I use Aurora, a Fedora Atomic image, because it doesn't need me to tinker with it. Some stuff like my music setup in an Arch distrobox needs and welcomes some tweaking, but once it's in place it's...
I use Aurora, a Fedora Atomic image, because it doesn't need me to tinker with it. Some stuff like my music setup in an Arch distrobox needs and welcomes some tweaking, but once it's in place it's done and ready to use. There was a point I switched to being task-oriented rather than OS-oriented, but now I just do the stuff I'm trying to accomplish with very rare deep interventions when I'm feeling cheeky or have a set goal in mind, like adding Waydroid to the image, or building out a rpi container hosting environment.
These articles and blog posts crop up now and again and I loathe them because basic distros doing basic things is not a game of Russian Roulette and hasn't been for years.
For most users, everything is in the browser anyway and no updates are breaking your browser and your bog standard parts.
Linux can be Russian Roulette if you use less common software and less common hardware, but stop trying to scare off the people that can use Linux Mint on an old Thinkpad with whatever browser installed.
I also have the feeling that since switching to a Mac (for work), I spend more time configuring that and trying out new tools and utilities, because it's so much harder to get things to work how I expect. On Linux, most things behave mostly like I want, and those things are usually fairly configurable if I want them to behave differently. On Mac, I need to install some fancy app from somewhere (and even pay for it in some cases) to get what feels to me like very basic functionality. And even then, it often doesn't feel truly stable.
Each to their own of course, but I'm very much looking forward to when Asahi has thunderbolt support and I can seriously look at switching back to Linux there.
That experience is almost exactly mine when trying to use Linux as my primary work OS, sans having to pay for anything. Very little behaves the way I want out of the box and no amount of installation or configuration seems to fix it. So I know the feeling, but for a different reason haha.
Eh, I am about as tech savvy as it’s reasonable to be, having run Linux daily since probably around the 1.2.13 kernel (Slackware desktop in the 90s), and my last Ubuntu desktop upgrade still went sideways on me last month. The only “less common” thing I’m running is a dual 3090, but I still had to dick around with kernel modules and ramdisks and forums to get it to even boot again. I regularly lose GPU support after an upgrade, even when it otherwise goes basically all right (as in I can boot). Linux is certainly better than it used to be (I haven’t built a custom kernel in a decade) but it’s a long way from osx or windows in terms of stability and user experience.
Im daily driving on an AMD APU and Ive only ever had to do one kernel rollback. I was able to safeboot, select the old kernel in a ui, and reboot.
I dont have automatic updates turned on, I deselect kernel updates unless I have the time and patience to rollback right then, and theres a ui interface for if I do need to rollback. Its absolutely wild how easy it is.
There's your problem. nVidia is notorious for bad Linux support and always has been. I've been running AMD APUs for many, many years now and the last time I had any graphics issues probably was when I had to mess with X11 modelines to get my CRT monitor working correctly. I bought the first AMD APU when it was brand new in 2011 and I got it working on Debian (of all distros) by installing a newer kernel from backports.debian.org.
It's definitely possible to get into all kinds of hairy problems in Linux, but that's because you are in control. You can compile your own kernel, install software from other distros and mess with boot parameters that are supposed to be used by kernel developers. And it's easy to avoid this: Stick to packages from your distro and do your research before you run sudo commands and edit configuration files.
Nha. I have nvidia, and it has been a long time since I had a boot related nvidia issue and it has been like a year or two since the last time I had an issue with Wayland
This seems to be your issue. Ubuntu has to be the distro that has had the most frequent breaks for me. I don’t like it that much, but fedora is what I would recommend, openSUSE, even Debian. I love Debian but it is too stable for me haha
I use Debian for almost all my servers so I like to use Ubuntu since it’s basically the same stuff inside but with a better desktop experience.
I used Debian for like three months like one year ago and for desktop use and it is fine... but I am kinda weird and like to have updated packages as soon as they get released, tried to use sid repo and sometimes this caused some issues.
For normal people I would say that Debian is enough, specially if you use gnome as DE.
Ubuntu is not so close to Debian now, I would see that Linux Mint Debian edition is closer to Debian now, and I would recommend for you to try it.
I recommend against Ubuntu, not because is a corpo distro or whatever, but because it offers a subpar linux experience, used in different periods and the only constant with them is that most of the time something breaks, with or without your participation.
I hop between Arch based distros, fedora and openSUSE. They are kinda okay too.
I think most people with any technical inclination coming from proprietary OSes are probably going to be annoyed with the age of Debian’s packages, especially if they continue to use those OSes alongside Linux. It’s weird for a single machine to be stuck in the past.
Haven’t seriously used SUSE in ages but Fedora has been solid with packages that are new-enough.
Old packages are not that big of a deal nowadays. For CLI tools I used a bit of homebrew and worked kinda okay for that, for gui flatpaks work fine and distrobox is okay to use, issue with this approach is that one layer of “complexity” but I would say you are going to have a reliable system. I also tested universal blue images and they offer a nice experience, just that I don’t like fedora that much for some reason, I just cannot explain why haha. I wish that something similar could be done with Debian so I could build something on top of Debian Sid
openSUSE is one of the best disteis I have used, however the issue with them is that they don’t distribute some codecs and you have to use a third party repo and that cause some issues, not frequent but they are present. Also their nvidia drivers sometimes get left behind, because they only use the stable branch or something, so I don’t use them as my daily driver because of that
My 90 year old grampa who definitely does not know how computers work uses Linux Mint on his old all-in-one Samsung from like 2009 that shipped with win8 on it and has like 4g ram.
All he does is read email and use facebook on it because he doesnt want to randomly browse the internet on his nice Win11 laptop where he keeps financial spreadsheets and does taxes.
This worked out really well for us because when he fell for a facebook ms support scam they couldnt connect to his computer because its running Linux.
Desktop Linux has a hit of a horseshoe thing going on, where people with the most basic needs on one end and people who live in the command line on the other are both very well served. It’s mostly those of us falling somewhere in between who run into problems.
