Maybe because all the developers ran away to Macs, instead of sticking around dogfooding and fixing bugs? Free software is a collaborative social enterprise - it's not really anyone's job to make free stuff for you to use. If, as a developer, you've taken the easy path of proprietary software for years, and now after finally getting fed up of being abused by a company that doesn't have your best interests at heart you return to the world of Free Software only to complain that it's still unpolished - then I'm afraid you are rather entitled, and deserve a serenading by the world's tiniest open source violin.

And make no mistake, the kinds of "rough edges" you refer to are not hard computer science problems. They're broadly just the kinds of everyday maintenance things that inevitably crop up in a huge software project on an ongoing basis and are easily fixed by many eyes and a little graft. The more eyes, and the more graft, the more polished the system.

For what it's worth, Desktop Linux for all its faults is still light years ahead of the competition. Far from perfect, as you say, but it really is the least bad choice. As they say - the best time to rally around Free Software is 10 years ago, and the second best time is now.

I used to love playing with computers and being able to try different linux distributions even if I had to spend 5 hours to have a usable external monitor (actually spending that time was one of the best parts) but that changed mostly because of my needs, but also because of my economy.

When I had to start being more productive and I could afford it I bought my first Mac Book, and it lasted ten years! At that point I realized that maybe for me it was worth it spending that money and using that time to configure a keyboard doing something else.

I feel I was the target at that time for Apple with some of their products, maybe now things have changed and I am not anymore.

And I guess yes, marketing is what is driving them, but I think they are abandoning part of what they used to be their target and, hopefully, someone will fill that void with something that makes me as happy as when I bought my first Mac Book.

BTW, now I am using a Pixelbook and a Mac Book for my personal stuff and Windows professionally and although is getting worst and worst I will still keep buying them.

This comment is unnecessarily belligerent; parent was stating facts. not complaining. Your attempt to guilt or shame them is completely unjustified.

The vast majority of engineers don’t commit to switching to free software not because not enough hearts and minds have been convinced yet but because the entire economy and the basis of everyone’s material existence depends on a system that is at this moment market-based.

The popularity of proprietary software stacks is ultimately structural, as are the problems and caveats of proprietary software. Engineers are, in the vast majority, dependent on selling their labor to the commercial employment market for their livelihood, in many cases an extreme amount of labor in a highly competitive environment.

It is absolutely great that many engineers dedicate free labor to contributing to free software, and it is completely unreasonable to expect that anything at all could make the vast majority do it. Not an unreasonable expectation of an individual, but of the structure.

[1] in the sense of philosophical idealism vs materialism

Some of the most popular video games that have massive markets and revenues behind them (CounterStrike and moba games) have all started out as free mods to existing games.

The largest share of the worlds smartphones run Linux.

Twitch streamers, some of which make extremely high salaries, use open source broadcasting software

Python is now becoming the de-facto language of scientific computing, with all the major libraries available for free.

You are greatly discounting how much open source software has affected, and more importantly changed the direction of bought software.

There are use cases that realistically warrant enterprise software, but those stem from the argument of optimization of time - for example, not doing all your computation stuff in python with spending upfront time learning it when you engineers know Matlab. But those are not intrinsic to the software, it just so happens that Mathworks funds universities and pushes their product to be taught in classes, so that they can get revenue from companies buying licenses when their engineers enter the workforce.

If colleges switched to teaching with open source software, this would have zero net effect on the capability/knowledge of someone that graduates said program, because all the material is going to be new to him or her anyways. And, it would also increase the userbase of the software, and thus improve it.

Also, design by committee rarely produces good UI. You can patch little UI bugs, but if you really want to holistically improve the UI it's a huge undertaking.

Just because you're developer, doesn't mean you want to hack on every tool you use. Software has gotten way too big for that.

You don't have to fix every bug you find. Just fix the odd bug, and work around the rest until somebody else fixes it; many hands make light work. But the work doesn't get done at all if you run away to proprietary platforms.

You don't have to boil the ocean. Just do your civic duty from time to time. Once a year, even. If everybody on HN used desktop Linux and, once a year, invested an hour into fixing a minor, polish-level bug, desktop Linux's polish problem would completely disappear.

You mean like that crufty thing called homebrew?

Or the default versions of software shipped are out of date by maybe a long, long time?

https://www.reddit.com/r/bash/comments/393oqv/why_is_the_ver...

