Even the UI conventions that let you use the keyboard instead of the mouse are now often broken by Apple itself (it impacts power users more than impaired people since accessibility features are still good).

And no containers - those require you to run a different kernel on a VM.

Frankly I feel that macOS went back to being like Mac OS 9 in a lot of aspects - it's just enormously bigger and has a proper foundation but the UI is again mouse centric and proprietary and the system is more tightly coupled than ever with the hardware

You might say it wasn't the best distribution for reliability, or that graphics with NVidia are always an issue etc. but the fact remains that, for me, for an OS to "just work out of the box", MacOS is much better.

[I'm also not a Linux n00b, been using it for over a decade, though not an expert for sure]

There is one way to run nvidia stuff on Linux and have a decent experience: run a distro that actually support and has partnership with nvidia, which mean a distro like Redhat Enterprise Linux. It has long term support too.

It is the same with Apple or windows if you start using shitty drivers from a shady brand you will run into issues at some point.

My way is rather: I don't want to even pollute my brain cache with that. I want a Computer with an Operating System that Just Work. Because for me tinkering with the setup of my desktop is not fun, the fun bit is what I do with a properly working computer. I'll pay a premium to Apple for that (though, mind you, MBP is competitively priced with similarly-performant laptops), and I'd pay that same premium to a laptop+Linux provider.

Except... my confidence in the latter working well is lower. Because apart from fixing broken graphics drivers, I've also had to, in my days, debug:

- package managers that somehow got themselves into a bad state

- fight with linkers when trying to build fairly benign stuff on my desktop

- don't even mention printing

and many other things I don't even remember anymore.

Sounds strange because both Linux and MacOS share the same Cups software for printing. AFAIK Cups main developpers are employed by Apple.

I haven't run into any hiccups these last 15 years. Everytime I was in the market for a printer I just verified it was supported well on openprinting.org. On my current printer I just needed to install one rpm.

Compare that to all the crappy software that was installed on my gf windows 10 laptop, involving a reboot, annoying popups telling you about ink level on every print and an app loading up at startup to stay in systray.

I like to mention that I used for 18 years a scanner on linux and bsd perfectly while it was out of support in Mac and windows since 2001. It wasn't even a device that would have used very old connectors impossible to find on modern hardware. It was using USB! In that particular case I don't think that Mac really accounts for what you'd call a "Just Work" experience.

My experiments with macOS actually had the same problems you list, though I haven't tried printing more than once. MacOS comes with ancient Unix tools and you end up downloading half a Linux install over Brew when you try to compile stuff, and now you have added an external package manager you need to deal with to as system that doesn't really support one.

Mg experience with package managers is that if you ignore the warnings (adding --force to overrule errors, adding external repositories that replace system libraries or aren't maintained, mess with config files to override same defaults, mix package managers (apt+global pip = hell)) you won't see them break themselves. I've broken Windows installs by messing with my system in similar ways, though there never seems to be a solution when this happens other than a reinstall. Trouble mostly comes from outdated, misguided guides found on Google that'll ignore any best practices for your opersting system and set things up Their Way, turning your install into a ticking time bomb when the writers have long had to reinstall their operating system without ever updating their guides.

All operating systems I've tried are bad in their own way. Windows worked great until 8 came out. MacOS works well enough if you don't mind Apple's control/decisions/limitations and accept the risk of buying a faulty device that the company will deny all the way up to class lawsuit settlements. Linux works well if you're lucky with your hardware. The BSDs work well if you don't plan on doing all that many things the OS isn't equipped to do out of the box and if you don't have any weird hardware.

That is exactly what you did by choosing Apple.

If you go on the redhat website and choose certified system you can pick your hardware from any vendor the same way you choose your Apple machine on the Apple store.

With partial open sourcing efforts I predict that the nvidia situation will improve a lot the coming years, luckily. Until then, don't blame people who try Linux for nvidia's problems; there is no user friendly guide to find what hardware is supported how well for Linux and its kernel updates.

Furthermore, even supported drivers are a mess sometimes. There was a bug in the Linux kernel for months where the kernel would freeze up less than a second after boot if you had an Intel GPU and were using a second screen through DisplayPort. My laptop didn't have audio on anything but a beta driver package when I bought it. Ubuntu and friends simply couldn't use modern Intel graphics with multiple displays or hardware acceleration because the drivers were never backported to an LTS supported kernel. One in five times, my Manjaro install kernel panics on boot when switching from text mode to graphics mode, with no obvious way to debug; I was advised to get two USB to serial port adapters to debug the issue which would likely help, but I don't want to bother to be honest.

The world of Linux is full of driver issues, mostly graphics and sometimes audio, that are impossible to even debug without a second computer and a few years of Linux experience. Many common peripherals lack any kind of Linux support as well. The "shitty drivers" come from every brand on every product range and the only guaranteed method to work with you at stuff you'll find is to never ever upgrade your install once you get everything working.

I want Linux to be better for everyone, but overlooking its obvious flaws and blaming users won't get that done.

My father even did the 20.10 to 21.04 LTS upgrade himself! I highly doubt if windows would've been as smooth an experience.

(Macs are out of question for us since none of us are rich!)

I'm not saying Pop is bad, but Windows upgrades are super easy and user friendly (if you ignore the privacy risks that come with using Windows). I wish common Linux distros would pack something like system restore by default already! I know these tools (based on BTRFS/ZFS snapshots) exist and work great, but they need to be set up manually and most people won't.

Ubuntu is a mess that introduces config-breaking changes every release and rides the already existing market. If Canonical tried to release their products nowadays without their track record and existing user base, they would never succeed.

The peak Linux experience for a Just Werx focused end user is probably openSUSE Tumbleweed on KDE or XFCE. Batteries included, fast and extremely hard to break package manager, YaST2 configuration manager, and lots of user repositories.

If you're saying upgrading between releases causes problems.. well that's true but not how I read the original statement, and not something I particularly care about. Each release is a different product and there's no reason to update until support is dropped on the one you're currently using.

I try desktop Linux again every year or two[0]. It's always just as bad as it's always been. Way more application crashes than I'm used to on macOS, jankiness galore, all the stuff I used to avoid doing out of habit because it often breaks things on Linux (and to some extent also on Windows) but am now used to doing because it's fine on macOS is still often a bad on Linux (e.g. drag-n-drop actions). Lots of little annoyances like the default US English keyboard layout being crap for no reason on most distros, which, sure, I can change it, but why not have a good default? Still nothing as good as Preview on any platform other than macOS, AFAIK, which hurts quite a bit.

I think there was about a two-year high point in the late '00s when Ubuntu was just curating good defaults and smoothing things out and the future looked really bright, then Ubuntu rapidly deteriorated and it's back to how it had been before then, now, just shinier because of all the mostly-mediocre-or-bad GUI changes in the major DEs since then.

My next attempt, I'll probably just shoot for the holy grail of FreeBSD on the desktop. Linux seems like a lost cause at this point. May not be any better but a lot about it sure is way saner than Linux-land, so, worth a shot. Great on servers, certainly. Not expecting much because it's mostly the same as Linux in the GUI department, though.

[0] Last time: Ubuntu and Fedora (I don't like rpm-based distros, but thought I'd give them another shot), plus tried Void for the first time which was pretty great actually but I just don't enjoy fiddling with configs anymore so, it's a no for me.