To be fair I run into similar issues on windows.
I dont think many people are going to argue that macos isnt the way to go if you really just want everything to work all the time, even development, its just that macos is expensive.
The real comparison should be against windows, and linux knocks windows out of the water on almost all points.
I’ll take Linux over Windows in most situations any day.
As far as costs go, it depends. For desktops costs can be lower, though as long as you don’t have need for a lot of RAM the base model Mac mini packs a lot of punch for a low price. For laptops, if you want anything with a high level of build quality and/or battery life and doesn’t cut too many corners, you’re looking at options that cost as much or more than MacBooks do. Everything below the US$800-1k line has some kind of major deficiency, which has been frustrating when shopping for something MacBook-adjacent yet Linux friendly.
I think I spent about $500 on my build in 2020ish and it’ll go for another five years at least without any upgrades.
I think pc builds get kinda crazy when you’re trying to do video editing or heavy simulators and gaming but for most people <500 + linux will get you what you need for 10 years.
I mean if we’re talking meeting the needs of the average individual, a lightweight Linux on a decent mid-2015 laptop with an SSD and 16GB or RAM is more than adequate. The only reason I wouldn’t say the same about a machine of the same vintage with 8GB of RAM is due to how darned heavy browsers and web apps have become.
With the new Mac minis and MacBook Airs I don’t think this is the case anymore. They don’t have any extremely cheap options. But it’s certainly not an expensive platform anymore.
Okay, macos with any kinda computing power is more expensive.
Depends what you mean by that. On the lower end the M4 is actually a pretty good chip. And on the high end lots of computing power is expensive no matter where you get it from.
Relative to Nvidia's offerings the top of the line Mac Studio is a steal. For $10k you get 512GB of homogeneous memory accessible to a pretty powerful chip. Trying to get that much VRAM from Nvidia will cost over $100k. Although Nvidia's solution will have a lot more FLOPs.
The MacBook Pros however are too expensive for me. But again - if you want a lot of VRAM they actually become a really good deal.
I read that in the same way you're pointing it out. If you only want to go A to B (use the browser for everything) most Linux distros are fine.
But if you want to go from C to A big chance you'll have to do some tinkering.
Following from this the tinkering in itself might become a hobby/time sink.
Is this marketing for Apple, or Linux-nerd rage-bait? Because it feels like it could be either.
Feels like a literal marketing line. Its also comparing Android with desktop Linux, which while sharing a kernel, functionally have nothing else in common. Its fine to try Linux and realize you don't like it, but no every update is not Russian Roulette, like what do you mean? I've had an update "break" my Linux install once over 10 years (it was Arch adding systemd-homed).
It's eerie how much Apple fans echo the same talking points nearly verbatim in a way that I never see from other strong brand loyalty like cars or consoles.
I think it’s at least partially because there’s a larger sum of differences (both technical and user-visible) between most Apple products and their Windows/Android/etc counterparts than there are for most categories of electronics.
If we take consoles for an example, most of the differences between a Playstation and Xbox are superficial. The only substantially different option on the market is the Switch, and similarly to Macs, Switches have a pretty fervent and opinionated fanbase.
And honestly: I don't really think that's the case. I can see a case for the desktop product, as that's pretty much a shitshow on Windows.
But the iPhone isn't really any easier to use or more intuitive than an Android phone. Hasn't really been since roughly 2014 or so. It's just that it's marketed as such and the group refrain makes it so.
Doesn’t necessarily need to be universally easier or more intuitive, just different, and iOS is still a good deal different from Android. It’s also the only other option if Android doesn’t do it for you.
And that's why in my top-level I said that people aren't savvy enough if it doesn't occur to them why that is a very bad thing. Most everyone should understand why we should support adjusting the legal landscape to fix it (ala things like the DMA), without their eyes glazing over 30 seconds in.
The primary reason there is only iPhone and Android is because phone carriers had too much power to lock out competition.
While I’m supportive of the DMA (in principle, some bits of implementation are dodgy), I have little confidence that it will move the needle at all in terms of competition in the mobile OS space. That ship sailed when Microsoft shot itself in the foot by allowing warring internal factions to reboot the Windows Mobile dev story multiple times in a short timeframe.
It will bring more flexibility to the incumbents but that’s not nearly as good as having a proper third or fourth option.
When I say "things like the DMA," I'm referring more broadly to consumer protection laws which limit anticompetitive tactics.
Phone carriers in the USA are basically allowed to blacklist or whitelist any device they choose, regardless of actual compatibility. And many won't let you activate a new SIM without an app.
Ahh ok. Yeah, cell networks are needlessly restrictive, no argument there.
There's a ton of astroturfing as well, I would go so far as to say a good deal of Apple users would never be involved in online Apple discussions or fanboyist gushing. They are my main devices and platform but they annoy the hell out of me just as much for every awesome thing they create or innovate in that I actually like and implement
FWIW I was talking about people I know IRL.
Is it really that hard to believe that some people have different priorities than you do? Maybe try to step into someone else’s shoes for a few minutes. Nobody said you need to buy an iPhone, or that Android should go away. Maybe it’s just someone expressing a belief.
I would agree that the author sells Android a little short. Both Android and iOS are extremely mature operating systems with a lot to offer.
Honestly I think the anti-Apple fanboy crowd can be worse than the pro-Apple fanboy crowd.
No? I don't care what OS a random person uses, but I do care about bad-faith representations of a thing I like and this post felt bad-faith to me. It claims that Linux breaks frequently after updates, which is a factual argument I disagree with. Personally, the conflation with Desktop Linux and Android is what convinced me that they weren't writing in good faith, because they have close to nothing in common for the end-user.
Are they really conflating Linux and Android? To me it reads like the author was intending, “Linux and Android, as opposed to macOS and iOS”, or in other words, “I’m glad there’s alternatives to Apple’s computers and mobile devices, but they’re not for me” rather than saying that Linux and Android are the same thing.