What kind of problems have you faced with Homebrew? Can you please elaborate?

I use Homebrew all the time and it just works for me out of the box without any issues. I never had to edit configuration files or customize anything to make it do the right thing. It just works.

I am typing this on a Mac. I spent years as a desktop Linux user and developer.

For maybe 5-6 years, I invested my evenings and weekends in trying to improve desktop Linux. I fixed bugs in ALSA. I worked on Wine. I fixed bugs in GNOME. I wrote freedesktop.org specs. I did a lot of stuff.

I also watched as lots of other people tried to fix basic problems.

You know what my experience was?

Half the time, attempts to fix things triggered massive flamewars. KDE and GNOME couldn't agree on basic things like how notifications should work; any attempt to come up with a compromise system resulted in the KDE guys screaming and yelling about how everyone should just adopt their own system (which had braindead usability problems). Linux people thought package management was God's Gift to users, even though actual users kept telling them it was awful and they just wanted to download apps from websites. The kernel developers insisted that every driver by GPLd, even though this was incompatible with the business models of key hardware developers, resulting in those firms working around the GPL, ensuring nobody "won". Common distros couldn't play music or video files because of a refusal to pay for software patents.

The other half of the time attempts to fix anything were rapidly undone by pointless ecosystem churn as things were written, rewritten, thrown away, and rewritten again.

There was no coherent plan, no architecture, and competitive evolution turned out to be bad way to create an operating system. Developer experience was a nightmare. Any time something deviated from what was laid down by the original UNIX in the 70s it caused massive schisms and basic APIs split or stopped working.

Linux on the desktop will never be competitive with macOS regardless of how badly Apple screw up their QA because the desktop Linux community is far more dysfunctional.

That's simultaneously a good thing and bad thing. It's good because it's possible. It's bad because when everyone is responsible for a platform's software defects, then no one is responsible.

Even if we ignore average users, and just consider developers, the overhead and learning curve is prohibitive. A frontend webdev or even a backend Java dev would probably have a really hard time tracking down and fixing an issue in Xorg or Wayland or in their touchpad driver. The relevant maintainer could likely fix it in a few hours or days if they had the available time and motivation, but the user (who just happens to be a developer in an unrelated field) would likely take many days or weeks.

Even if you match skill-sets -- say a C programmer is having trouble with some GNOME UI issue that would turn out to be a bug in a C library -- you still have a big hump to get over to contribute to a project you're not familiar with. Build system, how to safely test changes on a live system (where the normal software comes from a distro package), code organization and just learning how things work in a new code base, code style, pull request process, review process, etc. -- all of this makes it really difficult to contribute, even if the actual change is small.

I do wish more people would take the time to dig in and scratch their own itches, but I absolutely don't blame them for just wanting to be able to get their work done without having to first fix their OS and tools.

(Credentials: I use Linux as my daily driver, and have gotten frustrated by macOS as a development environment any time I've had to use it as such. I used to be an Xfce core maintainer, a decade ago. These days I mostly do Scala and Java backend dev, and consider myself quite rusty with languages like C.)

Well, there are open-source violins...

http://www.hovalabs.com/hova-instruments/hovalin

I enjoy reading the progress every week and digging into the bug fixes and review comments! One day I will have some free time to contribute.

Also, to those who didn't get the reference: https://xkcd.com/743/

And let's face it, most of these "rough edges" are just excuse making, the sound exactly like the sort of things people say to avoid losing weight, quitting smoking, etc.

In this comment you sound like you're absolutely convinced that linux is the best in every way, and as if linux is a goal, rather than tool to you.

If these rough edges are "excuses" not to use the tool, then how is that not a perfectly legitimate reason not to use it?

This is coming from someone that has linux as a daily driver by the way. I think over the years a lot of these rough edges have gone away, but some are still there. Sound configuration, multiple screen setup or gaming are just a couple of big examples that are still jarring and sometimes don't work right and would absolutely be a turn off for normal users, and a valid reason even for devs to say they don't want this.

People make it sound like these excuses are "entitled" from devs who don't want to contribute, but that just reveals that they think they're entitled to that dev's contribution, which is not true.

Because it gets a little old seeing people reason themselves into a position where they are stuck with apple and it's the fault of linux as the GP did. If only linux were better I wouldn't have to keep buying apple.

