Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I'm now dual-booting Ubuntu/Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15".<p>What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are very similar to the problems with 2019-era Linux. External monitors are a particular pain point for me. I've got an HDPI laptop and I want to plug into an old non-HDPI era monitor. Doesn't work. Spend the next 10 hours poking around forums, trying weird XWindows options, installing Wayland, etc. Still doesn't work. Eventually, give up.<p>Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs.<p>I'm not saying that the grass isn't greener on the other side. Macs <i>are</i> regressing, but the grass isn't greener on <i>either</i> side. Let's stop pretending otherwise.
1. Never once seen an issue with USB-C to HDMI or VGA connections. It doesn't even make any sense since MacBook Pro users with external, third party monitors are an extremely common combination.<p>2. I just downloaded Caret (Markdown editor) from their website and used Homebrew to install a CLI tool. Nothing has changed between the current OSX and previous ones.<p>3. If you have a tech support issue go into the Apple Store and work with them 1-1. Very rare to find anything that someone in the store doesn't know.<p>4. MacBook Pro has 4 USB-C ports.<p>5. If you resort to calling groups of people "condescending elitist hipster latte drinkers" then pretty sure you've lost the argument.
I've been on MacOS since 5 (mac classic). I went to Win 2000 and XP for a while but came back at 10.3.<p>On average every 2 years I'd pick up a few distros of Linux, play with it, then drop it and go back to OS X. This continued until recently. This last year I've been on Linux for the first time. Specifically, Linux Mint.<p>OS X hasn't been going in a direction I strongly care for (10.6 was my favorite, as well as Windows 2000). I'm a power user who just wants things to work. I don't need all the bells and whistles. I want a low maintenance experience without bugs, that just works. Right now Linux Mint is that on my hardware.<p>The only modification I've done to the system is using the graphics card for v-sync instead of the cpu. Outside of that, I'm on a 4k monitor that works at 60fps. I've not had a single crash or noticeable bug since installing (except a bug in Firefox). I haven't had to go deep in the terminal, but I have built custom versions of software. eg, the version of cmake on the OS is older than the version needed to build cuda projects that use cmake.<p>It's a minimum no bells and whistles it just works experience. So I'm happy. Is it for everyone? No. Are more every day desktop users going to be picking up Linux in the near future? Probably. Video game support has gotten so good on Linux that people who play video games have been slowly jumping ship. I've been surprised.<p>Though, if they break anything, I'll go back to OSX.
Well, no, it's not the Linux of 2000, it's worse than that, because it's closed source.<p>The GNU/Linux (e.g. the ecosystem) of 2019 is really fantastic. It keeps on getting better, and better, and better.<p>There may be a few missteps, maybe you don't like GNOME 3, but you can still use Xfce, or KDE, or LXDE, or i3 or whatever else if you want, no-one is stopping you.<p>By contrast, if Apple or Microsoft update the OS and make it wanky in some way you're SOL.<p>It honestly boggles my mind that professional software developers tolerate that kind of stuff. I guess if you're a web dev or you're 20 years deep into a career in a specific stack the benefits outweigh the costs.<p>I'm probably coming up on 15 years of *nix now. I do look back sometimes. It's universally terrible.
I think though it got upvoted, I’m not sure this piece should be taken so seriously by the commenters.<p>It’s a play on taking some ballpark similiarities and making it seem like Apple 2019 and Linux 2000 are alike.<p>Some might enjoy it, some might not but this is not meant as serious technical piece.
I do believe that macos is not as stable, performant or well thought out as it used to be. There are also a few recurring bugs that really annoy me (search not working in Apple Mail forcing me to reindex for example)<p>But, I think this article is over the top... I've never had issues with external monitors (nor know anyone who had some), I never use the App store (I oppose it on principle) and when<p>I've had a non standard issue with my mac, the technician proved knowledgeable and quickly figured I did know what I was doing so didn't baby talk me. It turned out to be a hardware problem but I was impressed with how well they diagnosed it.
