Right. So use Mac, and go for a nice walk outside whenever something pisses you off that is unmodifiable.

You have the free time since you're not tinkering, right? :P

Pretty much, yes.

You're talking about problems that "piss you off", whereas Linux has problems that not only piss you off, but completely stop you from being able to do what you need to do.

It's easy to talk about these things in abstract terms, but frankly I've run across two problems with Mac ever that I actually had to fix in order to do what I needed to do:

1. Get "gcc" to point to "gcc" instead of clang.

2. Get Valgrind to work (which problem is admittedly still not solved).

The problems that I've had to fix in Linux often start immediately upon booting up for the first time and attempting to connect to wireless, and end with me emailing documents to a Mac to print them because I needed the document printed within an hour, not after 8 hours of tinkering.

You assume that everyone wants to modify everything (or the unmodifiable, as you put it). After going through many years of FreeBSD and Linux, I now just want things to work. Mac gives me that. Should have switched sooner.

I used Linux as my daily driver until about 2008 when I switched to macOS exclusively. I made the transition to Ubuntu across all of my machines over the last three years and its been a much more pleasant experience.

Upgrading macOS and Xcode is a pain, especially with Homebrew and Macports. You'll have to recompile most of your installed applications and it's all managed with a hacked together package manager. Virtualenvs won't survive updates if Python is sideloaded because of linking issues. It's just a mess.

The result is having to spend an unknown amount of time fixing things that upgrades break on macOS, meanwhile upgrades on Ubuntu just work.

There was a time I fine tuned every aspect of every desktop environment I had. I had custom widgets on Windows 3 by replacing bitmap resources in Windows 3.1's SVGA.DRV. Did the same up until Gnome 2.

Then I stopped. These days rarely go beyond setting terminal font (I built mine, so it's only fair I play lab rat with it) and some Emacs settings. The effort spent in customizing every detail of every app is very rarely, if ever, recovered.

I feel a bit embarrassed I recently added overline support to tmux because I wanted proper overlined status lines on my terminals. In my defense, I did it for fun, not to improve my performance.

It works for you, yes. This entire page and thread of comments exists because for someone it didn't.

I see very little evidence of that.

I suspect what you mean when you say "it didn't work" is actually, "they didn't like it", which is actually not the same thing. I see a lot of people saying they didn't like things on Macs, not a lot of people saying things didn't work on Macs.

I've never used an OS that actually _didn't work_.

Unless we're talking about 15+ years ago before Linux had driver support for most stuff, or trying to like, just install Mac OS on an unsupported platform without hackintosh workarounds.

Everyone here saying that they used to tweak everything and now doesn't has just aged. You no longer feel the joy of your youth of computing in the same way. This is natural.

It's not really a rabbit hole. It has a clearly defined end.

I transitioned from GNOME to i3wm quite a while ago (after like 15 GNOME upgrade cycles, where I always had to figure out what changed, and fix what broke), and it was basically a day or two figuring out what I want and inventing/learning the shortcuts (not fulltime days, mind you). And maybe 2-3 instances of "this feels stupid, how can I improve it".

Certainly orders of magnitude less time than I ever spend making Windows do what I want on every damn re-install.

Now that I had my configs, I just copied them to all my 4 or so desktop/laptop machines, and it's such a timesaver. i3wm being ultra stable, there's no ongoing maintenance.