Hey there, this is gonna be a really long rant, so sit down, get a good drink and food, and relax.
I was debating on if I should post this here, or on c/libre, but I think here works better as this is general technology discussion.
Let me just say, Apple is an absolutely deluded and bat shit insane company, but MacOS is something special in my opinion, and I think that Apple themselves are holding it back.
Making the system as a whole proprietary, locked down and forcing people to provide so much information it'd make Facebook blush.
The OS itself works well, but the privacy implications of using MacOS, just like Windows, are absolutely insane to think about.
Apple, with their silicon valley pilled lies, have been preaching MacOS as a perfect, private safe haven for millions of users, but are of course, talking out of their ass.
Apple collects a similar amount of data to Google and Facebook, with MacOS being a victim of those actions.
They do it for one reason and one reason only, money. Apple is a trillion dollar company, crazy to think that they are worth more than the amount of money some countries make.
They've been pulling back a good looking Operating System by making it proprietary and trying to stop people from making a nice old hackintosh system (especially with their new updates), and they've been trying way too hard to stop people from installing third party applications and stores (this is not just an issue on iOS!)
MacOS has a good layout, is simple to use, and has support for so many apps that I WISH Linux would have, but Apple has been putting this Operating System on a proprietary leash, just like they do with iOS, and it has gotta stop.
I would like to imagine a world where MacOS is more like Linux distros, being open source and privacy friendly. It works similarly in so many ways, but Apple has made it so limited and annoying with their malicious, greedy practices, and it's sad to see.
Because of this, MacOS will never compare to Linux in my honest opinion, and I'd recommend people use that over MacOS, especially if you don't have supported hardware.
You can even make your Linux system look like MacOS if you wanna, a simple search will get you to find out how.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post, hope some people agree with me.
Nonsense. MacOS does not lock out alternative stores. Steam for MacOS exists. Users don't need to use any store to download apps.
The idea that Apple is a trillion dollar company because they collect user data is also nonsense. They are worth trillions because the have an iron grip on their supply chain and their margins are crazy compared to competitors.
Linux is a fine choice for some but there many a reasons professional developers prefer Macs and much of it is for reasons that directly contradict the story being told here.
But at least we can all agree no one should be using Windows and if one took this post and replaced Apple with Microsoft and MacOS with Windows it would be far more accurate.
Okay, I have multiple things to say in response to this:
I am not saying that MacOS is 100% locking people out from installing Steam, for example. What I am saying is that they are making it unreasonably hard. Windows requires a one click authentication, but on MacOS you've gotta say "yeah I want third party apps" THREE times, and get scary warnings in the process which scare most people away, apple does this to try and get people to use their store and their store only.
I was not saying that apple is a trillion dollar company because they collect data, either, I'm just saying that's a major part of it. We all know about the horrible labor practices that apple participates in, the absolutely ridiculous prices they charge, etc, but a lot of leftists seem to not care about data collection so I thought I'd point it out.
I don't know why a developer would prefer Macs, as I am not a professional. But Linux is still better as a general desktop, imo.
I know maybe 1/5 (professional, employed) devs who prefer MacOS, the rest prefer Linux. In my experience Linux is a far easier / more compatible / stable development experience, for everything from text editing to compilation. I've been using more or less the same setup for 6+ years. With rolling distros like Arch, you don't even need to have some weird yearly upgrade. I think MacOS is really only the best for apple development, because they only offer xcode on macs (last I heard) for some stupid reason.
I'm biased though, I hate everything Apples makes and stands for. Also I haven't touched a Mac since that 2017 butterfly keyboard monstrosity. I personally prefer the Thinkpad X1 Carbon series, thin and light and long lasting ! Mine is going on 8 years 🥳 haven't even replaced the battery yet.
The butterfly keyboard incident
Yeah, I hate everything about Apple too, personally use Arch as my desktop OS (with KDE ofc).
Been using Linux for almost two years now and I love it.
MacOS has gotten a bit annoying over time, it used to be a very nice GUI layer over a solid Unix system. The soup of services running on a typical system these days make it hard to figure out what's going on. Ironically enough, Linux also started dropping the KISS principle the past couple of years, with the rise of systemd.
I'd be happy to use either, but Linux just lacks the ecosystem for multimedia authoring. Even if there were credible open source alternatives for programs like Logic and Final Cut, it would still lack in terms of support for specialized hardware (higher end audio interfaces, controllers), and third party extensions / plug-ins.
On a machine only used for browsing / word processing / text editing, Linux has basically been an acceptable alternative for about 20 years now.
While it doesn’t have the Adobe suite or obviously Apple software, the media creation environment on Linux is getting pretty solid. Davinci Resolve and Shotcut are great for video; Darktable, Krita, Gimp, and photopea are solid photo editing options; Ardour, LMMS, and Reaper are good DAWs. It’s definitely not ready for a lot of professional environments but I’m impressed how much you can do with Linux for multimedia work right now
Y'know, Ive actually enjoyed the rise of systemd so much as I feel it does in fact simplify system configuration in Linux. I've had some experience developing on an Upstart system...it was ok, but you had to turn to other executables to do certain functions.
Systemd does do a shit load of things, but that's convenient because so much of it can be configured from unit files. Lots of documentation. Recently I've been "containerizing" (not really) lots of my home net services, and systemd makes it really easy to jail processes in another process/mount/network/etc namespace.
And because all the major distros are using systemd, your system configuration is more portable than ever! I can bring up a new system and just copy unit files !
Yes, systemd improved service and startup management. Likes launchd did for MacOS earlier. I'm just a bit grumpy because it didn't use to be that 'ps -axu' listed a shit-ton of processes on a freshly booted machine where I had no clue what even half of them did without looking it up. I'm sure there are perfectly reasonable motivations for all of these services existing, but operating systems do seem to have involved into being one giant honking attack surface.
Ahhh yes, that's definitely fair. Quite a few systemd-related processes and mounts that I still don't really know much about