As far as breaking after updates, in my experience it varies a lot between distros and hardware. I have a laptop that’s consistently solid under Fedora for example, but my dual booting desktop with an Nvidia card has a bit more of a spotty history, and I’ve definitely seen Arch break after a big pile of backlogged updates.
It didn't cross my mind that they could have meant it like that, but that's a fair reading. I have always kept my installs pretty up to date, so that could play into it.
Seriously. In what world is Android comparable to a desktop distro, when countless businesses use Android devices in production for real work every day?
Even throwing shade on desktop Linux is misguided, as if RHEL and SUSE Enterprise don't exist. Lowe's even spins their own custom in-house Linux distro that runs on everything the business uses. I worked for them in college, and the two Windows machines in the whole store were in the department that did custom kitchen and bath orders and the paint mixing machine, as they used software that was Windows-only and did not run well on WINE (and I think the mixer had hardware driver issues too, as the computer was embedded in the whole machine and was not networked).
I have loads of non tech-savvy coworkers who have zero issue using the Zebra devices (running Android) we do lots of our jobs through, and on a personal level, my mother is about as tech-inept as it gets, and she's had no problems running Android phones (and has not had any malware issues or non-hardware related failures, and I, like many of us, act as family tech support) since she first switched to one from a Blackberry (which she did have a few issues with over the years).
Gaminger? Small world.
Unfortunately I am tech-savvy enough. I'm not judging anyone who wants things that just work for them, but most of the time what I am personally trying to accomplish is the creation of new solutions for others, which is directly tied to my having a deep understanding of how things work. It can be quite frustrating and time consuming, though.
Protected as he lives and breathes. I can hardly believe it. What a small world indeed.
Is this still a problem on Linux for the kind of user who doesn't actually tinker with their system at all? I remember running into this maybe as recently as 15 years ago, especially when doing distro upgrades between major versions, but since moving to rolling release distros (Arch and then Void) I can't remember having a single issue resulting from an upgrade. Of course that could just be me misremembering problems that did crop up because they were trivial to me...
Even on Ubuntu flavors updating hasn't been Russian roulette since before I switched. I've run into occasional issues updating before, but they've tended to be due to my own tinkering (installing multiple Python versions without anaconda sucks ass, but it sucks ass on every platform).
It hasn’t been too much of an issue for me recently, but drivers for Nvidia and Broadcom wireless used to be consistent pains, especially the latter. That’s mostly fixed to sticking to Intel/AMD for graphics and other chipsets though.
Ah yeah, I used to have occasional driver issues until I switched to PopOS, but it's been a nonissue since.
I'm on debian for my gaming PC and I haven't had any driver issues besides the initial installation. It did take me 5 hours to figure out how to get the correct Nvidia drivers installed and configure them properly so my resolution was correct, but I don't think about them anymore.
Steam's Proton software is also a game changer for gaming on Linux. A year ago, I had to install various compatibility layers to make various games run. Even then, anticheat software just made many games unplayable on Linux. Now, I just run my games through Steam and they work. No performance issues or lag compared to my Windows performance and no setup on my end.
Yeah, I actually switched to Linux once the Steam deck was announced and going to be on Linux, since that gave me the confidence that it would work more reliably. While there are some edge cases with Proton, for everything I usually play, it's pretty much seamless.
Proton actually allows me to play a couple of my Steam games that always crashed upon loading on the various Windows machines I had most recently, so to me it's a step up!
Happened to me not that recently. The problem mostly revolves around the "russian roulette" with common required tools/apps. Discord dying being my most recent example, but I wouldn't be shocked if things beyond the browser get secondary support from companies and thus lag on linux updates.
I suppose this depends a lot on the specific programs in question. I've never had this issue with non-technical apps (Discord included) myself.
It's pretty easy on Gentoo using Portage slots :P
Haha Gentoo is probably a bit out of my comfort zone, I'm afraid.
Nowadays a lot of Python developers seem to be switching to uv. I was using Anaconda, but I plan to give it a try next time I need to use Python.
ooh I haven't heard of that, I'll check it out!
For me Linux has always been easier than Windows, but I use Mac for work and Ive also never had any issue with that.
The biggest thing Ive run into is gaming support. I cant take advantage of a security feature my game released because they specifically excluded linux support for it. I fear they’ll eventually require it and I wont be able to play any more.
Occasionally I’ll run into a website that doesn’t work on Firefox, but thats not a linux problem.
Oh, and many sites think I’m a robot. That gets annoying, but I understand.
This article is… really weird to me. Like, okay, the guy clearly values stability. But then he says:
I… just don't believe him. If he's having that much trouble with routine updates on any of those three, then either his install or his hardware (or both, I guess) are super fucked up. But even if it were true, if you care about stability, why wouldn't you try a distro with a reputation for stability? I've been using Debian since 2010 or so, and it has broken itself under me zero times.¹
In contrast, the consensus on MacOS version upgrades these days seems to be somewhere between "don't" and "at least give it a month for the critical bugs to shake out". And my personal experience with MacOS is almost entirely negative: basically nothing just works! My work Macbook's battery won't last a weekend on standby!²
Any assertion about why Apple's products are popular that doesn't address their titanic marketing budget immediately falls flat on its face, to be honest. So here's my equally-evidenced counterargument to the article's thesis: Apple's products are popular because of their titanic marketing budget, and the author has drunk their kool-aid.
¹ Not to say that I haven't broken it, of course. But it's always been very clear that I was doing something ill-advised, and the breakage was on me. And, of course, it's hardly difficult to utterly fuck up a MacOS install if you put your mind to it.
² Because I am tech-savvy enough, I actually know why: it's far, far too sensitive to various inputs while in sleep mode. So I bump my desk and it jiggles the mouse by two pixels, or turn my bluetooth headphones on across the house, and it wakes up and then happily idles until the battery dies, which takes a lot less than the 60 hours between Friday night and Monday morning. But Apple doesn't get any benefit of the doubt for making deliberate design decisions which make their products behave badly!
