Comment by trueno
21 hours ago
as a dude who uses all three heavily for work & personal (windows/linux/macos) macos doesnt even come close to windows in the "trying to sell me on the cloud services" front. microsoft ddos's my brain with sign in with an o365 account at every corner of computing now. microsoft products are actually insane now.
i have quite a few mac vms for development things and ive had no issue just disabling all the icloud pieces & my usage in these environments seems to be pretty damn quiet the way i like it. windows has gone completely bonkers damn file explore has network service call stacks summoning bing wtf is going on there.
feel like i have to shower after using windows now it's crazy. reminds me of early 2000s when HP laptops were just filled with bloatware when you bought them, except microsoft has now baked this unforgettable experience into their operating system.
i will remain on macos for my personal device until other hardware manufs make great hardware. i have the pleasure (or displeasure) of using lots of different devices for work so ive got a stack of thinkpads and surfaces and a couple frameworks even and apple is still leading the charge on the bonkers hardware that fits in my backpack. im loyal to no one in the end and have no dog in this fight, but i would really enjoy if someone could catch up to apples chip developments for mobile desktop computing. id love something that is as refined and performant+efficient as my m4max pro but runs linux.
all in all i think device/manuf tribalism is the lamest part of computing and it's always been in my best interests to try them all myself and switch on a whim to whatever feels like it meets my needs. im in a unique position to use a lot of diff devices and os's with what i do and there's undoubtedly frustrations with all of them. there's always going to be a free spirit inside me that champions linux to the ends of the horizons though, but apple is undeniably in a unique position to r&d bankroll tsmc, design their own soc, develop hardware and software and marry all of those things together. it's cool shit, and they'd score a lot of goodwill if they just documented their damn stuff so linux distributions could just work on these devices rather than requiring some crazy reverse engineering effort and all the associated mailing list drama that came with asahi.
The HP ZBook G1a is similar to a Macbook in case(*), touchpad, screen and audio quality, design and performance - just the efficiency and battery life are kind of crap and, uh, I haven't figured out yet how to configure reliable sleep on Linux. It lasts 6-7 hours idle. You can also empty the battery in an hour with heavy compile jobs, but that one Macbooks do as well according to info I've found on the net.
(*) Aluminum is more about perceived than actual quality - I wouldn't mind touching something with lower heat conduction, especially in winter. The only thing that I really like about it, compared to a Thinkpad, is the stiffness of the screen part.
We are very similar, you and I, and I'm completely with you on all of this.