Not trying to start flamewars, but more and more I wonder how much are people willing to put up with such practices. On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased. And spying. Really user hostile environment. No, thank you.
Because Linux is full of sharp edges which nobody seems to find it fit to fix.
I’ve been dabbling in Linux since the early 2000s with Yellow Dog, SUSE, and Ubuntu, tried making it my daily driver in the early-mid 2010s, and for the past 5 or so years have been using it in a secondary/tertiary role.
Recently I’ve been trying to move my gaming box from Windows to Fedora (which I’ve found mostly makes the right tradeoffs to suit my preferences). I’ve gotten things to mostly work, including games that have been blockers in the past, but just yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity. No big deal I thought, just go into settings and add it back, but as it turns out the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky and most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection. No, you have to drop down and use nmcli afterwards to fix things because the UI also doesn’t surface the right checkbox. I wouldn’t have even figured that out if it hadn’t been for a chatbot’s assistance.
This is the exact sort of time-burning nonsense that isn’t a problem on either of the commercial platforms that I tend to encounter under Linux. Is this single instance going to push me to reboot that box back into Windows? No, but if issues like that keep cropping up eventually one will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Desire to avoid continued frustration will win over the logical portion of most peoples’ brains.
While I dont disagree, Mac and Windows also have their own sharp edges that for some reason no one finds fit to fix even though they get paid millions of dollars to maintain the software. The other day my mom told me her Bluetooth speaker no longer worked on her windows laptop. I was like, ok, lets try the normal troubleshooting steps. Turn it off and on again. Restart computer. Unpair and repair. But I couldn't unpair. It just said no.
I installed ChatGPT on her laptop and allowed it to run a certain subset of shell commands and it finally worked.
If im gonna have to muck around in the terminal to do the most basic of tasks, I may as well use Linux so I actually have a semblance of ownership on my computer.
Bluetooth issues are as much on the manufacturers of BT cards and devices as they are on OS vendors. Outside of the Apple sphere the only way I’ve found to mitigate issues with it regardless of OS is to 1) buy Intel BT chipsets (or hardware incorporating such) and 2) avoid no-name BT devices like the plague.
That's fair, but this was an HP laptop with an Intel chip, and her speaker is an Anker speaker. I cant speak to the hardware quality of HP but her old HP laptop worked fine, and the problem was still resolvable via shell commands, which points to software, and I feel like Windows dropped the ball in many ways (i turned Bluetooth off and on and then even though it was on another panel said Bluetooth was off, i naively clicked on troubleshoot this issue and it also reported Bluetooth was off, and simply removing a Bluetooth device should be a fairly simple task regardless of hardware; I've never had an issue like this even with cheap devices)
Everything is full of sharp edges. It's just a matter of which ones are more painful to you.
The author's inability to uninstall or fully disable AI features is one for Mac OS. Window management is a common one for people used to other systems.
Windows has many, with (again) AI features that are hard to get rid of, and attempts to coerce users to create an online account being two of the most prominent lately.
So yeah, KDE's NetworkManager frontend is a little janky sometimes, and they should fix that. Is it worse than trying to coerce the user into using services they don't want to? For some people, probably. For me, no.
I think there's a fundamental difference between having things you need to ignore (windows bloat) and having problems that prop up when you try to do things (linux stuff).
I think people are generally more willing to put up with the former.
The defining difference for me is the number of affected users and how much the issue debilitates the system.
Should AI features be easier to switch off? Sure, no argument there, but a problem like a network interface vanishing, breaking internet connectivity, and re-adding not working as expected is much more serious, even if it’s an issue that impacts fewer people. At least the system with unwanted features is still usable for work.
I don't disagree in principle, though I question it in practice. I suspect network interfaces disappearing from KDE on mainstream distributions is rare. That may vary if you're using "Dave's Janky Arch Fork" or some such.
Commercial operating systems aren't immune. I found several people having a similar problem with Windows 11 on Microsoft Q&A, as well as a thousand third-party sites offering instructions to fix it, likely all infested with ads for "fix your computer" programs that will make things worse: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5583596/...
I've had computers with interfaces that vanished before. I've found that disabling NetworkMangler or whatever, and just raw-dogging a wpa_supplicant.conf with whatever wifi networks I'm likely to be interested in, cures the problem in near 100% of cases. Yes, it means having to sudo and change the config whenever I connect to a new wifi network. For me this is not a big deal.
GNOME is a project whose manifesto is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck", for a very specific value of not sucking roughly equivalent to "Let's make Unix into a shitty version of Windows". I'm picking on GNOME because its development psychology has infested the Linux ecosystem, yielding horrors like NetworkManager, dbus, frickin' systemd, et weary cetera. There's a sense that Unix-style composability, modularity, and (conceptual) simplicity is something that has to be hidden from the poor end user, but the people who are implementing the means to do so lack the organizational competence to pull it off. So the absolute state of things for Linux desktop use in 2026 is a tradeoff between jank and brokenness on the one hand and being exposed to Linux's technical underside on the other. I don't mind so much because I've never minded getting technical. I'm the kind of guy who still logs in at the VT console and types 'startx' to get a graphical session going because I came up on early Linux and appreciate being reminded of what underlies that UI convenience. And it sure beats being stuck on Windows or Mac, where it works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't you often can do little but shrug your shoulders and say "wellp, them's the breaks".[1] And that's before adding in AI cruft, advertisements, mandatory online accounts and vendor spyware.
The price to pay for having a hot rod is a lack of a luxury interior from the finest Swiss craftsmen. But a) you have a hot rod; b) it won't sell your driving data to insurance companies!
[1] In the 90s I heard stories from hackers about normies who just kind of assumed that computers were flaky, fragile machines that lost your work every now and then and needed to be restarted at least once a day in order to function. And when they heard of Linux or FreeBSD, their minds were blown because they didn't know computers could do that. But the computer wasn't flaky or fragile; Windows 9x was.
Yeah a lot of this comes down to the mindset one came into computers with.
While I have no aversion to CLI use, editing config files, etc where that is the best way to do things, my introduction to computing was Classic Mac OS. As such my platonic ideal OS looks a lot like Classic Mac OS without its well-known weaknesses: practically nothing is hidden or obfuscated away from the user, the filesystem is laid out for humans before computers and is easily navigable by even non-technical users, GUI control panels are treated as canonical configuration rather than a loosely bolted-on layer, and extending and customizing the system is as simple as moving files in/out of designated directories (e.g. /System Folder/Extensions/).
It’s a vastly different mindset than is found on any *nix-based system, and as well as modern macOS works for me even it still doesn’t meet that standard.
Inversely, I've ran KDE on bleeding edge for three years now and have only ran into a handful of bugs, and nothing critical that required me to drop to a terminal to fix. The networking issue seems particularly specific and I have never seen this occur across any of my desktop or laptops.
Im on PopOS and I had one boot problem where I had to pop in a ubuntu flash drive to run boot repair on, but that was like 3 years ago. There are definitely issues that come up sometimes when I upgrade to a new kernel version but it mundane stuff like my printer wont scan duplex. But now AI just helps me fix that stuff I don't spend too much time on it.
There's definitely some rough edges still. I wasn't ever able to get CUPS to work with the specific model of Canon imageRunner printers we had in the office. I also never need to print, so I stopped trying after it wouldn't take a few test prints.
LLMs are great though. I had a physical RAM issue that resulted in a bad pacman upgrade, failing the mkinitcpio process and corrupting that kernel upgrade. I had never ran into this before and it was complicated by LUKS being enabled. Claude was able to get me the right steps to remount the LUKS drives while I was chrooted in on a live USB, from there I was able to reupgrade and all was well.
> yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity
While I'm not deeply familiar with Red Hat/Fedora - I'm curious if you know what happened here? What changed to trigger this behavior?
Looking at a few search results - looks like an upgrade to 44 likely exposed/introduced a bug in power management that result in the Ethernet being turned off, and the kernel mode unloaded?
I'm guessing the intention behind the change was to enable more power saving.
But that is certainly a valid concern with most Linux distros - ocationally an improvement (higher resolution, faster, better color depth console or driver) will mess with bootloader, x/Wayland etc.
Still driver yank isn't unheard of with windows upgrades either. With MacOS I'm just going to assume any os upgrade is likely to cause some issues - even when Apple owns both the hw and os.
that's really ignoring two big points. 1. windows and macs don't "just work" either... they have their fair share of pain points that you have to accept and/or workaround. 2. linux is different than windows and is different than macos in the sense that you've spent a long time learning the quirks of windows and macos and have the fixes mostly ready. once you learn the quirks of linux it's basically the same.
After the learning curve of linux desktop(well kde) it's basically the same as macos for me and for most people that would use it. most of the computing is done in the browser and that's basically the same experience in any os.
Anecdotally: I usually run Linux on my desktop and have a windows partition only for one game I play. When I booted into Windows, it didn't see either of my two wifi cards in the system. I ran a cable across the house, updated drivers, BIOS, and eventually saw in device manager > hidden devices that the OS thinks my card is unplugged.
It was there before.
In Linux it's there.
Next step is unseat/reseat the PCI device, check connections to the motherboard, and leave powered off for a few minutes. Hopefully windows will decide the device exists.
I ran into this too. It blew my mind that I could run Linux just fine but I couldn't even install Windows because it had no wifi driver and it wouldn't install without a network connection.
I tried putting the driver files on a USB stick but the Windows installer refused to recognize those.
The thing you describe with NetworkManager is worse on Windows. I am uncertain how many different user interfaces there are for networking in Windows, and many simple actions take at least 3 screens, and still doesn't fix the problem.
Every time my connected monitor wakes up from sleep it steals audio back from my internal laptop speakers, the only way to fix it is (with the help of a chatbot to write a script) to permanently turn off the monitor speakers.
All of the rough edges with Linux that are legitimately worse are not things that are the fault of Linux. Tools and games and video streaming services which are either not tested or deliberately designed so they cannot function on Linux.
Microsoft Windows is so bad that most consumers just throw away their old computers and buy new ones when Windows stops working. The more persistent ones will search through some forums for solution, or nowadays try to work through something with AI.
Goodwill now resells donated PCs with various linux distros pre-installed, probably to avoid paying for the M$ license. If one looks for a stripped down distro while the look maybe quite retro it tends to just work. I've been on antix linux on all my computers for over a decade and I'm far from a power user -- but a reinstall takes less than an hour and updates are either automatic or requested. Which is to say, M$ doesn't take over my appliance for hours every timeI turn it on because it is ancient hardware -- it just works.
If you try again, be less ambitious. Don't try to get KDE or Gnome going.
Do a minimal install. Add just enough packages to get X working.
Configure a simple window manager like openbox or dwm.
I uninstall the networking managers. I wrote a simple bash menu program. In one terminal I used that to launch wpa_supplicant for the current network. In another window, I run dhcp. I have a workspace just for that.
When I stay in a hotel, I need to set up a new wpa supplicant profile, and that takes a few minutes. It's klunky. But system upgrades pass by without me noticing.
It's like running an old car with carburettors and simple electrics. You learn the machine once, there's hardly anything to go wrong.
Yes, don't try to actually get any work done, install anything you care about, or use it in a way that improves your life at all. Just reorient your life around learning this clunky system and don't expect to get any actual benefit from it until you've spent years learning it.
This is the standard Linux pitch, followed by "why doesn't anyone use it!?"
That's why I use Linux Mint, even if some Linux guys might think less of me.
Switched from Windows 11. My work system is a Mac. I just love how the Linux gets out of the way, everything just works, UI much better and consistent than Windows.
And I'll probably keep receiving security fixes and app improvements in 10 years for my old Thinkpad.
I also like old carburetors and simple electronics, but we're in the vast, vast minority. Most people want a car they don't have to think about or understand, looks pretty, and will take it to a shop when something goes wrong.
It’s also possible for a system to both be a “carburetor type” while also being well-considered and elegant in design and function so it’s easy to tinker on if you want to, but doesn’t need that 99% of the time. I just don’t think that’s ever been a serious goal of any desktop-oriented Linux distro or DE. They all embrace the complexity and add to or multiply it.
From my ~25 years of using Gentoo Linux, I'd say that it's exactly what you describe in your first sentence. The complexity is there if you want it, but only if you want it.
Gentoo is quite a bit more work to get set up than other distros, but
* Once you get it set up, it just keeps on going
* If you're already fairly familiar with Linux system administration, the setup process isn't hard... it just involves a lot of waiting, unless you use the distro-provided precompiled packages
* There's really good documentation that walks you through the installation process and leaves you with a computer with a functioning bootloader and kernel, Internet access, and some pointers towards what you might want to install next
I agree about system design, but I think - especially in the context of your networking example - the complexity lives below the OS and not a case where it's a lack of effort.
Networking protocols, connections, error states, etc are inherently complex and require equally sophisticated handling that linux may not always do. Some software chooses not to handle at all and expose directly to the user - but others like KDE simply lack the millions of dev-hours of polish that Windows and Mac have.
Is it that simple though? There could be so many other reasons. Maybe the particular issue is related to a specific hardware or network configuration that the developers have never run into or can't reproduce.
Linux needs polish for sure, but given a finite amount of time, energy, and money the reasons are likely more complicated than "they don't care"
I’ve tried the minimal tiling WM thing several times. It’s not for me. Too many little QoL holes that require manual setup to fix and the disjointed patchwork of small utilities that don’t work with each other or share config conventions quickly becomes grating.
I spend a disproportionate amount of time tinkering with Linux desktops trying to make them act the way I like anyway, but the amount of tinkering is exponentially higher with a minimal WM setup. I can’t get any work done under them.
I also don’t really care to administer everything via the CLI and don’t find it a good use of my time to write Bash scripts for everything. If I’m going to do that I’d rather just write my own DE, because even if that’s a wildly larger task than writing a few scripts I’m going to get vastly more satisfaction out of it since I can make everything work exactly as I think it should.
To be clear - I agree with your statement that Linux is full of sharp edges that won't get fixed. I got abandoned by a series of desktop systems. Like you I had gone to and from the linux desktop but had found it unpolished. I was with Mac OS X for a while, and then a major upgrade broke my workflows. Finally I gave up on having a nice desktop. Once I had accepted that, I found a kind of contentment. It has been 15 years, I wouldn't go back now.
I don’t think I’ll ever give up on having nice things. I’m very firmly of the opinion that my computer should bend to me and do its absolute best to serve me and my needs. A machine that sporadically requires manual twiddling does not meet that requirement.
I've been in and around hobbyist computer topics for decades, and I'm still not 100% sure if this comment is straight serious or a really well executed humorous trolling. They'd read essentially the same, so IDK...
"Frustrated with how critical details are missing from the GUI, requiring you to learn console commands? Don't be so ambitious, stop using a GUI for these things at all and write your own CLI for them!"
No, I replied because I think cosmic_cheese should be more cynical. Linux is hard, and won't get better. The X-Windows clipboard design is awful, the wayland team made a decision not to improve on it. I replied to the frustrations of trying to create a daily driver.
I really can't tell if you mean "Explorer.exe is good enough and I never felt like it needed improvement" or "Oh, I can make anything I want to, with free tools? This is great! I'll make a file manager for my personal usage that's perfect for me."
The former. You use one DE, typeahead triggers full text search. You use another, no metadata like image width/height when selecting images. You use a third one, no folder thumbnails.
It's baffling that you can't see that what OP is getting at is that there is not in fact any 'file manager he likes'. 50 half baked solutions are just that - half baked solutions.
"Just learn hundreds of different tools, spend dozens of hours reading all their man pages, understand all their limitations, and pick the correct one before starting your task, all so you can accomplish something completely ancillary to the task you actually want done. Geez, it's not hard."
Unfortunately, just because you have choices that doesn't mean those choices are good.
I was forced to the file explorer on Windows, and the file explorer was good so I didn't mind. I was also forced to use MS Paint. And it was good for a long time, until they added layers. Now my primary use case of it (pasting an image and cropping it) doesn't work as well as it used to.
On Linux I don't even have that choice. There are choices, yes, but none of them do what I want anyway.
What truly drives me insane is that if you say "I just want what Windows does" people tell you that it's not Windows, it's "different(tm)." Then you ask why do Linux software sucks in comparison to Windows, and you get told "well, it's because Windows has $ to spend in R&D." So it's double-think. Developers are aware proprietary software spends tons of money they don't have in R&D, and yet they shy away from just copying the results because they don't want to be Windows.
I just want Windows, but with freedom. I don't want "different" if it's not going to be better.
> Then you ask why do Linux software sucks in comparison to Windows, and you get told "well, it's because Windows has $ to spend in R&D."
Are there actually people who claim this? Microsoft has plenty of money but the premise that they use it to improve the user experience seems contrary to evidence.
