I just bought a Macbook because my dedicated Linux laptop, made by a popular Linux-only manufacturer, had so many issues that I got tired of diagnosing. I love Linux, but it's not a panacea for every computer issue under the sun, just a few of them. I, personally, am stoked I no longer have to deal with issues with this new machine, and can just take it into a Genius bar appointment to let someone else deal with it, for pennies a day. You can't get that on Linux!
Feel free to tell me I'm a sell-out, I am happy to be one today.
I switched to linux. I like it and haven't really had any issues to speak of. Not with sound, video, wifi or any of the other things people complain about. My fan went, but likely it was a pet fur issue, and easy to fix... I'm not an admin. I know how to use the command line, and how to use it as a work machine. Really my experience over the past 3 years, its been as trouble free as my Mac used to be. It really is the great development platform.
> I switched to linux. I like it and haven't really had any issues to speak of. Not with sound, video, wifi or any of the other things people complain about.
I'm running a last gen pangolin, (AMD 5700U). Pop OS. I don't do anything too crazy. I develop on JetBrains I did keep it awake for 3 days doing some genetics work I usually do on a cluster. Its fast, quiet and decent on battery. AMD on the notebook is really impressive.
> I, personally, am stoked I no longer have to deal with issues with this new machine, and can just take it into a Genius bar appointment to let someone else deal with it, for pennies a day. You can't get that on Linux!
Honest question. If you could get that on Linux, would you? and what kind of pricing would you consider reasonable? Is it something that would have to come with the computer (i.e. would you pay for it separately or would you only use it if it was "free" aka included with your laptop purchase)? Did you stick with the vendor-provided install or did you wipe and install your own preferred distro?
I would pay the same amount for a Linux laptop that worked as easily as a MBP and had similar build quality, performance and battery life.
Howver, whatever crazy-stable and easy to use and well supported hypothetical Linux this is wouldn’t be compatible with my “real” Linux use cases so I would then also install Arch or whatever and live with constantly borked everything and just swap between my Arch “Dev” OS and my “Linux Mac” business/work/consumer OS.
Current Linux cannot be made “MacOS”-stable. But maybe in 5 years.
Just today I needed to run some software only available in .deb and only on Ubuntu 22.04. So whipped out an old laptop that had Ubuntu installed and ran sudo do-release-upgrade to upgrade to 22.04. boom! GUI gone and the terminal was flooded with weird filesystem errors. I had to spend the whole afternoon reinstalling from scratch.
I would love a Linux daily driver but I've had similar experiences to the above every time I've tried it for the last 15 years.
Yeah I’m talking about Ubuntu being hyper aggressive about upgrading my GPU drivers even after I turn off all auto updates and borking my entire OS install and this happening enough that it’s faster just to make scripts which auto reinstall Ubuntu and all my versioned packages from scratch.
Or non-Ubuntu, software just randomly falling apart after 2 years. Like I need a newer kernel for a new Wi-Fi card but then I need a different GPU driver and that’s incompatible with some softwares UI library, so they update that but it has an incompatibility with something else.
Or how Linux still has Wi-Fi 6 totally broken.
Sure, Linux is rock stable if you have a production environment where everything is nailed down. But from an actual daily consumer user point of view it doesn’t feel stable. At all.
I love Linux. I love fixing it when it borks. But my god does it break every week.
The kernel yes, the distros and userspace, not so much. Linux is my go to for hosting, but macOS and Windows are designed to prioritize for the desktop user experience.
You are not sellout but just the average Joe. No problem with that I guess. Have fun with your Mac that uses a soldered ssd that when failing makes your whole Mac useless as well.
Nice part is that I have a warranty for hardware failures! The big issue I have initially is getting used to not having quite as much control over the OS level stuff like Linux, but I was avoiding even using my Linux laptop, so any improvement on usability will get me more productivity than having full control of every aspect of my computing. Maybe someday I’ll have time like I did when I was young, but until then I just prefer to have everything work together seamlessly, as things should in 2023. Apple offers that kind of support and service for a price I’m willing to pay.
Meh hasn’t happened yet but I’d just buy a new one. That being said, I always also have a windows and Linux machine, they’re just not my daily drivers.
You just didn’t get my point: in 2023 it’s about the environment at least for me. That’s why I wrote my comment. Just buying a new one is somehow dated imho. But ymmv
With all the attention being paid to macOS these days, there's enough mods and addon's that I don't miss Linux so much on my laptop. Hammerspoon gets me drag and resize windows how I want, and there's Rectangle.app for tiling-ish window management. There's no /proc, and all the rest of the cli utilities are just wrong (netstat, route, top, etc) but I can live with my M1.
(brew addresses a lot of the issues though, even if I do have to remember to run gdu instead of du (for gnu du))
> With all the attention being paid to macOS these days, there's enough mods and addon's that I don't miss Linux so much on my laptop.
One problem that I have is all that all those mods and add-ons are out there, but there's a real mindset that "everything must be an app" and a pursuant mindset that "might as well charge for it". I don't mind paying for a complicated app, but there are certain basic features that used to be served by the freeware model on Macs that just aren't any more, and my impression is that things are heading ever more in that direction. (As well as in the direction of subscriptions over app purchases, which are right out for me for basic utility needs.)
You mentioned Rectangle.app and Hammerspoon, which are both open source. Do you have any good recommendations for where to look for other high-quality open-source mods and add-ons for macOS?
What are you looking for? I don't have anywhere specific in mind, but with hammerspoon I find myself writing lua to write the functionality I want. Which I used to do with Linux. Ideally I'd write up and post it on a blog or github somewhere though.
Personally I'm okay with paying for software (though I do whine about it from time to time). Yeah it should just be built in functionality, but someone devoted their time to building a thing, so I don't begrudge them a couple bucks for it - so long as it's a one-time purchase and not a recurring subscription model for unchanging functionality.
This happens on Linux too. I was wondering if the weird CPU-hogging flickering was a bug in my compositor (picom) or window manager (i3) or browser (Firefox). Turns out to be a "feature".
not sure what your point is... ambient mode is a visual effects thing YouTube does and reading the descriptions, not surprised it causes increased CPU usage regardless of OS.
