Has Linux desktop share been increasing lately? I'm not sure why a newer Mac with better CPU options is going to result in increasing Linux share. If anything, it's likely to be neutral or favor the Mac with it's newer/ faster CPU.
> But frankly I believe Apple have lost ground UI-wise over the intervening decades, while free alternatives have gained it (they are still not at parity, granted).
Maybe? I'm not as sold on Linux gaining a ton of ground here. I'm also not sold on the idea that the Mac as a whole is worse off interface wise than it was 10 years ago. While there are some issues, there are also places where it's significantly improved as well. Particularly if you have an iPhone and use Apple's other services.
The second would be Apple pushing all MacBooks to M1 too soon, breaking certain tools and workflows.
While I think both of those scenarios could easily happen, most devs will probably decide just put up with the extra trouble rather than switch to Linux.
I don't think this is an issue. Apple has been fairly straight about timelines and people who want to stick with Intel have plenty of time and options to get their stuff in a row in advance. More important, Apple fixed most of the major irritations with the MacBook Pro. If they hadn't launched the 16" MBP last year, people would have been stuck with a fairly old/ compromised design.
I suspect Apple is going to maintain MacOS right where it is now. People have been worried about "iOSification" for nearly a decade now and while there have been some elements, the core functionality is fundamentally the same.
They changed a ton about the UI in Big Sur, none of it for the better as far as I can tell. They took away even more choice, I can't have a "classic" desktop experience.
My biggest frustration is that they were willing to make such drastic changes to the desktop UI at all. I have to re-learn a ton of keyboard navigation now. And there doesn't seem to be a coherent design to the workflows.
Such a drastic change seems to be an admission that they thought the previous design language was wrong but they seem to have replaced it with... no vision at all?
I am hopeful for the next generation of M1 MacBook Pros and whatever the next MacOS is. Hopefully they get their design philosophy straight and stick with it.
I see a strong vision in Big Sur, one that pulls macOS visually into line with iOS, but there are a lot of rough edges right now. Especially with some Catalyst apps bringing iOS paradigms onto Mac. Even Apple's Catalyst apps (News in particular) are just gross, can't even change the font size with a keyboard shortcut
There’s an enormous amount of wasted space. You need that 32” monitor. My 16” RMBP now has as much usable space as my 13”.
Keyboard navigation is bizarre. Try this:
1) Open Mail.
2) Cmd W.
3) Cmd 1 (or is it Cmd 0?!, hint: it’s whatever Messages isn’t!)
4) Without using your mouse select a message in your inbox.
5) Without using your mouse navigate to a folder under your inbox.
6) Without using your mouse navigate to an inbox in another account.
All of this is possible in Catalina and earlier with zero confusion (selections are highlighted clearly) and can be done “backwards” using shift. In Big Sur some of it is actually impossible and you have to just guess where you start.
When native apps aren’t even consistent in their behavior and appearance that is a trainwreck.
You may be able to read the tea leaves and see a grand vision here but I have to use a half-baked desktop environment until Not-Jony Ive is satisfied they have reminded me they are not Jony Ive. To them I say, trust me, I noticed.
I'm not a huge Mail user so I'm not up-to-speed on keyboard shortcuts. But I was able to navigate with the keyboard easily — I hit tab to focus on the correct list then use the up/down arrows to select the inbox or message (your 4/5/6). After hitting Cmd+W both Cmd+0 or Cmd+1 bring the Mail window back for me. And Cmd+Shift+D still sends mail which is the main one I use
I am a huge Xcode user and primarily use the keyboard for code navigation, and that is as good as ever on the 13" MacBook Air in Big Sur. Also use Sketch a lot, and that has been just great too
I guess we have a very different perception of Big Sur but mine is generally favourable, and I don't see the wasted space that you see. There have been a few weekends where I have done all my work on the 13" MBA, which is only just now possible due to battery life, and the experience has been really, really nice
You’d have more usable space with Catalina on that 13” screen. It was a noticeable loss of space upgrading from Catalina to Big Sur on a 16” RMBP. I used to have space for three partially overlayed windows on my 16” screen. Now I am lucky to get two. Usable space on a 16” Big Sur MacBook is similar to a 13” Catalina MacBook. I have both. My workflows changed. There is no benefit to me as a user.
Take a look at this visual comparison: https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/2020/07/01/a-visual-compari...
