I know many of the aforementioned issues have been fixed (to some extent) for linux. I'd be willing to give the Linux desktop another try but:

1. I really love my LG 5k external monitor. It's still hard to find hardware for linux that can drive it (especially laptops)

2. I got used to how fonts are rendered on macos

3. Keyboard shortcuts systematically different (CMD/meta vs Ctrl) make it harder to occasionally switch between the two systems. I know it sounds silly. But it's hard to remap those modifiers in a way that keeps everything else working the same.

Some examples of perks to be had because of giving in to the ecosystem..

1. Copy something on phone, and paste it on any application on Mac (and vice versa)

2. Instantly access all photos taken on iPhone for quick edits on Mac, or even to upload somewhere on a website(passport, dr.license and such).

3. Notes.app that is the same on iPhone and Mac because of iCloud. Notes has become my knowledge base.

4. I also have an iPad. Need to sign a PDF document? Right click and send to iPad where I can use my Apple Pencil. Save the document and it is instantly on my iCloud Desktop.

I can’t imagine the independent way of doing things again :-(

Similarly, you can right click on the Mac desktop and scan a document with your iPhone. Massive productivity booster for anyone shuffling lots of papers.

> right click on the Mac desktop and scan a document with your iPhone

Had no idea that was an option, until you mentioned it. Hiding right under my nose. Handy feature.

You can save your signature in the Preview app and then it's available to paste into any PDF.

https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/fill-out-and-sign-pd...

It's nowhere as polished and Just Works® as Apple's Continuity, but it's great for me with a desktop and laptop running Fedora, and mobile devices running LineageOS.

It definitely cost me a weekend for the photos thing, but at least I'm not locked in.

The whole concept is kinda ridiculous, but I never would have thought that it takes a Mac and iphone to do it.

There are also privacy implications to all that integration that honestly have me a bit wary of sharing any personal information with my work Mac.

Just to pick on another, the idea that anyone would be uploading photos of their passport and drivers license is a bit crazy. That said, I could easily with Ubuntu.

Is any normal user going to do that? Why the hell should I have to open a image editing app to sign a PDF?!

Why has no Linux PDF viewer added signatures as an option so far?

This is why I left Linux for MacOS

If it's not clear I didn't sign it in the technical sense, no one would know what to do with it, there's not a widely supported standard for that. These were business folks who wanted a png/jpeg image of the form with my scribble on it.

An image editor is perfect for that it turns out, and it takes two steps, three if you count save.

One is hardly a "variety of different apps".

Either way:

> It seems MS is much more on top of making Windows developer friendly than Apple is currently.

I see that too and it worries me. Not because I'm avidly anti-Microsoft, but because all the portents are we're heading back to the place where Microsoft dominates the desktop, with no practical alternatives. That wasn't good first time around and I don't see it being any better if repeated.

Microsoft is being very smart - and successful - in their strategy. Whereas the original Windows commoditised the underlying hardware, current "Windows" is commoditising operating systems. Hence subsuming Android and Linux into the platform.

"Windows", though, is really not the way to think about the platform. The deep integration of Teams into W11 is a pivotal step. Teams - with office365 - is the new "Windows" - the platform that Microsoft wants to dominate end-user computing with on the front end. With Azure on the back.

As a developer, I don't want to only have a single choice. But I don't see anyone meaningfully challenging Microsoft. Apple seems only interested in consumers. I wouldn't personally touch a Chromebook given Google's insatiable desire to monetise my every keystroke. Amazon seems only interested in the back end and, actually, that seems like strategic myopia. Microsoft really understands that owning the end-user experience is key. What future for AWS if all developers are using Windows, and it already "just works" with Azure?

So I'm not optimistic for the future. On the plus side, it's why I bought a laptop from System76, and paid ElementaryOS to use their distro. It's noise level compared to Windows/Mac, but that might just be what ensures there's a tiny crack of hope for desktop diversity.

>Microsoft really understands that owning the end-user experience is key.

Since upgrading to Catalina, I repartitioned my Mac to have a 1GB Windows partition for games, particularly 32-bit retro stuff. Other than my locked down work VDI, this is my first experience of seriously using Windows as a desktop OS in over a decade.

OMG is this thing horrible. Gah, my heart sinks every time I boot into it. Two Start Menus? A horrible, kafka-esque maze of settings and config in half a dozen different UI interfaces, all of them ugly as sin. One of my kids used it for a few days, and now I've already got some invasive search toolbar crap I can't get rid of, and I've shared a Mac with my kids almost all their lives (17 and 16). Ads built into the OS. The user experience on Windows is as godawful as it's ever been.

They've definitely upped their game on technology, WSL2 looks really nice. Power Shell looks pretty decent. They're making interesting moves with making .NET truly cross-platform. I can see the dev argument for sure, but the user experience on Windows is as much, if not more of an inconsiderate, abusive relationship as it's ever been.

Is this the same Microsoft that just decided to get rid of Local user accounts on Windows 11 Home?

yea, I think you are probably right. I was a linux user from 95-05 then switched to mac from 05-13 now back to linux. I'm well aware of the "this is the year of the linux desktop" joke, but honestly over past 4-5 years I think linux has reached the point that its fairly painless for 95% of common desktop usecases.

This has been Apple’s primary focus for the last decade, increasingly so each year. Apple has paid lip service to the education sector and business sector with managed accounts and profile based management but it is severely lacking and in many ways needlessly crippled. Apple is focused on the most profitable sector home / consumer market. They have exited the server market, exited itunes university, exited iweb, really excited anything self-creation or self-managed or self-hosted … in favor of ad friendly click to subscribe model and a locked down primarily content consumption device.