If they aren't willing to jump ship then apple has zero incentive to change anything, so they're just stuck and unwilling to accept any way out.

> In this comment you sound like you're absolutely convinced that linux is the best in every way, and as if linux is a goal, rather than tool to you.

It is, at least getting myself off abusive proprietary software is the goal. I can write at length of the problems in linux, but at least I'm not stuck complaining about telemetry and being too lazy to do anything about it anymore. I've still got a way to go in other areas.

I do however still sympatise with devs and users that simply aren't comfortable making the switch because of these "excuses". I think their position of staying with proprietary software is also perfectly valid- although as you point out, this doesn't help the greater good.

It took a little while to adjust, but since there are a lot of similarities between the Linux and Darwin command lines [and Linux package management being better than homebrew by my lights] , it wasn't very long before I was like "Damn, why didn't I switch 20 years ago!!!" Plus now my hardware works [edit : and is user-serviceable], is reasonably ergonomic, and OS updates don't break my existing programs...

I see no real adv to dealing with the mac platform today if what you want is a "unix" env. On the Linux of today, the minor annoyances are worth it - and they really are very minor on good hardware and a mainstream distro like Fedora or Ubuntu. Plus you get the tooling on the platform it was developed for - real docker, real pkg mgmt, etc.

Don't get me wrong, there are still some nice things in macos and the hardware (yes the trackpad is nice), but to me they really are not compelling enough args now - at least for me.

Now if only we could get a few of these minor annoyances fixed in the Linux desktop (e.g. Gnome) then I think it might really be the "year of Linux on the desktop" ;)

Since MS seems to have grown tired of trying to "sell" Windows, not sure whether to fight pirates or support them, etc., and is looking to services, most of which run on Linux, they could give "Lindows" away, like Google with Android but with more thought behind it, and create the kind of focus that could get all the things working reliably in a desktop Linux. Other Linux distros could then start with working versions of everything and offer customization options in only the areas that a specific customer segment wanted to manage for themselves.

I've finally recovered that sense I always got from the Windows 95 shell, that's been missing in every desktop environment until now - that sense of "wow, they've really thought this through".

I've used Linux several times over the years and the hardware never totally works. I've always had trackpad issues, issues with suspend and hibernate, wifi issues, screen resolution issues, battery life issues, sound issues, driver issues etc.

It 'works' in terms of you can technically do work on it, but you have to make a huge number of concessions and this is before considering it has less application support.

[Edit]: The replies suggest this is mostly still the case, people say it works flawlessly - except for [insert issue here]

Considering that HN is full of programmers and technical users, and literally every time Linux is mentioned people go "I had a problem getting Z working, but I did that and...", "X and Y did not work", "U is not supported", I'd say hit and miss.

Case in point, just from this thread, and from people who say they are otherwise satisfied:

"The worst of my Linux woes were the usual suspend/hibernate issues running Ubuntu on company-provided Thinkpads."

"Suspend/hibernate works on thinkpads with a moderately recent Linux kernel and a bios toggle."

"The only issues I have had is that the sound output sometimes does not automatically switch to/from HDMI when I unplug a TV, and that gnome gets slightly laggy after a really long uptime (its a really weak laptop performance wise)."

"I did have issues setting up certain drivers (i.e. the bloody wifi which tbh is still a bit iffy on my machine) but otherwise it's been amazing."

"actually, on one of my workstations I have a ten-year-old Quadro 4000 that was being a pain in the neck on Fedora 29 -- but the fellows over at LinuxQuestions sorted me out in two shakes."

"I have the latest X1 and almost nobody has a working mic. Also battery life sucks and Bluetoothd always needs a restart after suspends."

"I have a gen 6 and no issues. Is it a 7th gen? BTW what disto? Im on Fedora 30. I would check that you have linux compat turned on in firmware and patch to latest firmware."

"My only Linux laptop was a Fujitsu Lifebook. Turns out laptop manufacturers are garbage at writing ACPI drivers for their own hardware, and so Microsoft has been going around quietly patching them so nobody notices. I ended up having to create my own driver for the lifebook. I cobbled from two other people's failed attempts at making a better one (each fixed different problems) and some fixes from the newest model in that product line. At no point in time did I think it would be fun to write ACPI drivers."

You got me, though, I did have issues with my bluetooth mouse losing connection during suspend on my latest Thinkpad. You could get it working by turning the mouse off then on again, but eventually I fixed it for good with a two line shell script.