When something sucks on Linux with no alternatives it's usually because most people don't use the feature you want, e.g. because there is another way to do the same thing and more people are doing it that way, and then no one bothers to make thing you want because their desire to have that is already being satisfied by something else.
Of course, one of the choices you have is to build the thing you want yourself, which is why it works out that way. The chances of someone having done that go up the more people want it to exist. When the number is low, you have to decide if you want it enough for the person who makes it for everyone to be you. And it's fine if your answer is no, but now you know why that thing doesn't exist.
"Choice is bad because I might have opinions and then instead of the computer saying no I might switch to software that better suits my preferences. I just want a corporation to tell me what to want"
It’s more like, “I already have opinions and preferences and despite the various options available, none of them suit me well and so choosing any one results in a high degree of compromise, and so the next best thing is using a different one depending on the circumstance which brings its own compromises.”
Someone did though. Otherwise they wouldn't have created FilePilot. I have never had issues with any file manager in Linux. Explorer on the other hand is annoying as heck. Of course I am not picky with a file manager as I rarely use it on Linux anyway.
This machine is deliberately boring and well-supported. Higher end “prosumer” or “pseudo-workstation” motherboard (Asus ProArt X570 Creator), Ryzen 5950X, RX 9070 GPU. I actually swapped the GPU out for a better Linux experience (was originally running a 3080 Ti). Every distribution I’ve tried supports everything out of the box with no hoop-jumping.
> ...most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection.
What are those correct settings? Do you need something particularly special done for your Ethernet connection to function? Given that you were there because you were troubleshooting a NetworkManager failure, I'd also wonder if NetworkManager changed in a way that made that "add interface wizard" not work correctly anymore.
> ...the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky...
As you've discovered, NetworkManager is intermittently horrifically flaky. Every time I think about how it's the default for most Linux distros, I get so angry.
I used to enthusiastically use it for everything until the maintainers released a version that would always attempt to set the interface MTU to 0 after bringing it up, which the OS would clamp to something else... 12xx or 14xx, I can't remember. [0] After that clownshow, I dropped NetworkManager forever and used the "legacy" tools that had been working reliably for ages and continue to work reliably.
In the case of wired Ethernet interfaces, all that needs to be done for pretty much every home user is to bring the interface up and start a DHCP client like 'dhcpcd'. In the case of WiFi ones, you bring the interface up and start wpa_supplicant which can be managed with something like wpa_gui. Not-coincidentally, the Linux distro I use supports using both of these with its network configuration-and-activation tooling.
[0] For those who don't know what MTU is, know that the effect of this misconfiguration is that your network communications will intermittently stop dead for no clear reason at all. Things have gotten quite a bit better since then, and you can run mixed-MTU networks if you're careful about it... but back then, this immediately launched you into flaky network purgatory.
My network is extremely ordinary and doesn't need any special settings. PC is plugged into an unmanaged switch which is plugged into the router. Super standard stuff.
Specifically, on my machine interfaces created in KDE settings have a flag to prevent automatic DNS resolution toggled on, and this is not represented by a corresponding checkbox in the wizard or when editing the interface. As a result I could ping other devices on the network and external IPs like 8.8.8.8, but not browse the web or do anything else that requires DNS resolution. One has to use nmcli to toggle that flag off.
> ...interfaces created in KDE settings have a flag to prevent automatic DNS resolution toggled on...
By this, do you mean that interfaces created will get their IP addresses via DHCP, but will ignore DHCP-provided DNS & etc servers?
If so, given how incredibly insane that is to be a default, there's no way that the wizard is doing that. Given my past experience with NetworkManager, I expect NetworkManager made a batshit-crazy backwards-incompatible change and didn't bother to tell anyone. I know that that doesn't fix your problem, but maybe it will encourage you to find out how to stop using this fantastically complex network management software that you don't even need and is clearly maintained by a pack of ADHD-addled clowns.
EDIT: And no, I'm very aware that this does nothing but reinforce your point that some of the components that the major Linux distros are using are nothing but boxes of razor blades. I guess I'm just lucky that I came across Gentoo Linux a quarter-century ago.
Gnome's sharpest edge is that it has tried to simplify to the point that it doesn't have a UI for the thing I want to do. There might be an extension, and if I'm really lucky, it isn't broken and actually supports the current version.
I've been using it on my tablet, as I do find it to be a nice UI for the touchscreen, but I may switch to KDE because Gnome's onscreen keyboard is horrid, and difficult to replace.
It has plenty of them, especially for former power users pre-GNOME 3.0, starting with JavaScript for all extensions, famous for its early memory leaks, and the whole deal having to install several extensions to get the old behaviours back.
And then they decided the Windows registry is such a good idea, they should replicate it.
They're the next step in UI for computers. Telling codex to add a network interface is easier than a GUI which is easier than a terminal program which is easier than manually editing a config file. None of those are a crutch. They are increasingly useful tools.
Frankly I find terminal applications considerably easier than most GUIs for most purposes, but I agree that natural language is generally an easier interface layer than either, and that an interface layer to the functions of a computer in general seems to be LLMs' destiny as a technology
I’ve been using command lines for over 25 years now and the thing that rubs me the wrong way about them is that nobody can agree on conventions with regard to how a CLI utility should work, which limits the amount of knowledge that’s transferable between them. Each effectively has to be learned individually which gets old fast.
I mean I think there's about as much convention and overlap as there seems to be for GUIs at least, and with much more discoverable clarification to boot
The issue with manpages is that they need to be pulled up independent of the program, they’re overly verbose, and often don’t include practical usage examples or if they do, bury them under miles of flags I’ll never use.
Sometimes CLI utility help commands fill the gap, but often they’re too spartan or don’t even exist.
Sure, documentation could always be better. My first attempt is usually tab-completion in the shell, then I'll try --help or something, then I usually go to either the archwiki or web search, which increasingly these days is equivalent to asking a chatbot, or asking an llm in a TUI. I find I'm generally not getting past the --help part of that more than 10% of the time, and the web or wiki search solves my problem with one query 99.99% of the rest of the time, but I'm willing to believe this is aided by experience.
No amount of experience using GUIs stops me from about 40% of the time I don't already know how to do something having to find a youtube video that explains what arcane path I need to take through a menu to find a setting, and if the menus have changed I might have to find the part of the video that explains what I'm looking for, watch it, realize it's changed, and hope I can find a more recent one. This goes for both native and web applications, for mobile and desktop, for every operating system I've ever touched. Sometimes there's a text explanation I can find, usually via a web search or llm. Sometimes I can guess at where something might be (Tools > Preferences? Wait maybe it's settings? Is this one a view setting? Hamburger menu? O wait no that one's in account settings. Ah, that one's under a different specific tab because the org that makes the software considers it an integration and also they A/B tested that it's more discoverable in this other place so they moved it since the youtube video I saw about it). On a web browser it's helpful to be able to dig into the page via debug consoles, sometimes I can search for some string I know is the name of the setting, or a value that's probably currently set. I can do all that, if necessary, but I'm certainly not comfortable claiming it's "easier"
In no way is a stochastic system that has zero ability to understand anything "the next step in UI". That's a recipe for disaster and even greater frustration.
Yeah, the install was originally a GNOME one, but I added KDE after because it handles some things better. For example, GNOME tray item extensions will crash some tray-item-spawning programs running under WINE/Proton, which isn’t a problem under KDE.
I think GNOME gets some things more correct (it has a much better grip on design for instance), but I don’t agree with its strictly-minimalist philosophy that makes the macOS desktop look full-featured in comparison.
XFCE and Cinnamon are probably the closest to striking the right balance as far as I’m concerned (and are boring in a good way) but sadly they don’t get a fraction of the development resources that the big guys get.
This is a genuinely incomprehensible take to me. You damn well better learn to use the tool, or you will be obviated by those that do (at least, as long as your job depends on it). Linux or no Linux.
Also, you are now using the tool that is best suited to "use AI". You will hit those rough patches, and it's good to know how to work through them. But sometimes there is just no time for such bullshit, and you now have a tool at your disposal that can just sweep these problems away. It is not without its downsides, but this is a clear "dumping the baby out with the bathwater" scenario.
Your post has the same energy of the old codgers who won't "learn computers" and impotently swim against the tide. It's fine if you want to do that (you do you), but you are swimming in the wrong direction IMO.
(If you don't work in tech, the magnitude of my recommendations would soften towards you in particular, but the velocity would remain the same.)
What goes through my mind is some combination of "Holy shit, this technology is incredible." and "Holy shit, this technology is retarded." and "If I don't stay on top of this shit, I'm going to lose my fucking job.".
On the other side of the fence, the aversion to using the tool seems equally cultish, like not working on the Sabbath.
If it makes you feel any better, I don't think this tech is "AGI" and that it seems to have some fundamental limitations that make it perform worse than a 3-year-old can perform on many tasks. But it's foolish to avoid something that could cause you to be replaced by some idiot that can do untold damage with just a few prompts, all because you didn't (assuming you work in tech) want to stay on top of the tools available to you.
This is actually a great point. I've taken some esoteric issue with my Debian Linux install and gotten exactly the needed fix. Especially when the error is extremely misleading ("/dev/root: Can't open blockdev" was that I forgot to install the actual kernel image itself...) Distros could ship open-weight LLMs that sure, might take a minute to come up with the answer, but they could be preset with the privileges to actually execute the solution.
However, those only exist because real people talk about problems on forums. If we fully integrate an LLM into the desktop and nobody discusses the issues they run into anymore, will LLMs continue to be able to solve the problems?
Yes but we should not need an AI chatbot to solve problems which should be trivial for us to solve ourselves. Linux should just not have these issues, period.
OK, good luck with that attitude. Until the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop finally arrives, you can use the available technology to solve the problem in a practical manner.
-1 because why would someone who is annoyed with AI features in macOS migrate to Linux, where they would then be “forced” (in order to not waste their own time) to use agents to fix breaking OS-level functionality..
Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
Of course it works and is beautiful hardware and all that.
But don't fool yourself. You're subverted to Apple's rules the same as Microsoft users are to Windows.
I prefer to fight a little bit on an update on a unix system on something that is not working 100% to give up choices. When you use Windows, MacOS, Android you do not have choices. Choices are dictated from above, like it or not.
As for me every time I have to interact with something that is not BSD or Linux I suffer miserably.
We are trading usability & quality for freedom & privacy. We know that, but we're all so busy that we have to make that trade. I've used linux since 2000 for servers, I've used it (and still do sometimes) for workstations, but even 2026 linux workstations & laptops aren't at where macbooks were 15 years ago.
Yes, there is a whole moral discussion to be had, but as much as you win points for doing the better thing, the better things don't really pay bills.
The good news though is that we definitely won the server war. We can spin up VMs and install Linux without licences. We have access to software that works well, security updates, frequent releases, a massive ecosystem of free software, no advertising, very little to no licensing for software, and it works incredibly well. So much so, that we can't even imagine a world in which servers require licence keys or subscriptions or a marketplace account.
Imagine now, if laptops & workstations were as solved as servers are.
That's why we aren't there yet, because they're not.
It goes beyond that if you ask me. I think anybody in this discussion knows all these things, but ultimately they fall back to “…and my decision is the correct one.”
5000 people skip over an obvious flame bait thread. 1000 people read but don’t comment at all. 7 people who feel they’ve solved the problem of which laptop is best and want to tell everyone why they should switch to Linux/Mac or why Linux/Mac sucks post obvious comments about Mac hardware and nix freedom. But “the sentiment is rampant on hn” is the take away. The sentiment that is rampant on hn is that there is a sentiment rampant on hn.
Eh, I’d say there is a larger than standard proportion of stalwart know-it-alls here. Doesn’t mean your example is wrong. But man some people have everything figured out and still find a way to complain about it all.
> We are trading usability & quality for freedom & privacy.
Are we? Not sure what usability and quality improvement there are in an OS where you have to fight against its vendor's decision.
Most critics against Linux I read come from people who never took the time to choose perfectly supported hardware in the first place but just buy whatever bleeding edge stuff is available running on windows, then hope it will works. It is like criticizing Apple/macOS because it doesn't work well on an hackintosh really and is completely dishonest. I don't criticize windows because it doesn't work on the latest Macbook M8 ultra studio pro nor do I criticize iOS because it doesn't work on my Samsung Note tab 6 or macOS 27 because it doesn't work on a Microsoft Surface.
I haven't had any update nor hardware support issue in the last 15 years because I have chosen hardware based on Linux support compatibility before purchasing them.
I don't even get the "quality hardware" argument. The only hardware I interact with is my high quality mechanical keyboard, trackball, and color calibrated monitor. All are vastly superior to any Apple hardware that I would interact with.
> Apple laptops are good and all the other ones are bad.
Bad or not as good?
For many people not as good can be good enough.
For instance I am mostly working from home, and will never spend more than 6 hours straight without a pause nor do I work "on the road" so I never cared about having a +11h of battery life. I understand it can be very valuable in some circonstances but it has never been a thing for me and for many people using their laptop mostly at home. I wouldn't trade having a forced siri install or the shitty keyboard that used to come with macbook a few years ago for more battery life than I actually need.
> I haven't had any update nor hardware support issue in the last 15 years because I have chosen hardware based on Linux support compatibility before purchasing them.
You're unique! Also I hear what you're saying about the vast choice of laptops available with amazing Linux compatibility
I don't think so. Critics are usually more vocals than people who have no issues.
My grandmother used linux for years without issue in the late 90's, my ex inherited a computer from me 16 years ago and was still using Linux last I checked 7 years ago, having migrated from slackware to ubuntu on her own without being a particularly tech savy person. She had no wish to get back on windows as it just worked without getting in the way. My current wife migrated to linux without realizing it when the hard drive on her laptop died, she only figured it out when she realized icons of her office suite were different. Using an immutable distro has been painless for her so far in 3 years, same for my daughters, as update are done in the background and system boot simply to new image when started up. I am not even doing any maintenance, just checking once every few full moons that the auto update is still working (which is the case).
> Also I hear what you're saying about the vast choice of laptops available with amazing Linux compatibility
The irony is not lost when I consider this vast choice it is at least bigger than the choice of laptops[1] running macOS at any given time.
[1] currently 8 according to Apple's own comparison table separating model into line, then screen size and cpu.
Isn't the only difference that people using servers are expected to have deeper knowledge? As someone using Linux both on servers and on a desktop, I see little difference.
Apple doesn't even have a tiling window manager as far as I know.
They have one built in now and have had third party ones for over a decade. I used SizeUp to tile windows in Mac OS in 2013. Now the OS has it built in but I find Rectangle to be superior. And it’s free and much better than any window manager I’ve tried in any Linux Distro.
SizeUp isn't a tiling window manager as far as a youtube video showcasing it goes and neither is Rectangle. It's more like an alternative to the Windows aero snap thing.
I'm sorry but objectively macOS window management is wholly subpar compared to the options on Linux.
Rectangle is a literal hack on top that hopefully works when you need it. Rectangle is great, but Rectangle, Yabai and whatnot can only hope that the undocumented private APIs that macOS _allows_ them to use today don't mysteriously break tomorrow.
Meanwhile a Linux window manager actually does its full job unencumbered because it's a _real_ first class window manager and not a hack.
Yeah but the 1% can still accomplish whatever they want. It just may require a bit of code. No big deal if you’re in the 1%. And you get the added benefit of automatic security updates that don’t break critical system components like what happens from time to time in every Linux distro I’ve ever used over the last 20 years.
That simply isn’t true. You can disable whatever you want. You just may not be able to do it through the UI. I’ve customized my Mac to never phone home. It’s not hard if you know what you’re doing. It’s even easier if you don’t, and just ask Claude code to do it.
You can’t disable “whatever you want.” As the OP explains, in macOS 27 a “Siri AI” process stays running, always, doing who knows what, even if you turn everything off via the UI and CLI. If you know of a way to disable this, please post it because I’m sure many people would be interested in it.
As another example of what you can’t disable: I don’t wish to subscribe to Apple’s paid iCloud offerings. Yet there are several places in the UI both in macOS and iOS where there are non-removable ads for the service under certain conditions. For example, when your local storage fills up. Oh and now there’s a non-removable 20GB+ Apple LLM model now taking up space on my 256GB ssd. Thanks a lot Tim/John.
A large portion of the HN crowd woefully underrates this aspect of macOS. The types who would get pleasure tweaking their OS and understanding it intimately are overrepresented here, though props to them.
I don't care what people say; macOS is the only OS I've ever used that has never booted to a black/blue screen with relatively cryptic error after performing an upgrade. Not once ever. Windows today is of course abusive to users and shouldn't be used, and as much as I absolutely love Linux as a server OS and for VM appliances, I get no joy whatsoever trying to figure out why the DE stopped working after letting the OS update itself or debugging subpar rendering from the Wayland compositor or X11. (Linux people still tell me this isn't a problem in 2026 but, guess what, my Ubuntu VM hit a black screen a couple days ago after upgrading with no other changes made to the installation, so they're wrong) That and so much graphical Linux software is written with the attitude of "I'm a freak who thinks context menus shouldn't exist so fuck the user and fuck anyone who tells me I'm wrong", yet so many DEs integrate these apps anyway.
