I'm not 100% happy with where Apple is at, but I don't think I ever was. But I'm not going to switch.
I get the slickest hardware, great battery life, the best touchpad and keyboard, and a hi-resolution screen that doesn't have battery life, flicker, tint, or scaling issues.
Windows is still...Windows. The bash subsystem is half-baked. Windows itself is still the same mess. Docking is still a joke. Performance is terrible, laptop hardware is still 'almost-as-good', display scaling is a joke, and the ecosystem is still fragmented beyond belief.
Linux is still as bad as it ever was. It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. I've been using Linux on laptops since Redhat 7 (the first one from 2000) and a Dell Latitude C-series.
Somehow I shut my laptop off and it booted backup to a failure message, I had to make another bootable USB and go online to find out how to do a fsck. I was using external monitors without issue for a month, and then one day the configuration changed to a point where I couldn't even use the laptop with it's built-in display. The sound and volume controls are a joke. I was prevented from installing any packages because of an issue with a package from Google.
All fairly minor, fixable issues, but I forgot all about them because I haven't had to deal with crap like that since I switched to a Mac back in 2010.
> Somehow I shut my laptop off and it booted backup to a failure message, I had to make another bootable USB and go online to find out how to do a fsck. I was using external monitors without issue for a month, and then one day the configuration changed to a point where I couldn't even use the laptop with it's built-in display. The sound and volume controls are a joke. I was prevented from installing any packages because of an issue with a package from Google.
A bit of a rant ahead, but I am really tired of people still treating Linux like it's 1997 or expecting it to work like their old OS did and then running into silly problems that none of us, who actually spend our day in Linux, run into.
These problems sound more like inexperience in using Linux to me than anything else. fsck works automatically after a power failure, configuration doesn't override itself and installing a package from the web, while not a great way of doing things, definitely does not prevent you from installing other packages, unless you somehow broke a whole lot of other stuff by deleting dependencies without really understanding what you were doing.
If you want raw power, you can buy a car with 500 horsepower. But you handle all of that power, you'll need traction control and maybe stability control, and anti-lock brakes for when you need to stop it. But all of that limits the amount of power you have available, limits your control. Now, a race car driver would look at these driver assist tools and say "I'm sick of people expecting race cars to work like their Jetta and then running into problems that us professional race car drivers don't run into". When you complain that the tires spin or you are having a hard time working the clutch and steering wheel without power assist, they might even tell you "these problems sound more like inexperience with driving race cars than anything else".
And they'd be 100% right. But I'm trying to get to the grocery store, not win the Daytona 500. I want a car with power steering and an automatic gearbox and anti-lock brakes and traction control and an airbag. You may say "computers were designed for power and Linux gives you maximum power!" like the other guy commenting did but I don't want that because when it inevitably breaks (because I'm inexperienced), I don't want to be stuck on the side of the road reading manpages and stack exchange posts with no answers and trying to navigate mailing lists. I have a job to do.
(Seriously, did saying "sounds like you're just inexperienced with Linux" sound good in your head? Because it certainly didn't sound good reading it.)
The thing is, you really don't need to "be stuck on the side of the road reading manpages" these days and what drives me crazy is the outdated evaluation of Linux, it's like saying, "but viruses and blue screen of death" about Windows in 2016.
Does it require some adjustment? Sure, just like any new OS. If you're going to try it, I think it's fair to require you to learn its ways. If you don't want to do that, why not stick with your old OS?
Mac requires adjustment too, has many problems, (ie WiFi drops, file system, temps etc.), however I feel the reason people are willing to adjust is because they paid solid money for it and so want to get the most out of their purchase. Because Linux is "free", there's no such incentive and thus it is judged much more harshly.
Hardware selection is another problem, with Mac you get custom tailored hardware, but with Linux, most people just purchase any random junk PC and expect it to work great, not really fair is it?
> Seriously, did saying "sounds like you're just inexperienced with Linux" sound good in your head? Because it certainly didn't sound good reading it
I am sorry if it sounded harsh, but constantly reading about novice problems I haven't had in a decade also doesn't "sound good reading".