It's pretty clear that no OS is going to be perfect; but the message I take away is that Linux is to the point where you completely have the ability to tweak and adjust your system so that it works flawlessly after some effort (as in my case, switched ~1.5 years ago. Zero problems after initial checking of driver situations). On the other hand, macOS, even from a technically savvy point of view, is unfriendly and beyond the user's power to fix.

I've also had to use various Macs for work in the past and have had terrible issues with wireless networking and bluetooth.

I don't doubt that is your experience but I don't know why. Lenovo are pretty Linux friendly and suspend/restore has been a fixed thing in general for years. Maybe you need to update your BIOS.

I can provide you with a very long list of fucked up systems that will, say, not run Windows 10 1903, depending on already installed software and other silly stuff.

I'm typing this on a Dell laptop that runs Arch Linux.

Macs don't even feature on my radar.

All the "pro" laptops seem to be focused on smaller sizes, and on premium/luxury features and price. I'm glad cheap gaming laptops running Linux are a perfect fit for my use case.

But yeah, gaming machines always make for great dev stations, whether desktop or laptop.

Edit: not sure why the downvote... MacOS, don't remember when, switched to custom cifs network sharing, and it caused a LOT of issues for my workflow at the time.

I count 7 or 8 broadly unconditional "it works fine" child comments. 1 "it mostly works", 1 "I had to write my own ACPI driver", 1 "it works fine except HDMI sound switching isn't automatic sometimes", 1 "drivers were hard to set-up, WiFi is iffy", 1 "it's not perfect so try it first".

IMO that's majority positive - more than can be said for e.g. macOS which fails to do basic things like mount and copy files off an Android phone out of the box.

I don't think your conclusion is a fair one (or perhaps it was premature) and is perhaps tainted by your own negative experiences.

- they didn’t care about moving it around half a day and keeping decent battery life, for most of them it was effectively a desktop.

- they didn’t care about any CJK support. None of them would be bitching about chinese fonts on japanese pages or worse IME.

- they didn’t need any peripherals outside of screens, keyboards and mices. We had to use a usb dongle to project into videoconf room at a client, I have no hope it would have worked on linux. Printer/scanners would be a nightmare too (and it’s already not good on other platforms I concede)

Linux workstations are plenty usable, thus a lot of positive feedback. But we should acknowledge it’s not for every use case, and it can need tweaking in parts that are different for each user. MacOS with all its current flaws has still a lot of things better done than most (any?) linuxes.

You can actually buy Linux laptops with not just USB-C, but also USB-A, HDMI, Ethernet ports, etc. As someone with a Linux laptop who has never run into a peripheral issue and has coworkers with peripheral issues with their MacBooks, I'm not super convinced that the grass is greener on the Mac side of this one.

I have cheap USB-C - ethernet dongle I bought on amazon that works on my mac and windows.

Is the chipset supported on linux ? who knows, but probably ?

Now my USB-C to HDMI dongle ? hmmm

https://www.reddit.com/r/GPDPocket/comments/8smhzy/so_hdmi_o...

That reddit thread is odd, as I've been using the Apple USB-C multi-port dongle to do HDMI on Linux (no config necessary, just plug it in and it works) since before that post was made.

If they did care about CJK support, it's not a big deal. Most distros have CJK fonts packaged up (possibly not installed by default, unfortunately) that are a couple clicks or package manager commands away.

IMEs can be a little less straightforward, but I found adding ibus to an Xfce install to be pretty trivial; just a matter of installing ibus and the input methods I wanted, and then restarting (since GTK, Qt, etc. require environment variables to tell it what IM module to use).

It would be nice if this stuff was set up out of the box, but it's pretty easy to set up, at least compared to other complaints I hear about using desktop Linux.

Just in this context, we started from a post complaining about having to click into a lot of dialog box every first time something is done, and some stuff that doesn’t synch correctly forcing debugging and some setting reset/resynching. That’s such small potatoes in comparison.

Buy hardware that ships with Linux, such as a Dell XPS that ships with Ubuntu pre-installed, and it'll work fine.

Try to install on some random hardware, and of course you may have issues depending on who has volunteered what quality of drivers for that hardware.

The same applies to all Apple hardware. Nobody expects to install macOS on some random hardware, so why in a comparison to Macs is this a concern?

