I guess it depends what you’re comparing it to but macOS is (for me) the best of a bad bunch of compromises. POSIX with app boundaries that are (mostly) respected, if not particularly granular. There’s nothing I really hate about the platform save for homebrew and being walled in to the ecosystem.
I actually love modern Linux with Gnome, and it has all the parts these days to be a great desktop operating system, but I find the freedom there undercuts a lot of the promises (Flatpaks are a good idea in theory that doesn’t work in practice as the sandboxes are overly liberal and overreach on most apps because no-one’s forced to justify why they need the permissions they do etc).
I spent so long on Windows that I really don’t miss it. The Window management was way better for so long, but the idioms drive me crazy (registry issues and programs still freely writing anywhere they like), and supporting everything forever has massive drawbacks to usability (although Winget sort of slightly helps with this but it’s not much better than homebrew).
That's exactly why I don't particularly care for it, but still use it.
My first choice would be Linux + a tiling WM. I used DWM for years before Apple Silicon, and have been on mac ever since the M1. These new machines are so nice that I can't go back to anything else now, whether I hate the software or not.
But macOS is just baffling. There's POSIX underneath, and it's mostly reliable, and it has a lot of little nice touches - being able to search the menu with Cmd+Shift+/, emacs keybindings in nearly every text field, etc. But then there's stuff that makes no sense. Why do I need a third party app for any sort of sane window management? (and even then, I haven't fully replicated my preferred way of working, only gotten close enough with Aerospace, and more recently Raycast). A third party app to set a keyboard shortcut to launch an application. I can't disable the animations for switching virtual desktops, and when you switch there's a lag before it's responsive again for keyboard input (I just want this to be instant).
So much of how macOS expects you to interact with it seems to be mouse/touchpad driven, and that's just not how I prefer to use my computer. At least with Raycast I now have shortcuts to launch and switch to apps (but not specific app windows because of the app/window separation in macOS). Yet even still, I can't set a keyboard shortcut to move a window to a different space. I have to click and hold the title bar and then press my shortcut for moving to that space to move the window - Apple decided that action MUST involve the mouse.
I also can't set window rules. I can't tell my terminal to always open on workspace 2, or mail.app to always open on workspace 4 at a specific size, etc. Making an app full screen also creates a new ephemeral space that can't be switched to with the usual Ctrl+NUM keyboard shortcut. I can't set a window to be always on top.
I'm more or less waiting for Asahi Linux to get support for DisplayPort ALT mode & M4 support, although I'm not holding my breath.
I do appreciate having access to the big commercial apps though on macOS, but ultimately I want my M4 macbook pro w/ Linux & hyprland.
I’ve migrated a home server to a Mac mini. It was awful to achieve. Trying to get a machine to boot, connect network shares and start containers was a week long effort. I can do it in Ubuntu in about 10 minutes from a clean install.
So much is disgusting UI options hidden deep some in the (awful) settings app.
But the result is a server that is fast, powerful and using 6-7W per hour, compared to the old Nuc 9 it replaced that used 70W.
It’s just so good. The OS lets it down.
Why pay so much more to fight an uphill battle?
Unless you desperately need the hot garbage that is Xcode there isn't much reason to deal with Mac Minis running MacOS as a server. One update and it will suspend and be unwakeable without physical interaction.
It’s on a smart plug, so I can power cycle it remotely.
The hardware is far superior to any Nuc, I have at 4 or 5 of those already, I really like them. MacOS is a struggle, but I think I’ve tamed it.
I wasn’t the one paying.
10Gbps equipment is pretty spendy
- Window management wise the new tiling controls/keyboard shortcuts added last year have replaced third party tools for me. It's not as customisable as rectangle or moom but it covers halves and quarters which is mostly all I need. Additionally the "arrange" feature is nice letting you automatically tile N most recently used windows in a given layout.
- For window rules you can right click on an app in the dock and under options assign it to the current workspace and it should reopen there.
- 3rd party software like BetterTouchTool can "throw" windows to other spaces. But it did feel a bit hacky from memory (small but perceptible lag)
- The new spotlight features coming this year look quite promising for keyboard driven workflows.
Thats why I don't use Pixel devices, or any Android devices really. I know its a precarious situation with Apple since they could reverse their stance at any point and sometimes they get it wrong, but they have yet to completely fail me when it comes to privacy.
In any event, it'd be nice if there was a 3rd mainstream vendor in the mobile race[0][1]
[0]: Both design wise and conceptually, I miss WebOS when it was strictly under Palm. It could have really been something. Why they didn't embrace multitouch screens I haven't a clue, it was the one thing that baffled me.