It's not fair. It's very very unfair because even in the PC world, hardware vendors write their own drivers for Windows, or release documentation only under NDA, while Linux is often dependent on reverse engineering by random contributors. And of course the latter can't begin until the hardware is actually available, delaying support.
Unfortunately, that still leaves hardware broken on a large fraction of systems, with only a handful of vendors explicitly designing systems for Linux. It's better than it used to be, but not great.
>> I am sorry if it sounded harsh, but constantly reading about novice problems I haven't had in a decade also doesn't "sound good reading".
It's not a novice problem. I know what a fsck is and I know you're not supposed to unmount filesystems improperly. But you shouldn't be presented with an error that you can't recover without a rescue USB because your system lost power.
And the video configuration issues are just weird. Monitors plug and play perfectly but all of a sudden it got so screwed up, I had to poke around quite a bit to get things back to normal. Frustrating the heck out of me because I'm used to something that just worked.
I am not saying this didn't happen to you, but it looks like a fluke or a distro specific bug, since I specifically had power outages while running my Arch home server and haven't had to recover from USB.
Actually Windows can and does use NTFS transactions (TxF) in the Installer and Updater code, so the probability of non-recoverable damage should be lower (which is also my experience; power off a Linux machine during updates and you are pretty much guaranteed to have many packages with empty files, partial file trees and so on; power off a Windows machine and it probably is still fine, but sometimes you get weird issues where it can't properly reinstall/deinstall some updates to try again).
I don't think your analogy is very compelling; if a regular person untrained in driving race cars bought a new race car, crashed it on the way to the grocery store, and then blamed the car rather than their lack of experience driving race cars, I'd definitely find it a bit silly.
It's strange that you think that's what's happening here; if anything, the comment that the grandparent was objecting to was saying not to use a race car if you don't know how to.
Plenty of people this this comment section are saying that though, and you get it in every thread about Mac vs PC. When you've got basically the entire Internet telling you "Linux is a valid choice!" and then someone says "Linux isn't broken you're just not good enough to use it"... well, that's not really going to drive Linux user adoption, is it?
It's a "you're holding it wrong" moment. It's a completely ridiculous argument.
The issue I have with your characterization is the forced equivalence of "plenty of people in this comment section" and "basically the entire Internet" part of it. Don't get me wrong, there is definitely a segment of Linux users that vocally claim their choice is the superior one, but you could say the same thing for Mac and Windows. Given that there's no way to measure the number of Linux (or Mac or Windows) users who aren't commenting, it's a little presumptive to just assert that all Linux users are telling you your choice is wrong.
As an aside, I can't speak for other Linux users, but my goal is most certainly not to "drive Linux user adoption". If someone is interesting in learning to use Linux or wants advice about which distro to use, I would happily help them, but I actively try not to convert people who haven't expressed that interest. The reason I chimed in here is that I disagreed with the sentiment that Linux is a terrible choice. It's certainly not the right choice for most people, but there's a difference between being being niche and being bad.
Seconding that. I have a hard time understanding why professionals would look down on an OS that gives the user pretty much all the power, which, let's remember was the seminal idea of personal computing.
Interestingly, Linux comments are about 5% of the thread, which is also roughly the market share.
I 'm kind of more confused at everyone's seeming aversion to learning. Friends ask me why I go through the trouble of running Windows and Linux side by side with virtualization, or why I'm bothering to write my own blog site in python when Wordpress exists; why are you going the long way?
The answer is always "Because I'm learning cool new shit and enjoying myself".
You know when the last time I even thought about my OS was? Probably 8 yrs ago. I'd much rather fiddle with the stuff I'm building than with the stuff I just need to work in order for me to build what I'm building.
So I have no aversion to learning, but I want to focus my time learning the stuff I want/need to learn. And if there's an OS that runs well enough I don't need to think about it then that's fantastic.
Sure, but you had to learn something about this OS when it was new for you so that now you don't have to think about it. When you switch to Linux, there's maybe a week of adjustment to learn how are things around town, which is really the same for Windows and macOS.
