> Maybe they want a unixy desktop with working sound ?

In my experience, this has not been an issue for the past 10-15 years atleast. Before that there were some problems with few (external) soundcards or random cpu spikes with the mixers.

However, the UX can still improve. Switching audio outputs with multiple outputs like external displays etc is not very smooth or intuitive.

Some bluetooth headsets have issues but I've had those with a mac as well.

There's only a 1% chance these days on Linux that your sound won't work or your computer won't sleep when you close the lid or your wifi won't work, or your ethernet, or your cooling, or a peripheral, or CPU/memory spikes.

And a 90% chance it'll be at least one such thing.

All of those things work fine on every computer in my household that runs Linux. This spans thinkpad, dell and ASUS laptops, Dell desktops, home-built gamer type desktops, a few raspberry pi's, and a SFF PC we use to run Kodi on the main TV.

I do find it amusing in a thread about how you have to turn off a core security feature to be able to use containers properly on a Mac that the discussion immediately turns to how bad Linux sound drivers supposedly are. Honestly, I went in the other direction (Mac to Linux) and I've found the waters to be just fine. I don't know if I just have the magic touch or something, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Haha now that you mention it touch (trackpad) absolutely sucks on Linux when I last tried it - I couldn't even get palm rejection to work.

But this isn't bashing on linux desktop (I would use it if Mac wasn't an option) as much as giving a reason why people would use MacOS despite being annoyed by SIP.

Tell us what distro you recommend?

> In my experience, this has not been an issue for the past 10-15 years atleast. Before that there were some problems with few (external) soundcards or random cpu spikes with the mixers.

May be some confusion. To run linux on a newer Mac with "Apple Silicon" (ARM based), you need to go through a lot of hoops and much work needs to be done still for a stable environment. Check out https://asahilinux.org/about/

Or maybe you thought they meant running linux in general on a PC (Intel x86 32/64 bit)? In that case I agree - driver issues like that have been mostly ironed out by now.

I'm getting early PulseAudio vibes with PipeWire though. BT audio devices stuttering and sometimes losing audio completely regardless of output devices unless I restart the daemon. I guess it stabilizes again during next few years.

Anecdotal evidence, but here it goes.

I moved from Linux to M1 MacBook recently. I know my greps and vims, but I was tired of audio glitches during high CPU usage, system not waking up from sleep, total OS freezes, super loud fans, and so on.

Now I get none of that. I don't think I've ever heard the fans. Audio just works, everything is super snappy. It always wakes up. I'm no longer afraid of bluetooth.

And on top of that, setting my $DAYJOB VPN took three minutes and it just works, where on Linux I had constant problems with DNS breaking, and setting it up was always an hour of work, praying I got the config files right this time.

It really seems to be "unixy desktop with working sound", the best of both worlds.

Exactly my experience. After 15 years, I became an apple fanboy in 15 days. I still do hate losing my muscle memory on some bash shortcuts, but I'd say it was very much worth it.

You can just install a recent bash with homebrew and use that as your terminal.

Karabiner and applescripts can get you pretty far

Homebrew has GNU utils to smooth over the differences in package options.

  [0] https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/coreutils
  [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-replace-mac-os-x-utilities-with-gnu-core-utilities

The sound is an internal meme where the linux devops would regularly have to drop off calls to talk (restart to unmute :)).

On my desktop I couldn't even boot installer without running with safe mode, otherwise I'd just get stuck on a blank screen (ancient 1050 TI GPU and standard desktop components otherwise, so not exotic/new stuff).

I've used linux desktop for >decade and Gnome shell feels like home but these days I feel like I don't have the time for linux adventures. Maybe I'll mix it up with my next device, but I'm not reading great things about AMD power modes and Linux.

> The sound is an internal meme where the linux devops would regularly have to drop off calls to talk (restart to unmute :)).