Note: I had written this comment before I had read the actual article, so it is only vaguely related to the topic, but it seems wasteful to delete it...<p>This might be a subjective thing, but Linux when I used it in 2008-9 (I was a kid then) was unfriendly. My local community was very unfriendly, expecting you to RTFM three times except often the manual didn't exist or was obsoleted years ago.<p>Linux (Debian was what I used then) was rough. I had standard hardware, but I never got GPU to work without extreme tearing and pink-green lines and artifacts on the display. It was fast, I'll give it that. I often had to solve problems by reinstalling it, because I didn't have the resources (most didn't exist) to fix it "properly". I am not gonna talk about it further, but it was worse than now.<p>Ubuntu's 10.10 "Чиста Десетка" (as we called it here) was a release that started changing things for the better. The purity and exclusive-ness of the comunity was fading, people became more accepting. I attended meetups, met new people, made friends and got a lot of my issues fixed and many things explained.<p>In parallel with the comunity's development, the OS itself was developing and improving. IMO Unity was better than Gnome Shell at that time, and it really gave a friendlier feel to the OS. The kernel got more and more support for things you would expect to "just work" (especially in Serbia where so many people were using HSPA+ USB modems such as Huawei E1550 which had awful support before). GPU drivers got massively improved, new filesystem improvements reduced unnecessary latency, initiatives to prioritize UI-responsiveness and fludity came to provide a more awe-inspiring UX than Compiz cubes...<p>It just became better, and it keeps getting better.
> Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work. Fanboys are very vocal that this is the fault of projector manufacturers for not ensuring that their HW works with every Apple model.<p>Glad I'm not the only one having issues getting my non-antialiased fonts to render properly on external monitors. Crossing fingers for 2020.
While I want to sympathize with the author here he hasn't given any examples. If he/she has come up with blanket statements like "does not work with external monitors" or "hardware support is a pain" he should substantiate his claims by telling us what he did and how many monitors he tried.<p>He also does not mention why having one channel to install software is a bad thing. I am sure he saw issues but presenting use cases will help his argument. I do have an issue with the software installation source. On the whole I see it as a good thing. Linux in 2000 had a problem (one that isn't resolved even now), there is no one channel that gets you all you want, you are inevitably forced to go and find software and install from source which doesn't recognize that dependencies are already solved and will simply install copies again which will fuck up your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and nothing works. Macs on the other hand for the most part don't have that problem. If the app store does not meet your needs, you are most likely a developer and so you would go through home-brew.
Is this satire of the ridiculous false equivalencies so often employed in modern rhetoric? Does the author really think using a Mac in 2019 is a complicated and fiddly as using a Linux machine in 2000?<p>Or are people just upvoting something because it's the kind of lazy hot take that's candy for socially ranked sites like this? This is why I believe sites like HN and Reddit often make their readers dumber despite surfacing good information.
<i>Apple 2019: if your problem is not google-trivial, there's nothing you can do. Calling Apple's tech support line does not help, because they will just type your problem description into Google and read the first hit.</i><p>Really? My experience of calling Apple tech support (to troubleshoot something to do with Messages on my Mac) was that they were surprisingly well-informed, and they fixed my issue with approximately zero patronising, script-parroting, is-it-turned-on? nonsense.
I had the same issue with XCode update. Today, the download finally started, progress bar reached 100% then... XCode was not installed. Infuriating. Too bad Microsoft don’t allow easy access to LTSB and destroyed Windows UI. I feel the state of commercial OS declined sharply in the last decade.
My recollection of Linux in year 2000 was it was very easy to understand how everything worked. If you were searching for <i>"terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best"</i> then you were definitely doing it wrong (in 2000 and now).
"There is only True Way of installing software: using the Apple store. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad."<p>Isn't this sentiment a bit excessive. Homebrew is a perfectly safe and accepted way of installing software.
/me gets popcorn out<p>Apple people will be outraged about this post, even if it's mostly a joke.<p>My conclusion from it is that there are difficult topics, and, apparently, changing standards fast is not helping at all. (DisplayPort was finally more or less working, but sure, swap to another display outlet... and the same for a lot of things).<p>There is no time to build systems (hw or sw, or god forbid, the two together) that are _mainly_ bug free with common hardware. Windows XP in it's final days was close to this. The most stable desktop linux distribution I used was a short lived Linux Mint release, 10 (Julia), which doesn't make any sense.<p>Maybe if standards we slowed down a bit and we'd give more time to sand the rough edges tech history wouldn't constantly run in circles.<p><pre><code> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯</code></pre>
GNU/Linux is distributed under the GPL and other Free licenses. Apple is proprietary. Other differences stem from this difference or are cosmetic.<p>Until Apple releases all its software under Free licenses, the adversarial parts of its relationship with its users will hold it back.
<i>Linux 2000: There is only One True Way of installing software: using distro packages. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad.</i><p>This isn't true. People have been running `./configure && make && make install` since long before 2000 and long after 2000 as well.<p>Also, IIRC "alien" already existed in 2000, letting you install packages packaged for other distros (e.g. installing rpm on Debian).<p><i>Linux 2000: if your problem is not google-trivial, there's nothing you can do. Asking friends for assistance does not help, because they will just type your problem description into Google and read the first hit.</i><p>My recollection is that in 2000 people were less prone to just do a websearch and then give up when no relevant results are returned. People would ask in IRC or mailing lists.<p>Hell, in 2001 I had Linux on my home machine and I didn't have an internet connection at all. The only way to get things to work was to rely on friends and to figure stuff out for myself.<p>It was also more normal to spend days or weeks on a problem and not expect everything to be handed to you on a silver platter via Google or StackOverflow.