The argument is that if you're going to try Linux, it's only fair to give it a fair shot at adjustment, rather than complaining that it doesn't work like you old OS, because guess what - it's not supposed to.
Not even as a side project or something though, running on some old hardware you were never going to use again? I guess this whole thread is about working environments and precisely not what we play around with in our spare time though.
To be honest, I hadn't really given much thought to my OS for even longer before I decided to go looking myself, I'm glad I picked that fight though. Granted, 8 years ago I was 15, digging in to the guts of an OS for the first time is very different from focusing your time to build what needs building :)
> These problems sound more like inexperience in using Linux to me than anything else. ... unless you somehow broke a whole lot of other stuff by deleting dependencies without really understanding what you were doing.
That's the problem right here. There's a vanishingly small percentage of people who can afford a laptop who are also willing and able to spend the time to gain "experience in using Linux". Sure it's much easier than it used to be, but it used to be a completely unmitigated disaster (I remember things like having to teach myself enough C to fix a wireless driver that didn't want to compile under a newer gcc version) so that's not saying much.
> Linux is still as bad as it ever was. It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. I've been using Linux on laptops since Redhat 7 (the first one from 2000) and a Dell Latitude C-series.
This is so far removed from my world as a daily Linux user. I put Fedora 25 onto a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition and everything worked perfectly out of the box. The OS looks gorgeus, and I now have the tooling so perfected to my workflow that I would be absolutely gutted if I had to change OS. In fact, I would likely turn down a job if it meant having to use Windows as a daily driver. MacOS I could likely get on with ok, but would miss the customizations I have on my linux machine.
Absolutely. Maybe it's also just a Fedora thing, installed it a week ago on my laptop that only had Win on it before, and from prior Linux experiences (Xubuntu & friends) just some ~3 years back I was absolutely baffled how everything installed quickly without a hitch, without glitches. HiDPI graphics recognition with a good default scaling, there, no config-file messing required. Wifi, there. NumPad, multi-touch trackpad, even audio!! you name it, it Just Worked. Still very-minor rare glitches throughout the Gnome environment but no showstoppers especially regarding the first-install experience. Major props to the Fedora devs for rounding out such a smooth distro.
If someone gave me a MacBook tomorrow, I'd install Fedora on it, no contest. At least I wouldn't have to get lost in "homebrew ports" and such, or some "Powershell" RedmondUbuntu2017 concoction ;))
I'm surprised HiDPI is working so well for you. See my other comment but I'm guessing you don't run anything in WINE. Yes Fedora is miles better than other distros regarding HiDPI but there's still no way to force per-application scaling in Wayland.
I mean, Windows doesn't get a pass here - you still can't scale HyperV, or anything involving mmc.exe, but Mac's HiDPI support is flawless.
Now that is true. I can readily believe that Apple invests more efforts than the others in somehow ensuring even old no-longer-updated apps somehow render properly. It really is weird how the OS' font-scale factor seems to be ignored by so many old programs (or their GUI toolkits)!
For gaming, I will be the first to admit Linux has a way to go yet and the coverage is much better on Windows. It is certainly moving in the right direction though, and with recent developments such as vulkan.
I have a standing offer to buy a developer a laptop with a high DPI screen [1] if they can make High DPI support suck less on any distribution.
At least Fedora auto detected the screen and enabled 2x scaling. GRUB is still unreadable. WINE apps are unreadable. QT less than 5.6 is unreadable. GTK is unreadable.
> I put Fedora 25 onto a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition and everything worked perfectly out of the box
You have a 13" 1080p screen correct? Then all text will be absurdly small because Fedora only supports scaling at 1x and 2x but not at 1.5x, which is what that screen size / resolution combination requires for a comfortable DPI. Windows does support 1.5x scaling.
Maybe we have different definitions of 'unreadable'. I'm typing this on an XPS 13 with 1080p screen and 1x scaling (Fedora 25). The text is perfectly readable.
Are you sure you're working off of recent, in-depth Windows experience?
> I get the slickest hardware, great battery life, the best touchpad and keyboard, and a hi-resolution screen that doesn't have battery life, flicker, tint, or scaling issues.
