Comment by rich_sasha
4 years ago
The one thing keeping me on MacOS is that it is "*nix that works". I have never found Ubuntu / Linux to be as stable; worrying about updates breaking things, updates indeed breaking things, drivers randomly stopping working, googling in desperation for half-baked fixes online, randomly trying different options in some dotfile until stuff works etc. Mac just works; maybe there are features that Linux would give me, but as I spend my time between the terminal and the browser, I'm not sure I'd notice much.
I think I'm not alone in this approach; I wonder if this project has the change to be as rock-solid as Apple's offerings. If not, I'm guessing it's not for me.
I agree but the *nix part became less and less significant. Bundled Unix tools are ancient. Compiling your own kernel is almost an anathema (it is possible but you will have nonstop hurdles, you will lose a lot of features and you will have to fight the security system too many times to remain sane).
Even the UI conventions that let you use the keyboard instead of the mouse are now often broken by Apple itself (it impacts power users more than impaired people since accessibility features are still good).
And no containers - those require you to run a different kernel on a VM.
Frankly I feel that macOS went back to being like Mac OS 9 in a lot of aspects - it's just enormously bigger and has a proper foundation but the UI is again mouse centric and proprietary and the system is more tightly coupled than ever with the hardware
I don't know what is the last time you used linux but lately there is great improvements in user experience. I know non-techie people using Linux Mint/ubuntu without any hassels.
I'm writing this from my Ubuntu desktop (LTE). Just a few months ago some update broke everything (graphics). Then somehow I fixed it, but it broke again on restart. It took best part of a week for me to fix.
You might say it wasn't the best distribution for reliability, or that graphics with NVidia are always an issue etc. but the fact remains that, for me, for an OS to "just work out of the box", MacOS is much better.
[I'm also not a Linux n00b, been using it for over a decade, though not an expert for sure]
So basically you played with fire(nvidia) and got burned.
There is one way to run nvidia stuff on Linux and have a decent experience: run a distro that actually support and has partnership with nvidia, which mean a distro like Redhat Enterprise Linux. It has long term support too.
It is the same with Apple or windows if you start using shitty drivers from a shady brand you will run into issues at some point.
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I'm the de facto IT support for my family and neighbours. They are using Pop OS for about 3 years now. It has been great from both their UX and my maintenance perspective.
My father even did the 20.10 to 21.04 LTS upgrade himself! I highly doubt if windows would've been as smooth an experience.
(Macs are out of question for us since none of us are rich!)
Windows upgrades go so smoothly they've been repackaged as updates. They're also highly fault resistant by default with automated rollbacks out of the box.
I'm not saying Pop is bad, but Windows upgrades are super easy and user friendly (if you ignore the privacy risks that come with using Windows). I wish common Linux distros would pack something like system restore by default already! I know these tools (based on BTRFS/ZFS snapshots) exist and work great, but they need to be set up manually and most people won't.
Interesting - my experience has actually been the exact opposite. I always hesitate to update my Mac OS machine as it will inevitably break or misbehave, whereas I rarely run into issues upgrading my Ubuntu machine.
Crazy how much experiences vary… been riding the wave of macOS updates for years, always running the latest and breakage is rare, temporary, third party in nature, and is usually a result of the dev of the app in question not moving off of some deprecated API despite warnings that it would be getting removed in the near future.
In my experience, even betas are generally well-behaved. My MBA is only a "personal" machine, but none of the beta bugs I've encountered in either Monterey or Ventura have been debilitating. Standard OS updates have been virtually unnoticeable for me.
I hear a lot of people saying that. What I find out mostly is their last experience of linux on a desktop dates back to the early 2000 and or crappy distros like ubuntu.
What distro works more reliably than ubuntu?
Literally every one, including Fedora, openSUSE (both Leap and Tumbleweed), Debian, Linux Mint, Manjaro, Void, Arch and Gentoo with their respective derivatives.
Ubuntu is a mess that introduces config-breaking changes every release and rides the already existing market. If Canonical tried to release their products nowadays without their track record and existing user base, they would never succeed.
The peak Linux experience for a Just Werx focused end user is probably openSUSE Tumbleweed on KDE or XFCE. Batteries included, fast and extremely hard to break package manager, YaST2 configuration manager, and lots of user repositories.
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NixOS - it either works and you have a new generation, or it doesn't work and you keep the same state. If the new generation has some problems, you can switch to the previous one via a single command or select the previous one from the GRUB menu when booting.