Even if this is true, there’s a crucial difference: 90% of what you want to do in MacOS is very simple and works, on 2000 Linux nothing was simple at all. I know because I only used Linux back then.
> it said that there is not enough free space available to run the installer. So I deleted a bunch of files and tried again.<p>This sounds like the Samsung phone I purchased new some 5+ years ago.<p>This brand new phone never managed to do an update in all that time.<p>It would always insist a new update was available but on every attempt it would fail with some vague recourse issue.<p>It would even ask for permission to send details of the failed attempt back to home base.<p>After a dozen of failed attempts, a dozen approvals for feedback requests, the purchase of addition SIM memory cards to give it more memory in the hope the update would work, the online thing that did work was to just take the phone offline (data offline) and ignore the update request.<p>Now this was never a top end phone (less than $300 some 5+ years ago) but what was amazing is how bad this new phone from day one would continually insist an update was required, with each an every update failing to install.
This looks a little unfair to 2000's Linux fanboys (which of course included me): The well maintained, comprehensive, tested list of software, mirrors and checksums that Debian had and inspired other distros to emulate were a godsend compared to downloading a code tar file and hunt dependencies manually (when not modifying code yourself), you were always free to use other channels, but other channels were just usually worst; all other points seem to have similar nuances, from a user point of view situation is similar but is actually a real problem out of scope of developers (Linux) vs. Apple just being jerks.
> It consisted of running tmutil from the command line and giving it a bunch of command line arguments that did not seem to make sense or have any correlation to the thing that I wanted to do.<p>It’s not completely obvious, but when you delete something it doesn’t disappear immediately because your Mac will keep it around on a local Time Machine snapshot so that it can keep decent history even if you’re away from your backup drive for a bit. And even if this wasn’t the case, with APFS copy-on-write deleting a file won’t necessarily free up space on your filesystem if there’s another copy hanging around.
I have run into the storage problem a number of times, yeah. Once there was a `.Trash` file in some hard-to-access place that needed deleting. And if your Time Machine backups are failing, they can create a big cache somewhere mysterious in the file system. I have told Time Machine to ignore docker files as well, not sure if it helped in every case. In one case I deleted all my node_modules folders, and Time Machine backup succeeded and macOS deleted it's prepared backup files, freeing up tonnes of space.<p>We'll see if it occurs again with Catalina.<p>All the other stuff is almost entirely wrong, in my experience.
In my experience, when we talk about software (hardware issues are always a thing on less used systems) Linux is the less black-box of these three OSes. If you have a non trivial problem with Windows or OSX OSes or apps, you're out of luck. With Linux, you have the tools to reach the root causes. Or at least, that used to be the case. New apps in Linux (particularly in Ubuntu) want to be as "friendly" as Windows or OSX, so they hide how things works, and put layer over layer of abstraction to the point where nothing is obvious anymore.
Thanks for posting this! Some funny parallels in a humorous blog post is a great way to start any Monday!<p>Yes, I can read from the comments that it rubbed people the wrong way - but lighten up! I did a satirical piece on Apple earlier this year, but had to remind readers not to get their feathers ruffled beforehand: <a href="https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/2/2_Cult_of_Mac_eBook.html" rel="nofollow">https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/2...</a>
I will say that Mac OS is incredibly disk-hungry (and MBPs get vastly more expensive when you add options like bigger (still not that big) disks). I don't want to become a Mac OS hobbyist and figure out how this happens (I like Mac OS overall because it's a BSD and I'm a BSD guy, but it is not my hobby BSD of choice) so I ended up just spending a few bucks on some "cleaner" program that purged a surprisingly huge amount of disk the first run and purges like 5 gigs a week thereafter.<p>I honestly don't know why it uses so much disk.
I get the frustration 'cuz all of Apple's stuff seems pretty flaky right now, but there's still a huuuuge difference to the linux of 2000: whatever your config + problems, there's gunna be a bunch of other people running the exact same config, w/ the exact same problems.<p>Which means that there's a pretty good chance w/ time they'll get resolved. (Especially if you avoid upgrading to the latest and shiniest immediately, since Apple seems incapable of finding and fixing problems in-house.)<p>With linux, you could be running a mix of hardware + software that _no-one_ had ever tested before, and whatever your particular config was, it wasn't shared by everyone -- so whether you could get that mix to function properly was pretty much an unknown quantity and required a lot of luck and elbow grease.<p>I do wonder if at some point as the curve of hardware progress flattens out and the space of "what should software do" becomes more explored, we'll start to see more finely crafted software w/ fewer problems. Might be an analogy here to how in the early days of cars they were quite unreliable, but now they're pretty amazingly robust, for years on end. We're in the "new & shitty" stage of software, I think.
