However, I think Apple has been a far greater threat to Linux adoption than Microsoft. Why? Because it gives techies the *nix environment they want, with the software and hardware support no one will give them on Linux.
There is real value in proprietary commercial end-user application software. Most companies who make such software couldn't care less about supporting Linux. So if you want to use Linux, you have to use F/OSS alternatives and continue to try convincing everyone that somehow they're better than the commercial options... even when the rest of the world has agreed that they're really not.
The whole incentive structure around F/OSS development really doesn't work for software where the profit motive is in the product itself... Not some nebulous "support contract" that you don't actually need. (Which is a far bigger issue for end-user applications.)
The UNIX experience on the Mac is pretty shitty. Ancient versions of all the tooling. Command-line utils have that weird BSD well-water flavor. No package management. Funny Docker quirks.
The hardware used to be pretty nice, but honestly I'm still having trouble forgiving them for getting rid of the physical ESC key and turning volume control into a two-step routine on the TouchBar.
Honestly if I'm doing server-side development, I much prefer using my ThinkPad (Ubuntu) over my MacBook. About the only thing I miss is the far superior touchpad on the Macbook. That's it.
Can be easily fixed by installing homebrew. Also you claim it is a shitty Unix experience while complaining about BSD flavoured tools.
> Funny Docker quirks.
How is that Unix related? BSD has similar issues.
Maybe you should have written the GNU/Linux experience is pretty shitty on macOS but no one claimed otherwise.
> The UNIX experience on the Mac is pretty shitty. Ancient versions of all the tooling. Command-line utils have that weird BSD well-water flavor. No package management. Funny Docker quirks.
It doesn't have to be the best nix environment. Hell, it doesn't even have to be a good one. It just has to be "good-enough". For this, they still have an advantage over Windows. And compared with Linux, they still have the advantage that by-and-large, things "just work". I have never personally been able to say that about a Linux desktop I've had. There is always one more thing to tweak, one more knob to turn, etc...
I'm with you on the ESC key and touch bar though... which they thankfully fixed the missing ESC key.
I can also install something like multipass on macOS if I want a good integrated virtual machine.
Last week I had to drop to vi and edit nfs.conf on a friend's Mac to solve very slow transfer rates. "Just works" within a very narrow definition of primitive use cases.
To be fair it's always been a one-step routine on the touchbar (touch and drag the icon) and they brought back the escape key.
On the other hand, my speakers have a physical volume dial that provides feedback via friction on movement so I like that better than touchbar or physical up/down buttons.
Discoverability certainly sucks for that second one.
Linux is its own thing and trying to mix UNIX with Linux is always going to lead to disappointment.
Very, very true. And Homebrew is actively becoming worse now. A few years back, Homebrew was great - now using it feels like using some weird underground software stack that exists only because Apple hasn't come around to nixing it yet.
Well, OS X is Unix, but GNU is not Unix.
That's what MacPorts is for ;)
Not a fan of the touchbar of course.
Otherwise everything else I need is usable on a Mac.
With WSL, you basically get an actual Linux userland (with WSL2, I think you get an actual Linux kernel too), not just a Unix that's like Linux but different enough to be annoying. But I'm not sure that will be enough to convince people to move to Windows.
Most devs only want some kind of CLI and POSIX like capabilities.
which is why WSL is so great...
An approach already taken by other UNIX clones with their Linux compatibility syscalls layer.
Back in the day I was using Hummingbird.
I used to admin UNIX and develop for it from Windows NT/2000 workstations.
Also the FOSS version of Motif only appeared when Motif wasn't that much relevant and most enterprise shops were migrating to CORBA and Web as integration points.
Apple has a monopoly on their hardware, and they will likely sell a significant number of devices. This will lead to a lot more development for ARM that never would have happened otherwise.
That, in turn, may make tilt the balance in favor of ARM for a lot of other use cases outside of OSX when other tools, applications, and hardware vendors better support ARM.
As for switching... I'm increasingly unhappy with Microsoft's complete disregard of user privacy. Apple isn't perfect with that either, but IMO much better at least. For my use cases, Win and Mac are the only credible options due to software availability. So to get away from Windows.. there's not much choice these days.
What makes ARM so exciting? Maybe battery use will be better? Maybe it will be slightly faster? Maybe? There's also been a lot of tuning done for laptop workloads on x86, it's definitely a maybe. I expect the only noticeable changes for most users to be somewhat better battery life, some apps not working, and occasionally having to know which package to download.
But Apple can't just pay-up every cross-platform software developer. Smaller developers will have to re-evaluate whether macOS remains a viable target platform for them. Which can translate to a dev-gain for Linux. The catch is that Linux is in much better position to translate an influx of developers to an influx of new users: Linux runs on what you have, while macOS requires you buy Apple hardware.
And let's not forget about macOS as a gaming platform. Linux has made a huge leap forward with Steam Proton. On macOS there's still a ton of games not supporting x86_64 (Catalina), and situation won't get better by transition to ARM.
I’m sure that's not the case. It's much more in Adobe’s interest to be ARM-ready on day 1; there are plenty of Photoshop alternatives in the Mac App Store—notice they demoed Affinity Photo running on the ARM Mac and Affinity is much better at using Apple's native APIs and technologies than Adobe every was. And it's just a one-time cost of $49.99 vs. renting Photoshop from Adobe. Users of Apple devices are continue to be a large segment of their customer base.
Adobe has already migrated all of their core applications to a new codebase that should be relatively easy to bring to ARM Macs. Photoshop and several other of their apps already runs on iPadOS, so it won't be that big a deal to move it over to Big Sur.
So nothing is changing. ARM Mac isn’t going to change the Linux desktop/laptop story.
Hence why plenty just target Android, although some of their apps could easily be targeting GNU/Linux as well (specially the ones that are mostly NDK glue + whatever framework).