The worst thing that macOS has ever overtly done to me is slightly change the look of its interface over the years, which is incredibly minor compared to all the changes that Windows, Ubuntu, Gnome, and KDE have gone through in the last decade. Does it pull lame crap like phone home? Probably, but these days I assume that just about all software thinks it knows better than I and constantly pings cloud servers. MacOS is not really unique in this regard. I will switch to my own Linux if Apple goes down the road of "use our AI or else", but for now I don't really see the venom towards macOS to be justified when it's incredibly easy to prove that the alternatives are usually very poor.
Oh yeah, and the hardware is excellent. (except for the keyboards which need TPU dam covering them or else dust kills them after a couple years)
> macOS is the only OS I've ever used that has never booted to a black/blue screen with relatively cryptic error after performing an upgrade. Not once ever.
Happened to me years ago. No biggie, installed a backup and noticed I had somehow removed the most important directory with all my work files from the the time machine back up. Hardly Apple’s fault, though, but I got complacent with ”it just works”.
Since then I come to conclusion that the saying should go: ”It works - until it doesn’t”. If it os not the OS, it is myself who messes something up.
These days I almost solely use Linux. I have M1 Mini as a media centre connected to TV and I have to use Windows crap at work. Opening my Linux seems like a hig from an old friend in comparison. I might need to read docs and fight with drivers every now and then, but fuck it, I don’t care. Because this one is mine.
It's funny because I wrote my comment this morning and then an hour later my manager told me unprompted about how his work Macbook updated over the weekend and got stuck in a boot loop! I have a feeling the blame might actually be on some IT department configuration going haywire, but it could be Apple's fault for all I know. That was an amusing coincidence.
And yeah, "It works – until it doesn't" is probably the most accurate statement that can be made about all technology. My original comment also can make it seem like I'm taking a dump on Linux, but my gripe is more about Linux desktop environments. Linux absolutely can be a really stable OS, but I've only been able to truly reach that for myself by compiling my own kernel and composing my own desktop environment from barely-related packages. This is where I totally relate to your sense of "fuck it, I don't care because it's mine." Maybe someday I'll end up completely switching to my own Linux OS.
> I don't care what people say; macOS is the only OS I've ever used that has never booted to a black/blue screen with relatively cryptic error after performing an upgrade.
This happened to me once with a Mac upgrade!
And it’s still fewer times than something has happened to one of my Linux machines, by an order of magnitude.
There are little annoyances with Macs and occasional frustrating problems, but after using them side by side with other operating systems for years it’s what I choose for the daily driver.
Most complaints come from people who have become familiar with one OS for a decade and then get angry when they use something else and it’s not the same as their familiar thing. There isn’t much value in those comparisons.
It's things like this that make me imagine what kind of Linux desktop we could have if one of them had the kind of budget that goes towards Windows and macOS. The kernel itself is great and tons of money is effectively invested towards it and its ecosystem. In my humble opinion, it's the Linux DEs that sometimes get really close to being as equally awesome but never quite get there. MacOS is by no means what I consider a perfect OS, but it's reliable enough that I haven't had to think to myself "what if my computer stops working tomorrow because reasons." I know it happens to people, but it seems relatively rare in contrast to the alternatives. The one big exception might be the removal of Rosetta, but developers and consumers have had an abundance of time to migrate to Apple Silicon. In general, macOS respects me enough such that it isn't constantly trying to make me adapt to new ideas. You know something? I hate that I'm practically kissing the rear end of a gigantic corporation that does other things that are anti-consumer and anti-developer. I don't worship Apple. I think GrapheneOS is better than iOS. But I appreciate that their desktop OS causes me the least number of frustrations. And speaking of GrapheneOS, it essentially benefits from Google's budget towards AOSP, and Linux DEs don't have this advantage. Imagine if they did and we had a Linux DE that was as solid as GrapheneOS, and without the BS that comes with Android.
It's been ages since I've looked at System 76. They have quite an impressive lineup of products now! I'll definitely be checking them out the next time I want a personal computing device that's not tied to Microslop or Apple.
Ya wayland v x11. I ended up having to sideload xcfe+x11 just to do 1) video streaming work 2) kicad
one was a permissions/capability issue, but the other was straight up performance. As someone said above, an AI agent drilled down on both workstreams immediately, so the pivot wasnt too rough
Yeah I hate the term "sideload", but I'm guessing they meant it in the sense that they installed a separate DE within a distro designed around its original DE. Ideally, the DE that ships with a distro should be able to solve problems like video streaming and KiCAD with relative ease in the year 2026. Although I'd be curious as to why exactly that person decided they needed to change their setup in that way, I also can't say I'm entirely surprised that they would end up needing to do something like that.
The idea of a distro being "designed" around a particular DE has always annoyed me too. I'd hear people saying they wanted to try KDE so they wiped Ubuntu and installed Kubuntu instead and it's like, buddy you could have just... installed KDE. I know some specialized distros are really all about shipping a nicely-configured setup for their specific DE, but your old standbys like Debian, Redhat, Arch, Slackware, these are all infinitely flexible.
The idea, I think, is to provide a sense of GUI unity that Windows and Mac mostly provide. While it's nice in principle, the reality is you're going to install other software, and it's often going to use GUI libraries that don't perfectly match or match at all with your Linux DE. Personally, I've never found the need for a system to be designed so heavily around a DE. Like you said, it's entirely feasible and relatively straight forward to download Debian or whatever distribution and install a DE and chances are it will work ask expected. Well, until you perform an update/upgrade and boot to a black screen, but that's a different story. Once you've got your kernel and init system of choice, you can pretty much do anything you want. A premade DE is hardly even needed if you have a modest familiarity with how Linux works. The only downside is the added work from setting it up and debugging it, but people who use Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, MATE, LXDE, and so forth, end up doing that anyway eventually.
This is really the only reason I have a MacOS system around. The M4 Air feels like what I imagined a laptop could be 15 years ago. No fans to block, can grab it and carry it around almost like a tablet, works great as a thin client into a more powerful system over Moonlight, it's light enough that I don't even think about carrying it around in my backpack even when I'm also carrying my work laptop, and it was cheap enough that if anything happens to it I won't be too concerned.
Compared to the last XPS I had, it's substantially better for my use case, since I'll generally be remoting into systems anyway.
I find my M2 Macbook Pro so much less pleasant to use than my x220 thinkpad (running Debian) that I only use the Macbook for CPU-bound activities to which the x220 thinkpad is unequal.
I find the Apple offering's keyboard worse to type on, its enormous touchpad is a chore to engage with compared to the venerable Trackpoint, and the operating system feels contrived to make simple things difficult.
The x220 thinkpad is 14 years old now. And has a 500 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM. Perhaps in another 14 years Apple will be able to match it feature for feature.
One might well ask why I own Apple hardware at all. The answer is to buy entry into their walled garden as a developer.
That's defined as "the device has become a brick, cannot be recovered". It was mostly popularized by broken firmware updates which effectively destroyed the device, as it could no longer be salvaged.
You calling a borked package install in userspace almost bricked is telling about your technical capability.
And I agree that people that are basically technologically illiterate should not use Linux.
They could if someone administers it for them, but if nobody can help them - it's just not the right choice.
Can these 'technologically illiterate' use Windows?
I've spent the last 2 weeks trying to get Windows to work (hard crash at random times) when it ran flawlessly on Ubuntu.
The issue appears to have arisen because Windows decided to update my graphics drivers, so making them (for reasons AMD perhaps need to sort out) incompatible with Adrenaline. A million reboots later, using arcane programs to clear out hidden installs, hidden config, and trying to get details from a system that will readily tell you it recovered but gets shy about what caused it to crash .. eesh.
My experience is you need far more expertise to run Windows. Maybe if MS tested they're releases so it didn't break itself all the time ...
Your argument is that Linux has better GPU driver support than Windows? Might want to do a bit of research on that one. You don’t remember Linux flipping Nvidia the bird?
Edit: I also experienced the Nvidia driver update that broke a bunch of things on my (Fedora) server last week.
The internet has redefined "bricked" as meaning something stopped working but is still fixable, because they loved the word "bricked" and didn't give a shit that it had a meaning already.
For the vast majority of people, without much technical capability, “moderately messed up” is functionally equivalent to “bricked” as a purely technical slang term.
Yeah, but with Apple they can get help from the genius desk at the Apple store.
For both windows and Linux you'll have to find someone thats willing to help you, essentially. Usually a lot harder for those people. Especially with Linux ime, as even fewer places know enough to help you, even if they may be able to handle windows
I believe there is a whole market dedicated to give assistance to windows.
To use Linux on the desktop you first have to know about it for a start, so you are unlikely to end up with a linux OS without knowing anyone using it or an association/usergroup promoting it.
In vast parts of America, the "local PC shop" doesn't exist. It's BestBuy's GeekSquad (of dubious quality) or Apple's Genius Bar. There might be a repair shop somewhere, but most of the time, they just repair cracked screens.
Sure, but probably only because they can call you if something happens.
It's fine most of the time, so it's not a big deal... But if you're unwilling and they're technologically illiterate: they will not be able to recover. Apple has the genius help desk which will sort them out, with Linux... You're gonna have to find "someone", "somewhere".
Can be done for sure, however once again: I would not recommend
> Sure, but probably only because they can call you if something happens.
I had my parents on Linux for a hot second, and got tired of them calling me for help. So I switched them to Mac, and then I discovered they still call for help. At least with Linux I knew the system well.
Just my 0.02, but Linux is a smarter choice today than it ever was, because AI is extremely good at fixing things. I can fix most anything on my machines, but I still use AI, because it does it while I'm doing other stuff.
Mmh, reading your comment leaves me a little divided inside.
Are you unaware that they likely want to talk with you, and the technological issues are likely just the vehicle for this?
I suggest you just help them and try to savor the time you have with them. The time is likely a lot shorter then you expect. But of course, just a random bystanders perspective
> Are you unaware that they likely want to talk with you, and the technological issues are likely just the vehicle for this?
Not the person you're responding to, but: They may want to learn to communicate honestly. I would find the situation described deeply irritating. Enough to cut contact for a while, even.
Why? That term will also change due to common usage over time
We lost the battle over “literally “ a decade ago and I’m not going to spend my time fighting a bunch of people who would rather scroll through 5 second videos all day than pick up a book.
I think you might be betraying your own technical literacy gaps with that comment. In many Linux distros, your package manager can update your kernel and boot loader, from userspace. Yes plenty of safeguards exist to try to prevent really bad things from happening. Furthermore, brick has become slang for “doesn’t work”. I dislike the linguistic shift just as much as you but we can give the benefit of the doubt that the point is that everyday Linux uses still encounter massive problems like this with higher than normal frequency.
Which is the whole point, no? There would be more Linux everywhere if it didn’t occasionally break in ways that require special expertise to fix.
> i think you might be betraying your own technical literacy gaps with that comment. In many Linux distros, your package manager can update your kernel and boot loader, from userspace.
You think wrong.
I maintain multiple Linux system on the side an know about it well enough.
The Nvidia drivers however are not bios/uefi in case you didn't know. That's what firmware is.
Those can still be flashed from a root Linux booted into a graphical interface, but nonetheless were not the topic of discussion.
Aside from that - a borked kernel can still be easily recovered for most nowadays, as they usually keep the old versions around with a simple picker after an unsuccessful boot.
Still, I'm unable to grasp the point youre making in relation to what I said. I thought I was very explicitly recommending against people without any technological capability to use Linux... You seem to agree?
My impression of you is not something that can be right or wrong. My challenge to you was that a userspace program can brick a machine. I made that challenge because you predicated your ad hominem attack on the idea that a userspace package install couldn't brick a system: "You calling a borked package install in userspace almost bricked is telling about your technical capability." You haven't refuted it, because you can't. And the fact that you missed rebutting my challenge (claiming you didn't see the point) and argued past me with a different point that video card drivers are not the same as the primary bios tells me enough to form an impression.
Anyway.
This thread spawned off of a discussion about how people still use Apple because though Linux may be easier than it's ever been it's still hard for anybody to run a Linux desktop system without occasional downtime and repair when something breaks. That was the point of the comment you initially responded to.
But, you missed it; you responded to:
"and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt"
with:
"well um axually you don't know what bricked means and that's probably a sign that you're too dumb to use linux. people who are too dumb to use linux shouldn't use it".
Even though we agree on the point, I felt like your response wasn't fair or really even apropos. So I replied. To be crystal clear:
1. they did fix their problem, but it was not a fun time for them. I can empathize 1000% with that. Sometimes I just want to do something and Linux (and everything I sign up for when deploying it) itself gets in the way. When an apt update causes a boot failure, irrespective of whether it's a failing driver or a borked firmware, it's annoying and it gets in the way. It's not an issue of technical literacy. You still have to figure out the issue and fix it which costs time and attention that is so scarce these days.
2. "bricked" has evolved colloquially to refer to a spectrum of failure modes covering everything from "the firmware is toast" to "user-space didn't come up". never mind that the author used the term "almost bricked" to indicated they knew it wasn't hard bricked but intended to communicate that it also wasn't functional. your entire attack stems from you rashly misinterpreting the author's intent here. but even if the author had demonstrated clear technically illiteracy, there's a way for you to add commentary about the definition of bricked without the distraction of attacking the person's technical aptitude. I think everyone knows it's almost impossible to inadvertently hard-brick anything these days
All in all, you, me, and the comment you initially replied to do seem to share the same understanding: to operate linux you need to have a level of tolerance to deal with the occasional issues that come with it. And for many (even technical) people that's not the right balance. Everything else you introduced to the discussion detracted from that point.
Apparently it doesn't judging by the tons of articles published after every macOS update.
> just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
And I am on a run of 11 years of update (since Fedora 25 or 26) without a single issue. Anecdotal evidences are just that. Anecdotal. Some people will have issues, others won't. Putting yourself in a situation where you have less risk of having issues like not using hardware from a company whose drivers are not maintained in the mainline kernel source tree goes a long way.
Fedora updated my Nvidia drivers 3 days ago and it broke my voice assistant. Yeah I fixed it and it can’t happen again but that sort of thing only happens on Linux (and windows probably)
I repeat: Putting yourself in a situation where you have less risk of having issues like not using hardware from a company whose drivers are not maintained in the mainline kernel source tree goes a long way.
> but that sort of thing only happens on Linux (and windows probably)
Ironically the website from the company that is supposed to make software "that just works" do not let me put their page in english and force it back to spanish ignoring my choice. Hum.
What piddly little complaints. Do you want those of us who are linux engineers as a day job to post links to every single linux desktop issue that we can find? Because we have decades of those just sitting in our heads and they far, far outweigh the number of macos issues. I wonder if I googled "broken linux window server please help i cant see anything but a terminal" how many pages I would find. Also by whatever bonjour magic I have never had a problem connecting to a printer. We're here for anecdotes right?
You might not know this since your main language is spanish, but in America for the last 20 years every single linux engineering job gave me a macbook pro to work from. Big tech, small tech. And the one that didn't, they gave us chromebooks that everybody hated, but you weren't allowed to use apple there and don't you dare complain about the chromebooks because you knew they weren't going anywhere.
Me and my peers who don't live the richard stallman life expect a macbook pro as our work tool and wouldn't take a job somewhere that throws us a $1500 thinkpad or system76 or whatever to do our day jobs. We can have those at home.
> You might not know this since your main language is spanish, but in America for the last 20 years every single linux engineering job gave me a macbook pro to work from. Big tech, small tech. And the one that didn't, they gave us chromebooks that everybody hated.
My main language is not spanish either, and for the record spanish is used officially by 14% of the US population (and is estimated by 18% by other sources) so you are taking a lot of shortcuts to decide where I am and what is my main language.
> Me and my peers who don't live the richard stallman life expect a macbook pro and wouldn't take a job somewhere that throws us a $1500 thinkpad or system76 or whatever to do our day jobs. We can have those at home.
FWIW at the only job I got from a US tech company, we were given Dell laptops on which many dev installed linux. Company before that proposed Macs but many preferred linux running thinkpad due to the crappy experience at the time running docker on thermal throttling x86 macbooks.
So I smell a lot of uncalled for arrogance from your part. Personally I wouldn't expect a "work tool" that force install a local LLM model to fill up my hard drive and a has a barely usable desktop with stupid rounded corners acting weirdly.
Did you have anything relevant to add beyond crying about me assuming you might not be working out of America since you not only don't use Apples for engineering work, but also pointed out that your OS language is spanish? I could not care less what languages you speak, we're talking about corporate laptops.
