I appreciate those nags. Those nags clued me into app behavior; I learned what apps are requesting keyboard access even when they're not in focus, for instance. Blindly trusting our apps to access our keyboards and not gradually become keyloggers is a recurring problem in our industry, it seems, so that was a very welcome change.
The upside is 1) total customization, 2) if there is a problem you have a lot more power to fix it. There are just a lot more problems.
Here's a list of my daily Linux issues (NVIDIA driver required to use external monitors)
1. Resume from sleep causes browsers and electron apps to fail to draw anything. I have to close and restart them. I found a workaround for Chrome (turn on Vulkan) but that's not possible for Slack.
2. Periodically Linux reports I have no internal speakers and I have to kick pulseaudio
3. NVIDIA driver page faults several times a day requiring me to unplug, replug monitors and run xrandr to reconfigure the displays.
4. After an upgrade my system now boots to TTY and I can't figure out how to fix it.
5. Zoom annotations don't work
6. Discord audio didn't work until I found an obscure workaround.
7. External monitor detection doesn't work
8. The laptop display doesn't go into power saving mode ever
9. Usb devices have to be unplugged/replugged to be detected
10. Complete system crashes (hang with no recognition of any input, so no way to switch to TTY)
So, pros and cons.
edit: I should note that the last Macbook (2017 I think) would kernel panic randomly when connecting or disconnecting external monitors (like when going to a meeting).
I run an IdeaPad p400 with Ubuntu 20.04. Everything just works. Had a sager and a System76 that worked without issues, too.
Sometimes, it's the hardware that's the problem. Had a Dell and an HP for work that were so bad with Ubuntu that I had to give them up entirely for Linux machines.
Honestly, my next laptop is going to be a System76, top of the line model. If it can last as long as my Lenovo (2010, I think), it will be money well spent.
For GDB, the instructions on the GDB wiki should still work on Big Sur, and they actually last changed in the release before Catalina:
I upgraded to Catalina 5-8 months after it was released, mostly because the initial rollout was so rocky (at least according to the articles on HN).
Going to keep my eyes peeled for reviews here in the next few weeks. Hopefully this is a more stable release than Catalina.
The last part is the key: people who have problems usually complain loudly and widely, so there's a huge sampling bias. I've been using and supporting Macs professionally since the 90s. In that time, I've had exactly one case where a day one upgrade broke something — 10.4 shipped with a bug where all NFS exports were read-only — as long as you did a check first to confirm that any commercial software you were using was supporting (e.g. Adobe sometimes had fairly long delays).
There are two common problems you'll see frequently: a system which was already failing will be attributed to the new OS (I've seen people claim it broke their hard drive, when it was really just the first problem which couldn't be excused as a fluke), and people will often say that their system got slow because Spotlight / Photos were reindexing in the background.
I had several problems with the early releases of Catalina, including my Apple-made USB keyboard not being recognized.
Even after it seemingly was fixed, a dot release would break it again. I did at least two clean installs to resolve the problem once a stable version of Catalina was released.
It's completely different with Big Sur. I upgraded my work machine to Big Sur. After the Spotlight indexing was done, everything was working as it was previously, except I had the latest and greatest operating system.
It's still only been a few days but so far, I have no complaints about Big Sur.
Loving the new desktop dynamic illustrations and how much faster Safari is, even compared to Catalina.
Obviously YMMV but so far, it's been smooth sailing with Big Sur.
What finally did it for me was when I did an "ls" in a terminal after an upgrade, accidentally hit the wrong button when the OS asked for permission, and locked my terminal out of file system access. Mac OS is no longer any good for professional use, outside of media creation.
I had a 2016 Dell Xps 15" and both me and my coworker with the same machine had terrible issues with the keyboard randomly writing letters twice in a row. Also the on-board nvidia graphics card, while nice, was also a big power hog and that system had bad battery life until I turned it off. After a couple of years, the battery puffed up and started pushing up on the trackpad until it was unusable. Really soured me on Dell's build quality, and I can't recommend them at all, even though I admire their support for linux drivers.
You’d be better looking at the Precision line if you want a 15” Dell with Linux.
I agree, and I bet they will kick themselves for it in ~5 years time.
Technically, probably nothing unless you're tied to something like Final Cut. I like little things like obj (geometry), abc (geometry), and exr (image/textures) files can be previewed in Finder/Quickview out of the box. Quicktime is way better than what Windows offers by default (I miss Quicktime 7)--I'm not sure Windows can open Apple ProRes movies (a fairly common working format) without additional software.
ILM, Sony, Pixar, DreamWorks, and Disney aren't great examples since they all use Linux. For the few artists that need it, they have a second Windows or Mac box just for Photoshop. Because of their size they use Linux and a lot of in-house proprietary tools. There's like 10-30 companies in the world that work like this so it's not a great comparison for someone doing motion graphics bumpers for the web or making TV commercials--I would not recommend Linux for them.
As far as Sidecar goes, I don't own an iPad and don't plan to, so not relevant to me by any stretch of imagination.
I have a friend who effectively works on code quality at apple who's always talking about how seriously they take this kind of stuff... and yet, there are without fail always issues in their flagship OS releases. I don't get it.
It runs a bit slower, but at least you can try it out.