I’d say it just goes to show just how variable experiences are between users. Everybody’s usage patterns, hardware, etc are a unique combination that make for a wide gamut of results. Someone else might trigger behaviors in just a few minutes of usage that I wouldn’t in years, and vice versa.
I honestly think there is something wrong with your MacBook. Regardless of why it turns on it should go back to sleep after a period of non-use with the default power settings. Perhaps you have changed them?
You've got something else going on and you're doing the same thing linux detractors do. My personal macbook can unplugged (closed but not off) for at least a month without draining its battery.
I have wasted countless hours of my short and fruitless life trying to explain to the very many tech-savvy people in my social circle why I choose to exclusively buy Apple hardware, “when there are so much cheaper, open, and consumer-friendly alternatives” out there.
Well, would you believe it? I literally just stumbled on a blog post from someone who somehow gets me.
I do have several years under my belt tinkering with Windows and Linux. I liked the latter the most. Funny that I also had the same experience as the author did: my general knowledge grew considerably when I used it.
I guess it comes with the territory. When the hardware and the software are a box full of Legos, and the manuals are hard to comprehend, then you need to make a greater effort to build them yourself, but you also have more freedom to arrange them to your liking.
With Apple, the set is already built and tightly glued together. All you can do is play, and mostly only in the way that the set designer expected you to.
The author also used an illustration around toying vs. tinkering:
And that’s what it has always boiled down to for me.
If I had all the money and the time in the world, I would probably have an office with a desk where random PC hardware sits around that I would toy (tinker) on occasion with.
When I need to Get Stuff Done™ though, I just don’t want to have to troubleshoot my tool though.
And most of the time, I just want to Get Stuff Done™.
Can I ask how long it has been since you used Windows and to a lesser degree Linux? Because I can't remember the last time I had to reinstall or troubleshoot something on windows.
The experience of course is different per person, so it is just honest curiosity.
Probably around 2019? I didn’t have the update issue that the author wrote about though. My “issue” was that I got addicted to customizing everything about my experience on Linux, to the point that I wasn’t doing any work on it anymore. Like I said, if I had the time and the money, then I’d have a separate machine to tinker around with Linux, because I do enjoy the tinkering for the sake of it.
So that was Linux? Or also Windows?
Yeah i'm curious about the windows answer as well. I've only been bitten by windows when i'm screwing around, and even then it's been pretty stable for a long time.
It is annoying how the update frequency and "no stop asking me to sync my phone, you fucking can't" stuff pops up, but it's hardly the frustration of past years.
Linux.
Okay, but you also quite strongly stated an opinion about Windows. Which I specifically asked about ;) Honestly not out to catch you off guard or anything, I am just trying to place it all in context.
Haha. No problem. Sorry. My bad. I went back to read what I wrote and realized that I didn’t give you a complete answer.
With Windows I basically experienced everything from XP and up. I had several desktops and laptops. I bought my last Windows machine in 2018, a Lenovo laptop. I held onto it until last year. I sold it because I was basically not using it for anything (since I had fully migrated to Apple). That’s the machine that I experimented with Linux on.
My “tinkering” on Windows was limited to installing random programs for very niche uses, messing something up to the point where the system feels (very subjectively) like it isn’t working properly anymore (random crashes, and errors, and whatnot), and factory resetting the machine. 😂 I am pretty sure that I did that more than a hundred times across all the Windows versions that I used throughout the years. I just became really proficient at breaking the system.
I had less experience with Linux, tried out just few distros (mostly between 2005 and 2008), and only seriously invested myself into Ubuntu during 2019. I went all out with it, trying to customize just about everything. I was trying to see how far I could take it by asking myself: “This minor thing here. Can I tweak it to make it work 100% the way that I want it to?” Surprisingly, the answer was almost always yes. I was really impressed. And that’s coming from someone who is not tech savvy. I wasted hours reading documentation to figure out how to achieve these very niche tweaks.
Then I got an M1 Mac Mini in 2020, and that was when I truly began to shift towards Apple.
I should add that I had a mid-2010, 13" MacBook Pro between, well, 2010 and 2018. Miss it dearly. It literally lived with me trough some of the most important years of my life. It was even streaming my wedding to my family. 🥹
I tried Linux a year ago with an out of the box PopOS install and I tried again recently with a very customized Debian install. It did take me about 8 hours to get everything configured properly, but software compatibility issues and day to day tinkering is almost nonexistent.
I also run macOS for my productivity stuff for the most part because I like the ecosystem and find that terminal gives me an easy way to go behind the locked down nature of Apples GUI. I wouldn't use Linux for my main productivity machine, but I find it's much better than Windows for the "fun" computer.
Thanks! We have very different experiences using windows and Linux, but it makes your preferences a bit clearer to me.
I am not OP, but I have had a similar experience with windows. I last used windows in August 2024 for my work, and I still act as tech support for my family. Just two weeks ago, a windows update broke the fingerprint sensor on my sister’s framework. Apple has bungled updates before, but I don’t think any were bad enough to break Touch ID.
And for Linux, I still dabble for my servers. I have everything I host setup using docker, partly so I can burn it down and set it up again easily. I am currently trying to get flatcar Linux working with scale way. Linux is pretty great as a server, but I would much rather use macOS on a daily basis.
With moderate frequency (daily or close to it) I use Windows for a variety of things. It is better now than it was even 5 years ago, but there are still times that I encounter issues that are not easy to fix, and result in reinstalling or even just wiping the computer and starting again. Recently I had issues with my VR headset connecting, and fixing it was not trivial or pleasant.
I've had various other issues from a "it works in other OSes, but not in Windows" issues professionally. Adobe stuff tends to work better on OSX than Windows, in my experience. There are various other examples, like Docker, that are easier to deal with in a Windows setting. Much of this is better than it was, but still not as good.
Of course, YMMV, but that has been my experience. Whenever I have to do something other than video games on my windows machine, I am often grumpy at the results. And also sometimes for video games, as noted above.