The "work tools" had no twinkling of an installed LLM until this year. I've used Macbook pros at work for 15 years. I'm writing this on a $3500 macbook pro I bought myself and pissed about the LLM thing.
Completely irrelevant to the conversation until now.
And wow, shocking, you aren't working in American tech.
PS: Here in America, at real tech companies not the ones that let you do whatever you want to your corporate hardware, you wouldn't be allowed to install your own linux distro on a company laptop. You MIGHT be allowed to install their RHEL or something they've prepackaged with their own root accounts and spyware. You doing it yourself? That's an IT security violation straight to a fire just about everywhere that pays a real salary.
So instead of crying about me pointing out that you likely aren't American, maybe you should listen to the people in the field much longer than you who are much more experienced with the whole linux vs mac corporate thing. I will walk out the door if a USA tech company tries to hand me a dell. And now, what, I installed linux on it and have literally no IT support and have to fix my own laptop instead of donig my engineering job. I've was there 20 years ago, never again.
As someone who's first language is Spanish, that was completely unnecessary. You may ot know but in America Spanish is the 2nd most spoken language, with almost 20% of the population speaking it.
So in a US centric forum, most likely you'll find bilingual people that live in the US.
That's just not true. I updated MacOS on my work machine and Emacs stopped being able to read the filesystem. Any system breaks stuff on upgrade when that stuff isn't in the core testing path for the folks crafting the upgrade.
if you use distros which ship the latest _stable_ release of software
and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues, something I haven't exactly had with either Windows or Mac
like my current gaming setup from a year ago(roughly) was setup once, I had to fiddle some minor tweaks during setup and since then it "just works tm". No issues, not know how needed, nothing. (At least for the Games I play.) But also not Nvidea which has in recent years increasingly more QA issues across _all_ OSes and _all_ hardware including their supper expensive AI cards... But that is more a Nvidea then a Linux Problem, by now, was different in the past.
I've never used a computer that didn't have occasional hiccups. The Mac I have for work has lots of weird bugs. One is that if it has been using WI-FI and I plug-in my dock with an Ethernet cable attached, I lose internet access because MacOS can't gracefully handle the new interface becoming available.
I also find Apple's choice to just continually create 1G swap files until the system locks absolutely baffling.
> One is that if it has been using WI-FI and I plug-in my dock with an Ethernet cable attached, I lose internet access because MacOS can't gracefully handle the new interface becoming available.
And when your default route changes so will the TCP connection end-points. This is mostly an issue when you have a stateful session, like SSH, and less so with 'bursty' traffic like web surfing or e-mail.
By default wired connections are higher priority. I've been on Wifi with a MacBook and patched in with the Network Settings panel open and see the change, which is reflected in the output of "netstat -rn". Underneath the hood most of the macOS kernel is (Free)BSD/Unix.
Until we get SCTP multihoming popularized this will generally be an issue on any operating system. Though it would perhaps be nice to perhaps have a socket (TCP) API flag to tell the kernel "keep me on the initial interface as long as it exists" so sessions don't flip over.
I've never experienced this behavior with a Linux or Windows machine.
I'm not talking about sessions dropping. It has the symptoms of an IP conflict, absolutely no traffic can pass until I disable Wi-Fi. Any other laptop I have ever used would just switch, maybe drop an SSH session, but not this.
There's also the fact that I can never trust the clipboard to actually copy when I tell it to. Several of my co-workers have expressed the same issue, so it's not just me. Sometimes, no matter whether I use the context menu or ctrl+c, it just doesn't copy what I have highlighted and paste whatever the last thing I copied was instead.
I've been regularly plugging/unplugging my usb-c docking connected to ethernet while being on teams video call without issues on both linux and windows but ultimately it depends on the protocol. Web/https stuff is usually more forgiving thanks to sessions being maintained "externally" from the protocol itself. Copying files via sftp be a different experience I reckon because you usually use a different source ip address when you switch and need to initiate a new connection.
if it's just about connectivity then yes, that should be normal, a OS should only switch the default interface _iff_ the interface it switches to is up and ready.
Idk. about desktop Linux, but my phone does the (WLAN -> Mobile) switch just fine.
If it's about _not reconnecting_ (e.g. which for many apps might require some manual pause/resume of streamed data or similar), then things are more complex as you can't keep your IP, so it then depends on weather the application uses HTTP3/Quick or similar protocols in implementations which are designed to be able to freely roll over to different IP addresses.
>> > and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
is for how how to have a reliable acceptable Linux experience and
I have less issues with rare occasional hick ups then I had on Windows
and Mac in the past. But that is long ago. Through just looking at
all the AD/snooping issues, how often windows seem to have broken updates
etc. this is way nicer on Linux and seem to be still not worse on Linux
then Mac.
> > but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues
the example here with my gaming setup _doesn't_ require "have enough Linux know-how",
after the initial setup it so far just did works
The initial setup was just running a trivial install + ~2 simple to do and find through search, but should-be-unneeded initial tweaks (both Steam specific).
through I currently happen to only care about games both available on Steam and running on Linux without Linux specific manual setup/tweaks (like Silk Song, Nine Sols, Detroit Become Human (but all native 4k)). And it's all AMD and no "unusual" consumer hardware components.
> if you use distros which ship the latest _stable_ release of software
> and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
A Linux sysadmin teammate of mine has >10 years of running Linux servers, and chose to install Ubuntu on his work Dell laptop, and in the ~2 years he's been running that thing he's had regular (2-3/month) issues with audio during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meetings sessions. Both Bluetooth and wired headset connections.
At my last job (pre-COVID) I had a Linux workstation at my desk and a Windows laptop. At where I'm currently at we're hybrid and so we get laptops and I chose a MacBook because I knew I could both do my daily sysadmin chores through Terminal and also have access to 'business apps'.
I had very few issues using Pop OS on a Dell for all sorts of corporate stuff. It wasn't perfect - the sleep behaviour was particularly terrible - but it worked well with Teams and Google Meet. I later installed Fedora and that more or less fixed the sleep issue too.
I bounced around between Windows and Linux on my personal computers for the last 20 years. Generally I'd run Linux until something died or I needed Windows, and I'd return for a bit. I've been exclusively using Linux since 2019 or so. I don't think I'm going back.
These are web apps, they are unlikely to use anything other than what the browser/OS provide them. This is most likely due to lousy audio drivers, an issue plaguing desktop Linux since its very inception.
> issues with audio during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meetings sessions
I don't know about the app but it has been a solved problem on linux using the web browser early in 2020 when people started getting sent home due to the covid and remaining bugs were quickly ironed out.
Interestingly, Firefox handles all three like a champ. Even uses XDG portals so I can share a single window or just audio if I want. Chrome took ages to get support, and it's still hit & miss.
I have to agree, unfortunately. Macbooks have their issues, and give me violent tendencies like any piece of hardware every now and then, but when it comes to UX and reliability, they are far, far ahead of anything I tried, and I tried a lot of hardware.
If you look at MacOS with a critical eye, it's nearly impossible to say it has good UX. It's outdated and everything requires more clicks. Finder stuck 20 years ago. Hard to find settings. Poor screen real estate. Hard to read text with transparent everything.
Let's kill this myth that "Macs are more intuitive to use".
To each their own, I find the UX absolutely horrible and not intuitive, it's also poorly translated for non-english users (like "Finder", "iCloud Drive" or "Spotlight" not translated in the interface for example).
I have to agree on the hardware quality though but that doesn't do everything as I still have to use the OS
Translating terms that are basically proper names is not trivial, and Apple loves to give these catchy quasi-proper names for their features. Often it can be better to leave them untranslated.
They are translated on your average Linux distribution though, you won't see nautilus but "Files", gnome-software but "Software", Gnome snapshot but "Camera" (I've put the English term here but each term will be translated to your language). See https://apps.gnome.org and switch the language to see.
In comparison, both MacOS and Windows look more amateur with some leftovers not translated. (Like "Windows Update" on Windows for example)
Well yes it's translated by amateurs but as for the result, both KDE and Gnome are miles ahead in terms of translation quality compared to MacOS or Windows.
And soldered RAM and SSD, even battery replacement that with other computer is simple is a difficult task. Only USB-C ports, so you have always to carry a stupid adapter for normal things like connecting a USB stick or a network cable. ARM architecture so old software needs emulation to run, emulation that makes computer performance horrible.
Sure, Linux laptops are not "pretty", but I don't need a computer to be pretty, in fact I hope that someone starts to produce again laptops identical to old IBM thinkpads (not the insult to the brand that Lenovo is building) but with modern hardware, a computer that had every port you need on it, no adapter required, that you could have it fall from a ladder and not break, with removable battery, hard drive, with the trackpoint instead of those stupid trackpads, I want it even with a DVD burner fuck it. I don't care it to be small, I care it to be functional.
I don’t care about soldered SSD and RAM - just like nearly all other customers. It sucks yes, but I would rather have that then the hot, slow, short battery thinkpad (with a shitty display) that is my Linux box. Especially for the past few years where the m-series chips were dirt cheap.
Indeed. TBH if I was running a Google- or even OpenAI-scale company (3000+ devices) I'd probably invest into creating a useful Linux distribution and hardware configuration myself (at that scale, it could maybe start to make sense).
Red Hat had most employees running a custom corporate RHEL build or Fedora on Thinkpads prior to 2018 or so, and even then most employees moved to Mac as soon as they were allowed to do so.
I was a true Linux believer, and I still switched to a Mac because I needed things to just work. Poor battery life, awful HiDPI support, strange driver issues all contributed. Yes, I could fix them. I opened bugs and could talk to the engineers responsible to get things fixed ASAP. Even so, it was a second full time job keeping up with it.
Most big tech companies let you pick Mac, Linux, or Windows. Whatever you’ll be the most productive with. Whatever you prefer. Most devs (75%?) seem to pick Macs. To each their own though.
Google just announced Googlebooks, which deeply integrate with Android, even running Android apps from your phone, on your laptop. Both amd64 and arm64 architectures available.
Also don't forget calibrated screens, great speakers, long-life (you can use one for a 7-8 years without even trying), and durable keyboards which doesn't become smeared wear-fests which defaces itself within a single heavy development session.
I always run Linux (Debian primarily) on my desktops and servers with a zealot-ish dedication, but what Mac and macOS brings to the table as a portable machine is irreplaceable with anything else.
Even a top end ThinkPad with a well groomed Linux distribution can't come close, sorry.
It wasn't that long ago they had terrible keyboard lifespans which could be a death knell for the laptop, and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec. They've come far in recent years, and I certainly wouldn't be sad if it was my main machine yet I don't expect them to be an outlier forever.
In some dimension Apple (and any serious manufacturer) is always going to be ahead - and they certainly are in non-gaming portable CPU/GPU combos right now. Alas, they aren't ahead in many other dimensions; my Fedora X1 Carbon is my strong preference over my M4 macbook pro and a large part of that is the basic usability of the system and window manager (sway), which is something Apple will never match until we meaningfully switch interaction paradigms.
> It wasn't that long ago they had terrible keyboard lifespans which...
Yes, their butterfly switch keyboards were really bad. I skipped that generation. I own machines from 2006, 2014 and 2020.
> and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec...
Apple unfortunately does this sometimes, but interestingly just before changing CPU architectures (Power to Intel, Intel to ARM). I sometimes think whether it was semi-intentional. I don't blindly support them, however.
> that is the basic usability of the system and window manager (sway), which is something Apple will never match until we meaningfully switch interaction paradigms.
I'm way faster in my Debian + KDE system as well, but portables are always secondary machines for me, so Mac doesn't bother me much.
Also, I like running different operating systems and paradigms at the same time, so I can learn from all of them while developing some stuff for myself and others. However, as I said multiple times over the years, macOS is the "alternative" OS for me, not the primary one. Linux has that part for the last 20+ years.
I think most of the problems were down to Intel. They were consistently over promising and under delivering. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was what drove Apple to create the M series processors.
Mac build quality is nice indeed. And Nvidia sometimes doesn't play along, but that is a small price to pay for an everyday peace of mind.
My both parents use linux and are happy with it. If you mostly use just the browser and reading e-mails, I don't see any better system even for someone who is non-technical.
> but that is a small price to pay for an everyday peace of mind.
Running an AMD card on my Dekstop system. It's invisible as an Intel on-board graphics card, and this is a great thing.
Much greater than rebooting to a black screen because NVIDIA decided to not support your GPU anymore because it finished its economic life for the company, not you.
>If you mostly use just the browser and reading e-mails, I don't see any better system even for someone who is non-technical.
If thats all you do you might as well just use macos. Something comes up you can just send your parents to the apple store. Probably one of the last places on earth you can get a real life human in a real life building from a real life major company to sit down with you and walk you through your issue. They will do this for free, you only pay for an actual repair job, which you can also of course do there for a relatively fair price all things considered for oem quality work. Not sure where I would take any other laptop for repair. Do people even repair laptops as a business?
For software issues they have a real person - me, and for hardware ones they can be sent to ANY repair service. Just close to them there are like three vendors who do hardware work. But the thing is, for last 5 years or so I do not remember they actually had some issue with their box. Things just work and updates do not overhaul your system out of nowhere.
The major os updates on mac are entirely optional. They still do security releases for the other os's for a long time. This current mac I am on sonoma same as when I got it. That 2012 I kept on mojave. Its just the most polished unix os. The hardware is always set up to work perfectly with it. No driver support issues. Just works. Always works.
I've never been able to tell the difference between a cheap trackpad and whatever Apple uses, but I hear folks go on about it endlessly.
My guess? Most people don't care, but the discussions are driven by the few who do, because for them, it's a really big deal, and they'll pay accordingly. Similarly for "My code is unreadable unless it's on a 4k display at 220+ PPI" -- I'm sure it's true for them, but for me, a crappy FHD display I can get for $100 is great for coding.
I'm like this with Linux...I pay System76 a premium because I care about how they go about building their systems, both hardware and software. To normal folks, it seems like a crazy thing to pay a premium for, but for me, it's a great deal.
Very interesting point, and substantiated by the fact that every windows laptop user I see in the wild carried a mouse around with them. They do not care about this issue much, clearly.
I pulled out my old windows laptop to debug why my Linux machine is giving me issues, and the mouse was unusable, making clicking anything impossible. It was adding momentum, and any precise movement or click just couldn't be done because it wouldn't move with small touches, and added 'weight' to anything bigger.
Anyway, I was sure something was up, checked settings, and found a new feature akin to 'more accurate mouse'. I disabled it and my trackpad started working again. Everytime I have to use that PC I get angry about something unbearable windows thought was a good idea. Tbh my Linux has been driving me up the walls recently. I think I just don't like computers at all.
Wild guess is they have to reject palm input mostly because they make them too big. I don't even put my palm on my thinkpad trackpad so I don't even know if it has such functionnality as it isn't even needed.
Gesture is more an OS functionnality but I am not sure how a trackpad can be better or worse for scrolling or clicking. You slide 2 fingers, it scrolls right? you click (or rather tap these days), it clicks? right? Can a trackpad click "less" or even "scroll less"?
OK maybe some handle better wet fingers, that is maybe the weak point of my current trackpad.
> I am not sure how a trackpad can be better or worse for scrolling or clicking. You slide 2 fingers, it scrolls right? you click (or rather tap these days), it clicks?
I laughed. I have a work HP machine. The click is only available on the bottom half or third of the trackpad, with no visual indication of the area. It takes a strong push. It’s bad.
The scroll is shiite too.
When you get one that doesn’t work right, you really miss a good one.
> We're 30+ years into trackpads on laptops and they're still terrible on Windows machines. Make it make sense.
The old Mac trackpads were great. The new Mac trackpads where they increased the size, and made it solid-state feel terrible to use. Make it make sense.
Every time one of these threads comes up, the replies have the form “you’re not doing x right, or Linux would be fine.”
X is usually “pick hardware with good support in ToT kernel” or “use distribution Y” (where Y is somehow different in every post) or “do you really need feature Z that’s better on Mac? You’re making the wrong trade.”
To each their own but I’d rather not deal with XYZ and just get the thing that works.
p.s. I do hope they put a toggle back for Siri and their on device AI stuff
> To each their own but I’d rather not deal with XYZ and just get the thing that works.
Yes, but the point of the linked article is that this preference inevitably results in your device spying on you. To each their own indeed.
Edit: and of course I see your P.S. note. But that isn't really responsive. Most Linux users would point out (P.S.) that they'd like their hardware to be faster and lower power or their OS to be a little cleaner. But alas, you can't have everything.
That's the problem with these things. Personal preference plays a huge role. And these discussions bring so many people setting their preferences as THE TRUTH.
we should strive and push to keep having these a alternatives. Which the industry is trying to remove.
I rent a Linux GPU server for AI projects and the NVIDIA driver has broken four times without me doing anything to break it. Nothing like that happens on my Mac. I've run Linux for projects for well over a decade, so not a n00b issue.
