Comment by spudlyo
3 days ago
With both Windows 11 and macOS Tahoe now being non-starters for many, it's clear that we're going to continue to see impressive growth in the Linux desktop in 2026. Last year I migrated my Windows gaming machine to Ubuntu, and it's been a great success. I don't play games that require kernel level anti-cheats, so for me, Proton has worked great. I'm playing new games like Anno 117 on my 2019 vintage RX 5700xt and am having a blast. I'm about to wipe my Windows 10 partition and not look back.
I still have an M1 laptop with a broken screen that is going strong in clam shell mode, but once it dies or I can no longer run Sequoia for whatever reason, I'll be tempted to abandon macOS if Apple can't move beyond the mess they've made with Tahoe.
I’m still on Sequoia; I have high hopes that Tahoe is an aberration that will be fixed with the departure of Alan Dye. But let’s keep things into perspective here. The subtle enshitifications of macOS are mild compared to the train wreck of Windows 8 onwards. I daily drove Windows 7 until 2015; IMHO it’s the greatest version of Windows ever.
My wife works for a large corporation that is 100% Windows. I first used Windows 11 a few weeks ago when I was troubleshooting a connectivity problem on her laptop. To some extent my lack of experience with Windows 11 was a factor, but configuring network settings shouldn’t be so obtuse and fragmented. It didn’t feel serious. It felt like a parody of an operating system.
I agree that Tahoe is considerably less enshitified than Windows, but they are slowly turning the screws on us. With every release, it becomes harder and harder to run unsigned macOS binaries, and I can't shake the feeling that their ultimate goal is turn the Mac into more of a "trusted appliance" and less of a general-purpose computer.
Gatekeeper & notarization, System Integrity Protection, hardware level security enforcement, all of these shifts reek of security paternalism, platform convergence, and ultimately ... control. This frog is starting to feel the water boil, and to mix metaphors, can see the walls of the garden getting higher.
I agree there’s a lot of security paternalism, but the "trusted appliance" model is also the objectively correct choice for 99 percent of users. The real frog-in-warming-water problem, in my view, isn’t control being taken away — it’s the exponential growth of operating system complexity and connectivity. Computers are becoming more of a window into our souls every year, and with that the terrible opportunities for bad actors grows too.
Ultimately, choosing macOS is choosing to trust Apple. So the real question is: what do I get in return for that trust? As a "1 percenter" you’d think I’d resent ceding control. But when I look at Gatekeeper, notarization, Signed System Volume, and the rest, my reaction is: thank you, Apple, for doing your fucking job — for doing what I pay YOU to do for ME. I don't want to think about kernel extensions or rootkits, just keep my computer secure. Even as a 1 percenter, I still treat my main desktop as an appliance. Any time I want to go deeper into a computer, I'm in an ssh terminal to Linux machines under my control.
For me the logic is simple. If I don’t trust Apple to manage the security of my computer, then I shouldn’t be running macOS, period. Personally, I do trust Apple as much as I can trust anyone, including the presumptively honourable neckbeards who oversee your favourite Linux distro.
I'm a bit out of the loop, what are people's issues with Tahoe?
The new Liquid Glass UI has a lot of detractors, both on iOS and on macOS, but it seems like the clamor is even louder on macOS. Beyond the looks, it's created a lot of usability issues for folks. Buttons and controls can overlap awkwardly, navigation can be more difficult when it's hard to identify different UI elements on the screen, all the eye candy like transparency and rounded corners can create accessibility problems for folks less than perfect vision. It's a bit of a mess.