Hmmm once every full moon MS Teams running on ungoogled chrome do not seem to realize my Bose BT Headset is paired and available (and in that case I just use the internal soundcard) but I have seen people having sound issues on MS teams and needing to reboot regardless of the OS they were using. Windows, Linux, even some MacOS users so I wouldn't use that as a generalization.

I'm running Linux everyday and I really wouldn't recommend it for any serious audio stuff.

There is great audio software coming to Linux (Bitwig, Reaper, etc) which is great but the underlying infrastructure is a mess.

There are like 3-4 audio subsystems running, I never know which one is it, setting latency is wizardry and sometimes it doesn't run at all. It's usually fine when I run stuff like Spotify, VLC, or Youtube in Firefox, so for user-level audio, Linux is fine IMO. But when I run something where I care about latency and multichannel output, it's hit or miss. It runs fine one day and then I get no sound on another or distorted sound or sound playing at wrong speed and wrong pitch (yay, 44,1 vs 48).

Maybe it's the distros I'm using, maybe there are some that work better, but the UX isn't as great as with macOS. On Manjaro, update sometimes get audio notification removed from tray and I can't change volume using mouse or dedicated keys. Then I have to look for few hours for a solution only to have the same thing happen again three months later (same with brightness keys on laptop). On Ubuntu Studio with an external soundcard, I get randomly distorted sound or no sound at all. So it's easier to use some shitty onboard sound, great.

I like Linux, I use Linux daily, but sound on Linux is terrible. It's much better than it was, yes, but still terrible. For anything more than "play a song here", macOS is much better.

It sounds like your specifically fighting your distros problem, or something that its not your understanding.

I would not consider Linux sound Terrible, but to be fair, I only use it every day for regular development tasks for the last 10 years. Maybe I've become accustomed to whatever problem you see that I don't.

Fedora Silverblue with Pipewire will just use a single subsystem and that's it. Inmutable OS and the rest of software it's Flatpak. The issues are gone. Oh, you need a proper devel environment with dnf/rpm? Just use "toolbox enter" and install all the complex envs under that container.

> homebrew is pretty great

I hear this said a lot in passing, and I'm really curious what people mean when they say this.

Perhaps they are talking about Homebrew the package manager [1].

[1] https://brew.sh

I wonder what people mean when they say "Homebrew is pretty great", I do not wonder what they mean when they say "Homebrew".

It does what it says on the tin and installs the plethora of software available on homebrew with a simple command, which is pretty great

They mean that they have an overall positive opinion of Homebrew, more than “not bad” but less than “amazing”.

As someone who would readily say that Homebrew is pretty great, this is exactly how I feel about Homebrew.

For example people do not use homebrew to install python3 on a fresh install of mac os and get a python that spews a bunch of messages to stderr about the version of libc6.so and cannot speak TLS.

It only upgrades PostgreSQL 3 major versions up alongside without asking.

Think this issue was fixed a few years ago

Not sure I agree, when I use brew it still regularly updates random unconnected crap through multiple major releases. And of course it takes ages doing so

I was referring to your postgresql example, those became rudimentary @versioned packages

It's plenty solid, and there's a good library of packages on there. It's a package manager, doesn't take more than that.

I mean, it installs stuff more or less reliably for me so I’d say that’s pretty great. I’m sure it has issues (I’ve had problems trying to install old versions of packages for example) but I don’t think I’ve ever had “brew install <whatever>” fail to install what I wanted

I can use it to get stuff I need to do work and I don't remember the last time I couldn't. Upgrades sometimes leave me broken but it's usually ironed out fast because everyone is using it. If my dependencies are that locked down I'm using docker and special environments anyway. Linux can get tedious with upgrades breaking or dependency mismatches. Homebrew is probably the largest homogenous community - if you're doing something relatively popular there will be a lot of noise when stuff breaks. Linux is spread out across various distros/repos/package managers, overlap of users with your problem is a lot smaller.

Beats all the package management experiences I've had on Windows, admittedly I have not tried to use Windows for work for >1 year.