They’re not light years ahead anymore, this is an old assumption.
There are some incredibly good PC laptops out there with the same kinds of features of MacBook Pros and more: long battery life, haptic trackpad, aluminum CNC build, long sleep battery life, etc. Check out Intel core series 3.
They never were light years ahead. Apple fans have always drastically overstated how good their hardware is. It's good, yes, but it's not nearly as good as their fans claim. And it never has been.
I used a macbook for work and the thing would constantly throw me popups, changing any setting was a nightmare, installing software required either a subscription or adding an aftermarket package manager, and the browser would inexplicably leave a frozen, uninteractable duplicate browser window anytime I fullscreened a google meet, which would persist regardless of trying to kill the process and sometimes even helpfully came back after a reboot (though rebooting did generally work)
This "just works" thing is propaganda. Computers never ever do that
Agree unfortunately. I hate apple, for the same reasons as everyone else, but I have both a MacBook and iPhone and can’t do much about it. It’s like politics a little, you can only choose the least bad, there is no good.
I have a Linux server, and use cloud Linux machines extensively, but at least the last time I checked, Linux desktop sucks. There are always memory management issues, doing a video call makes my fan sound like a jet taking off, not sleeping, put my laptop in my bag and it gets to hot to touch - that’s just off the top of my head, I’ve tried Linux laptops on multiple occasions and they suck.
I don't think "use distribution_name" can be a universal advice, the reality of Linux is that you need to research which particular distribution supports your particular hardware well enough. Or try several distributions until you find one that has the least issues.
That, or make hardware compromises and buy a laptop that provides official Linux support, which is likely to have a more Mac/Windows-like experience of things "just working".
> Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
I pulled the same update, and it was annoying but it came nowhere near bricking itself. The integrated graphics worked, it just disabled the Nvidia open-source driver for the GPU. Simply (re)installing it fixed it. Notably, just asking ChatGPT for the solution worked (after pasting the output of a few commands).
Tbh I don't think my MacBook air m2 is better than my Asus Vivobook (arm64). They're different (Vivobook is bigger) - but I'd say the OLED screen is much better than the M2 screen.
The apple touchpad is better - but all touchpads suck. Still miss old school IBM ThinkPad stick.
> Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of any other hardware.
> Build quality (aluminum)
This is such an ignorant take. Every other laptop has an Aluminum shell. Dell, HP, you name it. My Sony Vaio came with a metallic shell in the early 2000s. As a Macbook owner, I am still extremely worried about coffee spilling on my keyboard. A problem that was solved decades ago by every other manufacturer but not Apple. My touchID randomly stopped working in under 2 years of owning my laptop too and the hardware needs replacement of the entire logic board. So, tell me again, where is this "build quality" that you speak of?
Every OS is filled with showstoppers. And yes everyone is blind to their own OSs issues or quirks. You work around them and develop different workflows.
When I first tried macOS I hated it and had a long list of issues I could give. They are all still valid but it turns out they don’t actually stop you getting work done.
For people making a living on western software engineering salaries, why wouldn't (Apple) hardware be worth the price?
A lot of other crafts and jobs need way more expensive hardware. Software engineers "only" need a $1,000 - $3,000 laptop every 5 or so years. That's typically less than 0.5% of that 5 year's salary.
> why wouldn't (Apple) hardware be worth the price?
How about "not worth the cost" instead.
Not worth the cost of losing the freedom to run your own software and make your own choices.
Commodity laptops might be slower and less flashy, but if Linux goes in the wrong direction I can install FreeBSD or OpenBSD or my own vibe-coded OS or whatever.
Western society has for the last few decades surrendered principles for convenience, and the state of modern computing is a microcosm of the consequences. You're all consumers now, instead of users.
One thing Windows did right is keyboard based navigation. Most of the general public does not know or appreciate how close to productivity nirvana the alt key brings you.
Same is possible in KDE. Combined with hot corners, you can become "blazingly fast".
Once a colleague seeing me work looked at my screen, lifted his head and pointed to my colleague saying "Have you seen how this guy work, he's a maniac!".
Mastering the tool you have always brings speed and smoothness into your process, one step at a time.
Any app can has its extensive set of keyboard shortcuts, but when it comes to DE itself, it's not always the case.
Microsoft has Meta+ and Alt+ combinations dime a dozen, and it's consistent across versions. KDE has extensive programmability which allows you to design you own. Both allows you to pack so many features into a small number of keys and work across applications or in general without thinking.
A terminal? It appears. A window? You call it without thinking. Ran out of space, a new desktop is just an instinct...
I’m a Mac dude through and through but its shortcuts don’t hold a candle to windows alt shortcuts. In windows, alt shortcuts are progressively revealed to the user and the entire UI is operable without having to memorize a series of hand cramping shortcuts.
Unix certification requires things like case sensitive file systems, which MacOS can do, but doesn't so they had to supply a special configuration for certification.
It's just that mishmash of OSFMK (with BSD APIs of 1991 or so) with random additions of newer APIs does not necessarily make it a great Unix to work with in 2026
People really get hard up about it shipping with some older versions of some tools. But if you are really that much of a unix nerd then you'd also know that is solved in 5 mins with a brew one liner.
I am enough of a nerd to know that people will come with assumptions about libc based on Free/Net/OpenBSD and get burned because no, you can't fix the system libc with brew oneliner
If your work is so dependent on a certain libc version then congrats, macos is already a better thin client for connecting to a remote dev box host than windows out the box. You already have ssh and scp and rsync and tmux out of the box and the laptop is genuinely the best in the market from a hardware standpoint. I code like this. Computer can probably chug for 16 hours without hurting for a charger just running an ssh connection.
As for tmux, I know UNIX since 1993, went through Xenix, DG/UX, Solaris, NeXTSTEP before GNU/Linux started to take off, worked across Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, OS/X before GNU/Linux really took off.
To this day I don't care tmux exists, just open a couple of terminal windows.
If you are going to mention jobs across sessions, nohup does the job.
If I wanted 16 hours for just SSH, I would have went with X-series thinkpad already back in 2015 or so when it easily reached 26 hours without suspend in my friend's testing. As a thin client it also sucks, because keyboard, never figured if they fixed grounding of the chassis, the "let's make your doctor ask if you're suicidal" hard edges near wrists, and so on.
I find the "Just Works" part of MacOS to be disingenuous. I use old hardware. You could call me a pack rat but I dislike getting rid of old, working technology. Unless you're on the bleeding edge of Apple technology. MacOS in particular doesn't "just work" anymore. In fact it's downright hostile to doing mundane things.
I have an old Macbook Air that's no longer supported by the latest MacOS. Trying to do anything on it is like pulling teeth. The simple act of running a modernish web browser is a horrible experience of "This App is no longer supported".
On Windows a laptop from the mid 2000's is still entirely usable albeit a bit slow. Not so with MacOS. You 100% cannot run a single piece of modern software. You have to dig around for forks that specifically support older versions of MacOS and if you want to run a browser with Plugins, good eff'n luck! Now you're trying to find a fork of Chromium that supports Adblock, but also have to find and old version of Adblock which isn't hip to all the new invasive ad technology.
I've probably heard "this time is different" on the topic of PC laptops catching up to Macs a hundred times over the last decade, but it never is...
It's hard to rebuild trust after selling a computer (without a CD drive) without networking drivers and no indication of which wireless chipset it has, but including a CD with said drivers.
I will never buy/use DELL again. Even if the company completely reinvents itself, stops selling computers and just rebrands toasters, these combination of letters make me distrust anything they are physically printed on.
I'm not exaggerating, I had so many horrible experiences.
Do regular people care about these things or is this a hn thing?
I find a trackpad (even a Mac one) is absolutely infuriating to use compared to a decent mouse.
Battery life/screens/magsafe I'm plugged into a dock 99% of the time so it's irrelevant, but when forced to occasionally, the ergonomics of looking down at a single small 1x in screen is just terrible if doing it for hours and also makes my back feel horrible.
I might be weird but actively prefer the trackpad to keyboard and mouse as I can let my fingers rest on the keyboard at all times and use the thumb when needed to touch the excellent trackpad. That’s better than removing the whole hand to grab the mouse just to click something.
My home setup has both a trackpad and mouse (and a separate keyboard). I like them both. In practice I use 65% mouse and 35% trackpad I think. Trackpad is great for horizontal (or 2d) scrolling and gestures. Mouse has better ergonomics for accurate pointing, and is more natural in some apps (eg KiCAD).
I agree. Trackpads also come with gesture support for things like switching between windows which I found difficult to live without. Unfortunately it's not very ergonomic to use a laptop with it's trackpad when you're using multiple screens.
Aluminium is not build quality. It makes lying stuff inside cheap. And feels horrible on skin contact.
The good ThinkPads with Magnesium feel much better (both for hand and lap) and are lighter. And the expensive and complicated build allows maintenance (replacing a keyboard is a bless on the X13). Lenovo is just stupid and also allows to purchase low quality screens, low quality frames and even a Windows. A thing that Apple never allows, you cannot purchase a bad configuration.
The MBAs at Apple figured out much earlier, that a rigid metal frame is cheap and gives the impression of quality.
Aside from that?
Customers are guilty, wanting a shiny and quick solution. And governments and companies by following ultra rigid and outright stupid purchasing guide (ISO craziness and “we can drop Windows, we invested another 300.000 in a Windows only Application).
YMMV. I never had any issues holding a mac laptop. I know people think they are sharp but I genuinely struggle to replicate this when it comes up. As I am typing this comment the laptop is resting on my chest with the entire weight of either hand resting on the sharp side edge of this mac. When I type I move my right arm so that the soft fleshy part under the wrist is now resting with full weight on the sharp edge of the mac. No pain or any discomfort doing this. Currently pressing down as hard as I can on that edge just so see. Again, no clue what people are doing to be in discomfort here. Lead hands? Skin condition? Not sure.
I haven't abused this m series mac as much. But my old original aluminum unibody from 2012, that thing lasted about 12 years until water damage took it out. It fell to the floor on every corner multiple times. None are perfectly round anymore due to the force of the impacts. Never shattered the screen or affected anything with the computer.
I have a friend who ran over his with his f150. That did end up putting some cracks into the screen, but it still worked and he still used it in that state for a couple years at least.
> Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of [hardware that runs Linux]
There was a discussion on this forum just a few days ago wondering why Apple is so hostile to open source support on its devices. And consensus here was that, no, it clearly wasn't due to competetive pressure.
But clearly it is. Because to many consumers, if you have to run MacOS to get an M6, you'll run MacOS instead of Linux. And that makes enshittifying MacOS as a revenue center very tempting.
> Also the OS mostly “just works”
Article is literally about the OS not working as desired, though.
It's true - every current cockup in our custom production system comes from Apple-using developers.
All of our Linux stuff is rock solid and is what we actually use to communicate with our satellites. We will explicitly avoid Microsoft and Apple here.
I'm in the same boat; been using linux for the last 15 years. Had to get a mac for work this year due to their logging software not being available on linux.
The laptop quality is great; great sound, battery lasts forever compared to mine (framework). Userspace tools and UI is terrible and have no control over but the hardware and the software integration is top notch. (I live in the terminal, and have nix-darwin to bring my existing setup to mac so it's not jarring most of the time)
Won't look back when I can transition back to linux full time; I'll be so happy. But I can see why people go with apple products. I really hope that ARM laptops become a regular thing.
> for some odd reason though, there's not many rabid windows fans.
Windows users are the ones who don't want to think about the OS at all. They want to get something else done and have the OS get in their way as little as possible. Linux fans want to dig deep into their OS and play with its internals; Mac fans want the OS to be an experience: trendy, sleek, reassuring. The kind of people who like it when the AI tells them "you're absolutely right!". Windows users generally understand that Windows is awful; the worst operating system, in fact, except for all the other ones.
> On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads.
I've been using Linux since the a.out days and MacOS X since the PowerPC days, and I find MacOS less of an ordeal for day-to-day tasks as my terminal/workstation. I sysadmin Linux (and previously also Solaris and IRIX) servers for a living. It's been several years since I had to daily drive a Windows machine (though I've heard PowerShell and WSL2 are pretty good).
I'm not sure what "ordeal" you are referring to. I'm mostly in Terminals SSHing places, so perhaps my work use cases are not 'advanced' enough to bump into them? (I also use macOS for my personal systems.)
Ubuntu have had a go at devaluing their distro with ads too (a couple of times to my recollection). It would be interesting to see if they got any increase in revenue from it.
Firefox added ads to the browser homepage - maybe now the money-grabbing lawyer who was in charge finished vampirically squeezing it for every cent they could make, perhaps we'll move past that nonsense.
> And ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased.
I’ve used Apple for my daily driver for years and I could not figure out what this was referring to. What ads? The only thing I can think of is if you open the App Store app and see a promo image for some apps to check out?
Yeah linux is awesome!
…
But for me personally after spelunking distros… getting past the immense learning curve… again and again and again… settling , tweaking with stability, getting past foundational philosophical approaches, tweaking some more… and some more and some more…
Finally getting somewhere and then… only then after starting to get to a place where i’m feeling some semblance of holy shit this is gonna work!?! Only to sit down and discover that Copy/Paste is this fucking dramatic cluster fuck… that yeah I could go through and I’m sure people have work arounds and it could arguably be solvable… or maybe I just need to get over my muscle memory yeah i’m the problem…
Or… I can just build a hackintosh… and would you look at that, even a janky hack that came together in literally two hours just fucking works…and I didnt have to spend six month of my life for it, and omg I can copy and paste across every application with the same key binding that I never had to tweak…
So yeah, I love linux but fucking shit if it aint ridiculous on some pretty fundamental issues that (looking at my watch) were solved forty years ago!
Because the Linux kernel is only usable for regular Joe and Janes, when hidden away underneath a Java based userspace (Android), a Web based userspace (ChromeOS and WebOS), or hidden in consumer electronics firmware (DVD and Bluray players, washing machines, ...)
Regular Joe and Jane, don't care about UNIX experience, want a ready to use computer they can buy down at the local PC store on the shopping mall, being able to share stuff with the neighbours, which also don't have any clue over technology, and so on.
Also when it breaks down, and they don't have a nephew to call in to repair their computer, it should be easily repaired at the same PC store, which usually has employees that only care about Windows or macOS, and do the bare minimum to revive the system, while charging a good deal per hour.
Ah, and for all the mess Apple and Microsoft pull with their desktop programming frameworks, I lost count what is now the full stack framework for doing desktop applications on GNOME, KDE, XFCE, or whatever happens to be the distribution that was taken out of Distrowatch.
Maybe if *nix devs and community actually prioritized putting together cohesive and consistenr systems with usability as a priority these garbage OSes wouldn’t have a market.
Unfortunately, there is too much friction for the average person who just wants to get things done instead of tinker for every specific use case they have.
Thus, it’s just less painful to put up with the hostile ads and spying.
By way of example, Debian has a stable branch which receives only security fixes, and even then, only if you run the update scripts. It will receive security updates for 5 years, and after that, will still be completely usable, provided you don't want new versions of software, or are willing to put in the work to compile them yourself.
Depends on the distro really. Linux (the kernel) doesn't have or require such a concept, but it's quite possible to build a linux-based system whose surrounding operating system is designed to work this way. My Meta Quest 3 is one such example. Linux kernel, but Horizon OS only allows updates to be postponed. It'll automatically install them and in one case soft-bricked itself, forcing me to recover manually. (Great job, Meta.)
This flexibility makes it difficult to make broad sweeping statements about the thing. Certainly however, it's impressive to log into a linux server and see an uptime measured in years. (Impressively horrifying, depending on your security posture, but impressive nonetheless.)
macOS has been on a downward trend since Apple started pushing "Services", basically iCloud. Now it's as bad as Windows when I last used Windows.
It's not just privacy violations. Those are the tip of the iceberg. I used to open the Activity Monitor and see a couple pages of processes. Now it's in the hundreds.
It's stuff that was badly done even before AI. The industry has been drunk on SaaS for way too long, and with SaaS comes the junk/slop and the privacy violations.
I've been doing my part and cancelling all my subscriptions apart from power, water, internet and garbage.
I won't disagree that MacOS has been getting worse, but Windows is even worse than you remember it. It's clearly a race to the bottom, but Windows 11 is full of ads, and you can't even search the Start menu for your installed programs anymore. MacOS hasn't gotten that bad yet, as frustrating as the new "Apps" menu is.
I switched my desktop to Ubuntu about a year ago, and while it's not 100% free of trouble, I still can't imagine running Windows 11 again. My MBP still runs MacOS and I haven't been pushed far enough to want to try installing a Linux distro on it.
I don’t like Apple’s services push either, nor do I like the ads that have worked their way into the App Store, News, and Maps.
