For me personally I found macOS got more in the way than out. Besides being easier to install MS Office on it seemed like every few months I'd encounter some speed bump caused by Apple and I'd have to find a workaround. Plus it just really sucks at window management and you're stuck with the macOS UI and whatever tweaks (usually paid) apps can do. For my workflow it just didn't work.<p>I was also extremely annoyed at the lack of upgradable storage as my needs quickly outgrew the pitiful base storage. I gave up and switched to an older thinkpad that runs Linux natively and I now have 4 times the storage of the MacBook for peanuts and can easily add more for cheap. Slightly slower but feels much faster than macOS due to linux being much lighter.
Ubuntu user since the 5.04 days. The vertical integration the apple ecosystem offers is incredible and not something linux can ever compete with. I see my fiancee use her iphone with her apple tv and her mac - everything connects together, seamlessly. There are walled garden elements to it but look, I'm done fighting the FOSS fight I waged in my late teens and early 20s. I got work to do, my life to live, etc.<p>My advice to the Ubuntu, Fedora, etc teams: focus ruthlessly on creating a smooth experience for the office/enterprise clientele who mostly use a narrow set of hardware (thinkpads x/t, dell inspirons, etc). Get this to a place where <i>everything</i> just works and lobby partners when it doesn't. Example from two days ago: shared my screen on zoom, clicked to stop screen sharing and the UI on my side didn't update. So another attendee went to share their screen and I couldn't see it - I had to rejoin. Worst still, that happens intermittently.<p>That said, I'm personally bearish on this ever happening against a much more well funded incumbent that is now producing ground breaking hardware with the M1s, etc.
About the final point—are Macs really "high cost"? Looking at their current lineup, configured with a minimum of 16GB and 512GB:<p><pre><code> M1 Mac Mini .......... $1099
M1 MacBook Air ....... $1399
M1 iMac ......,....... $1699
M1 Pro Mac Studio .... $1999
M1 Pro MacBook Pro 14" $1999
M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16" $2499
</code></pre>
I'll restrain myself from listing the ways comparing Macs to PCs is not apples to apples. Unless you go for costly storage upgrades (which I agree are overpriced), all of these prices are pretty reasonable for a 4-year ownership period. Considering Macs are typically owned longer than PCs, I don't see how anyone that can afford comparable PCs or UltraBooks would be priced out of Apple products.
I have found time to be the biggest factor. I use to have hours every day to tinker with Linux, I enjoy the tinkering personally and I can endure the lack of features. But at some point I began spending more than 8h on average on my work and really needed a break each day to not get burned out and take care of *health,on top of which I have a backlog of things to study up on for $work, any platform (including windows) that gets out of my way is welcome.<p>Not FOSS in general, but specifically the Linux desktop ecosystem is very chaotic. There is this rush to get a close-enough adoptation of features from other desktops which in itself adds chaos. I did learn a lot from dealing with the chaos but even when I had free time, practical things like editing government forms or sending a resume in a specific format (converting botches the formatting) made me almost pull my hair out.<p>Unpopular opinion: Linux desktops needs to be proprietary software friendly. As in accept blob installers that can install desktop applications that work well on any major DE and without consideration for package managers. Paid apps should also be a thing on Linux.
I'm honestly torn.<p>I was a big Linux proponent for a while, then Apple won me over with Macs for a time. They did "just work" for my day-to-day(DevOps).<p>However, last spring, I bought a new personal system for freelance work/side projects, and have been running Ubuntu as my daily driver. Funny enough, it seems like during that same period the my UX on my work-supplied Mac(2019-era MBP) has been steadily declining. I've been dealing with maddening slowdowns and numerous bluetooth issues(with Airpods no less!).<p>Conversely, I find working on the Ubuntu machine much more enjoyable, and I'm exploring the option of getting a Linux machine supplied by work as well. I'll caveat by saying it took some time to hone in on solid configurations, tweaks, and a good DE/WM(i3wm), but I gotta say Linux is winning me back over.<p>All that being said, I'm not deluded enough to think Linux(in its current state) is ever going to make inroads with Apple's consumer/pro-sumer userbase. It's still very much an enthusiast option in my mind.
“Platform A has these features I find convenient therefore I migrated from platform B which doesn’t have them”. That’s all this article is. Platform B might as well have been windows. I’m not sure why everyone is reading it as a dismissal of desktop Linux as a concept. I tried a Mac for a while, found it too restrictive, moved back to Linux on the desktop - doesn’t mean the Mac sucks or anything, just wasn’t right for me.
