Comment by bee_rider

Funnily I just yesterday realized that my macOS-bundled bash version is (was) from 2007 because $BASH_ALIASES (introduced in bash 4) didn't work.

I've always heard Apple's refusal to use GPL3 code was due to the patent clause. They certainly don't seem to mind including GPL2 software.

SIP is the obvious contra, though.

I don’t get your comment, do you mean superiority in what? Are you comparing operating systems or hardware? The combined experience?

If you asked me 2 years ago I would say something different about Linux than I would said today, because I’m running a different distribution with a different desktop environment and that changed my experience completely, even though I’m running on basically the same hardware.

I run Linux in Apple hardware too, how does that rank in your comparison?

Of course it does in the US tech bubble, if you talk to people who haven't been using Macs for 30 years you might hear a different story. While Apple makes good hardware they also have plenty of blunders, especially in recent years, much like Microsoft in its domain really. Both are coasting on their past successes and familiarity. I get it, many of my coworkers watch their announcement streams like they're video game announcements. From my standpoint they haven't put out anything exciting since the iPhone/iPod Touch, but I don't have the money for toys that cost thousands of dollars apiece like the Mac Studios or their VR headset, so maybe I'm missing out.

You have to pay me to use Apple, Microsoft, and Google products. None of those organizations are good.

Apple and Google both use immutable locked down OSes on their main products that prevents improving device security, such as IP & DNS filtering / blocking.

Microsoft user experience keeps getting worse. Latest version of Teams, as of today, says I'm at the "Calendar" screen and the navigation and content screen both show "Chat". "Calendar" was unpinned because I find Teams to be at interacting with content. No reason it should be a PDF viewer when the desktop application is actually usable allows for viewing chat and content at the same time.

I understand developing for those platforms makes money or is needed for other products. Unless I have to develop products that support those companies, I will never pay with my personal income to support those organizations.

For hardware only

No.

Linux is better.

That worm has turned, at least five years ago

I’m a producer since Cool Edit Pro and Fruity Loops. I’ve used Windows and Macs for audio and video production extensively over the last two decades. I have no idea what you’re on about.

I’ve used Windows at work for years, my personal/gaming machine is Linux (mint), my personal/development machine is MacOS.

They’re all perfectly viable options with strengths and weaknesses. None of them are especially great. I’m partial to MacOS, personally.

It’s willful ignorance to think that the many millions of people that like MacOS are just parroting what they’ve been told.

Tim Cook giving Trump a gold-plated statue in exchange for tariff preferences seems like a very bad sign.

> because they're not trying to sell my data

Are you sure?

Apple is behind in AI because they've prioritized keeping private data on your device, rather than in the cloud, but today's best (or even good) inference models still require cloud-scale compute, i.e. they don't fit on a phone.

I think we basically agree - just clarifying here.

Mac OS 8 was new in 1997 and was pretty innovative for user-facing features, if not the underlying operating system. It blew Windows 98 out of the water as far as that went.

Delusional take. Rosetta is for maintaining compatibility during the transition. Efficiency is fine with Rosetta. But it doesn’t matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done. Not true, unfortunately, for Windows.

Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.

We certainly are in a predicament aren't we!?

Now I am what you would consider a "Full Stallman" free software guy, but you can imagine my mixed feelings when I ended up being interviewed by Business Insider on why Microsoft shouldn't be giving up with web engine for a Chromium based browser. Yes, things like Safari are proprietary junk but they still keep things like Chrome dominance at bay. Alas I feel we are better having a few proprietary systems than a singular monolithic one. Once Apple lets that one go, it is only a matter of time until Google almost single handled controls the framework of the internet.

Save us Ladybird, you are our only hope!

That’s more complicated because the alleged harms are quite limited (it’s not like Android or desktop users are using PWAs much) and the biggest direct impact is the unalloyed good of “the web” not being synonymous with the Google Chrome roadmap. Everyone has benefited from proposed specs with significant negative privacy and security impacts not being adopted, so we have to ask how much the negatives outweigh the positives here.

Right? They are really limiting Google’s development of their platform, the internet, by making some websites pander to a non-Chrome browser engine.

Yes, but with that sort of thing, the harm is at least limited to Apple customers.

That’s why there are so many great PWAs for Android and most companies avoid writing Android apps and just tell Android users to use the web apps.

Oh wait, that’s totally not the case.

Apple computers are typically rather mostly used by people from media and audio production (+ some hipsters). GNU/Linux has its very vocal users, but as a matter of fact, it is rather a niche outside of nerd circles.

I would thus rather say many European countries are more Microsoft-centered, even though at least in Germany I would say that people deeply hate and distrust the more and more spying functionalities that Microsoft introduces into its software. So I would claim this current dominance of the Microsoft ecosystem is fragile.

Surprisingly, at least in Germany I observe that Microsoft plans to stop providing updates to Windows 10 (and forces the users to buy new computers) has made quite a lot of mainstream users to at least consider switching to the GNU/Linux ecosystem:

It is perhaps difficult to understand to people who are used to the US mentality, but the fact that Microsoft announced that Windows 10 will be the last Windows, and after that broke this promise (and particular importantly: cease to provide further updates for Windows 10 despite this promise) is considered to be near "high treason" by many PC users - a nigh-unforgivable sin. In particular US-American companies should really learn to understand that (in the eyes of German users, who consider such promises to be sacred) if you give a promise, and break it, this is (I am only slightly exaggerating) something that the CEO (or even the board) of the respective company should better commit suicide for because of the shame that he brought to the company.

Europe is a Microsoft stronghold in almost all areas except some tiny tech focused startups with young founders,

Since when does carrying Apple device(s) mean we have goodwill for Apple?

I dev on a Mac all day and own 2 macs at home. Why?

* not going to try to convince the whole family to change and I want the various family & imessage features that everyone uses to all work

* all the developers at my company use macs and I don't want to have to set up my own unique configurations for everything using WSL and stuff.

* In the US, often the Android versions of "apps" you're forced to use by random businesses (instead of the Web which usually would work fine), are pawned off on an offshore team, and no execs use Android so there's no accountability when those apps suck.

* Windows also has many recent disappointments (ads in the start menu, increasingly dumber and worse settings screens), so they're doing a bad job of winning over people like me, dampening my enthusiasm to switch.

* Linux is cool but I'm too busy to want a project as my daily driver PC.

I have nothing but scorn for Tim Cook's Apple and have zero goodwill for them. They haven't shipped an actual smart idea for any of their platforms besides maybe Shortcuts (which they bought), and even then it took them 3 years to let me run automations unattended.

There's a huge regional variation on this. In some parts of the US, Apple is everywhere. In others, it's rare enough to be worthy of comment when it gets spotted in the wild.

Ah yes, what could be more stylish and cool than a company assigned work device.

In this case it's more that hardware isn't a critical business for MS, I think.