None of these things are universal among Windows machines. I can't remember which model, but a Verge review recently said that a Windows laptop had surpassed the best Mac (in terms of hardware quality).
> display scaling is a joke
It's fine. Everything works and looks good. Sometimes you use legacy apps (which is a feature of Windows -- legacy apps still work) that don't handle scaling well, but the OS helps resolve those issues.
> Performance is terrible
Reviewers, people on this thread, and I have all reported Windows being much snappier than OS X. I actually switched to Windows for performance alone. I hate not having a bash terminal, but it's better than using buggy, slow OS X.
> None of these things are universal among Windows machines. I can't remember which model, but a Verge review recently said that a Windows laptop had surpassed the best Mac (in terms of hardware quality).
Doubtful. Apple does crazy stuff like custom ACPI for Thunderbolt controllers so they can be very efficient. Or having each of the fins on a fan be at a different angle so they have a different pitch and fan noise is distributed across the sound spectrum (reducing total perceived noise). They were also the first (not sure if the only one) with terraced batteries.
> It's fine. Everything works and looks good. Sometimes you use legacy apps (which is a feature of Windows -- legacy apps still work) that don't handle scaling well, but the OS helps resolve those issues.
It's universally known that display scaling is the forté of macOS, and has been for a long time
> Reviewers, people on this thread, and I have all reported Windows being much snappier than OS X. I actually switched to Windows for performance alone. I hate not having a bash terminal, but it's better than using buggy, slow OS X.
Final Cut Pro works fine (read: smooth) on the anemic Macbook 2016. Try running Premiere on a Netbook and see how that goes. This is the power of macOS/Apple: they only have a handful of devices in each category, so they can hand-optimize every single one of them. So, wrong.
> It's universally known that display scaling is the forté of macOS, and has been for a long time
I have to interject here. Apple was the first one to have actually working and non-horrible implementation.
But the way they went about it has big performance cost. They can only render 2x versions. So if you use the physical resolution, the one that is "as big" as 1280x800 on 2560x1600 13" rMBP, they render it in 12802x800x2 and everything is fine.
But if you use scaled resolution, say "as big" as 1400x900 on 13" rMBP, they render it in 14402x9002 and rescale it to 25601600, and this gets laggy on bigger resolutions or on older devices or devices without dedicated GPU.
Meanwhile, other operating systems can do non-2x scaling and have no problem with resolutions like that.
(Personally I don't can what Windows can do - I'm not using that if I can help it. I just wanted to note that there's this issue with how Apple decided to do scaling.)
> and this gets laggy on bigger resolutions or on older devices or devices without dedicated GPU
I have the original 2012 rMBP, which by all accounts has far too wimpy a GPU for retina, and I've been running it in the max scaled resolution (the 1900x1200@2x mode) since the day I bought it.
On first few versions of OS X after it was released, yes, the graphics often got very choppy (especially stuff like Expose), but Apple has really optimized the hell out of those drivers, and by now on Sierra, I never run into any noticeable 2D graphic lag. I'm sure it's terrible for 3D though.
In graphics power for example ALL macs suck. Even when you spend 5000$ on a workstation you barely get something that can hold even with top-of-the-line pc hardware.
Mind, the last one is a high-accuracy cad work graphics card, but if you're looking for raw graphics performance for 3d development for example, all of those are easily outperformed by a piece of kit costing 190$:
Yes I know, but anyone that needs to do heavy graphics work hasn't been Apple's target market for a long time. That really started to show when they switched to only offering a discrete GPU on the most expensive 15inch MBP.
In general I feel that no one (for now) can touch Apple in the laptop market, although half of the reason is macOS working so damn well on MacBooks. But other companies have other markets on lockdown.. Windows is best for the desktop. Linux (or BSD) for servers. Android for phones.
> Or having each of the fins on a fan be at a different angle so they have a different pitch and fan noise is distributed across the sound spectrum (reducing total perceived noise).
