Comment by bigyabai
20 hours ago
Speaking purely on the software preferences, all of those feel like nice-to-haves. I like a well-tuned HiG and widget library as much as the next guy, but the majority of macOS's features are bloat to me. What am I supposed to do with Stage Manager or AppleTV+? Why is Safari allowed to send me notifications begging the user to boot it up and try the new features? Why does the Settings app show a persistent notification when I log out of iCloud?
There was a point in my life when I also thought I needed those creature comforts. Now I've spent 7 years without dailying macOS and I really don't miss it one bit. You could give me a $0.00 Apple Silicon M6 Ultra laptop with 4 days of battery life, and I'd probably still be reaching for my Thinkpad if I wanted to get work done. As a development OS, macOS is borderline intolerable.
> Why is Safari allowed to send me notifications begging the user to boot it up and try the new features?
For what it's worth I've been using macOS (and OS X) for 14 years, and you only get the notification once after a fresh install and you can click close and it's gone forever, sure Linux is better on this front, but I don't want to spend my whole life tinkering my os until it works. It's still a hell of a lot better than Microsoft consistently shoving Edge down your throat.
I don't need many newer macOS features myself. I'd be happy with an experience that's roughly adjacent to that of OS X 10.6 or 10.9, but that's not on offer either.
I do need a laptop that's good at its job, though. If a laptop sucks at its defining qualities, I'd be better served by a backpackable ITX build or maybe a one of those trendy mini-PCs, because at that point the form factor's tradeoffs are too great to justify.