Look at the “traffic light” buttons. Note how much thicker the top bar is in Big Sur. It’s 50% taller! That’s a lost row of text.
Messages does not have great keyboard navigation — I can't tab around like I can in Mail. I am putting this down to the fact it is a Catalyst app and they are a bit sloppy with consistency (not necessarily a Big Sur thing, as these were on Catalina)
But in Catalina Cmd-1 selects the inbox and full sidebar navigation including between accounts is possible with arrow keys. Nested lists can expand and collapse with left and right.
In Big Sur Cmd-1 just reopens the window with no selection. In addition you cannot navigate the full sidebar with arrow keys.
Combine this with the lack of visual indication of your selection and keyboard navigation becomes a struggle.
I have not found a UI improvement in Big Sur.
Sure, but Jonny Ive just officially left. He was head of all design (when he should have been head of hardware design only). It’s natural that there would be greater-than-usual changes as someone new took over.
Big Sur has some pretty terrible changes. There’s nothing surprising that changes occurred. The only surprise is how bad they are.
Overall though when I hear about the "iOSification" I worry foremost about locking down the OS which doesn't seem to be a big issue.
My personal computer is on Big Sur, but I've kept my work laptop on Catalina so a lot of this doesn't hit me work wise. It doesn't seem too horrible to me when working on private projects but that's a small percentage of my time.
I feel you there, one of the reasons I didn't like Windows is big, seemingly random UI changes. I don't think Bir Sur is crazy like Windows NT -> Windows Vista crazy, just feels like a big change for MacOS which has been relatively stable for a few years.
Seems like Apple tends to go long when they make big sweeping UI changes, then in the following releases they dial things back or work out the glitches. It's frustrating for certain.
At least I feel I see a lot more Linux now, not just in the company I work for but also elsewhere.
The speed advantage over Windows is so huge that it is painful to go back once you've seen it.
MS Office isn't seen as a requirement anymore, nobody think it is funny if you use GSuite and besides, last time I used an office file for work is months ago: everything exist inæ Slack, Teams, Confluence or Jira and these are about equally bad on all platforms.
The same is true (except the awful part) for C# development: it is probably even better on Linux.
People could switch to Mac and I guess many will. For others, like me Mac just doesn't work and for us Linux is an almost obvious choice.
For the rest of the company, MS Office may very well be essential. In particular, Excel is king for many business functions.
There is a procedure to get one, but so far I don't know anyone who used it. Quite on the contrary I know one of our sales guys used to install and run Linux on his laptop.
Yes, I work and an above average technical company but we do have HR, sales etc and they aren't engineers (at least not most of them).
(email in my profile ;-)
I see it far more now than I did ~5-10 years ago when it was my daily driver. I'm just not sure if it's gotten a baseline support and flatlined or if it's growing consistently now.
Fully agree with almost all of your points, and if MacOS did go off the deep end in terms of functionality, I'd be back on Linux. It's why I'm a big fan of what Marcan is doing and follow it closely.
If Linux support was as good now as it was when I switched, I'd likely have never switched to the Mac.
But now I just stick around for the hardware.
I run on Mac for desktop, Linux for projects. I don’t know that more people have been switching than before, but I thought the author of this[0] piece illustrated well that it’s easier than ever. That said, the author states that they opt not to have a phone. That’s much less lock-in than most of the market.
I had already decided that 2021 would be my year of the Linux desktop, but Apple forced my hand a bit early. My 2019 Mac’s WiFi went. Had to lose my primary dev machine for over a week as it shipped out to have a bunch of hardware replaced.
So, I built a PC with parts that have good Linux support. I think that’s the key. I imagine System76 machines would run smoothly. It’s definitely not as smooth a UX as Mac, but I like being in an open ecosystem on a machine I can repair. And it’s had a number of perks such Docker running efficiently for once.
Edit: I can now trivially repair my computer if it breaks. The entire rig cost about 1/4 what my MacBook cost, and it is much faster.
With a hybrid 1-2 days in the office and the fact that the NUC form factor has gotten smaller and higher performance, I could make a case to actually stick it in my laptop bag for the 1-2 days and do email/surf only on my train commute. I was never really that productive working on the train anyways.
And I personally hope that by then, GNU/Linux will have an M1-like processor available to happily run on. The possibilities demonstrated by this chip (performance+silence+battery) are so compelling that it's inevitable we'll see them in non-Apple designs.