Not trying to take away from the innovation of that idea, but IMO ventilation is one of the few areas where I think Macbooks are strictly worse than the PC laptops I've used. The Macbook I was given for work (13" Pro, 2015) constantly overheats, as there isn't really any vent for the fan to push the air out of. I'm sure it's a conscious design decision not to have a vent (either because it "looks bad" or because blowing out hot air is considered worse than overheating the laptop itself), but I'd personally have trouble counting the way that my Macbook ventilates as a net win in "hardware quality".
The rMBP 2015 vent is at the laptop hinge. If you get the fans to spin up, you can feel the air traveling across the face of your screen with your hand.
That being said, it's still awful ventilation. I tried playing video games on it through Windows and Apple's drivers left the laptop more hot to the touch than I would like. I ended up using a fan curve controller application to fix that.
Yeah, I probably could have been more precise and said "there really isn't any ventilation" rather than "there isn't really vent". The vent is there, it's just completely ineffective.
I use my 2012 rMBP in a tropical climate in summer (ambient temp 30 C and up) and it's constantly throttling the CPU and it's survived well. Complete hell on the li-ion battery though (time for my second replacement)
even 4k is workable, although not quite as smooth.
Desktop Safari is also notorious for not being as smooth and fast as other browser because its primarily built for (battery) efficiency, not performance.
> Performance is terrible
> > all reported Windows being much snappier than OS X
It's odd that this is a discussion point. I have a MBP 17' circa 2011 or so. I have both OSes installed. They are both really snappy. I am not quite sure what all the fuss is about.
Cheap underpowered laptops are really common in the windows world. My wife had an HP that we bought in 2015 that would take up to a minute to load chrome on Win10 for example. Everything done on the laptop was an exercise in waiting. I would honestly dread having to help her with her laptop because of how slow every action one. She upgraded to a Yoga finally and it's snappy now.
I've tried to use an app developed in 2014 with Windows's display scaling. Some buttons you need to be able to do anything end up being placed outside of the window, so you cannot click them.
I am using bash extensively on the newest insider build (so this is coming in creators update), bash is working flawlessly.
I have no problems with scaling with a combination of 4k, 1080p and 2736x1824 monitors. (It's working great, though it's true it didn't work like that a year ago)
With a surface book you get hardware that's even better quality than any Apple laptop, and actually has a detachable screen I can write on (this isn't a gimmick, I'm using it daily as a software developer).
No idea what you mean with saying "Windows is still a mess", maybe give an argument for that?
I think the start menu on win10 looks like someone threw up a bunch of squares and trying to update settings in what was the control panel is now a special kind of hell.
I don't use it ever except when I need to help friends/family though.
I live in Linux world (Archville with visits over the border to Debiana). I admit getting things ideal takes a while and every 9 or 10 months something melts down but the cost is a couple of days here or there.
The cost of Mac or Windows is cumulatively huge for me: on both I regularly sit wondering when some incidental operation will end.
"great battery life"? really? that's why I gave up Apple, they aren't keeping up. What's the new Macbook 3-6 hours, maybe? Meanwhile Windows laptops are pushing past 12.
The bash system is incomplete when compared to native Linux, but it's still really good for anything that is purely userspace. I haven't had a userspace issue in many months, and it's only getting more complete over time.
Also - command line usage on Mac OS is far from perfect. While bash itself works fine (as it does on Windows), many command-line tools are differently organized or missing features. (Try adding a user on the command line on Mac OS.)
Even though there are some things that are annoying or in a bad shape, all in alle macOS and the ecosystem makes me more productive than Windows or Linux.
As a developer, I also notice that a lot of tools don't work well on Windows. Even things like Docker.
Not really. It may not be suitable for all use-cases, but it has certainly much improved in the last years.
To make a concrete example, I'm running ArchLinux + bspmw on an Asus Zenbook UX305UA. Thanks to ArchLinux I don't have all the bloat that I don't need, putting me at 10 hours of battery life. The tiling WM allows me to be extremely efficient with desktop and window managing. This is why I find it really obnoxious to use both Windows and OS X when I have to.
If you don't need proprietary software that doesn't run on Linux I seriously suggest you give it a try.