Knowing this was a thing is partly why I bought the Quest 3 as my first VR headset. Admittedly mostly the price, but partly because even if connecting to the computer failed or was too fiddly, I would have the fallback of a device that’s intending to be standalone.
That said, my experience so far with just letting Steamlink handle everything has been pretty fantastic! Bless valve (and all their cs casino money) for putting in the effort to have stuff just work!
Mine is a quest 2 and most of the time it works well! But yeah, it's good to have the fallback if just playing a game without it being connected.
Discord just randomly doesn't do voice chat right on Windows 11. Device shows correct, you see people's talking indicator, they hear you, but no sound output. Three different people I know have been affected by this at one point or another. Sometimes restarting Discord fixes it, most of the time needs a full machine restart.
I don't have this problem on Linux.
I was about to reply “yeah but windows 11 is still in beta” but I don’t know if that’s true, and even if it is, windows 10 is being deprecated this year, so they really shouldn’t still have this reputation today
On top of all of this, macOS does actually work for people who want to tinker a little bit. It won’t satisfy the people compiling their kernel from scratch, but it still has a ton of customizability. I think people assume macOS is just as locked down as iOS, but it isn’t. You can install any software you want, including unsigned software. You can disable system integrity protection and modify every single part of the system.
macOS is perfect for someone who wants a desktop with sensible defaults (for the most part), but can be modified for the small handful of things you do want to change.
Another fantastic thing is having a complete Unix shell that is well supported by the developer community. Sure, it isn’t true Unix unless you change some obscure settings, and it isn’t Linux, but most developer software works perfectly on the Mac. Windows is closing the gap with WSL, but that is a VM running on top of windows.
It absolutely is a true Unix environment out of the box. This next point is admittedly pointless, but still illustrative: macOS is POSIX certified and all Linux distros are not, and GNU tools have non-unix defined behavior. GNU find works quite differently, for instance, whereas it’s the same on macOS and freeBSD.
You can also argue that the non-monolithic kernel of macOS is more in the Unix spirit of composable pieces. Launchd is also much more lightweight and composable compared to systemd Linux distros.
In that aspect, macOS is more of a pure Unix OS than Linux is. Not that it really matters.
I was referring to this article that came out a bit ago : Apple’s macOS UNIX certification is a lie. You do have to change a handful of settings to make it pass the UNIX compliance tests. If you take a look through the settings they change, it isn’t things that really matter that much. I would argue that the macOS default settings are better than what UNIX expects. For example, the root user should absolutely be disabled by default. Time coalescing to 5 seconds probably makes things better. File indexing is a good thing, even if it means file open times are slightly unpredictable. Updating file access time lazily is almost certainly better.
Like you say, this doesn’t really matter. It’s mostly an academic discussion. These are things that likely won’t affect programs designed for UNIX compliant systems. On top of that, just take a look at your alternatives for a Unix compliant OS. There is a single OS on that list that is consumer targeted. If you want to buy a Unix OS for daily use, your option is macOS, flaws and all.
The thing about desktop Linux that gets me, even as someone who uses desktop Linux (even if the bulk of my usage is macOS), is that despite it being a full box of Legos as well as full box of K’Nex and adapters to make the two work together, you can’t really build anything meaningfully similar to macOS, even if you try.
You can build Windows-likes all day or tweak your way to the tiling setup of your dreams, but you can’t build a Mac-like environment. The best you can do is something that only superficially looks kinda-mac-like (and even then, still gets loads of aesthetic details wrong).
This is incredibly frustrating to me. If I could build a high quality macOS replica on top of Linux, it’d substantially increase my chances of switching, but I can’t, which means I’ll be pouring countless hours into refining a desktop that will never suit my tastes and mental models all that well, which sounds like the worst value proposition ever.
And so my usage of desktop Linux is restricted to single-purpose machines, like Steam Decks and study laptops where the desktop environment makes practically no difference. “Real work” on the other hand remains firmly planted on my Macs.
I think that I understand what you mean, but I want to make sure.
You see, I have this thing where “user interface consistency” is really important to me. I am very sensitive to visual “inconsistency” of any kind on the screen.
So, one of the many reasons why I locked myself up in the Apple ecosystem and threw the key away, is because across all of my current devices (a Series 3 Apple Watch, an iPhone Xr, a 2020 Mac Mini, and a 2022 iPad), there is that coveted “user interface consistency”.
Even between macOS and iOS I rarely feel like my brain needs to switch between how I use one or the other. When I was using Windows + Android for several years ago though, I felt like I was being tortured.
This is purely a me thing. To use a real world example: I used to live in an old studio apartment where every room had a different style of wallpaper and it drove me up the wazoo.
I’m, of course, not saying that macOS/iOS UI is perfectly consistent, but it gets a lot closer than anything else, for obvious reasons.
Consistency is a factor for me too, though that can be found to a considerably reduced degree under Linux by trying to stick to apps designed for GNOME or KDE Plasma.
What’s bigger for me is irreconcilable differences in philosophy and functionality.
If we take GNOME for example, which I’ve seen many suggest is “Mac-like”, it takes an entirely different approach to among many other things menus and power user functionality. Where under macOS, the menubar is the domain of the system and inviolable by apps, under GNOME it rarely even exists and instead is replaced by a headerbar and hamburger menu containing only the bare minimum of functionality expected of the class of app in question. Where under macOS, niche and power user functions are placed in a submenu or hidden behind a modifier key to enable progressive disclosure (functionality revealing itself as the user becomes more technically adept), GNOME just tosses them.
There’s a boatload of things like this, some more significant than others, but it all adds up to make for a radically different experience.
ZorinOS comes close IMO.
I haven’t yet tried it, but a quick search suggests that its desktop is a set of tweaks on top of either GNOME or XFCE (user’s choice) which places some heavy limits on how closely it can resemble macOS. That said I’ll see if I can spin up a VM to poke at it some time.
I use Zorin as my daily driver, on PC and laptop, and do all my work and personal stuff on it. It's absolutely not a drop-in replacement for MacOS, it is as you say a tweaked up version of GNOME so the UX is not the same.