Homebrew is available for Linux as well since approx 3yrs now. I've been using it without issues https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-on-Linux

OK but what I like about homebrew on mac is that when I'm having an issue with "popular stack X broke after updating" it's probably me and >10k other people out there, so by the time I hit the problem it's already under investigation on GH. I'm not sure the same would apply to homebrew on Linux - even if you ignore the differences between distros - how popular is homebrew on linux and linux desktop in comparison ?

I wish more of those 10k people would help get others off of a package manager that is so fragile and convoluted that updating so often leads to popular things breaking.

Things like macports and pkgsrc do things in an arguably much simpler, more unixy way, without the contortions that so often seem to leave homebrew in a bind after routine operations like updating.

I’ve never experienced a broken homebrew and I’ve used Mac for years

Neither have I. My main complaint is that it's slow.

The comment was in response to parent's stated complaint, namely having to wait for someone else to resolve issues with popular packages being broken after an update, which has been the experience of more than one user.

I’m curious what’s the benefit? I use homebrew as a Linux package manager for MacOS. On Linux I just use the distros package manager

If you need to build something from source (my use-case: Vim, so I can change which language bindings exist in the resulting build) it can sometimes be a lot easier than cloning and using the "raw" C/Make build system.

Also, assuming a downstream distro like Debian or Ubuntu, what's in Homebrew is likely a more up to date package. You could fiddle with adding/using Debian testing or some PPA, or... you could just use Homebrew.

(FWIW: I use Arch and the AUR on my desktop Linux installs these days, and it's essentially the same process. But still using Homebrew on the Mac, and occasionally in Linux when I'm not on a desktop)

The experience is really seamless, mostly it just works… which IMO is nothing special as they mostly support installing the latest and maybe a couple of other versions, and software that requires weird stuff will likely be packaged in a self contained way.

They mean they haven’t tried another package manager for Mac, like pkgsrc or macports.

I switched to it after using both Fink and macports and it was the first time I felt like I had a package manager as reliable to apt on Linux. Both Macports and Fink would routinely break my whole system by putting extra versions of system libraries where other applications could find them. Since, I’ve switched to nix.

depending of what you mean by friction with containers, there may be different solutins. for example, as a temporary solution on Docker when you don't want/have time to support both arm and x86, you can do something like this: FROM --platform=linux/x86_64 ubuntu:23.04

i haven't found any issues with it that i could not get over in the past 2+ years of m1. most of the containers are available on both architectures anyway. the performance improvement was totally worth it, i won't even talk about the heating issue with intel.

> i haven't found any issues with it that i could not get over in the past 2+ years of m1.

I'm currently running a Journal of Open Source Software x86 container on aarch64 and it's terribly slow. Takes 12GB of RAM and 3 minutes to build a LaTeX document, see https://github.com/openjournals/inara/issues/30. Any tips?

Building a single-page LaTeX document as a PDF can be done in less than 0.3s when the environment is set up correctly. I don't know anything about this particular container.

> I'm currently running a Journal of Open Source Software x86 container on aarch64 and it's terribly slow

There's your issue. Use an aarch64 image.

This is a fair point. For folks who want a “just works” Unix system, disabling SIP probably makes sense. But most it’s still very niche.

Is there a way to make a separate partition of MacOS and have one copy with SIP and one without?

> But most it’s still very niche.

I'd say that the whole containerization topic is niche

> Is there a way to make a separate partition of MacOS and have one copy with SIP and one without?

I think you can install macOS VM on your macOS host and disable SIP _inside VM_.

I use AMD64 containers on my M1 Pro under Docker Desktop with zero problems. It’s about 10-20% slower than my AMD64 Linux machine on average, which is usually fast enough.

You ever give OrbStack a go? I used Docker Desktop before it but find OrbStack to be a lot faster and native feeling.

No, I’ll give it a look, thanks for the tip.