[1]: The one project I really wanted Mozilla to take a long term view on - Firefox OS - was another great innovation of our time that didn't get the love or support it deserved. It was a blast using web technology to build apps that ran fluidly on modern hardware. Unfortunately, it was all too often relegated to cheap manufacturer hardware that couldn't support it ideally, but even with this being true, they pulled off alot of technical excellence with that project.
I haven't tried /e/, I prefer installing a raw lineage with microG myself (although I don't currently use the microG part), but it seems like you and your parent commenter would be in the intended target.
I do agree that an alternative would be great. I'd gladly use Linux mobile with good, realiable hardware.
It did encourage me to provide my Google account credentials, which I refrained to do, which made the appstore essentially equivalent to F-droid.
I can't really get excited about it.
Huh? WebOS was Palm embracing multitouch screens.
I already own a Pixel running GrapheneOS, but if this happens I'll probably order one as soon as they come out to cast a vote with my wallet.
Not expensive and work great. Was playing with one today. I am impressed.
google and apple, apple is the best in this privacy field
Apple is pretty much the same as a vanilla google phone in comparison.
Sure, but then it ceases being a Google device. The discussion is focused around Pixel, as is, vs. Apple/iOS, in which case Apple wins by far in that aspect.
"Apple is pretty much the same as a vanilla google phone in comparison"
Google literally Ads company, do you know how ads company works????
There are several ways to block ads on Android. First and most-important, with a de-googled OS like Lineage or /e, the built-in tracking functionality just isn't there.
To blame the OS for an app spying on you is like saying Firefox is spying on you for Google because a webpage has a google tracker in it. Nonsense. An app is not the same as the OS. You can just not install the app like you would not visit the page.
But even then, open source android has many ways to block ads if you do want to install shitty apps that track you.
- The AdAway app that uses host file updates
- App Warden, which actually disables tracking libraries in apps
- LineageOS has the ability to turn off network access for apps that don't need them
- AFWall+ for app-level firewall rules.
The OS is absolutely not spying on you and actually gives you tools to stop spying. You can't say this AT ALL about Apple or vanilla Google Android.
Opt-in cross app tracking instead of opt-out, but if Google can get all apps on board with their new privacy sandbox thing that'll be less relevant.
More importantly, an equivalent to Apple's advanced data protection for all Google services & backups. I want full E2EE for photos, notes, backups, passwords, bookmarks, etc. I want built-in hide my email to gmail, I want to be able to turn off network access for any app I want in the permission settings. I want Google to treat Android as something completely separate from their advertising business instead of an extension of it as a source of data collection.
And yes, it allows you to disable network permissions for apps, among many other nice things.
I did consider it at some point but not having google wallet(apparently nfc payments are only available via banks' apps there) was too big of a downside for me.
Wallet is there, you can hold digital cards, and transit cards, and your Ikea member card, etc. It's GPay that won't work to do the payment. And it's Google the one being a bully and deliberately making you think like that towards any alternative that's not in their list of approved systems that can be used in your own phone.
It is such a breath of fresh air. It is so quiet and functional. It feels like it prioritizes me, the user. I am so grateful to have this OS.
Of course it has flaws, but they're lesser flaws. Like the crop tool is sometimes unusable in the gallery app. I can live with that. I couldn't live with the AI onslaught and spyware infiltration.
Beyond the monochrome icon pack that cannot be changed in the included launcher (which is so aesthetically challenged with an appearance that only a mother could love), the browser that cannot grasp dark mode, and the lack of the accustomed pattern unlock, I find the lack of one singular thing intolerable:
I want root. At a minimum, adb rooted debugging.
I realize that I could unlock the bootloader and Magisk this thing, but with the number of correct decisions that have been made by the authors of this operating system (and they are legion), they do not recognize one fundamental need of administrators:
I want control of my systems.
That is really a shame.
Another reason I stick with Apple is style/design. Aside from the latest Alan Dye-led stuff, Apple's design has been top-notch, they make every other company look like they lack class and design-sense.
With that said, I did like Nokia's Windows Phones and the the period of Microsoft's design revolution where Surface devices had suede or whatever. That massive Surface table thing was dope too but man, Windows just keeps getting worse...somehow!
I'm looking forward to getting a Framework laptop at some point and installing Linux.
But only from the iPhone X to 14, after which the Dynamic Island took over.
(I'll see myself out)
Apple tends to have products on a design refresh schedule, and for the Mac is it about five years. I think the combination of user dislike of the initial implementation and limited developer integration caused the physical Touch Bar to be eliminated in the M1 design.
Is there a Minecraft extension so that the Touchbar becomes the game's hotbar with icons? I've never looked.