But the reason I use it is similar to what I like about Macs, which to paraphrase the blog in the OP is that it "removes the possibility of tweaking". You can futz with it like any Linux, but it's more of a pain to do (on purpose) because Zorin is built to have sane, stable defaults you're not meant to mess with at a basic level. It's not as easy to tinker with the UI as just starting with Arch, say, and building out your own experience, which the blog author wants to avoid.
If you don't like the default experience, you're going to have a bad time and should look at another distro, because like Mac it's meant to stay as it is in most respects. But I do like the default experience, a lot, and it's the closest in Linux I've ever seen to the "it just works" of Apple. I've found it to be extremely stable, everything worked out of the box with no setup beyond installing my apps and turning Proton on in Steam, and I've had zero issues in the year I've been running it since I moved off Fedora, which I unfortunately can't say the same about.
That's kind of what I was referring to. No system is gonna be able to reasonably make a drop-in MacOS without rewriting MacOS. Especially if Apple has any active UI patents.
My wife has been using the GNOME version. They brand everything close to the OS (like KDE Connect) to avoid confusion for casuals. They configure the QT<--> GTK theming well which helps with consistency.
I'm not deep in the Mac space, but from what I've seen of my coworkers setups its pretty comparable.
I think the answer is "you're not tech savvy enough until you can tell when you're having the wool pulled over your eyes."
I don't expect everyone to want or be able to compile software from scratch. I want them to understand at some level why it is important for people to be able to do so on any device they own.
I want everyone to be savvy enough that a change in interface or program is not a world-ending event. There is an entire generation of people who freak out if their desktop icons get re-arranged for one reason or another.
Or, in the phrasing from my favorite rant on the topic:
If not, you're not savvy enough.
I think the answer is that younger people need to be exposed to the rough edges of Linux (and less locked-down computing environments) in their learning years, so they can properly appreciate what the computers that permeate every corner of our lives are capable of.
When I was 9 I was troubleshooting IRQ conflicts without internet access, just the manuals that came with the components. I wouldn't wish that hell on anyone, but nobody should be daunted by installing an operating system. Especially since most installers have abstracted all but the most basic (like choose a time zone and a disk to install to) years ago.
While I agree with this, I would also like everyone responsible for an interface or program to stop fucking churning it pointlessly like a shark tank full of chum, pleaseandthankyouverymuch.
</digression>A/B testing and using UI as branding (thus requiring full redesigns when branding changes) are big drivers of this and it wouldn’t hurt my feelings a bit if both fell out of popularity.
As an argument for UI changes (which @ButteredToast & @vord have also posted concerns about) -
One of the big things people complain about with a lot of FOSS applications is the UI and UX. Either inconsistent themes, applications with a very old-looking interface (like most versions of Qt), and functionality that's scattered all over the place.
A UX example I can provide is GIMP. Photoshop users play around with GIMP for an hour and quickly conclude that it does not support their workflow. It's a mess of multiple floating windows.
The UI thing applies to... most FOSS that doesn't live in the browser. There's a lot of self-hosted applications that I love, but 90% of them are things I can open in a web browser or PWA.
If you try using a Linux distribution as a desktop OS, I feel like this compounds further. I haven't tried desktop Linux in a few years now, but I previously gave most of the desktop environments a shot: Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, and probably a couple others I'm forgetting. All of them lack the polish of Windows (and probably OSX but I haven't used a Mac too much).
What I'm trying to say is that I think UI and UX refreshes can be a good thing. Frequent changes are a way to make gradual changes so you don't shock the userbase with something completely new. Are some changes excessive? Absolutely. But I would argue many are ultimately good.
There is a difference between GIMP being an utter mess from 0 changes, and Discord continually futzing with a good thing.
Hear me out: The only thing that was blatantly wrong with Firefox 3.5's UI was having the bookmark toolbar visible by default. Themes could already change the "ugliness" of the icons and colors without rearranging everything. By leveraging the standard OS menubar, you haven't broken the UI patterns that the rest of the OS UIs use. Firefox 3.5 on OSX vs Firefox OSX today. Notice how Mac prevented the worst breakage of UI patterns.
For more contrast
Windows: Firefox 3.5 and Modern Firefox
Ubuntu: Firefox 3.5 and Modern Firefox
The real problem is that GIMP's UI has never been good.
I'm actually glad the 3.5 design is dead. There's so much space going to the browser container rather than the content. The 3.5 screenshot feels like its just absolutely full of clutter that is eating up screen real estate that could be used for something I actually care about. I almost never need to interact with the container beyond editing the URL, tab interactions (open, change, close), and closing the whole window.
Editing in an extra hot take: I despise the persistent bar on Mac. Hate hate hate. Often I have to click an application window just to get that bar to change to the application I want to access the toolbar for even though I have floating windows for both already. This makes workflows that involve multiple applications pretty miserable for me. In other OSes without that irritating bar I can directly click the button I want because it doesn't disappear just because I changed window focus. And concrete-ish example, imagine you're reading a guide in your web browser and you need to click certain menu buttons in QuickTime or something and every time you switch back to read the guide the buttons are now gone!
For what you mention, all you would have had to do in FF 3.5 is remove the extra two icons, except the tab bar integrated into the window manager. And frankly: that was a terrible decision by people who didn't care about breaking UI patterns. The OS is the one that should adjust the pattern if the window manager is consuming too much space around the browser.
I used to pay for Stardock Windowblinds for that exact reason: To make the window dressing on Windows XP better.
The Ubuntu 3.5 one is insanely cluttered not because of Firefox, but because the user installed 3 extra toolbars. I left it because of Stumbleupon nostalgia.
The Modern Windows screenshot highlights the exact problem: Three applications that do the same thing, three completely different styles diverging from the OS styling.
If I shrink down VSCode to be a half-screen width window, it's almost impossible to grab the window itself without clicking on something. It is the natural conclusion of the "F it, OS styling means nothing" design pattern.
