I never disliked an OS as much as I dislike what Apple is doing with MacOS (and iOS by extension). I've been with MacOS for 20 years, but I've switched at home to Linux full time 2 years ago and I don't regret it. At work I'm forced to be on MacOS. It's concerning how Apple doesn't care anymore about user needs, usability, design and consistency. Where it was the best OS in the past for me, it's not anymore. Other OSes are better suited for where I'm at in my life.
Importantly, that philosophy relies on the result having merit, and working cohesively on its own terms, even if it's not your preference. Like, if I go to a restaurant that refuses me sugar for my tea, it better be darn good tea.
I might prefer my tea with sugar, given the choice, but I'll still be satisfied if the tea is very good (this metaphor assumes I don't demand sugar, but merely prefer sugar). I might prefer that Apple products work differently, but if they work well, I'll tolerate that they don't work exactly how I want. In either case, I'm willing to adapt my preferences a bit to an expertly made product.
> I thought that was supposed to be Apple’s thing. “We decide how to make it and you decide to buy it or not.”
This was Apple; your customization options were limited, but things were well designed and cohesive. If you were willing to adapt to their design paradigms, you'd benefit from their expertise, and also have to put in less effort tweaking. Plus you could pick up any random new Apple product and be up to speed immediately.
But to extend the metaphor, if the tea sucks, I'll stop going to that restaurant. If Apple makes their UIs both immutable and bad, I'll use something else.
This is an opinion, though. macOS did do certain things better than Windows, but it also did a lot of things markedly worse. The Mac market share never overtook the Windows market, on-merit it was considered a worse product. You or I might think it was a decent system at some point, but the evidence is really just anecdotal.
I agree with the parent comment, Apple's "thing" was their financial skill and not their manufacturing or internal processes. Once the IIc left the mainstream, people stopped appreciating the craftsmanship that went into making the Apple computer. It was (smartly) coopted by flashy marketing and droves of meaningless press releases, documented as the "reality distortion field" even as far back as the 1980s.
How is that different with other companies? Like with Windows? Do you have a choice of UI when loading the OS? Are there ways to remove the taskbar and replace it with a third-party one? Can you change all the core OS shortcuts?
The fact Apple makes and sells the only hardware to run macOS does not mean the software is fundamentally different from the rest of the industry. Apple has deprioritized backwards compatibility, not user choice.
> does not mean the software is fundamentally different from the rest of the industry.
I bet you wish that was the case. XServe existed though, and for all of Apple's confidence in the product it was (and is) treated like a second-class citizen that doesn't compete with free alternatives.
There is literally nothing that stops macOS from falling into the same pit of irrelevance besides first-party hubris. How much do you trust Apple to make smart, responsive decisions?
Seriously? UX in Linux is awful, there's no single desktop metaphor. You have hundreds of distros each with their quirks. There is no "Linux" other than the kernel.
There's a lot more consistency in the Apple ecosystem.
Don't get me started on the other crap with Linux distros: power management doesn't work, audio barely works, heck even though both Linux and MacOS use CUPS for printing, in MacOS it works way better.
But Linux is getting better each year (seriously, KDE is amazing, Gnome works well if you like it), made by hundreds of independent people, while Mac is getting worse, made by one focused company.
I've had no problem whatsoever with 2 laptops regarding power management or audio.
Get a major distro and major software if you don't want to wander into problems.
Judging from this article, Linux seems to have more consistency between the thousands of applications all built by different people with no guidelines than MacOS right now.
At least half of those complaints on the article have standard, close to universally agreed icons.
Your experiences are not universal. I'm sorry that happened to you, but I've personally never had a power management, audio, or printing problems with Linux in 17 years of using it.
Having no single desktop is a huge bonus. If you don't like one distro, you might like another. "Consistency" is a poor way to restate, "Windows or MacOS might be bad, but at least someone can unilaterally make it worse against your will."
I'd rather choose a drink from a soda fountain than get a more consistent flavor from a urinal. But to each their own.
It looks like an old comment from 5 years ago. I bet you haven't tried Linux lately. Yes there are many flavors of this OS, and that's alright. Everyone will find what it needs. As for the other crap that doesn't work: again, install and use any popular distro. You'll see for yourself. Most recent hardware is perfectly supported and things just work™.
The other way is true too. I’m reading for about 20 years quite often that Linux is perfect at last, no issues exist at all, and it improved immensely the year before, because “back then” (ie one year before) it was terrible. And of course if you mention a problem under an article mentioning problems, you obviously just somebody who doesn’t know anything. You just need to “configure” it bro, because a famously unreliable thing cannot be unreliable, because it worked for them in a completely different setup. And probably I will read these in 5 years too.
CUPS has "just worked" on Ubuntu for me for like, as long as I can remember. If you use only GTK apps and either gnome or cinnamon, things are a lot more consistent than Windows (like, windows itself, not even 3rd party stuff)
Whereas on my laptop and my distro it works. And a lot of other people probably feel the same way. I use Linux at work and have never had issues with it in the last 6 years. Prior to that, yes.
The word "stable" literally does not appear in the comment to which I was responding.
Maybe I'm just scarred from laboring much too hard in the 90s and aughts to get desktop and laptop Linux working, but here is my current take:
- Yes there is fragmentation. Perhaps there are not hundreds of Linux distros but, off the top of my head: Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Rocky, Alma, Arch, Manjaro, openSUSE, Kali, PopOS, elementary OS, Zorin, Gentoo, Alpine, NixOS are all viable options. Next, pick a desktop: GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, Pantheon, Deepin, Enlightenment. Each has different UX conventions, configuration systems, and integration quality. There is no single Linux desktop and its bewildering.
- Power management now "works" in the sense that, when you close your laptop lid and re-open it, yay! the machine (mostly) comes back to life instead of just crashing. It took us at least 15 years to get to that point. However, PM does not work in the sense that battery like on my M4 Macbook Air is literally 2x what I would get from a comparably priced Linux laptop. Part of that is better hardware, but _a lot_ of that is better power management.
- Audio now mostly works without glitching, just like it did in OS X circa 2002. But God help you if you're not using a well-supported setup and find yourself manually having to dick around with kernel drivers, ALSA, Pulseaudio. (Just typing these words gives me PTSD.) Here is a typical "solution" from *within the past year* for audio troubles in Linux: https://www.linux.org/threads/troubleshooting-audio-problems.... There are thousands more threads like this to be found online. For typical, 99%-of-the-time use cases, experiences of this sort are rarely if ever encountered on Mac.
- Printing is arguably the closest because, as previously noted, they are both using the same underlying system. But printing, thanks to AirPrint, is still smoother and more pain-free on Mac than on Linux.
- Don't even get me started on Bluetooth.
It's not that I'm anti-Linux, I wanted sooo bad for Linux on the desktop and laptop to succeed, for a variety of reasons. But Steve J came along 25-30 years and completely pulled that rug out from under us.
I've used Mint for a long time. Extremely solid, stable and simple. In the last three months I've been on Arch (through Omarchy) and it's also very stable and so powerful. Everything just works. I have a pretty beefy computer and even my favorite game of all times (Path of Exile 1) runs fantastically on it.
if they're going to just crap on their software, I'd be far happier with just neglect.
They did desperately need a distraction from the complete bedshitting mess they've made of AI though. Regardless of whether you think AI is good or wildly overpromised, getting on stage and lying through your teeth about what your AI does is what C-tier companies do, not Apple. Except they do now.
