I think that's a mantra that applies a little better to Linux than it does MacOS. Linux is well known for it's customization, and you can really pad out your desktop to be an ergonomic and customized place designed for you. MacOS, on the other hand, is practically the definition of fighting your OS: you aren't allowed to have a proper package manager, Apple has to drip-feed you old coreutils through their notoriously slow XCode service, and now you aren't even allowed to use a VPN without Apple disabling it on some of their apps. I don't really see how a Mac elevates your workflow that much, especially when most of your praise seems to be towards GNU tools and your Linux machines.
> you aren't allowed to have a proper package manager
I don’t know why you say that there is no package manager. This is demonstrably false. It’s just a different update mechanism than the core OS, which hasn’t been a problem for about a decade.
> Apple has to drip-feed you old coreutils through their notoriously slow XCode service
The old coreutils are the result of GPLv3. Latest versions are one command away with your package manager of choice.
> now you aren't even allowed to use a VPN without Apple disabling it on some of their apps
If you’re alluding to the Little Snitch thing, it had nothing to do with VPNs, and has been fixed AFAIK.
Honestly, your points sound like third-hand complaints you’ve heard in an echo chamber. It’s fine if you don’t want to use the OS, but then you don’t need to comment either.
It's great that source-level customization is possible under Linux, but really, who has time for that? I could see myself delving into writing a macOS-clone DE (which as a sidenote, GNOME and Pantheon doesn't go far enough with) if I'm fortunate enough to be able to take a multi-month break from work but otherwise it's a lot easier to just keep using macOS.
How do they not go far enough with it? The only thing that I can think of them not emulating is the menu bar in the top left, but the Gnome team is already flying pretty close to the sun with their recreation. Even still, there are ways to implement a global menu bar into Gnome with a little effort if it means that much to you. Otherwise, I really can't fathom what you're missing out on, besides some walls for your garden.
There's also a huge pile of small features that go beyond the scope of a comment to list, which are either implemented inconsistently or not at all. For example, in GNOME and Pantheon, window minimization is disabled by default and even when enabled lacks integration with whatever dock you may be using.
GNOME generally is rather odd, even if it's one of the more polished options. It strikes me more as a somewhat-desktop-adapted iOS than it does macOS.
>GNOME generally is rather odd, even if it's one of the more polished options. It strikes me more as a somewhat-desktop-adapted iOS than it does macOS.
That's because Gnome has to fulfill different responsibilities as a toolkit. It has to accommodate for touch-enabled devices, which pads out the UI quite a bit. It takes some getting used to, but I think I'm finally quite into it. It does a nice job of maximizing the actionable area of your window without sacrificing usability, uniformity or screen space. Compared to Big Sur's design language, the Gnome devs are already quite pretty far ahead of the game in my opinion. Gnome 40[2] positions the DE in a pretty good spot for the next several years, too.
[1] https://github.com/helloSystem/hello [2] https://forty.gnome.org/
> OS updates are non-events
Big Sur and Catalina have been the most disastrous updates in MacOS history. I'm not really sure why you'd choose now to highlight their notorious stability and ease of use. Ask any sysadmin who had a fleet of Macbooks during this update cycle: it was a nightmare and a half. Failing that, ask them about Catalina. They might run and hide under the table, a lot of them are still a little skittish about the word.
> I don’t know why you say that there is no package manager. This is demonstrably false.
Brew and Macports both suck. If you use Linux on a daily basis, then you're well familiar with what a good package manager looks like: apt and Pacman are both good examples. The amount of software on either of those platforms default providers makes Macports and Brew look like a pathetic joke. Add in the lack of extensibility offered on them both, the lazy Macports development cycle, Brew's half-correct installation philosophy and how out of place they all feel on MacOS, and you've got yourself a package management system that is just about as helpful as 'make install'ing it yourself.
> The old coreutils are the result of GPLv3. Latest versions are one command away with your package manager of choice.
The ball is in Apple's court then. If they want to brag about being a real Unix system, the least they can do is ship modern Unix tools with their OS. Ironically, MacOS is the least compatible Unix system around.
> If you’re alluding to the Little Snitch thing, it had nothing to do with VPNs, and has been fixed AFAIK.
No, I'm referring to the fact that Apple gives divided their networking API into privileged and non-privileged systems as of Big Sur. Now, Apple can designate certain developers (and themselves) a way to circumvent any custom network filters when sending data.
> Honestly, your points sound like third-hand complaints you’ve heard in an echo chamber. It’s fine if you don’t want to use the OS, but then you don’t need to comment either.
I mean, the M1 Macbook Air is sitting in my desk as we speak. I've also run MacOS on my beloved Thinkpad(s), but even the magic of a touchscreen Mac couldn't really persuade me to like the operating system. My guff is well founded, I think: as the most valuable company in the world, Apple has an obligation to provide at least some level of modularity in their ecosystem. Otherwise, the precedent they set will continue to influence every market we can conceive, until our concept of "ownership" is poisoned to mean a subscription service. It's driven by greed, and makes me sick. It always comes at the cost of the user, and the declining greatness of MacOS is a perfect example of how Apple's hunger for money is poisoning their product line.
macOS ships with BSD coreutils. It sounds like you prefer the GNU coreutils package, but that doesn't mean that the BSD tools aren't "real Unix", or that they're "less compatible".
That’s not saying much, everything is always terrible and it was all better under Lion/Snow Leopard/Tiger/OS 8. The 4 computers I had to update did it just fine.