We just have very different preferences. The one I was actually looking at when I was calling it cluttered was the Windows one. I'm both glad that there's no longer a bunch of space to reminding me of the name of the application and I'm glad to not have File, Edit, View, etc. as I click them so rarely that they don't deserve to be a constant presence.
Admittedly the OSX one looks almost okay, but that's just because they hoisted half of the same junk into a different persistent location that happens to be outside the screenshot.
OSX has 4 vertical sections, plus one outside the screenshot for a total of 5. They could easily get rid of bookmarks to bring it down to 4, but I only really use 2 (tabs and URL/search). I'm not using a Mac these days, but was up until a few months ago, and I honestly cannot remember a single time I ever used the out-of-screenshot menu items with Firefox. Maybe once in Safari to enable F12 since they don't let the dev tools be turned on by default?
Windows has basically the same 5, which again could be easily reduced to 4, but I again only want 2 of them.
So I guess I'm saying that I'm glad they changed it because I don't think that keeping with standard patterns is necessarily a great reason to leave a worse design. I think that getting rid of the title in the title bar and using it for just about anything else is a strict improvement over wasting space on text I don't need. If the standard had been to put the menu bar in the title area (ie. icon, menu bar, padding until right side, minimize, maximize, close) my guess is that browsers would've settled on 3, but the standard was bad. Every application eating up a bunch of vertical space with a title and then a menu of rarely-used options was just, at least in my opinion, a bad standard.
Additional note on the dragging since I didn't respond to that originally: I bound super key + drag to drag whatever window its over without interacting with the Window itself. I didn't actually do this for applications like VsCode (I was trying just now and found it difficult to produce a size that was problematic, but some definitely exist unless you're willing to use the icon itself as a persistently available location), but instead because it also lets me move stuff that never would've had a title bar in the first place. For example, I can get back windows that I somehow pushed too high (title bar above screen) and a game running in borderless full screen can now be dragged between monitors. For this reason I wish something more like this had been the initial standard rather than depending on titles that may or may not be present.
Just a note: GIMP has had single window interface as a feature for probably at least a decade now.
There was a time when GIMP really did well as an alternative to Photoshop, but to Adobe’s credit, they have really added a lot of functionality since then. From my understanding many of them are patented so GIMP is not legally able to reproduce them.
I can get behind this. Change when change needs made to make thing better. Not because you need to hyperoptimize eyeball retention regardless of usability.
I know this is kind of snarky, but I always found some truth in the line:
"Linux is only free if you don't value your time".
Having said that, macOS brings with it a whole other can of worms: namely the worst window management in any modern OS. Still, I'm at an age with a house to manage, loving wife, two small children, dog, full-time job, and etc. that I want the peace of mind of knowing that if some Apple product I own breaks, I can drive 20-30 minutes to an Apple Store and have it fixed relatively quickly and pain-free.
I dunno... I've been running the same Linux install for the better part of a decade across three different hardware platforms (ship of Theseus style). I have my entire setup including all configuration tracked and managed under version and pick up my entire work life and plonk it on any pc hardware and be where I left off in ~ 20 minutes. If a software update is bad I have 6 generations of previous configurations to rollback to. I really value my time. I value it way too much to have my shit wrecked by some vendors timeline for software updates or deciding that my hardware is unsupported so no security fixes.
Linux all the way.
The number one thing for me is that if anything other than the hard drive breaks, I can yank it out and put it in any other x86 machine and it'll work. It also means restoring a disk image to any sufficiently large drive gets me operational from total loss quickly.
I can directly copy the EFI and root partition to a large enough USB and have a portable backup.
Windows will freak out at you for changing hardware and a portable install is not officially possible.
Completely agree. It's insane how resilient a Linux install is to random hardware provided you don't skimp on kernel modules.
My home server is currently hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4, booting from a USB 3 SSD via EFI.
My goal when I have (unwasted) free time is to shrink the root partition enough to get a second one in there, then install an x86 install, and then migrate the non-binary configs to a shared partition that gets mounted and symlinked in place.
Thus could boot off ARM or x86, and just run a system update on the given architecture and be operational again.
If I spoof the MAC address for Ethernet in the config, wouldn't even need to adjust the firewall settings on the router.
The “stuff’s broken, how do I fix it” experience is also worse with macOS IMO.
With macOS you’re going to get either Apple Support Forum posts with 1000 people with the same issue, no official solution, and lots of “reset these settings, clear this, reinstall that” that randomly work for some people but not others. Or you’ll get a spammy clickbait article that has most of the same “reset settings” steps. Half the time nothing ends up working but the problem will just go away at some point.
With Linux you’ll get a bunch of more technical discussions on Q&A sites or distro forums which may be harder for less savvy users to follow, but also offer real troubleshooting steps because unlike macOS there is probably a log somewhere that explains the problem, if you can figure out where to look and how to decipher it. Forum convos are often a back and forth of “look here” then “look there.”
Don't forget the contingent of folks being out there solely to tell you that you are using MacOS wrong and should just use it as intended :P
if you like a twm, yabai is great with some basic setup. I don't understand how people can live without their windows tiling, though
I definitely sympathize with the author's desire to "just do stuff", as someone who has spent an inordinate amount of time tweaking Linux (and XP) to get everything just right and end up spending more time on that than actually getting anything done, though I did all the tinkering because I genuinely found it enjoyable to do.
I don't get the "Russian Roulette" thing, at all, unless you're using a non-mainstream Linux distro or truly getting your elbows into tinkering with the system. I assure you that MacOS will orphan its phone and laptop hardware with point releases sooner than any given update will completely break my Zorin install.
Macs are great at what they do (I used them for years), and there are legitimate reasons to not use Linux, but if you just want to get things done on your computer, pretty much no OS holds you back from that these days--not even mobile OSes now, really--barring some very specific software needs and those gaps keep closing every day.
I immediately flashed back to an old Dilbert cartoon.
Dilbert (looking over dinosaur's shoulder as he works on a computer): What are you doing?
Dinosaur: Using my computer.
Dilbert: Why are you using your computer?
Dinosaur: It saves me time.