One thing I have to say, in general to many of the posts here about the state of linux, is that linux is just the kernel, and the vast majority of issues people tend to have is due to one or a combination of distro choice and DE/WM choice. I went linux exclusive personally and professionally a few years ago and have nothing but good things to say about it, but far too often I see stuff complaining about linux when it's really not linux per se, but the other software choices.<p>So, protip, if you are having issues with things like multi-monitors, etc, start out by trying a different DE like awesome/i3, xfce, etc, rather than the big 2 (KDE/Gnome), and if that fails try a another distro (such as Manjaro).<p>I almost always use Manjaro these days because the hardware detector is second to none, but I used to distrohop habitually and if you get a new laptop it's almost a requirement to try out different distros until you find the one that just works, and this especially applies to MacBooks, which I used to triple boot but started doing linux only on because sometimes it's easier to get a macbook approved in some companies than the equivalent hardware normal laptop.<p>One side benefit of going linux only is that I have, besides gaming, almost completely GPLized my stack. Plus, I believe if you are managing systems you should be running the OS those systems live on. EG if your core systems are debian, you should have a debian install somewhere that you interact with daily. I can't tell you how many times I've had to help devops people recover from things like MacOS text bunging or outdated bash related problems. I think they should be doing the dev work at least in a container (lxc, etc) on what they are working on instead of the native system.
Too many of the issues the author cites about Linux are still problems today. They're not nearly as bad as they were in 2000, but they still exist.
And in typical fashion, this person lists the exact problem I'm having with my mac (disk space not reclaimed after deleting files) and says "fixed it" without ever saying what steps they did to actually fix the problem. Now they'll get indexed by Google and show up on top so the next person with this problem will find the post, but not find any helpful solution.
<i>>After a ton more googling I managed to find a chat buried somewhere deep in Reddit which listed the magical indentation that purges reserved space. It consisted of running tmutil from the command line and giving it a bunch of command line arguments that did not seem to make sense or have any correlation to the thing that I wanted to do. But it did work and eventually I got XCode updated.</i><p>I had this exact problem recently. There's a simpler, safer solution. Delete files to free up enough space. They're moved to "Reserved Space", and when the system fails to delete them to free up space for new installs/updates, you run<p><pre><code> sudo purge
</code></pre>
in the commandline.<p>Wait 20m or so and the Reserved Space should be emptied and your hard drive free space again.<p><a href="http://osxdaily.com/2013/11/14/use-purge-command-os-x-mavericks/" rel="nofollow">http://osxdaily.com/2013/11/14/use-purge-command-os-x-maveri...</a>
I haven’t thought of it this way before but I think you’re right. External monitor support does break randomly and hardware support through dongles is extremely flakey.<p>A small excerpt from my personal list of woes:<p>- Using a USB-c <-> DVI cable gives the monitor a purple hue. An HDMI cable does not. Also, this isn’t an issue in bootcamp.<p>- Can’t use the serial debugger of a Particle Photon because it can’t use the dongle’s USB-A interface directly.<p>- Sometimes the Touch Bar goes completely unresponsive for ~10s. Sometimes, after a reboot or after waking from sleep, it just doesn’t start at all.<p>- At one point the speakers started blasting white noise at the loudest volume for no apparent reason. Closed the lid, opened it, same thing. Rebooted the machine and never encountered that problem again.<p>- If a certain kind of network error occurs when setting up Time Machine then System Preferences will hang completely for ~5 minutes.<p>In many ways the experience is what I would expect if I could run Linux on this machine: Hardware kind of works with lots of random bugs.
There are some call outs in this worth talking about...<p>> Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for popular devices like Android phones.<p>Is the Android issue on Apple or on Google. Each is very much into ecosystem lock-in. Who is failing to write the integration software?<p>IMHO, it would be far better for consumers if these things were like plumbing or electrical. You can mix and match from different manufacturers because of standard sizes and interfaces.<p>> Apple 2019: if your problem is not google-trivial, there's nothing you can do. Calling Apple's tech support line does not help, because they will just type your problem description into Google and read the first hit.<p>How much of this is UX and expectations. I imagine the person writing this isn't an average consumer. Is the expectation someone who can do level 4 tech support rather than the tech support reps on the front lines? Those front line people trained to handle general consumers rather than people who read HN.