The only designs I'm fond of are the macs. The iPhone looks pretty meh these days. The software side is slowly getting worse, it was great and they've lost the plot making changes for changes sake
Not sure I understand this? One assumes that "daily driver" involves Linux VM use in this context[1], and ChromeOS's Linux VM integration is just wildly ahead of WSL (which really isn't bad) or the mess on OS X (awful). Installed Crostini apps appear as native apps in the UI. Transparent cross-filesystem access works flawlessly. Wayland and X11 apps appear with native decorations. Clipboard/WM/IPC integration does exactly what you expect. USB devices prompt you if you want to connect to the VM on insert (and remember the setting) etc...
And yes, I'm biased because I work there. But really it's a great development environment.
[1] I mean, if you're doing iOS development or need an M4 Max for performance reasons, or need some legacy Mac tooling like Adobe stuff, you're probably not looking at alternative platforms at all. Someone making the choice you posit is like 99% likely to be a web or embedded person working at a Linux shell as their native environment.
School Chromebooks are very limited devices (often these were low-end units purchased at the beginning of the pandemic!), and you're likely comparing it to the flagship Samsung or whatever in your pocket, which is just objectively a much more powerful computer.
Ultimately, I tolerate Android from a privacy standpoint because we're still able to fully modify our devices and use open-source app sources. The minute that goes away (and it feels like Google isn't as tolerant of it anymore), I go.
GrapheneOS may interest you.
>Also, on either platform, why is it still not possible to toggle off network access in app permissions. Its a glaring and deliberate omission.
GrapheneOS specifically supports this for all installed apps.
I have a "banking" profile set up with Google Play services installed. 98% of the time I'm using my phone, I'm using the primary Owner profile. All the other profiles are encrypted-at-rest, meaning that until I enter my Banking-profile-specific PIN, the apps and data (including the Google Play Services installed there) are just encrypted files, and unable to do anything at all. (There are provisions for allowing a secondary profile to run in the background, but in this case I have obviously left that disabled.)
So yes, you can hand the phone over to a friend or family, and they cannot get to any other user profile. Or you can set up a separate profile just for them, and they will have their own isolated set of apps - something like a separate user account on a desktop PC. And if only they know the PIN for their profile and you don't, they can keep secrets from you on that profile.
> Both iOS and Google Android transmit telemetry, despite the user explicitly opting out of this. When a SIM is inserted both iOS and Google Android send details to Apple/Google. iOS sends the MAC addresses of nearby devices, e.g. other handsets and the home gateway, to Apple together with their GPS location. Currently there are few, if any, realistic options for preventing this data sharing
P.S: Citing a paper from 2021 is propably useless. Apple was the driving force in dropping trackable App ids, google had to follow suit. More stuff has happend in the space since then.
But that is exactly what your previous comment said:
>> Sounds like an awful lot of work vs. just having an iPhone and regularly install your banking app on it, and still not get spied on.
Installing GrapheneOS admittedly requires a computer, a browser, and about 15 minutes of your time after you buy the device, assuming you've never done it before, but claiming that that's "an awful lot of work" compared to "just" having an iPhone is false. They don't provide even remotely the same level of control over your privacy or security. With technical hardening measures on one side, and on the other, a vague promise that Apple might crack down on third party tracking methods that happen to be misaligned with their own business goals.
> AirDrop works offline only between devices etc.
That's actually a great example because Apple obediently restricted AirDrop as soon as Chinese authorities discovered that it was being used for anti-government protests. Apple doesn't care about privacy ideologically, their actions in other countries and their commitment to growing their advertising business should serve as proof of that, but there's clearly some dissonance at play.
1) it's known they scan all your content and pics on iCloud
2) the phone's always listening, always
3) once that I forgot my password to the MacBook, all one needed to do to access my data was to enter recovery mode and reset the password. Sure it logged me off from browser sessions, but all my files where there available to anybody
To me apple is overly invasive with their icloud accounts and things, and password resets taking weeks, yet I see no evidence it is any harder to get my data than on other devices, if anything, it's easier.
So what is the claim here? Some tracking less by advertisers? That's privacy? An ad less about computers and one slightly less correct about idk wine?
The fact is that anybody with physical access to my devices has an easier time logging through the apple ones than the windows/androids i own and that I care more than advertising
> once that I forgot my password to the MacBook, all one needed to do to access my data was to enter recovery mode and reset the password. Sure it logged me off from browser sessions, but all my files where there available to anybody
Sounds like you didn't have FileVault (FDE) turned on. If you did, that wouldn't work you'd have needed your recovery key.
> it's known they scan all your content and pics on iCloud
They can't if you have ADP.
> Some tracking less by advertisers? That's privacy?
Yes, it is privacy. Let's not understate the massive surveillance that ad networks do, Google included.
Google is an advertising company, they have zero incentive to offer the same level of privacy that Apple does and probably never will, it would be directly detrimental to their core business.
Also, ADP does not work in UK, at all.
The rest of the message I won't even comment. All things that if you care you get easier on any other device.
And Apple's ad business is booming while other are stagnant.
