It’s pretty impressive that Ubuntu and Arch (Power User-only experiences in my mind) are considered an alternative to macOS by anyone at all. It shows the Linux desktop is actually delivering something very valuable despite the numbers. Although that the numbers don’t tell the whole story isn’t really saying much.

What if it turned out that ease of use and OS-wide app consistency was the easy part all along? That building good APIs - which includes not changing them, making a good publishing experience - which includes not changing your rules every six months, and making your developers rich - which includes lowering fees - were the hard parts?

Besides the average person does care about privacy and security. Keychain is a product everyone on macOS and iOS uses. Imagine if the OS forced Private Browsing to actually work.

The thing to remember is that, under all the chrome and Apple styling, macOS is rooted in BSD. So the power users who enjoy the *nix-y bits of macOS and are looking for a replacement will look for something that gives them more of that.

Is this a real thing? Like there are people that don't VM/SSH into Linux but use shell?

What demographic is this? College kids and Apple employees?

It seems like minor benefit in an otherwise atrocious platform.

Over the years I haven't found very many unix tools I couldn't install with homebrew. I'm also a big fan of the move from Bash to ZSH. Why start up a VM or SSH into another machine if I can just use Terminal or Iterm.

I don't understand.

What commands are you sending your macbook outside installations?

It's not like you are running a server, you still need to SSH into the server to do anything.

For what it's worth, look-and-feel is arguably more consistent on an OSS desktop than the average commercial workstation, these days. The vast majority of free apps and DEs are built on either GTK or QT, which have a broadly similar feel and can be themed to look identical. Meanwhile, closed/commerical apps are a mess of in-house toolkits and embedded web interfaces, and Windows even has several inconsistent styles in the base install.

How reliable is the security vetting in the Ubuntu store?

You are overestimating how many power users use Apple products.

If you are technology literate, you've seen the evils of Apple for decades.

A power user fixes their own problem, not waits years for Apple to fix it.

This is clearly anecdotal, but nearly every dev/engineer from every company I have ever worked for has had an MBP as their work laptop.

I'm the other way, I've never seen a Macbook in an (Engineering) office setting, four fortune 500, two small businesses.

I've seen them at University and some non STEM students homes.

That said, I see iPhones at work, but probably because they are not critical to doing anything other than email.

I worked at SAP for seven years in their cloud business and about half the engineering staff had MBP laptops. Some engineering teams used only Macs. Operations was the same way. Engineering computer usage in India was mostly Windows, China was ~50% Macs, US/Canada was ~80% Macs, and Europe was ~50% Macs.

Software is not Engineering. You guys call your developers Engineers?

.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering

"One of the core issues in software engineering is that its approaches are not empirical enough because a real-world validation of approaches is usually absent, or very limited and hence software engineering is often misinterpreted as feasible only in a "theoretical environment.""

Software engineering is Engineering like sandwich Engineer is Engineering.

They should use "specialist". It's not like they are using science to prove something will work.