> This felt exactly like using Linux in the early 2000s.<p>In my experience (I have personal machines running all three OSes), macOS has certainly declined over the last few years, but I would say it just feels like Windows now. Windows has always had the occasional nonsensical problems you had to find an incantation online to solve. Fortunately, the platform (and its pitfalls) are consistent enough across different platforms and users' experiences that it's generally not super hard to find the right fix. The same is usually true for Macs.<p>The thing with Linux, even in 2019, is that most of its problems are <i>sensical in isolation</i>, there are just <i>more</i> of them. If you really know your system you actually have hope of solving them on your own, whereas you're going to have a much harder time finding a magic fix from someone else who had your exact issue, because there's a good chance nobody else has had your exact issue.<p>Pick your poison.
<i>Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work.</i><p>Is this true? Because I'll tell you a story about my early days of using Mac OS. We've all sat in meetings waiting for someone to do the Fn-F5/Ctrl-Alt-F3 dance trying to get the laptop to output to the projector. I had to do a presentation, and using Mac OS for the first to do so. "Oh, shoot, I don't even know the keyboard dance to do to hook it up. Meh, plug it in, figure it out in a minute." Plugged it in and...it just worked(tm). As soon as cable touched plug, it output to the projector. Fuckin'-A. And here's the kicker: Mac OS was running on a Hackintosh, not real Apple hardware. That right there was enough to sell me on Mac OS. I don't connect to random external monitors much anymore, but I've never had a problem getting output to any random display I've hooked a Mac to.
I enjoyed that. Thanks!<p>Well, I've hitched my wagon to the Apple packtrain, so I'm in for the ride.<p>I know a number of folks that work for Apple, and have confidence that they will get their stuff together, sooner or later.<p>I'm not sure they have managed the transition from "brink of failure upstart" to "big ol' blue chip" too well.
In many cases the things he claims are past linux behavior remains the same today. Perhaps he hasn't used Linux in recent years?<p>> External Monitors<p>Plugging in monitors in linux today frequently does not behave as you expect. The chances of errant behavior is significantly higher on linux than any other operating system. I can't speak to apple computers not working with projectors, but it seems like he's comparing apples to oranges here.<p>> Software Installation<p>The "One True Way" of installing software is still the case in linux. Installing outside of the native package manager's repositories is discouraged. Installing of any software on mac is 'discouraged' in that you need to authorize just about every installation you do on the app store. Homebrew does not require sudo to install applications, though GUI applications will generally still need an okay from the user to open and use. The outlier in software installation is Windows, where it is still encouraged to install executables downloaded on the internet.<p>> Hardware comaptibility<p>Linux and MacOS both bake hardware compatibility into the kernel. You will still run into weird cases where a display port out on your graphics card won't work with linux for some indiscernible reason. This is admittedly significantly better than it was in 2000, however.<p>> Laptop features<p>Linux didn't have dedicated laptops in 2000. The fact that they lacked USB ports has nothing to do with Linux.<p>Current macbook pros have 4 usb ports (other than entry level mbp 13). Retina macbook pros had 2. I'm certain he's talking about usb-a ports, however. This isn't unique to Apple laptops, however. Most PC laptops manufactured today lack more than 2 usb type a ports. It's very difficult to find.<p>> Advocate behavior<p>It's pretty remarkable how someone can be so condemning of condescending elitist behavior while simultaneously being a condescending elitist jerk.
"Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best" that's still Linux for me, nothing has changed in the last 19 years.
By default, files that you delete, even after emptying the Trash, stick around for 30 days, incase you change your mind.<p>You can change that behavior if you want or you can delete the files by:<p>1. Select About this Mac from the Apple menu<p>2. Click on the Storage tab<p>3. Click on the Manage… button<p>4. Click on the Trash icon<p>You can now delete the files permanently.
I use Ubuntu with Cinnamon when I can. It supports almost everything, and is endlessly flexible, looks nice. Supports a full data science stack + GPU.<p>My work provided me with a Macbook pro which is fine since I run everything in docker anyway, the hardware looks nice but the keyboard sucks. Each key has like .5mm clearance and one grain of dirt will stop it from working. I would never buy another mac because their walled garden policy is terrible.<p>I use windows for gaming, but hate developing on it. What can I say, it works as a casual desktop. Except if you want to move it to a new drive, or do anything beyond web browsing and video games.<p>They are all okay, not sure why there is so much vitriol in this thread.