Dilbert: What do you with all the time you save?
Dinosaur: I work on my computer.
I used Windows full time until 2013. I was at a friend's place and saw her old 2008 MBP in her closet and she said it was basically a paperweight and asked if I could wipe it and recycle it. Anyway, I wiped it and decided to play with it a bit and really liked the OS. I was still part-timing it, but when it came time for a new system, I bought a MBP and only use Windows on my HTPC / gaming tower.
Like many, I am still somewhat bound to the Adobe creative prison, so moving to Linux full time isn't in the cards. That being said, I use Linux for my servers and love it.
For me it all boils down to the best tool for the job. Windows is great for media and gaming, MacOS is good as a daily driver, and Linux is the best for server shit. MacOS is also excellent as a happy middle ground where I get all of the good stuff from Windows with the *nix stuff from Linux.
The hardware is also great (at least when I last bought this MBP.) This thing is from late-2013 and still runs everything nicely. Eventually I'll openCore it to update it, but I've been putting that off.
There has been a lot said already so I'll add just a bit.
It is not that I do not value just works mentality. I am simply saying that the direction of Windows is clear and it does not end with a better user experience. MacOS is likely similar if different in particulars.
Also that I personally did not have worse problems with Linux than with Windows in closer to a decade than not. I also do not use MacOS.
I get this perspective, but for me, this is part of the fun.
Funny, ever since I started using Arch from scratch this problem went away entirely for me. I don't know if it was something about Manjaro, but it used to crash randomly every once and a while. If I was extra lucky, it would crash during a system update. I started to get used to booting into a live USB and chroot-ing into my install so I could fix it. Once I switched to Arch, it's been surprisingly smooth sailing. I'm curious about anyone else's Linux experience that mirrors the article, because in general it hasn't been mine.
I think this is a super fair critique of open platforms but that's also kind of what you're signing up for. I'm a technically minded person. I actually feel genuinely held back by macOS and Windows for most of what I spend my free time doing. I love the velocity that is granted to me by the particular flavor of Linux I've configured. And that's why it works for me.
I could also just be really lucky and have finally found a setup that I enjoy and doesn't need much tinkering with. After all those years!
In my experience, it's fun while you're doing it, then it just becomes part of your daily life, until 6 months later something breaks and now you've forgotten everything about it and now it's work, because you actually need to get something done so there's time pressure.
I've been moving things from self-hosted to managed offerings by companies (e.g I swapped from vaultwarden to just paying bitwarden, I stopped trying to use nextcloud and just pay dropbox, and so forth) because the entropy was driving me insane.
Agreed. Spinning up my Linux box is akin to pouring out a puzzle or wrenching on a project car. I started with Linux about 23 years ago compiling kernels and running apache servers. I also ran NT and IIS at the time. I do like the power of Linux. But it continually gets in its own way.
Last year I had some oldish hardware and decided to spin up a server with nginx and nodejs. It was actually seamless. Except that the onboard wifi chip was one specific batch of intel chips which are not supported. Also the monitor I had didn't work so I had to pull an old vga monitor out of the basement. And then run a 100 foot ethernet cable across the house to plug the system in so that I could set it up at a desk since that wifi didn't work. Then I was an idiot and was running some git commands wrong and I thought my SSH was borked. At which point I took a break and then went back a couple weeks later and saw my obvious error.
Which is all to say, yeah sure, skill issue. I had fun, but I would not call my time very productive.
OTOH, SteamOS on the SteamDeck is awesome. Best linux system I've ever used. I also like OSX, I think the author is overstating how much a mac laptop is "locked down." You can do quite a lot in the terminal.
I love that "monitor not working" is one of these, because I have a messed up monitor that ONLY works on my linux box for reasons I don't care to figure out. My work Windows laptop, my wife's Mac, and just routing HDMI from a game console to it do not work and they all give garbled mess, but my Steam Deck and desktop work fine with it.
Somehow though, this is a failure of the monitor rather than a failure of Windows or Mac.
Some guy 20 years ago snuck in a software fix for his broke-ass monitor and nobody noticed....probably.
Yeah I've been there before. It can certainly be stressful. Over the last six or so years I've accumulated enough hardware and done enough configuration to never really be that down a creek anymore. I understand that's a privilege!
This is my huge issue as well and something not nearly well appreciated by the self hosting crowd.
If it's your hobby or your job, great. Many of us don't want it to be, and having to dive through 5 config files to figure out where something broke is not helpful.
I'm also currently on Arch, but not really because I wanted to customize things. In some ways almost the opposite. Every couple years I back up my files, but not my configurations, and try a few different distro out of box experiences. I then tend to stick with whatever default experience I liked the best, figuring it'll probably continue to be developed in a direction that already suits my preferences. For example, my desktop environment is KDE Plasma with almost no changes. I think I changed one super key behavior, but I haven't even changed the background.
Maybe weirdly, my push to give Arch a try was Valve. Seeing that they were funding parts of upstream Arch rather than building stuff directly into SteamOS was showing that it was probably going to stay pretty close to "just working" without a ton of tinkering because they obviously want SteamOS to "just work".
I'll also throw in that because I don't care about my configurations I just YOLO all my updates without backups since no update, no matter how botched, should prevent me from mounting the drive into a live USB and copying out the documents I care about. To date, this has never bit me in Arch. I periodically just update everything using yay and it always seems to be fine.
But the wiki explicitly says to not do that!
I do it too.
The wiki was written by cowards.
Real talk though: the Arch wiki is one of the best wikis I've ever used. The maintainers of it do legitimately great work.
I use Aurora, a Fedora Atomic image, because it doesn't need me to tinker with it. Some stuff like my music setup in an Arch distrobox needs and welcomes some tweaking, but once it's in place it's done and ready to use. There was a point I switched to being task-oriented rather than OS-oriented, but now I just do the stuff I'm trying to accomplish with very rare deep interventions when I'm feeling cheeky or have a set goal in mind, like adding Waydroid to the image, or building out a rpi container hosting environment.