2) I don't think it's at all unfair to macOS / Mac hardware. Macs used to be great, hardware and software-wise, for development and other "making stuff" type work, and they used to be stone reliable. There's been a real qualitative change in Apple's approach to 'pro' users [for lack of a better term] -- OS updates having more unexpected / unwelcome effects, number and type of physical ports on systems becoming smaller and less practical [not even one single normal USB port on this year's MPB!], user-servicability + upgradeability of hardware diminishing over time to practically zero -- the situation is well bad.

I was a devoted macOS / OSX user, but as I mentioned in the earlier comment, I got fed up and jumped ship due to these reasons, which reasons had real impact on my productivity and contentedness-as-a-user

The only issues I have had is that the sound output sometimes does not automatically switch to/from HDMI when I unplug a TV, and that gnome gets slightly laggy after a really long uptime (its a really weak laptop performance wise). And I'm a person who gets very annoyed with small issues, I'm just super happy. I have a real native terminal with package management, and a window system that I like, and all software except photoshop.

I'd rather have 100 bugs that I could fix in principle than 1 bug that I just have to deal with because some company thinks it's a feature. And I'd rather be part of thousands of engaged tinkerer types interested in improving the support community than be part of millions that would rather convince me that their expensive hardware is proportionally better instead of actually talking about the tech.

I've been using Linux as a daily driver since high school (15 years ago). Lately though, I have noticed that we Linux types are insufferable in our own ways...

Indeed, but this is the (sour) price of 'victory' too: it means Linux is going mainstream now. Hence, it's becoming more 'popular' with all that entails...

Linux is best 'lived' in professional circles nowadays, imho: specific blogs, forums and channels with solution-driven people. I find myself more and more attracted to the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora space for this reason, too.

I like helping people, so if the future holds more software today breaks transparently, then that's more people I'll be able to help.

I thought you were referring to 'wars' between Gnome/KDE, or against systemd, and we're thankfully relatively free of these popular sports in more professional circles.

If you know Noah Cheliah (podcast Ask Noah, formerly from Jupiter Broadcasting), that's my kind of guy. Up there with the pros, but always willing to go out of his way to help anyone, no questions asked, newbies very much welcome. A great steward of the community imho.

The ISO already had nvidia drivers bundled. Volume, brightness, functions keys worked out of the box.

Flawless it isn't... for a desktop, entirely usable. If I were going laptop would be doing a LOT of research and going for a last generation device.

The problem people run into is that they fall into one of two shitty extremes. You either dive into the deep end and try to configure your own kernel and forget something. (Common in Gentoo circles) Or you go with Debian stable or RHEL and their kernel is two years old and they don't have drivers for the latest generation of graphics drivers because of course they don't. Just install Ubuntu like a normal person and you'll be fine.

Problems with WiFi, trackpads, and hibernation haven't been a problem since like 2010 or so. I get 11 hours battery life on my XPS 13 9360 which advertised 9 hours battery life when it was new in 2016.

> people say it works flawlessly - except for [insert issue here]

This is a thread about how OSX works flawlessly except for [insert issue here]. And as it happens there are a pile of issues this time around. If you have a house that doesn't have stones thrown through its glass walls (besides TempleOS) I'd love to hear about it.

EDIT: actually, on one of my workstations I have a ten-year-old Quadro 4000 that was being a pain in the neck on Fedora 29 -- but the fellows over at LinuxQuestions sorted me out in two shakes.

I have a dell XPS13 that came pre-loaded with Ubuntu. It works perfectly out of the box and the hardware quality is fantastic.

Ready for the desktop?

I would check that you have linux compat turned on in firmware and patch to latest firmware. Also running tlp helps depending on the distro. I get good bat life, mic works fine and no BT issues after sleep/wake.

Although traditionally lenovo has done well with linux, I will say this is where Dell does this better - actually certifying and supporting some of its laptops on linux for devs.

I uploaded it somewhere so nobody else would have to deal with this bullshit, but you still had to recompile the kernel to get the new version to override the firmware.

At the time they were still talking about how Linux was going to take over the desktop, while the early numbers were already in that laptops were killing desktops. Linux is taking over the server room, but it's essentially nonexistent anywhere else, and it truly has earned that honor.

That said, it's still not perfect, and warrants a trial on a throwaway hard drive if absolute hardware functionality is a must.

