I don't really get this. I switched to MacOS because it's fundamentally BSD with a nice/ well integrated GUI. Almost all of the good OSS I love is supported nearly perfectly.

Perhaps I'm a bit jaded after running into too much bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in the 90s and 00s. Since I made the move I never wax nostalgic for the "Good Ole Days" of fighting for hours to get Wifi working properly.

Even assuming Apple released the specs so you could port Linux to M1, on top of the usual laptop driver issues around the trackpad, wifi drivers, and video drivers, you also have to deal with the Secure Enclave. Without that, you are stuck with either a non-encrypted drive or running drive encryption on the CPU which is likely going to kill many of the performance gains from using the Mac hardware. Likewise, without the Secure Enclave, you lose fingerprint auth.

Not anti-Linux by any means, but dropping Linux on the M1 isn't going to get you the same performance or battery life by any means. You are far better just going with a laptop which was designed to be Linux friendly to start with.

> Since I made the move I never wax nostalgic for the "Good Ole Days" of fighting for hours to get Wifi working properly.

I can assure you that you didn't have to do that for quite some time and it's not that which people are looking for.

- Am looking for a system that lets me run any damn thing I want without pipups, blocks, firewalls, warnings, requiring signed binaries etc.

I am looking to run and develop for the same environment I end up deploying on.

- I want a system that has native docker support, systemd and makes updating the whole system or installing pretty much anything as easy as one terminal command.

- It's important for me to trust my system; where I know no single entity has more power over the machine than myself and no secret upgrades I didn't desire are going to be pushed my way.

- There's no telemetry in my ideal system, certainly not at the system level and patched out at the app level where possible.

- I want a system that is open, configurable, respects the four freedoms and is community ran.

macOS cannot give me this, no matter how "fundamentally BSD" it is. I value the freedom that free software gives that no closed-source BSD ever could.

IMO, the BSD/Darwin stuff isn’t the problem, but rather all the recent additions that are just super invasive/restrictive/bloated - Gatekeeper and trustd, that in my experience often (not just when OCSP is down) chewed through CPU often for example. IMO, even a few years ago (when I mostly switched off from Macs) the LaunchDaemon/Agent situation was getting totally out of control, as were notifications and updates (worse than Win10 even).

Here’s a script (that no longer works apparently due to a new system signing restriction) that disabled some of those, to give an example of the amount of crap running by default: https://gist.github.com/pwnsdx/1217727ca57de2dd2a372afdd7a0f...

> I switched to MacOS because it's fundamentally BSD with a nice/ well integrated GUI. Almost all of the good OSS I love is supported nearly perfectly.

This is the reason I initially started using macOS more than a decade ago.

However, I've been told that I'm the wrong kind of user by Apple fans whenever I criticize Apple for transforming macOS from a pretty Unix into a locked-down App Store appliance.

The BSD parts of macOS are getting old and crufty, and are being locked out and overridden by Apple's proprietary and significantly-undocumented layer. For an example of this, check out how networking is done on modern macOS versus how networking is done on a BSD or Linux.

> Perhaps I'm a bit jaded after running into too much bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in the 90s and 00s

Linux has gotten much better, and the problems of the 90s and 00s have vanished for my use case.

These days, at least to me, Linux is the pretty Unix that just works that macOS used to be.

Well... That's why I have a ThinkPad, that is certified on Linux. (So your prejudice is dated)

I'm literally trying to figure out how to install Python 3.6 alongside 3.9 in MacOSX .... right now, and it's not a one line command.

So... No. It has massive issues with developer friendliness. New OSX stalls with bluetooth mice and randomly locks my keyboard(MBP 2020). The only thing I can commend OSX on - battery life on a MacBook and nothing else

> install Python 3.6 alongside 3.9 in MacOSX .... right now, and it's not a one line command

To be fair, that's not easy on any OS (well, maybe Windows). Certainly on CentOS it is a chore to get two versions of Python installed simultaneously.

I'm on Ubuntu - it's not as mindbogglingly hard as on MacOSX.

Unsupported versions - harder, but still a few commands...

Supported versions? sudo apt install python-3.6 and done.

Python: another way to do this is to install Anaconda and then spin up virtual environments with specific Python versions.

  conda create -n myenv python=3.6

Having multiple versions of system Pythons can be complicated. I've learned not to touch the system Python.

pyenv[1] might help you out in this department. It's also cross-platform.

[1] https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv

I've never used another BSD, but the reasoning for my 'I prefer Linux' complaint could I think equally be said to conclude almost any non-Mac Unix - my primary concern or annoyance is configurability.

Sure, it has a 'nice/well integrated GUI', but I'm not allowed to choose a different one. Good luck configuring the one they give you for different machines without lots of pointing and clicking. (Yes I know about `defaults write`, I tried to maintain a script to configure everything that way and similar for several years, things change every version, and it's a mess even when it works. It's not how they want you to do it, and it shows.)

I think part of the aversion is that we're seeing a generation come into being that doesn't understand that Unix > Linux.

The way that for Windows people Unix was "other" and bad and scary. Now we have legions of programmers who were brought up on Linux, and now think of Unix as "other."

Having had the fun experience of compiling a fairly heavy UI application on Unix, they all seem pretty "other" to me. Solaris didn't do anything weird, so it was maybe the only non-other. HP-UX had something really weird with linking and I feel like it was lacking some shell commands that were fairly standard. AIX did something strange with shared libraries and their error messages were decidedly non-standard, although they all had unique code at the beginning so at least it was easy to search for problems. I think AIX was the only one for which malloc(0) = 0, all the others at least produced a valid pointer. I can't remember what the problems with Irix were, I think it was just that by 2008 Irix was just old so getting an up to date compiler was troublesome. Linux was just as "other" compared to the rest, but it was increasingly full-featured. Solaris kept up for a while.

And admining them was definitely very different aside from the basic shell commands.