That said, I recently bought a Windows laptop (which was wiped to run Linux day 1). Before I installed Linux I had one task I needed Windows for. To create a local account and not connect it to the internet, I had to lookup a keyboard shortcut to show a terminal, lookup a command to run the setup in a different mode for IT departments, then run through setup again to make my local account. Once in the OS, because I wasn’t on the network, 90% of the start menu was full of placeholder icons that needed the internet to download the actual icon… presumably a bunch of cloud services (ads). Then there were basics, like trackpad performance… it was unusable, I had to get a mouse to move around without pain. Once Linux was installed, the trackpad worked great, maybe even better than macOS, it’s close, just a matter of preference.
Compare that to macOS, which still lets you make a local account without jumping through hoops, runs fine without iCloud, and has all local apps that won’t leave you with a bunch of placeholders. The basic hardware, like the trackpad, also works well out of the box.
macOS and Apple aren’t perfect, but are still miles ahead of Windows, imo.
Linux isn’t perfect either. Initial hardware support was very hit and miss depending on the distro. Things I’d consider basic functionality required plugins that I had to hunt for. Other annoying out-of-the-box defaults required plugins + custom scripts to resolve. All of this can be very frustrating. Most people don’t want to tinker this much.
No system is perfect, it’s just a question of which tradeoffs a person is willing to make.
As a Mac user and in general an Apple user, it's up to the balance between how much are you willing to take as a user from a bullshit perspective and the things you find good and useful from the device. Unfortunately, even for Apple devices, the balance is starting to shift towards the bad side. The problem is that there is no real alternative. For a laptop/pc, you might say whatever Linux distro, but let's be honest, for the general population there is no real alternative.
There's a huge amount of people who need nothing but, basically, a chromebook. A Linux laptop works great for that.
My wife gave up her Dell Windows laptop because the performance was terrible. I installed kubuntu and started using it, and then she immediately reclaimed it because all she ever needs is a browser and Linux vastly improved the performance. ("Well, it is my laptop...") She knows nothing about Linux, and the only Linux-specific question she ever had was how to recover when it sometimes doesn't wake up from sleep. Overall, much less frustration than Windows.
I was using Windows on my personal-but-for-work laptop; it got to the point where I hated it too much so tried Linux. Most stuff was great (even Teams was 90% fine!) but I couldn’t function professionally without installed versions of Office, and I couldn’t find an acceptable workaround.
I then switched back to MacOS and am mostly happy hanging on to Sequoia… but I’m dreading the point at which (for some reason) Apple make it unavoidable to upgrade.
> I then switched back to MacOS and am mostly happy hanging on to Sequoia… but I’m dreading the point at which (for some reason) Apple make it unavoidable to upgrade.
MacOS 27 is a lot less shit than 26, thankfully. I upgraded from 15 to 27 directly (on a M-series Mac).
IIRC in Linux you can run the windows version of office via wine or one of the successor/forks. Not sure if AD integration works nicely. And maybe it is just a group policy that somehow blocks it. But running the software should be possible these days.
This is the billion dollar question for corps though. Windows and MacOS are first class citizens of the corporate IT universe and all the weirdness of corporate IT works. MDM, identity/auth, Office, LOB apps, video, document signing, data labeling, everything.
Linux has taken huge, heroic strides, and has caught up to about 2005. Corporate IT simply will not sanction Linux desktops unless they are provably as well versed in the entire ecosystem as Win/Mac, barring a "political" decision made at the top to make it happen.
To change this would require a profoundly deep, expensive, and continuing investment in all aspects of the 'Modern Work' experience, plus genuine commitment from Microsoft to make it happen (which would likely require lawsuits and enforcement).
The situation today is that a few orgs are playing catchup on some features, but that will never be enough to match a platform that has been dedicated to corporate life for 40+ years, and from a company infamous for extending their advantages to extinguish the competition.
AFAIK, Wine/equivalent only works for older versions (up to 2016?) - newer versions +/- AD require a VM of some variety. (This was originally where I noped out and switched to MacOS instead.)
I was going to add the same sentiment with the addendum that normal people seem to find AI really useful, and long for Siri to be a more useful companion. Apple makes a compelling argument of an agent with frontier level smarts, access to your Apple stuff like iMessage, Reminder and Mail, and privacy (which I'm not here to debate how they're handling). Normal people like it, and Siri getting better is an advantage.
Everybody now knows M$ or Google are evil. The weird part is that Apple still seems to escape the same judgement. But they're no different. They're exactly like all the others.
They seem quite distinct to me. Microsoft is focussed on selling to corporations and OEM’s. Google is selling people’s attention to advertisers. Apple is selling premium hardware directly to consumers.
Removing ads from Windows is still much easier than making sure Linux works on a machine that is not Linux-certified (which, for me, is usually the case, as I have particular hardware preferences), and getting software I need to work. I've used Linux for work for a long time, but I'm still sticking to Windows at home. All else being equal I would greatly prefer Linux, but with the current gap (for my purposes) convenience still trumps ideology.
Well the example given in the article, for example, will not be noticed by just about anyone, and most of those that do notice don't care. Myself included - I already use iCloud, some extra analytics aren't going to kill me. Maybe one day we'll switch away, but I'm doing a lot less tech support now that the whole household is on Apple.
I'm a lunix engineer, probably 25+ years of lunix now (I started on bsd, thats why I say lunix), I've worked on macbook pros for the last 15 years. I had to reinstall macos for the FIRST TIME ever this year because their current version Tahoe is absolute trash that slowed down my M1 Max so my much I finally gave up and wiped it.
I also won't go near an x86 processor ever again after using the mX/arm procs.
We're paying for the hardware. The 100x better screens, speakers, battery life, the apps on macos blow linux apps away even if all of them, even the most simple apps, cost $20+.
But with that said Apple has also priced me out of buying another MBP for a long time with how expensive their 64gb+ versions are. My m1 max was $3500 and I can't believe I paid that, but here I am 7 years later still using it and it cranks. I'd have replaced 3 x86 laptops by now.
Oh, and I had the entire laptop replaced for $99 when its battery got bad and the screen cracked last year thanks to applecare, though that did require me paying for applecare at $99/yr each year. But that still doenst add up to another $3500 laptop. I just drove to the apple store dropped it off and picked it up a week later.
Yes, an anti-AI mood had entered the mainstream (anti-data center in particular), but I don’t think people will connect this to that.
For most people, this Apple Intelligence change isn’t a ‘really hostile’ move. They keep the default settings. They have disk space, because most people don’t use terabytes of space, and Macs come with, historically speaking, tons of storage now.
They will upgrade, and if they notice at all, it will be because ‘Siri works way better now’ (and all people who use Siri, whether here or in the general population, complained about Siri not understanding anything complex and seemingly not knowing anything much of anything before). This is probably, on the whole, going to be good for Apple’s reputation.
Windows caused me similar dismay when I was forced to use it at work (2022-25), but macOS - while far from perfect - has been more than fine for my purposes for the last 20 years. I like linux and can choose to use it on my superior apple hardware. Not a fanboi, just a pragmatist.
It’s the standard enshittification playbook. Get a large market share with a good product, then you can safely degrade it since your users are too reliant on the ecosystem to conveniently switch.
When I'm at home I can afford to waste an hour to debug audio which inexplicably stopped working (LLMs help with it a lot). When I take a laptop with me somewhere, I probably can't afford that, hence a macbook.
Yes, the slow enshittification and the increasingly obnoxious push for services and recurring revenue on MacOS is worrying, but it's also extremely reliable in a way that Linux simply isn't. I love Fedora KDE for freeing me from Microsoft, but there's a new issue every month - usually minor, but sometimes not. As of last month I had to restart plasma-shell multiple times a day because the desktop window would become non-responsive when CPU was under heavy load.
Helps that macbooks have excellent hardware and battery life, too. I just wish users weren't increasingly treated like cattle to be milked.
This is why I sold my macbook and switched back to Linux. I don't want your stupid cloud/ai services. If I want to rm -rf / then the system better do that.
This comes from an ardent Apple/macOS/iOS hater. Yes, I know I am using a very strong word. The short version is: when it comes to laptop hardware w.r.t price nothing comes even remotely close. Like, literally none.
Price as well? Yes. When I bought my first MacBook Air in ~2011-12 I was shocked to see what I got for ~57K INR (no, I am not converting it to USD) I would not have gotten from any other OEM even for fricking 120-130K INR (I had the choice here to instead say 1.2-1.3L :D). And that hasn't changed more or less.
But their OSs are pathetic, their software (even other than the OS part) are downright disgusting. But they sort of have a great personal computing hardware monopoly. Because no one else bothers to make it. For whatever reason.
They make it increasingly hard to make Linux on this. Really really hard.
What else sucks? Repair and repair cost. You are literally using a costly (bank-broken-level) repair affair ticking time-bomb in your backpacks - there is no two way about it.
And people who are going to say, like every time, "but how many times has your Apple device broken down", or even "but why won't you buy a new one after 3-4 years", or something even more stupid like "wait.. so your AirPod stopped working after 3 years.. you wanted it to last for 30 years?", please go and put the head back into the warm sand where it safely was. Anyone saying, "but they give you repair kits", please f-- off!
tl;dr: it's not the right way to buy personal computing hardware, but the the closest right way is a decade behind or at best many years.
I can't speak for OP but there can be many reasons. For example, I'm using a Macbook Air for development purposes, it's essentially dumb compilation/notarization machine. I don't use it for anything else because I find the user interface infuriating and can't get around it (which is weird because I used to be a Mac developer but IMHO the UI has gotten much less practical).
Fanboys, including management, push macs down our throats and there's little you can do when apple fanboys are also decision makers, since they don't listen to reason.
Author claims the system setting "Privacy & Security > Apple Intelligence Report > Report Duration" with its 3 options [Off | 15 minutes | 7 days] sends that data to Apple with that frequency. This is wrong - this is a transparency report so that you as a user can see everything that is getting sent to Apple as a part of Apple Intelligence. Nothing additionally is getting sent to apple if you switch this away from "Off".
It's placed right next to a similar report for the user to see which apps generally connect to the internet and to which domains.
Basically, the main point of the article, "I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data" is not true.
that refers to a post from 2025 that he links to. this is clear from the first sentence of the article. I suspect maybe you didn't actually read the article and spent more time writing this erroneous comment than you might have reading the article.
This is literally the main point of the article:
"The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025, I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off."
Disappointing that we have multiple 10-deep reply chains pearl-clutching Apple's disrespect for the user, and no one actually bothered to verify the premise of the article. They just want to be mad.
When I updated, I had to actively sign up for new Siri and even make space for it. Until update, my phone had the "old" Siri. Not sure what the issue is
I don't have a solution, but on this topic I let Fable write a browser extension I called "Nee, krijg de tering". It's "No, fuck off" in English, but the Dutch feels more visceral for me. It's really rough, but it tries to find these "Maybe later", "No, thank you" etc. buttons and replace the No button.. I guess it's kind of self-explanatory. Does not really do anything, but it is cathartic (and also messes with a lot of UIs to the point where unfortunately the blocklist of domains this should not be used on is growing a lot :'( ).
I feel this pattern is really abusive. Like I am offering to slap you in the face, giving you two answer options: Yes and "Maybe later/no, thank you". As though you have any obligation to be forced to answer this question again at some late time, or to be very polite while you refuse to be slapped in the face. The correct answer is obviously "No, fuck off".
Sensible. Add in a 'Nee, flikker op met je kutcookies' button for cookie consent banners, and you're golden.
This 'maybe later' dark pattern seems to have gained so much traction that UX folk just use it because everyone uses it. There is probably some handwavy reason for it that amounts to not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive, but it just ends up being another grain of sand on the micro-annoyance pile of today's tech.
Consent-O-Matic handles those kutcookies for me, but an interesting feature would be to use these fancy new "decision models" to determine the correct explitive to use in the No,-button text based on (the context of the element on) the current page.
> not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive
In their refusal, while (accidental) acceptance is always definitive...
EDIT: In another thread this is called the ratchet of consent. Apt.
Dutch is fairly unique in how it uses diseases as expletives, whereas most other languages use body parts or excrement. TB even has the honour of having two expletives named after it (tering and pleuris).
Or the EU with their online chat control. First round they couldn’t get a majority. Then, they sneakily turned it around so people had to vote to NOT want it. The day they did the second vote, many were on holiday and thus it passed.
I have this one notification asking me if I want to enable the Personal focus when I’m at home. I don’t want my iPhone to care if I’m at home or not, so the past two years whenever it pops up I click Later.
Not sure about the focus pop up but most/all of Apple’s other nags (like set up Siri, try Apple Music and the like) go away permanently if you go to the settings app and click “later” from there (as opposed to the button in the pop up which has the exact same label).
Google Play Store has a notification to enable notifications. You didn't read that wrong. It shows a badge and everything. I said no for years except that last time. Now I can't find how to turn it off again.
Can’t you just disable notifications for the Google Play Store app? Maybe it’s because I’m on GrapheneOS, but I can just enable/disable notifications like any other app.
> It's always "maybe later" and never "no seriously, I don't want this, go away"
No? When I'm asked about Apple Pay on an iPhone, it says "Maybe later". In the Settings it has reminder, and if I go in and say "No" it never pops up ever again (maybe on a iOS major version upgrade?).
Generally with Apple it's one "Maybe later" with a reminder flag set someplace, and then that's it.
It's slowly getting worse. For instance, the update nag for Pages and Numbers Applications towards their newer subscription-capable equivalents can't be disabled in the MacOS UI. Selecting "Not Now" still results in the nag appearing every. single. day.
My favorite one on iPhone is the Apple Health app. Marginally useful to track some trends, so I was using it occasionally. Every 2 weeks it will nag you to "Make sure the Health features on your iPhone and Apple Watch are set up the way you want them" with a banner that takes up 1/3 of the screen. There's not even a "maybe later". No matter what you do, it comes back every 2 weeks. Sure, I can "just" close it. After 5 years, I've closed this stupid nag close to 150 times.
This hostile behavior has unfortunately grown over the years.
Notice how often you cannot really unsubscribe from newsletters, because clicking the small link in the email will only unsubscribe you from 1 of 25 "topics" or whatever and they will gladly re-define the "topics" every 6 months and re-enable them all.
Jesus Herbert Christo. Literally, not figuratively, literally, as I was reading your comment I got the "iCloud Storage is Full" upsell nag that I have tried to disable a hundred times. I stopped to asked my Lord and Savior Claude to help this time around:
> What I found on your Mac
> Apple Intelligence is ON. com.apple.CloudSubscriptionFeatures.optIn → [REDACTED] = 1 — that number is your Apple Account DSID. ~2.5 GB of models in /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_*, with generativeexperiencesd, intelligenceplatformd, modelmanagerd, TGOnDeviceInferenceProviderService and a Messages Assistant Extension all resident.
> The nag is pure upsell. Every iCloud service that notification names is already off on this Mac — your account has only KEYCHAIN_SYNC and FIND_MY_MAC enabled. Photos, Mail, Backup, Drive: all off. It's nagging you about your other devices' storage. Source is the com.apple.appleaccount.notifications bundle, fed by followupd and com.apple.CloudSubscriptionFeatures.followup.engagement.
> "I said no and Apple said yes" is literally happening. Siri shows Assistant Enabled = 0, yet ten Siri daemons are running. Share Mac Analytics is off (AutoSubmit = 0) — and SubmitDiagInfo still logged LastFullSubmissionSuccess today at 12:36 UTC.
Apple has an allergy to fragmentation that can be both admirable and annoying at the same time. As a developer it can be really nice to know that your audience all has access to the same feature set. As a user it can be annoying to be subjected to Apples feature upgrade treadmill.
And Sync Immediately's only affirmative option is "For Today", so I get to set a daily reminder to remind the setting that I do in fact want it to be ON.
Techbros just can't grasp that "No" doesn't mean "Later." It's not exclusive to Apple by any means. Android update incoming? Your choices are "yes" or "later."
Techbros are just the ones happy to implement it. Which is of course a black mark all on it's own, but the ones explicitly rejecting the very concept of consent are sales, marketing, management, project leaders, etc. IE the people who are actually legally in charge of making these decisions.
Frankly, most of these people at high levels in these companies seem pretty apathetic to the concept of "Consent" at all, because I don't think they think we have a right to it.
Remember, LG owns the glass. Not you. Not the person who purchased it and has the legally respected rights under the first sale doctrine, but instead the company who bought some code that runs on it.
I get the annoyance at "ask me again later", but "maybe later" or "not now" is helpful - there's no way to trigger dialogs by yourself, so this is a promise that even if you say "no" in the dialog, you can still go into settings to change your mind. Gives me less anxiety about the choice.
A much better way would be “Yes” and “No” with a small message of “you can change this later in the Settings”.
Or have three buttons: “Yes”, “No”, “Remind me Later”. Apple does stuff like that in other parts of the OS, like when asking for app permissions, so they clearly know how to do it.