Sorry to hear it did not work for Navi, was the wiki any helpful to understand what goes wrong?

Started with Pop!_OS with 5.x kernel (5.2 fir wifi drivers, though not using it). Onboard audio also weird, the UI would show for audio out, but alsamixer was needed to raise "headset" to control the port. When I upgraded to 5.3 and dropped in the lib files for navi10, it booted with the card swapped but stuck at 1080p (on a big 4k screen) after messing with it, I couldn't boot to a gui, but was still able to use the terminal. I decided to give Manjaro architect a try (since you can choose your kernel) that gave the same issue that Arch itself seemed to... hard locking during boot.

I would like to know more, but at some point, I just want to get work done...

------

My hardware:

    * Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master
      (RGB header connected to Thermaltake fan controller)
    * Ryzen 5 3600 (waiting for 3950X)
    * Corsair CMW64GX4M4C3200C16 Vengeance RGB PRO 64GB
    * LIAN LI PC-O11 Dynamic Razer Edition (USB RGB Controller)
    * GIGABYTE Radeon RX 5700 XT GAMING OC
    * Creative Sound Blaster E1

After I borked my setup, I'd decided to give Manjaro Architect a try, since I could choose my kernel... I saw the same issue that I did when I did an Arch proper setup, with the latest iso as of last Sunday 2019-10-06.

It would boot and hang, loading graphical ui... The keyboard was completely unresponsive.

I was since able to install Ubuntu 18.04.03 LTS and the release drivers from AMD... I didn't bother updating the kernel as I'm not using wifi or onboard audio. I think one of the onboard LAN ports also was never setup, I think I'd need extra drivers for that too.

Thanks for your time... I'm thinking of adding a couple SSDs to test other OSes on, and put Windows on one as a fallback over the weekend.

> Does the hardware actually work?

Yes, flawlessly. Desktop with a GeForce GTX 970 (prop. driver) & AMD Ryzen 5 2600 & MSI B450M PRO-M2 V2 (MS-7B84). Laptop (Lenovo Yoga 730) works just as fine.

Never got external monitor working. Just had issues with my wifi yesterday that persisted through reboots and randomly worked after I booted back into windows and then linux again (dual boot). Lost hours of my life trying to get any combination of browser + smartcard reader to work with two different card readers.

Sleep/Hibernate still don't work properly all the time. Sometimes my laptop decides to do the right thing, and I pray it doesn't undo itself and drain the battery in my backpack.

- Terminal of some sort

- Browser (Chrome, Chromium, Firefox)

Really just want a stable OS that stays out of my way, and never pushes shiny new features, only performance and security patches. But the responsiveness of browsers on linux turns me off every time I try to switch (feels sluggish).

Also, I like the MacBook hardware, battery, aesthetic. Just been falling out of love with the OS for the last few years as they seem to be semi-combining it with iOS. Due for an upgrade and have been eyeing the latest MBA... but the OS is getting super annoying.

I like futzing around with my operating system, but I expect my changes to make things overall worse for the general user, because I have weird preferences. The OS should not be doing the weird preferences.

Sometimes I wonder about Linux users who say you can’t customize macOS. In my experience, it’s a lot of the same kinds of customization potential and rooting around in the system...updating the OS may totally mess up your configuration, but the same is true of updates in the Linux or BSD world.

I guess what I’m saying is, there are systems that you can buy where the manufacturer has preinstalled Ubuntu and you have a high expectation of the hardware getting out of the way. I want that for FreeBSD or OpenBSD?

I use MacOS because it has a thoughtful, consistent, coherent, beautiful user interface and desktop environment. The things I use all day are basically a web browser, mail client, code editor, and terminal. I can do actual work on any BSD really, there is no proprietary app that causes lock-in, I don't use iCloud or any of their services.

All I want is their desktop and core system apps. If Apple stripped down the OS back to Mac OS X Snow Leopard standards, and charged $129, I would pay for it.

If there were an equivalent desktop environment for BSD that replicated the MacOS desktop environment, I would pay money for this. Charge customers to hire full time designers, developers etc.

I'll probably still stick to macOS on my mobile hardware (Linux and BSD on the fixed machines, embedded and servers), as it is still least worst, but I miss the feeling of high stability and productivity you would normally get when you work on your machine and don't have to touch any of the other flavours.