It does work if you've enabled it before it got disabled back in Feb, and the US successfully managed to get the UK to back off its demands for a backdoor, but it remains to be seen if new UK customers will ever be able to enable ADP again.
https://support.apple.com/guide/certifications/intro-to-appl...
https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/risks/bac...
Google Photos is meant for sharing, where E2EE makes little sense. You can search your photos from any device.
If you really want to give up that convenience for E2EE, you might as well do it right and use Proton or Ente, which have E2EE for all photos, unlike iCloud, which isn't for shared albums or photos shared to anyone with the link. Unlike iOS, Android lets these apps have access to all the same device APIs as Google Photos, meaning they're as seamlessly integrated as possible. Apple iCloud uses iOS APIs not available to third parties, locking you in to using either a gimpy service or a gimpy app.
[1]: https://ente.io/ml
They are? By what metric? This sounds made up to support the assertion that a company which doesn’t do broad data sharing with third parties, but keeps it to themselves, is somehow less (or no less) private than those who do.
Do you not know how computers work? That how it works on every computer without encryption.
You wouldn't have been able to access to the data passwordless if you had enabled Filevault encryption
Because from where I stand they do load everything into their cloud. They insist on having you pay for iCloud through obnoxious means. They have you go through their store for everything. They even have an ad platform.
What supposedly so good about it? Their track record seems awful to me.
It's still a compromise, sure, but it's a better compromise than what Google offers.
Plus small things. Apple's tracking protection for example is opt in instead of opt out on Android. Google's core business is ads, they won't push features that can negatively impact that. Apple also has an ad division but it's not their main focus, hardware is. They can implement better privacy without impacting their bottom line. Apple's refusal to unlock phones at the request of the FBI, etc.
It's not that Apple is the be all end all for privacy, but they are far ahead of Google and are by far the most convenient option if you are within the walled garden.
Or so they say. Has that actually been proven?
This is not unique to Apple, it's impossible to prove any system is free of a backdoor, including Linux distributions (see: the xz backdoor, or "Reflections on trusting trust"), unless you hand-crafted your whole smartphone from raw silicon.
source? Is there a site that tracks this, or only shows up when someone raises an issue on github?
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...
The end-to-end encryption guarantees on this page seem pretty real to me and have little to do with marketing: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
It's very easy to completely disable iCloud. I've never used it and don't intend to, despite running a mac as my primary computer for ~12 years now.
My experience widely differs.
Apple will nag you all the time if you don’t have iCloud or just use the free tier and the free tier is very limited. You lose the only way to actually easily sync the phone when you disable it.
Most of the iPhone owners I know including me have caved and pay the additional tax every month.
As an example I think Androids have a single device ID which is given to all apps. But iOS has a per app device ID.
The marketing department exploded when Apple announced that change, it made user conversion tracking completely useless.
And of course there are guidelines that disallow most of the abuse scenarios I suspect people want to imagine: https://developer.android.com/identity/user-data-ids
The main difference is it's opt in on iOS, but opt out on Android I believe.
On iOS, when the app pops up and asks to track, if the user says no, the app can't access the system advertising ID at all, and also is not permitted to track activity via other means like email address, user ID, etc (but the only thing that's technologically enforced is the system advertising ID, it's only forbidden by policy to not use other tracking methods).
Given the huge fit Meta threw after Apple implemented this, while they were silent about Android, I'm inclined to believe Apple's method has more of a privacy impact.
Also worth noting Google is hoping to move away from device-level advertising IDs with their "privacy sandbox" thing.
This is literally GrapheneOS or LineageOS+microg x) which ironically is fully available on Pixel phones and and a slowly vanishing number of others...
If aosp was actually open, like managed by all biggest phone seller in a consortium, i bet we would actually have feature that people want to get. Instead of a thousand « material you » redesign, that honestly looked ugly from the get go and isn’t much better years later.
Many people want to be able to invert the recent and back button, most in fact, yet Google stubbornly refuse to add that setting. That’s just an example, but this repeat a thousand time over the whole Android project.
I just got my first MacBook Pro this month and feel this exactly. I prefer Windows as an OS hands down. It works with all my peripherals and has better configuration options.
But the hardware makes up for it. My MacBook Pro is about twice as fast as my new x86 desktop from work. Its battery is nearly 15x longer than my Razer laptop and four times as fast.
I’ll take gaps in the software quality for all of the progress in hardware quality.
For me, it's Apple's privacy stance (which I know could change at anytime, but that's where we are at right now). Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.
As long as apps on Android can do crap like the web-to-app tracking via localhost and other shady data harvesting that Google continues to allow, I don't touch it no matter how much better it is and how much I prefer the workflows.
Also, on either platform, why is it still not possible to toggle off network access in app permissions. Its a glaring and deliberate omission.