Hmmm ... I've been running Linux on laptops and desktops since 1997 (yes, really). My current laptops are 1 Mac OSX and 1 old linux machine of similar spec. My current desktop is a big honking many core, huge ram machine, with lots of SSD/disk goodness, and a nice recent Nvidia card.
The only problem I've had with this desktop has been the occasional hissyfit of compiling the Nvidia driver against a modern kernel. Thats a story for another post, but the Linux systems I've built and used for my day-to-day work are and have been rock solid. Without me sitting there struggling to make things work.
On the laptops, I've not had an issue in like 5 or 6 years, apart from a single Wifi driver ... which also didn't work in windows. So I added a simple Panda nub and off to the races I went.
Really, from my own personal experience, the OSX interface is a pain in terms of how it maps against keyboards, and the lack of a sloppy focus equivalence in OSX.
From a programming scenario, the toolchain is maddening (I am looking at you Xcode ... every (&(&^&^&* update, you have to reapply the click-this-license-button) on OSX. I use homebrew (having left macports in the dust), as I want stuff to work. And then along comes an update which just breaks everything.
And then the SMB stack in OSX. Yeah, the SMB stack. Using a lowest common denominator for our office meant using crappy file system technology, but thanks to either licensing issues or a NIH mentality, OSX has an almost completely neutered SMB implementation. It is awful. Painfully slow even over fast connections.
Then there is the desktop experience. Many of the customers of my previous employer are creative types whom used to use Mac for their video bits. Most are migrating to Linux, some back to windows. They are done fighting the battles (don't shoot the messenger, this is what they tell me).
I know the article was clickbait, and had a number of issues. But blasting Linux, which is a perfectly good, and very functional OS for many by rehashing issues from 10 years ago ... might not be the best approach for advocating your view.
FWIW: I run windows. In a window. Having had the joyful experience of self-destructing windows installations on wife/offspring's laptops, I've sworn to never again allow a windows OS to run installed on bare metal. I've taken wife/offspring's old laptops, virtualized them, and they can run their old stuff in a VM. They use Macs now, and I won't try to force them to change, because they just work for their use case.
Linux is a great OS for desktops (ignore the haters). Linux Mint is definitely one of the best user experiences I've had on a system so far, for day to day use.
Yeah, agreed. I use Mint nowadays, too. I started a couple of years before you did on Linux. It was painful until about Ubuntu 7.04. And then it was very slick pretty much from that day forward. Funny story: I built a gaming machine recently (specifically for Star Citizen), and Windows 10 failed to find my (onboard ASUS motherboard) NIC, and I had to iterate through a few versions of driver for my ATI/AMD 7790 GPU before I found one that was stable with Windows. I realized that day that I hadn't actually had a single hardware problem on Linux for something like eight years. It was a funny and strange feeling, hitting a hardware brick wall with Windows 10, of all OSes. Then you've got all those really annoying things about it, like the whole update thing. I paid for a "Home" (or whatever) license, but when I realized I couldn't stop Windows from crippling itself by automatically forcing updates of the fucking GPU driver I decided to go back to a pirated version of "Ultimate" (or whatever it's called) just so I could keep this shitty OS from killing itself. LOL!
I get the slickest hardware, great battery life, the best touchpad and keyboard, and a hi-resolution screen that doesn't have battery life, flicker, tint, or scaling issues.
Windows is still...Windows. The bash subsystem is half-baked. Windows itself is still the same mess. Docking is still a joke. Performance is terrible, laptop hardware is still 'almost-as-good', display scaling is a joke, and the ecosystem is still fragmented beyond belief.
Linux is still as bad as it ever was. It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. I've been using Linux on laptops since Redhat 7 (the first one from 2000) and a Dell Latitude C-series.
Somehow I shut my laptop off and it booted backup to a failure message, I had to make another bootable USB and go online to find out how to do a fsck. I was using external monitors without issue for a month, and then one day the configuration changed to a point where I couldn't even use the laptop with it's built-in display. The sound and volume controls are a joke. I was prevented from installing any packages because of an issue with a package from Google.
All fairly minor, fixable issues, but I forgot all about them because I haven't had to deal with crap like that since I switched to a Mac back in 2010.