Total side note to this, but there are apps that only work on Windows like Adobe Creative Cloud. If some of these companies were to support Linux, you would see a huge migration off of Windows to Linux.

Adobe has steadfastly refused to support Linux. Even after years of Linux users saying they would gladly pay to use Adobe products on virtually ANY Linux OS. All to no avail. So here I sit, stuck between two operating systems. One I love, and needing the other strictly out of necessity to run a specific set of software.

Then they unified the teams that made their products for the different platforms and we ended up with the ribbon toolbar UI, which was a pure example of "good looking UI over functionality". I remember using excel with the ribbon toolbar, and it was really easy to put a funky pattern on my bar charts, but annoyingly fiddly to extrapolate data - ie. to actually use excel for science...

It's got to be said that if it was my company I would still have unified the teams. I probably would have ok'd the ribbon toolbar too, as I imagine that if I was running Microsoft I probably wasn't doing a lot of data analysis myself and I wouldn't know any better.

I really want to like Safari and I try every release, but I can't use it for more than a few minutes because the adverts that get through are just so unbelievably bad (to someone that isn't used to seeing any). The Apple-recommended strategy of using simple OS-level Content Blockers just doesn't cut it unfortunately. It's such a shame (to me) that all that developer effort on Safari is effectively wasted because of the relentless scurge of ads.

I understand why Apple decided to prevent the install of integrated Ad blockers directly in the browser because it's a security risk, but the reality is that the web is unusable without them. I really hope that there is an Apple Engineer reading this, and that some day Apple will find a solution :-)

Perhaps the solution is as simple as Apple curating their own approved blocking database similar to that used by popular adblockers and baking it into Safari in a secure fashion. Then again, that might open them to legal challenges.

I...don't see ads.

It's not as hyper-configurable as uMatrix, and there are certainly annoyances that don't get filtered out (first-party videos, "subscribe to our newsletter" overlays, etc), but it's got some decent user input, such that I could probably block more of those if I cared to spend some effort, and...well, I just don't see ads in my common usage.

Ah cool: The Adguard website says that they've just added M1 support. I think M1 support was probably part of the issue when I was last trying the available blockers.

On the first site - no ads. Whitespace where the ads would have been because content blockers can't interfere with the DOM and remove fragments.... but not bad.

Then I went to the NYT. Absolutely massive banner ad, full width of the screen taking up 25% of my screen real estate.. and then repeated again further down below the content. Looks utterly gross.

Now of course I don't have to use the NYT and could choose never to go to that site ever again, but this is the problem with Content Blockers that I'm talking about - they aren't enough on their own. So again, Safari is not usable with this approach.

Do you really see no ads, danaris? Perhaps you just don't go to these sorts of websites. Go and look at nytimes.com, using only AdGuard and Safari under macos and tell me what to see.

The claims on the AdGuard website are misleading... get this:

"No ads on YouTube - We'd wager you like watching YouTube and you don't like ads. The same for us! Luckily, AdGuard remover knows how to get rid of ads on Mac (even video ads)".

So I go to YT ... click on the first video on the homepage and there you go: advert... straight in. I mean I expected this, but again, the claims are just misleading. I mean perhaps that works on other OSes.

Whereas, with a browser-integrated blocking solution in Firefox - no video ads. I don't see how macos / iOS Content Blockers can't really be good enough when only inspecting traffic to the browser.

I can see that AdGuard is probably a decent product for most other current browsers, though. Thanks for suggesting it anyway.

The only changes I've noticed in the last few years are telnet, emacs, and ftp aren't included anymore and I have to install them manually. Changing to zsh was good though.

I wouldn't be surprised if they continue and eventually I find out that things like grep, awk, sed, uniq, etc are all slowly taken out.

It's best to either enjoy the walled Prison or escape. You can't really enjoy freedom and Apple.

However...

I'm not seeing how your comment is relevant to my statement that I don't want to use Apple's browser in its current state, when I can easily use many other browsers in what you've described as their "walled prison", and I do use them.

Whilst the situation may change for the worse in the future (resulting in a true walled garden), I can currently install anything I like on macos - you don't have to use the app store. This isn't iOS.

I don't feel abused by Apple at all. Conversely, I have been relentlessly abused by Microsoft in the past, however; (no choice in some old jobs)... and recent news stories concerning Windows 11 suggest that they're still at it. My experience suggests that things really aren't as bad as you're implying.

There is no particular reason to believe this wont eventually be the case on Mac

Seriously, you guys are relentless and exhausting! It might be time for me to bow out of Hacker News for good, if this sort of nonsense keeps up in the comments. Getting to be as bad for discourse as Reddit.

All I'm saying is that the browser-external Content Blocking approach Apple has chosen doesn't work very well and is disappointing in practice, even if it's a better proposition in terms of browser security. This currently has nothing to do with walled gardens on macos, whilst one can choose to use other browsers and add in-browser extensions that filter ads more effectively (as well as being able to remove DOM elements).

If you've got a helpful suggestion about Safari and the advertising situation, then please comment about that. As it happens, I'm not using Safari, but I remain interested in trying it again under macos, if Apple or someone else can offer proper ad blocking / ad removal.

Chrome is going that way too (it is proposed to remove permissions for integrated blocker extensions), but that _does_ have more to do with Google's nefarious ambitions with respect to advertising income, just as much as it is to do with security, I suspect.