All seems sensible stuff, the "it just works" can't be overstated.<p>But the Apple Maps point felt like a stretch - Google Maps is available everywhere. I don't see much to suggest you'd need it as an app, it works great in the browser with hardware accelerated graphics, which it has had for 10+ years.
I’ll keep my tiling window manager and keyboard driven workflow, along with the ability to sudo to root and modify my system as I please, rather than banging my head against the wall because Apple has literally locked me out of parts of my own file system, or have some obscure launcher/service management that’s poorly documented. Or the fact that servers all run Linux and apples non-posix, slightly different, proprietary tooling is just subtly different enough to make it a huge pain in the ass when you run a command to deploy something and it’s botched by a subtle difference like slightly different flags/behavior.<p>Sounds like Mac is great for blogging, happy to hear it; as long as I’m doing software development, deployments, etc, I’ll stick with Linux.
I’m a bit disappointed by current macOS state. Xcode breaks console: even man man starts throwing some warnings. softwareupdate —-install-rosetta reports success with error and doesn’t actually installs anything. Xcode still requires Rosetta. I unpacked JDK and every console command fails because macOS doesn’t trust it yada yada. I have to go to settings and allow every binary. And I need 4 JDKs… After compiling go helloworld first launch takes like second. It seems to check notatization of my hello world. So much for M1 speed. After boot Spotlight hammers CPU for 3-5 minutes. So much for battery life. It’s a mess for development. Nothing unsolvable but definitely worse than it was 7 years ago.
They left Linux because they want stability and portability so they jumped to macOS? I don't understand.<p>Also: I just punched directions into GNOME Maps and it worked flawlessly and cast my entire desktop to my Shield TV via Chrome browser.
As someone who exclusively used Linux desktops since the early Gnome 1.x days, who migrated to MacOS around 2005, the major selling point of MacOS is "it just works".<p>Your experience may differ if you're not "all in" on the Apple ecosystem, but using mostly/only Apple devices means that everything integrates, and integrates well. You may recreate a similar experience with Android and KDE (or Windows i guess), but it feels much more "tacked on" than in MacOS where it just works out of the box.<p>I also mostly use "stock apps" which may or may not improve my experience. Instead of trying to force MacOS to fit my workflow, i fit my workflow to the tools available, and it has rewarded me well.<p>I still keep a VM with Gnome (Debian 11) running every now and then, but it's mostly just for fun.
> At the end of the day, my goal in life is to make a difference, and also have a bit of fun. I want a system that is out of my way and lets me focus on that. For me, in 2022, that system is a Mac.<p>TL;DR: Another very happy Apple customer. It seems that they are not looking back at the Linux Desktop.<p>What can the Linux Desktop ecosystem learn from this?
To my experience, it’s the integrated OCR that really pleased me as a new mac user come from linux. I basically get to treat images with text like normal paragraph. And it just get my daily work done without any issue.
Fascinating, I've never heard of this universal clipboard and I'd absolutely hate it. Guess I'm one of those anti-mobile curmudgeons because I see how it could help with what the author described, but for the 1 thing per week I share between my mobile and computers there are 'safer' ways that won't leak everything everywhere else.<p>Maybe people <i>are</i> different (as I usually note when I say that I hate the 'close lid for sleep' on laptops and go out of my way to disable that) :P
I see some people in the comments saying they strongly prefer Linux desktop to Mac/Windows. If you are one of those people, I am curious - are you comfortable changing system configurations, using the terminal, updating system software by hand, etc? Because I quite enjoy playing around with Linux on the desktop, but I would never suggest it to anyone who isn’t already familiar and enjoys that sort of stuff.
My experience with Macs has been good in most aspects except one. In the years I used a Mac I stopped tinkering and OS/systems related hobby projects.<p>I continued to use Linux at work. I recently set up a home firewall with OpenBSD and have an itch to assemble a desktop exclusively for *BSD and Linux. If only hardware prices were not so high...
> You could probably make something as nice and integrated as Things on Linux, but for someone as busy as me, it is nice to use what is already there.<p>I find this a funny point, as Things is one of the apps that has a near-direct clone[0] on Linux. It also costs $49.99 less than Things!<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/alainm23/planner" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/alainm23/planner</a>