I've got an M1 Mac (mini) sometime ago. This is my first mac. What surprised me most is how buggy the OS is. I frequently see crashes of core system services (system settings, app store), night shift with "sunset to sunrise" doesn't work at all, on second boot spotlight search stopped finding any programs whatsoever without giving any error messages hinting what went wrong. And of course resizing windows, something that you don't really think about on Windows and Linux, is something that requires effort and focus. And of course the OS is ugly as hell.
What bugged me most though is the keyboard and the mouse (I got myself the official ones). Last week I gave up and decided I'm not using this computer until I get alternative keyboard and mouse, because my hands just can't stand the official ones.
I'm writing this, because Mac had a reputation for being polished. But what I'm seeing is a lot less polish than even desktop Linux in 2021 has. It really surprised (and disappointed) me.
Coupled with better developer tools, I think Windows is more pleasant to use these days, but we'll see, maybe after changing the keyboard and mouse I'll change my mind.
All of my Macs have been way more problematic than my Windows and Linux systems. Certain keyboards and mice don't even work on a Mac, so good luck with that. My Mac Pro 2012 wouldn't even boot unless a dual link DVI cable was plugged in, until I upgraded the video card to a rx580 so I could get to Mojave. Also every so often I'll get a macOS update that will just break shit all over the place (I also have a MacBook Pro 2015).
My (Manjaro) Linux desktops are the most problem free of them all. Updates just work. Installing new software just works. All of my common hardware works with it.
Windows I now use only for gaming and watching streaming stuff on the TV. It works well enough for that. I tried using my old Mac pro for that in my exercise room but it will only wake up with the wired Apple keyboard and not a wireless Logitech K400 which works fine with every other computer in the house. For programming I got sick of all the layers of crap and extra configuration I had to do to deal with Windows. Linux is much smoother for running docker and common web development run times, tools, etc. My Macs are for doing Apple stuff. If it weren't for iOS I would throw them in the garbage.
For what it's worth, I have three Macs with BigSur: an ancient Air, a Pro and a new M1 Air. The M1 is buggier than the other two, which are absurdly rock solid. My hunch is that macOS on the M1 is buggier just by virtue of being new.
> I'm writing this, because Mac had a reputation for being polished. But what I'm seeing is a lot less polish than even desktop Linux in 2021 has. It really surprised (and disappointed) me.
This bears repeating.
I have a $2500 2019 macbook pro running macOS 10.14, and a crappy $500 acer running Debian. In the last month alone the macbook crashed more than the acer during the last year.
Yes, especially the part about backward compatibility on OSX have changed a lot.
Microsoft have always cared a lot about backward compatibility, going as far as emulating bugs from older versions of Windows to prevent breaking binary software that was relying on those bugs.
Apple on the other hand has been pretty shameless about breaking binary compatibility, the biggest breakage recently being about stopping to support 32bit apps in Catalina.
If anything, I don't think breaking binary compatibility is such a bad thing today compared to 10 years ago. When you were buying software license to use a version for life, binary compatibility was important. Now you're mostly buying services with software that comes for free, so sticking with an old version because you don't want to pay for the upgrade doesn't really happen any longer. Also when software is no longer supported by the publisher you're forced to switch to something else anyway.
He is joking, right? OS X / macOS is abysmal in backwards compatibility. Where is 32-bit? Where is OpenGL? Linux is way better in backwards compatibility than macOS will ever be.
And it's not a new attitude for Apple. They simply think they know better than the user what the user needs and give no choice in the matter to anyone.
There's a BSD version of this story. It terminates in "and then I decided I needed to work mostly with binary release mainly|only software which was starting to struggle with the Linux compatibility shim, and decided to just move to osx"
And, like Icaza you will wind up using BSD for in rack server purposes and interact fine with it via terminal access, and be productive and capable.
Unlike Icaza you aren't so worried about Open vs Free vs Net vs Dragonfly vs TrueNAS. There are issues, things like pledge() and unveil() which can trap you up, but mostly it's ok. The inter BSD compatibility is not perfect but it's pretty good. OSX being the outlier, but home-brew fixes many problems.
That OSX-as-an-Xstation/O365/terminal model, I like.
As an embedded engineer who runs Linux on devices that we develop in our company, I completely understand this. You get used to doing things one way (e.g. /etc/network/interfaces), then you upgrade to new kernel, and now setting up a static IP address doesn’t work the old way any more. This being just one of the examples. I was recently introduced to FreeBSD, and fell in love with its internal consistency. I only wish now that tooling for configuring FreeBSD for ARM becomes better so that we could switch to embedded FreeBSD.
I haven't noticed that they destroyed anything, beyond those that bought into OS X for doing GNU/Linux work finally realising that they should get a GNU/Linux distribution for that.
Apple stuff is doing just fine, we just use GNU/Linux for server VMs on Java projects. .NET projects run on Windows, all desktops/laptops are a mix of Windows and macOS.