"Remind me later" means "bug me again with a dialog in the future", which is not what I want. I don't need to be reminded, but if I change my mind in the future, I want to be able to proactively go and change it.
Yes, more text can be another way to provide the message, but if you've ever done any user testing, you'll know that people at best scan through your UI. I know I wouldn't read that, or at least would prefer not to have to read that.
I guess I don't see why "No" combined with "You can change this later in settings" is so much less offensive than "Not now".
> "Remind me later" means "bug me again with a dialog in the future", which is not what I want.
But it is what Apple and others do, and what the conversation is about. Sounds like you want what everyone else does (a “no”) but are just arguing over the specific wording of the message.
Yes! Somehow people seem to assume I'm arguing for different behaviour, which I'm explicitly not. I'm saying "Not now", and the ability to manually go into settings or wherever to change the setting later, is better than "No", while doing the same thing as "No".
And as I said in my first post, "Ask me again later" and the associated behaviour is annoying.
Have you ever seen an app where upon responding to a dialog, an option is irrevocably removed from settings? The conversation is about “no” meaning “don’t bother me again with this question unprompted” (which used to be the norm), not “rewrite your own binary to remove the choice”.
Of course not, that's why I was surprised with the suggestion - if that's not what it should do, then it's no different from what I was proposing.
I was agreeing with you that indeed, I don't want software to bother me again with the question unprompted. Additionally, I appreciate the reassurance that the dialog isn't my last opportunity to set the setting (because sometimes that is the case).
So tl;dr: label the button "Not now", and don't prompt me again.
“Maybe later” doesn’t explicitly say that you’ll never get the prompts again, so even if it did work that way, PMs would be able to weasel out and change it back to nagging you with the next update. (In reality, the wording like that is used precisely for this reason already, and that’s why we hate it.)
And it doesn’t really help the user. If I click “Not now” and later decide that I do want the feature, how do I find it? If you want to reassure the user, just say that:
Enable cool new feature X?
(You can always change this in System Settings → Y.)
[ Sure ] [ No, thanks ]
"No, thanks" is also insulting and unacceptable. I want "No, fuck off", so let's compromise on a plain "No" like we used to get in the era when computers were made for the users.
I agree that telling me exactly where I can change it can be helpful, although I'm also sure I won't remember that.
But we're comparing to the case where it just says "No", in which case "Not now" at least tells me I can look up how to change it later now - or more importantly, that I don't need to give this further thought now.
Yes, PMs (or anyone) making software doing dumb shit is dumb anyway, but that also holds true if it were labelled "No".
I don't know what metric Apple implemented that has caused these engagement spam prompts (ads) to appear in their platform, but I want none of it. I've turned Siri off in the latest macOS and iOS because it's so damn slow. I'm bullish on local LLM compute but Apple it's not ready yet or not in the way you've integrated into the user interface! When I am attempting to search for an app on my system I don't want an AI response that takes 2 seconds to start. I want to see the filtered list of apps immediately. When I want to search a term I want the results immediately with any slow AI interpretation fed in asynchronous. It's painful as hell to try and use the new Siri and be resigned to wait a few seconds for any sort of answer. The worst part is you have to wait 2 seconds and then 98% of the time Siri is wrong our outdated and you have to redo the query somewhere else. When it became more convenient to jump into chatgpt or claude I pulled the plug on the new Siri.
If you want to own your computer, linux is where it's at. Windows is rusty iron chains and MacOS's are gold-plated silver pretending to be gold, but they're still chains.
I would love to move my gaming PC to Linux but until the kernel devs permit kernel-level anti-cheats, or an equivalent, I refuse to give up games that I love. It's nearly impossible to play multiplayer games now without KLAC. The cheating is out of control.
Unfortunately this is an ideological hill that many Linux devs are willing to die on, so we're at an impasse. Valve claimed to be working on a solution, and if there is any company which can negotiate an accord, it's them.
It's very fortunate that Linux devs do not tolerate this DRM crap. What you are asking for is to turn Linux into another Windows, at which point there is not point.
If you're not willing to stop using harmful software that's your problem.
And let's not forget that cheating in online games is only an issue because companies have co-opted what was a social activity between people you know (or at least can get to know) into a more profitable asocial e-peen measuring contest between randoms.
Really you just need to bring detected servers back. That left people with a community that they tended to police themselves because they owned it. But those community run servers meant they couldn't control/shutdown old multiplayer games at will so they got rid of those. Then they started whining that they needed ever more draconian tools to police the online games that they needed to have 100% ownership of so badly.
If that's the tradeoff, then yes. I don't know. I keep a Windows partition for Fortnite to play with one of my friends, and I miss the days of CS:S with 64 player zombie mod.
I don't know if enabling KLAC in Linux can happen without opening nasty doors for other software. If it existed, perhaps one could have different kernels to boot into: One for the invasive software that one boots into for gaming and a secure kernel for normal work, perhaps even with different userspaces.
Online cheating as existed for as long as online games have existed. Long before companies cared about online gaming as a serious generator of revenue. There is a certain percentage of the population which enjoys hurting others and making them have a bad time. The anonymity of online games allows them to be antisocial with very few social repercussions.
I think equating having the option of KLAC with Windows is totally disingenuous. There are countless other differentiators. You would be free to just not use KLAC if you so desired.
The "anonymity of online games" is much greater than it used to be. It used to be standard practice for people to host their own private servers and play with people they knew. This naturally filtered anti-social behavior because people knew they wouldn't get invited back. And public servers were a more casual environment, where the occasional cheating wouldn't ruin any serious competition.
I recently started playing a game that installed "anti-cheat" software that has done absolutely nothing to stop the amount of cheating in the game but it has made my Debian desktop unstable with random gnome and application crashes caused by their poor software. I never had crashes until that garbage got installed. It works exceptionally hard at preventing me from streaming my games I used to not have an issue with
kernel level invasive garbage would be beyond destructive and still not solve the problem
If it's on Linux then it wasn't kernel-level anti-cheat, and therefore mostly useless. It's not surprising that it did nothing to slow down cheating. Even KLAC can be circumvented. It increases friction and cost for cheaters but it doesn't solve the issue completely.
Ideally you would be free to not play KLAC games, and I would be free to play KLAC games. I just hope for the option one day, as I would very much like to make the move to Linux.
It stops a lot of people cheating and usually keeps it at a manageable level. This isn’t a binary choice where we can only expect perfect solutions, and in their absence, we throw up our hands and declare the problem intractable. KLAC is much better, and I’ll take that.
I think you're missing my point: there is no KLAC for Linux, therefore if you wish to play a game with less cheating, you choose a game which requires KLAC. Therefore, you do not use Linux. Your comment is a non-sequitur.
Except that some games use KLAC on Windows, but also have Linux versions that don't use it, so whether you use Windows or Linux is irrelevant.
If you choose to play Windows-only games because you think that is protecting you from some nebulous group of cheaters who moved to Linux to aid their cheating, I think you don't know the cheat landscape well.
Cheat makers primarily operate on Windows, not because it's easier, but because that's what most players still use. This idea that you're going to avoid cheaters by staying on Windows is honestly the opposite of true. MP games with Linux clients are not the games with massive cheating problems.
The real problem is that servers are now entirely the domain of the companies running the anti-cheats. We used to run the servers for most of these and could ban cheaters. But the game companies demand we play the game their way, not our way. We've really lost something.
I agree, it's a curve. I don't think we'll ever completely eliminate cheating, but we can make it so difficult and expensive that most people don't do it. That's good enough for me.
I don't really understand why people insist on treating cheating like something that has to stop. Back in the days before the Internet was a thing, just playing board games, cheating also happened. There are even board games designed around the concept of deception.
Play single player games, then you can complain about cheating AI opponents.
If this post bothers you and you feel the need to defend yourself against it or something, realize I'm not the one making it true. Nothing you say to me can change this.
It's worth having a look at https://areweanticheatyet.com/. I found that the most of the games I play which use anti cheat work on Linux. It's also not hard to dual-boot windows as a backup, though I haven't had a use for my windows partition yet.
Thanks. I intentionally avoid games without KLAC now because the cheating is so bad. The most recent example is Arc Raiders. Such a fun game at launch, very quickly overrun by cheaters. They eventually added KLAC but because they also offer a Linux build, they could not stop the cheating. The game is mostly dead now, [down to just 6% of its peak.](https://steamcharts.com/app/1808500#All)
But why do you like them? What do you get out of them? What's the benefit?
I've watched people play slot machines. They sit there and pump money into the machine for no real benefit to themselves. Why are video games any different to that?
I get fun out of them. I don't mean to sound snide, but do you really not understand why people play video games? I derive fun from many places, like hiking, reading, movies, music, and video games. Do you not derive fun from your hobbies?
A video game allows you to develop your skills and use your brain in a complex way (especially true of competitive multiplayer games). A slot machine is played by mindlessly pulling a lever.
To be equally reductive, how is any hobby more than playing a slot machine? It’s just pulling a dopamine lever.
I do not believe a hobby needs to yield social value. I believe it is sufficient to derive enjoyment from the activity itself. You don’t need to personally enjoy my hobbies, just as I don’t imagine I would enjoy yours.
I'd say it's less reductive and more the objective reality.
> I do not believe a hobby needs to yield social value
I didn't say anything about social value. I'm talking about value to you individually.
I don't think you've answered that question. I don't see there is any value. I think you're pushing buttons to make the blinking lights blink differently, just like a slot machine.
Any activity you enjoy is enjoyed because it produces a dopamine release (for someone who enjoys it).
People who enjoy reading get the same dopamine reaction from that as people who enjoy video games. Or slot machines.
The difference with slot machines is that the purpose of them is solely to tie that dopamine release to giving away money predicated on deception (specifically, both by not disclosing actual odds, and by lying about them).
A slot game that requires no money to play isn't a problem, because it's not tricking old people into giving away their pensions.
> to tie that dopamine release to giving away money predicated on deception (specifically, both by not disclosing actual odds, and by lying about them)
So just like loot boxes in video games.
> A slot game that requires no money to play isn't a problem
So similarly you should only be playing opensource and freeware video games that aren't designed to extract money from you.
Which is why people have specific problems with loot boxes, yes. But most video games don't have loot boxes.
> So similarly you should only be playing opensource and freeware video games that aren't designed to extract money from you.
"Paying to purchase a game", and "paying to wager money on or in a game" are 2 different things.
I'd also have no issue with someone buying an actual slot machine to sit in their house, so they put in money but also keep the money they put in. But people don't do that because they're not playing for the gameplay, they're playing for the gamble.
> When your grandkids ask you what you did with your finite time, is "I pwned noobs" the answer you want to give?
You are being ridiculous. First, unless the person was a professional gamer they would probably answer with the time they spend at work and time time they spend raising their family. But let's assume the grandkids specifically asked what they did for entertainment.
The answer would then be something like "I got together with my friends and we played the popular online games together". They would probably also mention any other things they did a lot of entertainment, too.
Wow, you really dont understand the concept that people are different and have different opinion do you. You are entitled to think what you want, but why tell other people they are wrong in what they think and like?
Feel free to list out all of your hobbies and what you do in your free time and we will all critique it for you.
How is Exapunks[1] anything like a slot machine? Or Slay the Princess[2]? Or Minecraft? A blanket statement like "video games = slot machines" just doesn't work. I won't deny that there are many games that are predatory/mindless, but video games are such a broad medium.
Playing slot machines absolutely is many peoples' hobby, unfortunately.
As others have said, why don't you list out your hobbies (as I did mine), so we can understand exactly what recreational activities you think constitute "valid" hobbies? That will also make it easier for me to explain the difference between video games and slot machines to you.
What are you on about? You clearly don't like video games and think they're a waste of time, which is fine. Other people do like them and find them fulfilling for whatever reason, which is also fine.
Why are you trying so hard to "prove" that someone's hobby is a waste of time?
True story: I know a woman who built a relationship with her tween nephew on the other side of the world mainly by playing Fortnite with him ever week for two years - all for free because she never bought a skin.
KLAC isn’t the problem so much as lazy or shitty devs refusing to put in the work to support Linux as a platform. They’ll literally have game logic run in encrypted VMs on other platforms but then refuse to do the same on Linux with superior hypervisors like KVM and bhyve. Some developers have explicitly removed EAC support on Linux from their games, despite no open issues with it. Others demand someone else write the APIs needed for their invasive rootkits to run, ignoring that Linux is very much a community effort and that if one will write and publish it, others will use it.
I will 100% give Linux evangelists the guff they deserve on shitty UX in GUIs and their insistence upon a dozen slightly-tweaked solutions to the same core problem that prevents the industry from consolidating into widescale popularity on endpoints, but the incompetence and/or laziness of major devs to support even something like Debian is not a failing of Linux.
There is no doubt an economics problem here, where it might not make sense to invest a lot of effort into a system from which less than 1% of revenue is derived.
However, KVM does not solve the problem. In fact, Riot explicitly explains why virtualisation can make the problem worse: if Vanguard runs inside a guest, a cheat can run on the host and manipulate the VM in ways the anti-cheat cannot see. Riot says Linux currently does not give it sufficient ability to attest the boot state or kernel modules, with distro differences making the problem harder.
Linux also deliberately does not provide a stable in-kernel ABI for proprietary out-of-tree drivers. The kernel documentation explicitly says there is neither a stable binary kernel interface nor a stable internal kernel interface. The preferred model is for drivers to be upstreamed and maintained with the kernel, which is almost the opposite of how closed-source kernel anti-cheat is normally deployed.
And this isn't just Riot. EA actually supported EAC through Proton for Apex and then removed Linux access because its anti-cheat team said Linux was being used for impactful cheats, that Linux cheats were harder to detect, and that they couldn't reliably distinguish a legitimate Steam Deck from a malicious Linux client pretending to be one.
Valve itself tells developers that Proton's recommended solution is user-space anti-cheat and that kernel-space anti-cheat is “not currently supported and is not recommended”.
So I guess it's technically possible for a game dev to effectively create their own Linux distro, but I hope we agree that's never going to happen. They're game devs, not Linux devs. Anti-cheat needs a trust chain that the hostile user cannot control and not just an API through which it can inspect the system. Linux deliberately gives the machine owner far more control over the kernel and environment, which is exactly what makes strong client-side attestation difficult.
FYI bhyve isn't a Linux hypervisor. It's part of FreeBSD.
> Riot says Linux currently does not give it sufficient ability to attest the boot state or kernel modules, with distro differences making the problem harder.
Why would a game developer have the power to approve what I boot on my hardware?
Especially a peddler of live service free to play.
Have you talked to those people running de googled Android phones lately? Apparently they're excluded from banking and government apps because of "attestation" that's not permission.
You are confusing your right as an individual to do what you want with your OS, and the rights of developers to do what they want, with their software. You have the right to use whatever software you like. They have the right to not sell or give you their software if you don't want to abide by their rules.
I want to clarify to anyone reading this that this only effects high-competitive games, like LoL, Valorant, PUBG, R6S; and not all of them (e.g. Counter Strike).
It does not affect "multiplayer" in general, to the contrary, most multiplayer games are not affected (coop games, MMOs, RTS).
| It's nearly impossible to play multiplayer games now without KLAC. The cheating is out of control.
Ofc, cheating is also present with KLAC, its just the next level of the cat and mouse game (Driver exploits, DMA access via PCIe, Network Packet analysis, ...)
| Unfortunately this is an ideological hill that many Linux devs are willing to die on
Nonsense. 1. Almost no anticheat is implemented on Linux in the first place. Most "working" anti-cheat solutions for Linux are just a #if Linux doNothing(); #else ... 2. KLAC requires SecureBoot/ChainOfTrust + closed source code running with highest privileges. This does not make sense for any PC, but I dont see why it would be harder to do on Linux than on Windows, Linux just has a smaller install base in general and a lower acceptance rate for KLAC, therefore its not worth it to implement.
I would like to respond because you're speaking authoritatively but this is mostly your opinion.
> I want to clarify to anyone reading this that this only effects high-competitive games, like LoL, Valorant, PUBG, R6S; and not all of them (e.g. Counter Strike).
It affected a game I really care about: Arc Raiders. That's not a "high-competitive" game. It's PvPvE, shooting at funny robots and scavenging rubber duckies. Cheating killed the game. [It's down to 6% of its peak.](https://steamcharts.com/app/1808500#All) Just because this hasn't affected the games you love doesn't mean it's not affecting many games. See Titanfall, H1Z1, and The Cycle: Frontier, among many more.
> It does not affect "multiplayer" in general, to the contrary, most multiplayer games are not affected (coop games, MMOs, RTS).
I was going to ask you to back that up, but I realise I made a broad claim and can also not back it up, so we're just giving each other our opinions, I suppose.