Also, as it usually happens with Apple hardware advancements, Linux experience will be gradually getting better on M1 Macbooks as well.
0:https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-reporte... 1:https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/14/21221062/google-processor...
I'm a huge fan of OCaml, Java and Python (RC but with cyclic garbage collection), and RC very likely incurs more developer headache and more bugs, but at the end of the day, that's just a question of upfront investment, and in the long run it seems to pay off - it's pretty hard for me to deny that pretty much all GC software is slow (or singlethreaded).
MacPorts and Homebrew exist. Both support M1 more or less and support is improving.
Big Sur is a Big Disaster but hopefully this is just the MacOS version of iOS 13 and the next MacOS next year goes back to being mostly functional. I have more faith in that than a serviceable Linux desktop environment.
I may be naive but that seems like hyperbole. I updated to Big Sur shortly after is was released. It was a little bumpy here and there, but not more than any other update. I'd even argue it has been as smooth or smoother than any of my Linux major upgrades in the past 20 years.
I upgraded my personal laptop and it’s so bad I’m holding off on my work laptop until I am forced to upgrade.
I agree generally though. I see macOS as an important Unix OS for the next decade.
Also proprietary software. Unfortunately, many people still need Adobe.
I personally like Krita, Shotcut, and Darktable better than any of the Adobe products I used to use, but it's a real issue.
E: Add "many people"
You also get POSIX compliance.
Recently there are some hypervisor-like things for security, and more things have been moving to userland instead of being kexts. I'd still say it's less of a microkernel than Linux since it doesn't have FUSE.
Ugh, not even.
Simple and straightforward shell scripts that work on decade-old Linux distributions don't work on Big Sur due to ancient macOS bsd tooling.
Just look at stackoverflow or similar sites: every answer has a comment "but this doesn't work on my macOS box."
(I've had to add countless if-posix-but-mac workarounds for PhotoStructure).
Sadly, fewer of my coworkers use Linux now than they did 10 years ago.
Could we do a roll call of experiences so I know which ones work and which ones don't? Here are mine.
Dell Precision M6800: Avoid.
Supported Ubuntu: so ancient that Firefox
and Chrome wouldn't install without source-building
dependencies.
Ubuntu 18.04: installed but resulted in the
display backlight flickering on/off at 30Hz.
Dell Precision 7200:
Supported Ubuntu: didn't even bother.
Ubuntu 18.04: installer silently chokes on the NVMe
drive.
Ubuntu 20.04: just works.> both Dell and Lenovo have models that come with Linux
Like the Dell Precision M6800 above? Yeah. Mixed bag.
Rules of thumb: - Use older thinkpads off business lease is great - stick to intel video graphics - max out the ram and upgrade storage (NVMe)
Like the Dell Precision 6800 above? The one where the latest supported linux was so decrepit that it wouldn't install Firefox and Chrome without manually building newer versions of some of the dependencies?
"System76 is better at this than Dell" is valid feedback, but System76 doesn't have the enterprise recognition to be a choice you can't be fired for.
Maybe ThinkPads hit the sweet spot. I'll have to look at their newer offerings.
Some definitely will. Significant enough to assume they're not well-situated other-configs? Probably not. Even the most VIM- and CLI-oriented devs I know still prefer a familiar GUI for normal day to day work. Are they all going Ubuntu? Or Elementary? I mean, I welcome any migration that doesn't fracture the universe. But I don't think it's likely.
I’ve known colleagues that tried to run Linux professionally using well reviewed Linux laptops, and their experience has been universally awful. Like “I never managed to get the wifi to work, ever” bad. The idea of gambling every developer on that is a non-starter even at my level, let alone across the org.
Is it not at least somewhat possible that at least some of those Apple laptops will age out and be replaced with GNU/Linux laptops? Agreed that developing on ARM and deploying on x86 is unpleasant, but so too is developing on macOS and deploying on Linux. Apple’s GNU userland is pretty ancient, and while the BSD parts are at least updated, they are also very austere. Given that friction is already there, is it likelier that folks will try to alleviate it with macOS in the cloud or GNU/Linux locally?
Mac OS X was a godsend in 2001: it put a great Unix underneath a fine UI atop good hardware. It dragged an awful lot of folks three-quarters of the way to a free system. But frankly I believe Apple have lost ground UI-wise over the intervening decades, while free alternatives have gained it (they are still not at parity, granted). Meanwhile, the negatives of using a proprietary OS are worse, not better.