I hate Apple and since 2010 I started using a macbook and I haven't looked back. I still hate Apple, but I'm far more frustrated with the fact that I don't feel I have a good alternative. It's very much like the post said, I got tired of spending my time fixing issues with the system instead of working on what I wanted to work. For those who want to spend time working on their system, great, but I'd dare say that most developers don't.
I contend that as of the last year or so it looks more possible to have a system that just works with Linux than any time in the last 10-20 years for sure. I am working to mitigate most issues that remain. I think a combination of remapping keys to be more sensible, RDP, and setting up a script to handle my initial setup for a specific distro, Ubuntu Budgie, that I can really resolve 99% of the issues I have with it and not lose any productivity.
In other words, the software is "free" only if your time has no value. Amazing how long some really smart people took to reach this really obvious conclusion.
What's missing with Linux on the desktop is an overriding vision and guiding force to direct the overall effort toward a clear objective.
This open source army has lots of generals but it is missing a commander in chief. Lots of battles being fought and won but the war is not moving any closer to a conclusion.
I disagree, actually. I think we already have Windows and OSX for that, and even Android and Chromebooks. I think the biggest value of Linux Desktop is that it is an experimental playground for a melting pot of ideas.
I have used Linux on the desktop exclusively at home since ~1998 and, like Miguel, I went through a lot of pain. Heck, I remember the days when I couldn't even boot my machine without tampering with the kernel. And to compare that to what we now have, well its a world apart. I have been using Debian Testing for some 8 years or more and in that period I probably had one or two (at the very most) dist-upgrades that borked my system. And those have always been due to binary NVidia drivers.
For me, the importance of Linux is that it offers something that no one else can offer - I could take this exact same setup back to my home country and start teaching kids and they would have exactly the same setup as me, with top tools, even though their hardware would be extremely old. I do not think its important that Linux takes over the desktop, much as we all would love it. What is important is that it remains viable without changing its fundamental characteristics. And that, I think, has already been achieved.
Offtopic: I'm here from the thread where you asked fractionalhare for a mirror of their article, and in which thread it's not possible to reply anymore. Well it seems the article is available in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20201205202104/https://www.pseud...
In other words, the software is "free" only if your time has no value. Amazing how long some really smart people took to reach this really obvious conclusion.
This is both asinine and patronizing. People and businesses do, in fact, understand TCO and make decisions based on it.
What's missing with Linux on the desktop is an overriding vision and guiding force to direct the overall effort toward a clear objective.
This is daydreaming. Of course it would be nice if some übermensch stepped in straightened things out. But that's never going to happen for multiple reasons.
Personally, the Linux desktop as it is more than enough for me. It makes no difference whether it's mainstream or not.
This kind of happened with Mark Shuttleworth in 2005. At that time you had Suse and Mandrake/mandriva as the top desktop distributions. Both were going out though: Suse was moving to servers/closed source and mandriva was in crisis.
Mark's millions gave desktop linux a good push and it spawned a new generation of desktop linux (like Mint)
But what if hacking computers is my hobby? What if I actually get lots of joy digging into an operating system and how it works? Then there are no other options than the free systems... And I have been this way for almost 30 years now...
And you can then find your niche from there. For me it's a nixos/sway/emacs/firefox that serves me well and gives me enormous power when I need it.
I'm a programmer anyway, so loving linux comes naturally.
I think what I tried to reply here is to the idea of not liking to play with the operating system. I love it. Systems programming, understanding how your OS works AND being able to go to the lowest level and fix things by yourself.
It's a pretty good deal and I'm not doing this just because Apple and Microsoft force their own ideology and tracking down my throat, but because this is my passion... I hope I can stay in my niche for the rest of my life and there's no sudden movement to closed systems that will take it away from me.
I used to do that in my 20s ?got a history in /.) . Now in my early 40s I still could do it but I just dont care... theres so many times I can get joy compiling the kernel, tinkering with ALSA/Pulseaudio, winmodems, xfree86 , bluetooth and countless rough edges. The last I did was compile a kernel in mint with custom scheduler to fix some bug to play CS:GO. In this day an age... why do I need to do that? It's not Linux fault, but its Linux problem.
And I come here always to remind people in the Apple bubble, that there are big groups of us who are not thinking like that!
I'm also soon in my 40s and I had my Apple years between 2004 and 2010. I came back to Linux and kind of hate the word tinkering even. The current Linux system offers something that nobody else does: your own desktop just how you like it.
With this config, I can take any ThinkPad (that are plentiful, great HW and cheap), boot from USB and get the same exact desktop experience I've had for almost a decade now in twenty minutes.
And what kind of desktop? A minimal tiling window manager on top of Wayland. Exactly the applications I need. The same wallpaper as always. The same editor, the same browser, the same keyboard shortcuts, the same kernel params, the same internet setup. Sound? Always worked. With PipeWire, it even seems to work better than on my Windows installation (and replacing PulseAudio with PipeWire was a one line config change).
