Let's also keep in mind that the Linux desktop commits most of these offenses, but worse.
Core Data threading? Does Linux even attempt something like Core Data? How well is that going?
Swift? I remember when Linux diehards invented Vala. The Swift of Linux, but with none of the adoption.
As for UI code, Linux is finally starting to get a little more stable there. GTK 2 to 3 was a disaster; Qt wasn't fun between major upgrades; if you weren't using a framework, you needed to have fun learning the quirks of Xorg; nobody who builds for Linux gets to lecture Mac about UI stability.
Or, for that matter, app stability in general. Will a specific build of Blender outside of a Flatpak still work on the Linux desktop after 2 release cycles? No? Then don't lecture me about good practices. Don't lecture me about how my website or app was sloppily engineered because it has dependencies.
You seem to be conflating 2 different things. Apple’s OS proficiency and the associated technologies they support on their OS and Apple’s dev tools proficiency.
People use Apple’s dev tools because they are the only/best way to deliver apps on Apple’s OSes.
If we changed the situation, so that Apple Dev Tools could be used to create applications for non Apple OSes, or non Apple Dev tools were first class citizens for creating Apple apps, I bet the vast majority of people would use the non Apple dev tools to create both Apple and non Apple apps.
What’s keeping Apple Dev Tools in the game is their privileged position in the Apple OS ecosystem.
And the UI situation still has issues. If you want flexibility in language choice, GTK is the only modern-ish framework option there is. The rest are tied to 1-2 languages, bad at accessibility, look archaic, etc.
People complaining about whataboutism are more obstinately committed to avoiding decent conversation than the people who commit it. This ain’t a formal debate.
Formal in what sense? There's certainly no set form for discussion outside of threading. But there's certainly no assumption of persuasion or sense of shared goals or values.
Even Wikipedia says Whataboutism can be completely deserved in some cases.
It is absolutely deserved here - Apple built a 100 foot tower, and it's grown hairy over the last few decades. Linux built 7 30 foot towers without stairs in the same timeframe; but yelling about the overgrowth on the 100 foot tower is still somehow defensible.
If they can't build their own towers correctly, they have no right to act like the main tower was built worse than their own.
(Edit, posting too fast: For the complaint that Apple has money, Linux does too. 90%+ of work on Linux comes from corporate sponsorship, and has since 2004 when it was first counted. They are fully capable of doing better.)
Corporate sponsors on Linux provide a fraction of the money Apple does and even what they do are geared towards their own needs.
But more relevant is the fact that their donations are focused on running Linux as servers and there Linux is miles ahead of anything Apple provides, to the point that Apple has abandoned its server OS.
“Linux” isn’t a person or a company. Different people contribute to it with different goals.
> 90%+ of work on Linux comes from corporate sponsorship
And approximately 0% of these corporate contributors care about the “Linux desktop” experience. Unlike Apple their goal is not to build a consumer-targeted OS.
Linux on the desktop is very, very niche, and even among the people who do use it, a lot of them will spend almost all their time in just a few windows (e.g. terminal, browser, emacs), not a rich array of desktop applications.
If you haven't used linux desktop for a while, even a year ago, try again. Use a bleeding edge distro like the latest Ubuntu or Fedora ideally running Wayland and you will be surprised how smooth and feature-full it has become, with gobs of high quality apps available with no finicky compile instructions or crazy installation steps needed to follow.
Whatever rough edges you may encounter will keep being sanded down at a speed I haven't witnessed since when linux was the hot new thing in the 90s. Linux desktop felt stale and abandoned trough-out the 2010s but nowadays its pretty marvelous how fast it's becoming a real alternative to windows and mac. I truly believe that if it had the proper developer adoption and first class hardware support from OEM vendors it would already be a true alternative.
Core Data threading? Does Linux even attempt something like Core Data? How well is that going?
Swift? I remember when Linux diehards invented Vala. The Swift of Linux, but with none of the adoption.
As for UI code, Linux is finally starting to get a little more stable there. GTK 2 to 3 was a disaster; Qt wasn't fun between major upgrades; if you weren't using a framework, you needed to have fun learning the quirks of Xorg; nobody who builds for Linux gets to lecture Mac about UI stability.
Or, for that matter, app stability in general. Will a specific build of Blender outside of a Flatpak still work on the Linux desktop after 2 release cycles? No? Then don't lecture me about good practices. Don't lecture me about how my website or app was sloppily engineered because it has dependencies.