Actually in the 90s with Linux you could destroy your external screen by setting the wrong parameters. [1] It was really easy to destroy your partition table or mess up your whole configuration. I think this is the core difference with MacOS and Linux, really messing up your system is quite difficult. (And destroying hardware was never a thing with Apple :))<p>[1] <a href="https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6614/can-the-wrong-sync-frequency-really-destroy-a-crt-monitor" rel="nofollow">https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6614/can-...</a>
Can’t we just admit all three major OS’s suck badly for various reasons? Why do we need to pick winners when they all have major usability issues?<p>* Apple and Microsoft don’t care about your needs at all and provide no route to changing or fixing the software you use. If you aren’t a large corporation you’re nobody. They will NEVER ask your needs but tell you them.<p>* BSD/Linux with X11 is still working to catch up with basic Windows usability and may already be a suitable replacement for you, but if you want changes they will take years for the community to invest in.<p>* There are no other options for getting work done.
There were so many bits of this that I found weird but this one stood out:<p>> Linux 2000: There is only One True Way of installing software: using distro packages. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad.<p>I was in my "dating phase" of testing Linux distros out as a kid in those days, and I <i>never</i> felt "bad" building something from source when not available from aptitude (or portage, or whatever)...?<p>I feel like being able to build one-off software has always been part of the ethos of Linux due to the whole "freedom" aspect and all =/
On a MacBook with Catalina I can't update XCode at all; it downloads ~4GB then resets the progress and starts re-downloading until it reaches 100% where it resets progress again and repeats.
Had some laughs. And yes, it's all true, at least to an extent. Unfortunately no OS nails everything, all have their shortcomings. I like Linux, Mac and Windows for different reasons and dislike them for different reasons as well. Where one falls short the other excels. And so on. But if I were to pick only one, it would have to be Windows. Pick two, it would be Windows and Linux; Only thing I like about Mac is the overall quality of their apps. Several of them are unmatched in Windows and specially in Linux;
Linux was something you downloaded for $0 and half the fun was tinkering on it.<p>Apple is a proprietary product that you pay a hefty premium compared to other available options for.<p>It's getting to the point where even the most full-throated Apple advocates have to admit that things are not going in the right direction, and normies are starting to bitch and moan about their Macbooks more than Windows laptops that cost half to a quarter. They really need to focus on quality, if they want to remain a viable platform.
I guess what I really want to know is: is there a 2019 Linux distro which is the Mac OS of 2011? One where stuff just works, looks good, and works smoothly.
I know what this guy is trying to say about Apple, but it should be said that Linux isn't that way any more.<p>Really the last time I installed a Linux distro on a laptop it went wonderfully. I'm not even a Linux fan boy. I'm also not usually complimentary about things like this that should just be the norm. All that said, client side Linux is so much better than it used to be. It's a dramatic improvement.
> <i>After a ton more googling</i><p>I believe the author is exaggerating it a little bit. Local time machine snapshots are not arcane secret knowledge (man 8 tmutil).
> Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best.<p>Depends on whom you ask. There are people who use it exactly because when "things break at random" they absolutely can understand the reasons and actually fix it in contrast to some other OSes (or Linux from more recent years).
When my 2014 era MacBook Pro dies, I have an XPS15 waiting in the wings.<p>Unless Apple makes significant design improvements, I'm not going back. Windows is terrible in a number of ways, but it's improved dramatically in the last few years and I can get work done on it without raising my blood pressure. Apple's seriously screwing the pooch with developers and designers and doesn't seem to care.
> Apple 2019: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their system is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers.<p>Apple has always had an unusually strong contingent of people like this. But I guess if you were going to stick with them in the 1990s, you had to have an irrational attachment to their brand.
Kind of a tiny point but it drove me nuts when using Arch. Did anyone who's tried switching from macOS to linux manage to get comparable trackpad behaviour? I fiddled with this for far too long before more or less settling for something pretty underwhelming. I know it's not the most important detail but it's hard after using a rMBP trackpad for years.
Apple 2019: Siri remind me to call mom when I get home
Linux 2000: …<p>Apple 2019: Use my iPad as a secondary screen wirelessly
Linux 2000: …<p>Apple 2019: AirPlay to my TV this content
Linux 2000: …<p>Apple 2019: Sync my contacts, notes, calendars, wirelessly with all my devices
Linux 2000: …<p>Can we stop being ridiculous now or do I have to keep lowering myslef to the stupidity of the writer of this?
As a JVM developer, to me, Windows became a superior developer operating system to both MacOS and Linux about five years ago.<p>I still use both Windows and MacOS on a daily basis and dislike my MacOS time more and more each day, due to a mix of hardware reasons and software issues like the ones described in that article.