Now. There will be no product manager somewhere that will dictate how I use my computer. If something changes in my workflow, that comes from my configuration. Nowhere else. No advertisement for new products, no suddenly disappearing applications. If something breaks from an update, I just boot to the version before I started them and I'm back to the previous state. When updates are leaving me to a state I'm happy about, I commit them to that GitHub repo and they will work exactly the same until I decide to update again. And I run the master branch of NixOS which is breaking sometimes, and it's still much more stable experience I ever had with OSX...
Of course this is not for everybody, but please understand when celebrating the commercial offerings how there's so many of us who do not want a desktop experience dictated by product managers. Who are kind of conservative how our workflows should stay the same for years, or decades. And we are still super productive, doing our work and very happy using Linux.
> There will be no product manager somewhere that will dictate how I use my computer.
You are free to do whatever setup makes you happy, but you will be eluding yourself to assume it is free from corporations that put money into Linux, like Red-Hat, IBM, Intel, Oracle, ARM, Google, ....
Yes. Compared to an OSX or Windows feature updates, for sure they have no effect to my day-to-day work. I even love systemd and wayland, and don't really operate with dbus...
The secret of course is to make your own desktop and choose the parts for the system. And, now when talking about systemd, it's much nicer to use compared to the Windows and macOS counterparts.
I do exactly the same on Windows, macOS, UNIX and whatever OS I can put my hands on.
When I came into contact with Linux, I was already coding for a decade, used Xenix and DG/UX before, it was just a mean to save trips to the university computer center.
After graduating, HP-UX, Solaris, Aix, NT/2000 were the OSes I cared about.
Then J2ME and Symbian came into play.
GNU/Linux became relevant again to me as the other UNIX vendors messed up and it is basically the only option alongside Windows for server deployments.
However thanks to cloud language runtimes, the actual OS is becoming irrelevant to me.
On the desktop side I rather play with macOS/iOS/Windows/Android stacks.
And on embedded, bare metal runtimes for Arduino and ESP32 are where my fun is at.
So programming and Linux doesn't come naturally to me, it was just a means to free beer UNIX when I couldn't afford something else.
One of systemd's biggest achievements is paving over tons of stupid inconsistencies between distributions. Even something as simple as the standardized format of /etc/os-release already massively simplifies my applications' install scripts.
If you mean by adding new and different inconsistencies, sure. Personally, /etc/resolv.conf has worked for decades and I don't see how systemd taking control of that improved anything. I wish it had stuck to launching programs like init, rather than breaking everything in new and exciting ways.
Just to be clear I was only joking. It was neither pro- or anti-systemd. Stating an opinion on systemd is like discussing religion or politics; best avoided on forums.
Edit: he appears to be working on something Apple related.
He never really understood Linux, did he? He was always trying to sabotage it, or bend it to his will. Worst was when he tried to get people to use dotnet on Linux.
I'm not entirely sure that is a fair comment, given his many FOSS contributions. I think Linux is a meeting point of many ideas, and Miguel (and Nat and many others) had their vision. Maybe they saw something like OSX. Others saw (and are seeing) something else. RMS had/has his vision. I think its perfectly fine to do your best to make your vision come to life and when that does not quite workout, do something else. Your contributions will remain, and can be used by others to build on. This is the true power of the FOSS philosophy, that it is the sum of disparate agendas, IMHO.
Sure, I'm not saying his contributions were worthless. (Some people even like using Gnome for some reason! - I kid, I kid) But it is his contributions that lend him credence and so when he uses that credence to support Microsoft's soft EEE strategies, it's kind of a let down. Whether Miguel sees it like that or not, it's just how it felt to me during his reign of influence. Clearly so did RMS.
For example, he supported standardizing on Microsoft's file formats. The same formats that continue to cause problems for alternatives to excel and word to this day. And his support of dotnet at a time when Microsoft was funding the SCO lawsuits, and calling Linux cancer, rattling patent sabers etc are either tone deaf or disinterested in the freedoms given to use by FOSS.
Or maybe he's a saboteur. He definitely worked for Microsoft long enough. :D
Hi sorry about the delay. No, I don't. But if you look at the era when it was created (MS funding the SCO lawsuits, MS calling Linux cancer, etc), creating a technology that gave Microsoft _more_ control over computing was definitely the wrong move.
And because of his previous experience developing Gnome, his actions were more influential. So it just sorta depends on how you see the actors in the game. To me, Miguel's support of Microsoft tech (dotnet, and his support of Microsoft file formats) makes him at best a liability to the free world I want to live in. At worst, yeah, a saboteur.
What bugged me most though is the keyboard and the mouse (I got myself the official ones). Last week I gave up and decided I'm not using this computer until I get alternative keyboard and mouse, because my hands just can't stand the official ones.
I'm writing this, because Mac had a reputation for being polished. But what I'm seeing is a lot less polish than even desktop Linux in 2021 has. It really surprised (and disappointed) me.
Coupled with better developer tools, I think Windows is more pleasant to use these days, but we'll see, maybe after changing the keyboard and mouse I'll change my mind.