Right now, all any other vendor has to do (besides the create-a-BSD-desktop) is good hardware integration. Because that is more effective than people might think. Even with the whole butterfly crap the whole package deal is unbeatable. The only time I ever had hardware/firmware issues was back in the 90's where OpenFirmware got sad because one of the data lines of the ROM was corroding and the SMU would reset every boot making sleep unreliable.

Having a machine that has a good hardware-software relation down to the firmware and no weird double powerons or a bunch of stupid splash screens, one where you can just add your tools and work, it's the best thing. It it used to be exactly that when you got a Mac... any Mac, even if you don't get a powerful one. It always works the same way, it always delivers consistently (unless you break it yourself), always stays out of the way so you can do what you actually came to do.

Sigh.

I actually went to WWDC 2008 when it was announced and they handed out CD’s for it — no new user-level features — just a hardened OS (grand central station and kernel level threading and stuff under the hood was changed).

Sigh. Marketing now rules the world. Look new emoji’s!

But for some people, they have used MacOS since OS X 1.0 (or for me, System 7) and there is a particular "Mac" way of doing things. There are expectations and standards for how the system and user interface should work and respond.

Perhaps you could attribute this to baby duck syndrome. You could also attribute it to people having different mental models for the world, there are clean desks and messy desks, different cataloging systems. There is something for everybody. For people who like Macs, everything else seems like a clumsy intolerable mess.

There are themes and hacks to make systems "look" like MacOS, but they fall short of even remotely functioning like it.

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

But when you're living between a terminal, editor and browser, and fonts are perfect on these 3 (or whatever else you use)... it's hard to justify using a lesser and more expensive platform, just to correct the 1% of the time some app doesn't look great.

In fact, if we speak 'consistency' in a functional way — not disturbing the user's "flow" while working — I'd argue that bad or extremely limited UX the likes of Windows and now sadly MacOS too (by comparison, and because it got worse in the last five years) is a much bigger problem than font rendering, for most workflows.

Case in point if you really care you can fix font rendering for pretty much every app (and select aliasing parameters like strength and RGB ordering to conform to your external displays panel type and pixels 'pitch'; whereas MacOS or Windows will be hit-or-miss with some models and you just can't help it). Haven't needed to on Ubuntu or Fedora, but I know as of 2017 Arch let you apply general font rendering settings over GTK and Qt, and you can use terminals like urxvt to fully control such things.

The GUI/UWA design direction that started with Windows 8 to accommodate phones and tablets was a step backwards for the desktop.

Things are just bad now that Steve Jobs is dead. We just have to get used to that.

I really think this must depend on the hardware; Windows 10 switches between monitors fine for me, on multiple laptops. Indeed, I only actually have a problem with this on MacOS, where my MBP even crashes on occasion when switching to external displays.

I keep hoping to hear about some 30-year-old up-and-comer running a company with flawless hardware, but it keeps not happening.

(On mobile, things are different, but even here PowerVR is increasingly looking beleaguered compared to ARM and Qualcomm's offerings.)

My only complaint is that the trackpad is a little small for my hands, but the sturdy keyboard with real function keys more than makes up for it.

Oh Please. this lie keeps getting repeated every single time this topic comes up. Meanwhile people who actually use Linux every single day have like zero issues for years to keep things running and working. I have 4 machines using different flavors, getting updates all the time and nothing mysteriously breaking, and this for years. Sure, you will always find the one user saying the exact opposite but among all the Linux users I interact with this is not the norm.

To say the parent poster is lying is a bit much. You have know idea what kind of stuff they're trying to do.

For a counterpoint:

I have had less issues with my Linux setups than with Windows for 15 or so years and I use both for the same:

- development

- mail, timesheets, documents

- small amounts of gaming once in a while (mostly causual matches on CS:GO)

I believe that others have problems with Linux but generally it has a highter tendency to work well out of the box than Windows has.

Also, as mentioned elsewhere, the most annoying thing about Windows is how it "stops the world". It is only milliseconds but for me it is maddening to wait for a high end 2019 PC to respond to keyboard input.

Usually it is driver issues and usually I get it sorted after a few weeks or months but it should be unneccessary for a stock Dell or HP machine. (Protip: don't ever use consumer or prosumer editions, not even XPS, always go for the the pro models.)