> Brew and Macports both suck. If you use Linux on a daily basis, then you're well familiar with what a good package manager looks like: apt and Pacman are both good examples.
Indeed. From my experience either work great (I use CentOS and OpenSuse daily, alongside macOS). The only bits of software I’ve ever needed which weren’t on Macports were quantum chemistry codes, which I wanted to compile myself anyway to configure them properly and avoid MPI issues. At some point I had to compile GCC myself to track the development branch, but I haven’t had to do that in quite a while now. So yeah, your points are valid, but they still do their job, and you don’t have to rely on them for OS updates, so they cannot compromise stability.
> The ball is in Apple's court then. If they want to brag about being a real Unix system, the least they can do is ship modern Unix tools with their OS. Ironically, MacOS is the least compatible Unix system around.
They haven’t bragged about it in a decade. Besides, if you know UNIX, you realise that this kind of shenanigans is just life, and that there is quite a bit of variance in the specific implementation of user land software. Your problem is not that it is a sub-par UNIX, it’s that it isn’t Linux (which isn’t UNIX). The BSDs also lack most of the GNU tools by default, and so did most other UNIXes when they were still around.
> I mean, the M1 Macbook Air is sitting in my desk as we speak.
That’s fine. I didn’t accuse you of lying, and you are entitled to your preferences. I just pointed out that your arguments were not great, and indeed often heard from people who never really used Macs.
> My guff is well founded, I think: as the most valuable company in the world, Apple has an obligation to provide at least some level of modularity in their ecosystem.
This might be your problem. Whatever their market cap, they don’t really have an obligation to align with your opinions. I understand that you’d like it, but what kind of moral imperative would there be?
> Otherwise, the precedent they set will continue to influence every market we can conceive, until our concept of "ownership" is poisoned to mean a subscription service.
How is this related to their business policy? I strongly dislike their foray into services, but other than that they sell devices, not subscriptions. Your devices are yours, nobody is going to come and take them.
> It's driven by greed, and makes me sick. It always comes at the cost of the user, and the declining greatness of MacOS is a perfect example of how Apple's hunger for money is poisoning their product line.
Right, so you have an ideological problem and that’s why you sound like that. Well, if I can recommend anything, it would be to keep using Thinkpads, they are good devices and Linux is great as well. That way you can completely ignore whatever happens on the Apple side and be happy.
Welcome back to square one. The only reason I even had any input on this in the first place is because I frequent Hacker News, and I just wanna pitch in my two cents where applicable.
You might be right. But Linux vs MacOS argument is meaningless. For me it's "Linux laptop" vs "MacOS laptop", and there's a huge difference in 2021.
As I mentioned in another comment, macOS works for me. Linux is more customizable, yes, that is objectively true. But macOS is uniquely structured by default to work how my brain works.
Just because something is more malleable does not mean it is the best solution for all people.
> I think that's a mantra that applies a little better to Linux than it does MacOS. Linux is well known for it's customization
> pad out your desktop to be
You've just described fighting your OS.
I mean, sure, if you like customizing things and "padding your desktop", knock yourself out. The last thing I want to do on my machine is spending any time doing that.
> I don't really see how a Mac elevates your workflow that much
You listed package manager, coreutils, and VPN. That.... That is a minuscule part of a programmer's workflow. And for the vast majority of people who end up using Macs as their development machines these three are a non-issue.
It's only fighting if it wasn't designed for it in the first place, which isn't true. Linux (and the software designed for it) will always be modular. Once you have your desktop however you like it, you can backup your dotfiles and call it a days work. Bare git repos do the job almost perfectly.
> You listed package manager, coreutils, and VPN. That.... That is a minuscule part of a programmer's workflow.
If coreutils and a package manager are "miniscule parts" of a programmers workflow, I'd sure like to see someone program on a Mac without them.
You've completely ignored this: "I mean, sure, if you like customizing things and "padding your desktop", knock yourself out. The last thing I want to do on my machine is spending any time doing that."
I have other things in my life than fiddling with arcane configs.
> If coreutils and a package manager are "miniscule parts" of a programmers workflow, I'd sure like to see someone program on a Mac without them.
Yes. Here you assume that everyone is like you and has the same workflows and desires from a desktop like you. Nope, not everyone.
For the past 7 to 8 years brew has served me as a good-enough package manager. It's not perfect, but no package manager is.
No idea what your gripe with coreutils is. All of these [1] exist and work just fine out of the box.
So yes. Those are incredibly minuscule parts of a programmer's workflow. I've yet to remember any pain points concerning these two in the past 10 years of working on anything from backend in Erlang, Java, C#, Python, Go to frontend in Javascript and Typescript [2].
Granted, one thing you might not want to do is do C/C++ development on a Mac. I don't know the details, a friend of mine does embedded development, and needs a Linux machine for that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GNU_Core_Utilities_com...
[2] Well. Two or three times in these 10 years I needed a version that wasn't immediately available in brew, so I had to find out how to install the specific version I required. Installing also involved brew. Installing arcane versions isn't a better experience in Linux either. And LTS versions of Linux can rarely properly install new versions of required packages, much less arcane ones.
It's great that works for you, but that only works for people whose brains are (or have become) attuned to Apple's (often... interesting) ways of doing things.
It just means that it works well for me.
I don't have to fight my OS. It works with my brain. When I'm using awk and grep, it's in Linux, not macOS.
Not judging you or your opinion here - just explaining that I'm as bewildered by your experience as you are by mine.