Wow, this article is bad -- like, literally WRONG on nearly every boldfaced point.<p>1. "External monitors don't work". Wrong. I present often, and frequently use hotel projectors or monitors. I've never had a problem connecting to a monitor.<p>2. "You can only install software from the App Store". Wrong. Software installation is simple. Sure, you can use the App Store, but you absolutely do not have to.<p>3. "Only a limited number of hardware works out of the box". I have yet to run into a hardware compatibility problem. I use non-Apple keyboards and non-Apple mice, non-Apple cameras, non-Apple mass storage, Sennheiser headset, etc.<p>4. Tech support with Apple is better than I've had with any other major tech vendor, including Dell -- where we pay out the wazoo for supposedly gold-plated support -- with only one actual problem: Apple doesn't sell the 'we fix it RIGHT NOW' plan Dell offers. (Of course, Dell tends not to actually meet this promise, so ...)<p>5. "It is very difficult to find a laptop with more than 2 USB ports." Wrong. Apparently the author didn't look very hard, because the 15" Macbook Pro has 4 USB-C ports. Here, he seems to be mad that the other two models -- marketed as compact and slim over powerful -- have made more tradeoffs to be small than the 15".<p>So yeah, forgive me if I don't take his comments terribly seriously. It's not that there aren't some very legitimate criticisms to be made about Cupertino, even if you don't take a position on proprietary software. There definitely are. But absolutely none of these are valid.<p>However, I'm absolutely certain that the Apple-hating contingent on HN will eat it up with a spoon. :(
"Apple 2019: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their system is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers." - sounds much like the Sonos discussion forum.
"Linux 2000: There is only One True Way of installing software: using distro packages. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad."<p>That is absolutely correct and if one is installing software in any other way than packaging it into an OS package, one is hacking in the worst possible, amateurish way, with the added bonus that every experienced UNIX system administrator will hate one's guts come time to automate the installation of one's software. It's enough to make my blood boil and suddenly get violent and I don't even work as a system administrator. This is not an issue specific to Linux, it's one quarter laziness, one quarter ignorance, one quarter incompetence and one quarter amateurism: if, as a programmer, one considers a programming tool like OS packaging too hard or too complicated, one is truly in the wrong profession.
I suppose having problems with external monitors makes it like Linux, since if you want to support monitor hardware on your immutable headless Linux server instance deployed in the cloud you are doing something wrong.
I see a lot of people here bitchin about bad Linux desktop experience and they I see they were all using Gnome. Just give KDE a try people. It is very light, clean NixOS KDE5 installation consumed 450MBs of RAM.
A critical difference is that Linux circa 2000 was on a path of improvement.<p>macOS 2019 seems to be sacrificing usability for those of us that frequent HN, in an attempt to be more useful for the iPad crowd.
Mac user since 2010. At the time the laptop hardware was just so far ahead of anything else when it came to battery life and sleekness.<p>I still like it for general use (web, development, terminal stuff).<p>But the hardware is driving me away. Un-repairable, expensive, non-upgradeable, failure-prone...<p>I have a 2 year old MacBook Pro with a fan that gets annoying clickity/clackity, $500 repair from the Apple store. No thanks I will live with it.<p>One of my biggest pet peeves with MacOS is that even though it's so nice to use, it's just so damn slow. Everything is slow. When I user a lesser Windows 10 or Ubuntu machine, it feels like a rocket.<p>The only thing that feels fast on a Mac is Safari.
Got fed up recently and ordered a windows laptop for dev work; I'm hoping WSL will meet my needs and I can get away with a VM for osx, but we'll see.
Apple's strength has been hardware/software integration for a long time. If you have an Apple product, you can be reasonably sure that if you connect it to another Apple product, it will work well with minimal work.<p>Linux's biggest weakness (for the situations where one would use an Apple product) is hardware/software integration. If you have a Linux laptop for a while, you've probably spent hours tinkering with hardware drivers, and are still not happy with the results.<p>System76 seems to at least recognize the problem and be trying to work on it in Pop!OS, which I'm excited about.
I just came here to say that lattes haven't been cool for a very long time. Offtopic, yes, but about the most substantial allegation made in the post.
… without the openness. Soon RIP OpenCL, and OGL. Also non existing bare metal Vulkan kext. (I know about moltenVK … but this is 3rd party metal wrapper)
<i>I managed to find a chat buried somewhere deep in Reddit which listed the magical indentation that purges reserved space</i><p>I think he meant 'incantation'.