KDE allows you to "lock" the desktop icons/widgets in place. That is a feature that is sorely missing from all other WMs (Mac/MS/ int al) and for me is a killer feature. Some of my end users have a habit of smearing icons (launchers) all over the place.

Desktop Linux is way better than say Desktop Windows (by OP metric). Updates take a few minutes rather than hours in some cases. Fixing things does not involve sfc /scannow but then neither does that work on any Windows box unless it has spinning rust and loses power regularly without battery backed cache.

I update my wife's laptop via SSH when she is using it and I throw a reboot job at it out of hours via cron.

My wife is happy with what she needs to get to - Facebook, email, some odd Flash games on FB and a few other things. I'm sure that Mac and Windows sysadmins can all say the same (I'm those as well.)

Desktop Linux for me is Ubuntu 18.04 on a ThinkPad T450s and it's currently my favourite daily driver (we have a 2019 MacBook Air at home I share with my partner and a Windows 10 machine for testing websites at work). I can't think of the last time I had any problem getting anything to just work - the T series ThinkPads are well known to work with Linux so YMMV with other brands/models but I just happen to love the ThinkPad form factor and design so I'm super happy.

It sucks now having the Adobe CC suite available on my primary work machine but more and more we are using Figma for any digital design related workflows and it's wonderful.

Regarding Apple laptops, I was holding onto a 2015 MacBook Air until I upgraded it for the 2019 model because it was meant to be the latest-best Air... MacOS, iCloud integration and the keyboard has been disappointing to say the least.

Couldn't disagree more. Gnome took a bit of tweaking but it has been performant, stable, and exactly what I want. I recently changed jobs and am forced to use a mbpro. I hate it. It's slow and painful if not impossible to customize.

And also use a MBPro at work. The amount of issues of that I had with it surpass any windows laptop, most notable of which how the usbc port will just stop working, needing an SMC reset, and the laughably long startup from shutdown time despite having an SSD.

The notion that Mac can do hardware or software right is laughable. I guess people forgot the $1000 monitor stand.

I use desktop Linux as my daily driver (personal and work), and generally have very few problems. I hear so much grief from friends and colleagues who are running macOS and have so many issues. I really don't want to be "that guy" who obnoxiously pushes desktop Linux, understating its usability issues for average users, so I decided to log some of the issues I had over time.

I realized that the failures on Linux, while fewer, were usually much worse: the things that fail on macOS are either annoyances that can be ignored or worked around, or things that can be Googled and fixed (for the most part). There were certainly sometimes failures on Linux that followed that pattern, but there's another class of failures: when things failed, they failed hard. Once, I rebooted after some kernel and Xorg package updates, and Xorg just hung on startup, logged nothing useful, and only responded to SIGKILL. I did manage to fix it, but the average user would be completely lost, and, to make matters worse, would have no GUI to use to search for help on the web. They'd probably end up having to reinstall and hope for the best. That's not acceptable; that might have been a common recovery step with Windows back in the 90s, but people expect better now.

The distinction is that macOS failures are overwhelmingly solely of the type that frustrate and reduce productivity. It's very rare to run into something that grinds you to a complete halt. While desktop Linux has come a long way, and I'd (unscientifically) say there can be fewer frustrations than on macOS, there are still enough hard-stop, my-computer-is-a-brick-now failure modes to make it unsuitable for most users.

Apple seems intent on driving the Mac off a cliff - both hardware and software, but for those of us who have not upgraded in the last few years, the good times are right now.

I'm going to keep my MacBook Pro maintained like a classic car until something better comes along.

Not great, but not bricked.

For example, one of the author's use cases is "Because I’m an idiot with reasons, I have a python daemon that launches as root via launchd." - i shuddered just reading this, i'd never attempt to do that with anything other than linux. but chromeos is perfect for my little laptop i keep in the living room to check my email on. i was also happy using an iPad for the same thing. My software dev machine is a linux desktop, but if i needed a work laptop there's no way i'd put linux on it.

maybe one day there will be an OS that i can use for all the things without complaint, but right now that doesn't seem to be a reality, and i've stopped pretending it can be.

I'd been using a laptop with an HDD (but otherwise great specs) and the experience was trash. Then I upgraded to an SSD and its an entirely new OS.

That’s your problem, stop looking for a windows/OS X replacement. The ideas are fundamentally broken; a lot of them are built around pushing you toward just consuming things from other people.