No, it's not. Most prominently Apple costs thousands, Linux is a community driven kernel and software distributions on top of it, which commonly are free of charge. From that perspective his comparisons are nil. Linux doesn't make computers that have problems. Apple has its own closed ecosystem of hardware and software, Linux is Open Source Software. To say that modern Apple systems are just as bad as Linux systems 20 years ago is making Linux look bad, it's an unfair comparison. Remember Apple 20 years ago? It was even worse than today!
macOS is still light years better than subjecting yourself to Windows or Linux and the Escheresque nightmare they call a GUI.<p>Maybe once they have figured out how to scale for high-DPI displays without looking like something stretched up in Deluxe Paint*, I might tolerate giving them a second glance.<p>(Not a jab at DP, it was the bomb and I miss it dearly.)
Sorry, the article is BS.<p>> Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work."<p>Yeah, no.<p>> Software installation<p>That was not true for Linux in 2000 (alas, I know, I had to manually compile tarballs for all kinds of stuff, and download binaries of others), and is not true for macOS in 2019. Notarization != the app store.<p>><i>Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for popular devices like Android phones.</i><p>Yeah, no.
This is so shallow it feels like it was written just to create buzz.<p>It's so easy to build a shallow and polarized list like this about ANYTHING. All I can take from this article is that this guy doesn't seem to be good at argumentation. 2/10 on Apple whining.<p>Here, take your buzz.
Brace yourself for an infinite stream of angry 'fanboys' (or girls :p), who will point by point, try to dismantle this 'agrument'<p>Or in other words... cant take a joke!
TL;DR: A user is as frustrated with the Apple experience in 2019 as s/he was in 2000 with Linux. Then that user goes on to rant about some things that frustrate him/her, completely ignoring that one is FOSS and by no means a hardware manufacturer while the other is proprietary and primarily a hardware manufacturer.
> Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work. Fanboys are very vocal that this is the fault of projector manufacturers for not ensuring that their HW works with every Apple model.<p>I just setup a new Macbook Pro with Catalina (one day ago). Plugged three monitors. (Adapters were cheap knock-off from China). And it worked fine.<p>> Apple 2019: There is only True Way of installing software: using the Apple store. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad.<p>I'd say the state of OSX is much better than Linux. Apple doesn't favor the Apple store as far as I'm aware but just signing apps. Apps in MacOS are simpler. They are a "single" file bundle (but the bundle is mostly non-exposed to the user). Uninstall is also simpler: you just remove the file from your applications folder.<p>In the longer run, this should make you trust your applications more although signed by apple doesn't mean it's not going to harm your setup. This might prevent average users from installing apps but more sophisticated ones will just go around it.<p>> Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for popular devices like Android phones. Things either don't work at all, have reduced functionality, or kinda work but fail spuriously every now and then for no discernible reason.<p>I already have the whole laptop working from the get-go. That's already an advantage over Linux. I have my old printer working. Ledger worked out of the box with no drivers setup. Maybe I'm in the minority.<p>> Apple 2019: it is very difficult to find a laptop with more than two USB ports.<p>Macbook Pros come with 4 usb-c ports. That's more than enough considering that you can run multiple things on parallel on a single usb-c port.<p>> Apple 2019: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their system is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers.<p>Stop talking to retarded people. Your quality of life will increase considerably.
Yes but no because it is 2019. It's simply a list of things that Linux sucked at and Apple is now dropping support as it no longer matters or things that affect a very small number of its users.<p>I remember when I tried to use Linux as my desktop operating system because it was up and coming to destroy Windows.<p>>External monitors<p>I don't know how you can have a problem with that. I have a 10gbp dongle from Amazon with HDMA, DVI and VGA output and works with no configuration. On Linux, I had to do some hacky stuff on the terminal to get a monitor to somewhat work(wouldn't turn off, would come back from sleep mode etc.)<p>>Software installation
I don't feel any pressure to use Mac Appstore, in fact, I never use Mac Appstore. I also, in fact, know that people don't actually use Mac Appstore because here are many stories about Mac Appstore being useless for developers<p>>Hardware compatibility
The given example is an Android phone. That's nothing like the given example of not being able to use your graphics card on Linux. The Android phone is not an integral part of the Mac user experience, it is a separate computer that you may choose not to use if that computer's vendors are not providing decent support.<p>>Technical support
I would agree that Apple lacks on the phone support but Mac power users are much more polite on the internet than the grumpy Linux gurus out there that will not hesitate you to tell you how stupid you are for not being able to solve that basic problem. Also, there are Apple stores where you can hand over your computer and get it fixed.<p>>Advocate behaviour
Oh god, this is no comparison. Lunux power users are the worst. They are out there to get you down, they are angry, unfriendly and arrogant. They are on a mission. Maybe they should seek help just as Linux Trovalds.