> Ofc, cheating is also present with KLAC, its just the next level of the cat and mouse game (Driver exploits, DMA access via PCIe, Network Packet analysis, ...)
Indeed. The goal is to reduce cheating to a manageable level. It is impossible to eliminate.
> Nonsense. 1. Almost no anticheat is implemented on Linux in the first place. Most "working" anti-cheat solutions for Linux are just a #if Linux doNothing(); #else ... 2. KLAC requires SecureBoot/ChainOfTrust + closed source code running with highest privileges. This does not make sense for any PC, but I dont see why it would be harder to do on Linux than on Windows, Linux just has a smaller install base in general and a lower acceptance rate for KLAC, therefore its not worth it to implement.
Linux does not properly support KLAC because its architecture and development philosophy work against it. For example, Valve explicitly recommends user-space anti-cheat for Proton and says kernel-space anti-cheat is “not currently supported and is not recommended”.
The Linux kernel also deliberately does not provide a stable binary kernel-driver interface. Kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has said that Linux has neither a stable in-kernel API nor a stable binary kernel interface, because maintainers want the freedom to change kernel internals rather than permanently support proprietary out-of-tree drivers.
Riot is on the record as explaining that Linux does not give Vanguard sufficient ability to attest boot state and kernel modules. They also claim that distribution differences make enforcement harder, and that cheats can potentially operate outside an emulated environment where the anti-cheat cannot see them. Riot is on the record saying that anti-cheat is “extremely hard on Linux by design”.
So you're technically correct, but I think you misunderstand a lot of the architecture which underpins this issue, and the ideological boundaries which many developers prefer to enforce around security, FOSS, and ownership.
| I would like to respond because you're speaking authoritatively but this is mostly your opinion.
Sorry, I felt inclined to respond to your broad claim "It's nearly impossible to play multiplayer games now without KLAC".
XKCD 'Wait, Honey, sb. is wrong on the internet', we both know it.
| Indeed. The goal is to reduce cheating to a manageable level. It is impossible to eliminate.
I agree with the goal, but KLAC is not an acceptable way to get there. I would rather suggest to:
- dont trust the client
- really dont trust the client
- support / let customers host the servers (they are the ones who will put in the time required to deal with cheaters, and they will also be there once the devs/publisher have abandoned a game)
- Use statistics a lot more: mark outliers for review, and until review, aggressively move them to their own matchmaking bracket.
- Implement a "demo"-style replay format for matches/sessions (which therefore contains all inputs of all parties). Make all "ranked" or eq. matches publicly available (no names/chat, just the gameplay) and people will develop tools in their free time to detect cheaters.
Also: Have a simple trust score (Account age * Money spent), and act more aggressive on people with low trust score.
Let new people improve their trust score by reserving ~$100 on a credit card which will be billed if the account gets banned for cheating.
I do wonder if AI could be used to statistically identify likely cheaters, but as with all statistics, some innocent people will be caught, and many guilty people will not be caught. Existing server-side anti-cheats have been trying to use some variation of statistical analysis for at least a decade, with poor results. It's not hard to program movements based on statistical modeling of pro players and ensure the movements remain within a standard deviation of that. Aim bots are particularly difficult to statistically identify, assuming the bots have been competently programmed. The end-game is cheaters running around with pro-level skills.
To be clear, I welcome the attempt, but I think it just results in the same cat and mouse arms race we've seen for 20 years. Inference has been beaten time and time again. Until it is proven to work I will stick with the best options we have right now.
These stats should not auto-ban, but flag for human review.
ImO, the goal is to find the statistic cheaters will skew since they are cheating.
Lets say, one is wall-hacking in Counter-Strike.
In Counter-Strike, many maps have a central location/lane called "mid".
There is often a kind of mind-game of limited information going on:
- Does 0, 1, or both teams have an AWP(=one-shot kill sniper)
- Is the enemy sniper guarding mid?
- Which entrance to mid is the enemy sniper currently watching?
- Has the enemy sniper guarded mid in the beginning, but has now left?
Any wall-hacker will be a major outlier regarding not running into mid while the enemy sniper is watching.
If you can accurately dissect/classify/log player behavior, I expect the statistics to look similar to those of poker players who cheat and know the cards of the other players on the table:
https://media.pokertube.com/uploads/2025/12/5d96fe17d39043a0...
Doesn’t Arc use KLAC? Sounds like it did not accomplish its goal. And I’m not sure how you trace direct causation between cheating and decline in popularity. Plenty of games with rampant cheating (Tarkov) do just fine.
Only on Windows (and only after the game had already lost around 80% of its player base), which makes it effectively useless. Because they have a Linux build, there is no way to prevent cheating at a larger scale.
It's fair to argue I have no evidence of the cause of decline. I cite my frequent interactions with hundreds of players in the community, and streamers like Burnt Peanut. However this is qualitative, not quantitative. Me and my friends stopped playing because of the cheating, and so did every other one of my friends who picked it up. It wasn't that we wanted to stop playing the game. It was the cheating.
Well, a quick perusal of some Reddit threads about this leads me to believe that the decline in playerbase is more about lack of content than cheating. (And may not be out of the ordinary for this sort of game.)
But I don't know since I don't play Arc. I'm just aware of a number of other games rife with cheating that remain wildly popular.
To be honest I don’t really understand the hysteria re KLAC. Installing something in kernel space requires trust, but so does installing something in user space. If you don’t trust the developer, don’t use their software. A malicious app installed in user space can steal, encrypt, delete or exfiltrate anything the user can access. It can abuse their applications, credentials and resources. Kernel access is worse, but both are very bad.
Are there any games in particular or is this a blanket statement? I've switched and not missed anything. I stopped playing Fortnite, but it's not a very good game anyway. The gaming world is huge with plenty of variety.
There's nothing kernel developers can do to "not permit" kernel-level anti-cheat, anyone can build an anti-cheat kernel module (as long as you honor the GPL licensing requirements naturally).
And chains of Linux have links that break when you update them, or sometimes they just aren't compatible with random metals: "galvanized chains are planned in a future release, please donate"
I don't know if I would say this as much anymore except for Linux distributions steering away from Red Hat/IBM or Canonical attempts at replacing traditional methods, or the BSDs that aren't necessarily in agreement with more recent developments either.
I certainly would not feel I owned my system if I accepted the full suite of attempts by these companies to replace and subvert existing standards. I do feel I have control with non-systemd init and service management, and source based packaging.
Running FreeBSD on a Lenovo Thinkbook 16 G7 ARP that was bought brand new less than a year ago. Everything except the wifi works flawlessly (daily driver for working).
And the wifi is easily fixable either buying a non expensive dongle or waiting for the next release.
Also running bhyve as daily driver with Ubuntu for development purposes. Everything works without issues, perfectly.
That's valuable and good to know, but I meant a machine that's actually new (not one you just bought recently). That laptop is about 2.5 years old specs wise at this point. I use mine for anything from programming to video editing to AAA gaming on Linux. I don't think a machine like that could be my primary one, but looks like a decent secondary.
I don't know what you consider "actually new" hardware. The machine I use to work has 16 Gb of RAM. Ryzen 7 and an AMD GPU. For me that's a pretty decent and recent hardware.
If you meant the lastest of the latest GPU, processor, chipset and so you you might better off with Linux.
But the fact that the computer that was given to me was boxed from factory and bought after two weeks after started is a sign of recent hardware. I haven't tried it but two other person where I work have high end brand new ThinkPads and I'm confident FreeBSD can be run on those well too.
Ryzen 7 is a 9 year old, AMD GPU a 20 year old generic term.
If Notebookcheck is correct, the "Lenovo ThinkBook 16 G7 ARP" comes with a Zen3(+) CPU and a RDNA 2 GPU, both released 6 years ago.
If Zen3+ vs Zen3 is a significant architectural difference, than it would slightly miss the 5 year mark, since it was released 4.5 years ago.
By new hardware I mean CPU, GPU, WiFi etc. that was released by their manufacturer within the last 1 year or so, I don't even mean hardware that was just released.
The laptop mentioned is fine. But it is hardware that is just at that mark where I'd normally replace it.
As I said, I think it's still OK if my goal is to run FreeBSD. But if my goal is to get the best hardware now that will last me the next 3-5 years then it's dated and I'll have to compromise just to be able to use FreeBSD with it. I don't have to do that with Linux.
I think if I am going to compromise on hardware because I want a particular OS on it, it'll probably be Haiku over one of the BSDs because I don't get the sense BSD offers enough of a difference vs Linux to justify that compromise.
Perhaps, but the BSD developers do not fully invite themselves into your home and network through use of their operating system. I do appreciate however that macOS is BSD somewhere under the hood and switched to zsh as default shell (even if it was supposedly only for licensing reasons, but I believe it's the correct decision practically or legally)
Maybe with the rise of immutable distributions like SteamOS, Bazzite, GnomeOS and KDELinux.
But the other "user-friendly" distributions are just not good enough for a non-techy.
We need better and more A/B partitioned immutable distributions and we need a new implementation of Flatpak.
I recently had to repair my parents their Linux Mint installation because it powered off during an upgrade. Apt does not handle that well, Linux Mint has no snapshotting, you cannot apt autoconfigure -a through the UI. Also the UI does not explain why the machine is getting hot while it's building dkms modules for an hour.
Just this week I saw someone with Fedora get a buggy graphics driver that made the whole system glitchy, they had to downgrade the kernel.
The week before I had to repair a manjaro installation from a friend because getting nvidia to work on ArchLinux isn't trivial even if Manjaro pretends it to be.
To be frank, desktop linux is still in a pretty bad state.
I think it's equally likely a windows update breaks a family owned computer and the solution isn't clear to them eg reinstall drivers directly from Vendor.
I'd also rgue Mint is easier to navigate than Windows with it's 3+ different context menus and baked in ads.
GPL is a more free license if one cares about having control over their computing. The BSD community cares a lot less about that in my (limited) experience and more about purely technical aspects. Which is fine, I just wouldn't expect them to hold if Linux is no longer an option somehow.
I had many conversations about this and it always came down to business.
GPL is indeed restrictive if your priority is the free market. Pretty much every serious BSD person I know of runs it as part of their business, so from their pov GPL is restrictive.
However in the context of the constant restrictions of general purpose computing, GPL has my back. BSD at best doesn't care about restrictive forks and at worst even welcomes them as 'good business'.
Two different approaches, they both have their place but as a user, I feel GPL was written for me. BSD (license) was written for the developer.
This is an oversimplification. I'm sure that some people think like you mention, but it is by no means all. I personally choose permissive licenses because I find the GPL to be hypocritical in the way it restricts freedom while talking about promoting freedom. If I'm giving a gift to the commons, then I want it to be a true gift, not something with strings attached. So for me, permissive licenses are the way to go. It hurts nobody if someone chooses to make a closed source fork - software is a non-rivalrous good, so whatever someone else does cannot take away the free version that I have provided. So I see no reason to deny others the freedom to use my software as they see fit, even if they use it in ways I don't personally agree with.
Thanks for sharing your POV, but that's basically how I understand it. It's the old individual freedom (BSD) vs collective freedom (GPL).
The BSD is certainly less hassle and just a simpler way to give something away.
> I find the GPL to be hypocritical in the way it restricts freedom while talking about promoting freedom. If I'm giving a gift to the commons, then I want it to be a true gift, not something with strings attached.
The right to free speech is a freedom too, yet it has strings attached. Namely it's no longer a freedom the moment it crosses a certain line into endangering someone else and their freedoms. That's sort of the view the GPL takes, but it gets into how different political philosophies view the concept of freedom. Is it freedom to pay whatever the free market (in practice monopolies) demand for commodities critical to survival (BSD view of freedom) or is it freedom not to have to worry about not being able to afford commodities critical to survival (GPL view of freedom).
I do agree the BSD freedoms is simpler to grasp.
> It hurts nobody if someone chooses to make a closed source fork - software is a non-rivalrous good, so whatever someone else does cannot take away the free version that I have provided
True in theory, trickier in practice. 'It hurts nobody' only goes so far because if a closed source fork starts collecting telemetry then it actively hurts its users, unless very much opt in. Now how many average computer users are going to know that there's an open version that doesn't do that? A small number. Trickier still, because the fork is closed, it's likely going to be quite hard to replace it or block the telemetry, at least without loosing some features. So again, the difference is in what is viewed as the commons. BSD views the commons as everyone, including capital interests best in a position to take that the software and twist it into a tool in the ongoing war on general purpose computing, ability to repair etc.
GPL views the commons as the users, so it aims to grants freedoms to them, even at the cost of restricting the freedom of capital in the process.
In short, I do understand and even appreciate the BSD concept of freedom and its simplicity, yet I find it insufficient to protect my freedom in a system full of monopoly power, corruption and exploitation.
In an ideal world where the behaviour the GPL aims to protect doesn't exist, I'd agree the BSD is more free. In the current world, I'd argue that BSD gives freedom to exploit computer users to those with the means to do so.
A Linux computer is so many things and also nothing at the same time that's is basically impossible that one or N AI company can impose you something like Apple, Microsoft or Google can.
With that said, also or instead using *BSD won't do any harm.
The biggest thing people seem to be up in arms over is the disk space. I don’t see any of the suggestions on that page freeing the disk space back up, please correct me if I’m wrong.
On previous versions, there was a single "Apple Intelligence" toggle that turned off all of these features. This support doc describes ~10 separate settings, and still doesn't provide any way to turn off certain AI features (e.g. Genmoji).
Having to turn multiple toggles to express the lack of consent is one thing.
However, having to redo it on every system upgrade is another thing. "No" should mean "no", but now the expectation is that you need to constantly shout "No no no no no no" otherwise your previous "no" will turn into "yes".
The speed with which we went from pearl clutching that Apple hasn't added as many AI features as Google and Microsoft have to pearl clutching that they have finally done so is amusing.
Meanwhile, Google just announced "laptops" that are locked down to the Play Store, and the sound of crickets is palpable.
> Google has confirmed to Ars that Googlebooks will enforce developer verification requirements for apps similar to Android phones. Under this system, only apps from developers who have verified their identities with Google will be eligible for installation
One solution is likely the same as the one that stops every other iOS update from re-enabling iCloud password sync: Create a profile using Apple configurator <https://apps.apple.com/de/app/id1037126344> that forbids all these AI features and upload it to your devices.
The other solution is to say goodbye to these products that don't respect you.
By the way, if you're annoyed by the new huge "sync" menu entry on Firefox, you can disable it under about:config by setting identity.fxaccounts.enabled to false. Again, a lack of respect, this time by Firefox, for forcing this stuff down our throats. I'm only using Firefox because the alternatives are worse in terms of privacy. Ladybird, we're waiting for you!
> The AI industrial complex does not do consent. You will use it.
I posted a thread on thr MacRumors forum making a similar point. I tried to couch it in the language of Apple being inconsistent with Apple Intelligence. You can’t turn it off anymore globally but Apple provides the user the ability to block, not turn off, some parts of it. Even then you can’t block everything, like the Apple Intelligence parts of the Photos app. Even if you turn off Siri that stuff sticks around. But iOS 27 does not require Apple Intelligence to function or anything like that because my 4th gen iPad Air can’t run Apple Intelligence but can run iPadOS 27 just fine.
The answer is simple: Regulation to grant users the right to refuse during installation/setup of a system. This must also include updates. This feel like a repeat of the EU browser choice rule!
That mindset shift surely started quite some years ago? At least in my book they’re actively hindering standards/compatibility with other ecosystems, greenwashing their products, squeezing out third-party developers, and design/UX is also going downhill at least since Liquid Glass (or rather since Jobs left).
I'm convinced we have crossed a threshold where compute is no longer personal, it's platformed. "They" don't want you to have control over your machine as they don't trust you with it. They want you to buy the things they want you to buy, envy the people they want you to envy, submit your data to the collective, so they can control markets and industries for profit and greed.
Linux is our only hope and even that is plagued by corporate interests. I'm going back to 1994 days and only using tech for work. I have shunned social media, youtube, netflix, hulu. I have shunned subscription based SaaS. I'm tired boss.
Wait so you got rid of Apple because its baked in AI, and went with Omarchy that is also fully vibe coded and has baked in AI? Furthermore it has built-in ads for the products of DHH, such as Basecamp. Omarchy feels a lot like Windows, with it being slopped together and with built-in ads for products.
I don't know about Macs, but under iOS/iPadOS you can set a Siri region to somewhere it's unsupported (e.g. Russia) to truly disable it.
It gets back about 15 gigabytes of storage and removes additional stuffs you couldn't disable by setting Screen Time options, such as the Safari Reader's gigantic "summarize" button.
I foolishly bought a Macbook Air with only 256GB of drive space. Now whenever I need to "upgrade" OS versions, there's not enough drive space to do so. It sure would be nice to delete all this unnecessary Siri bullshit bloat so that I can use my laptop with the latest updates.
Are these Spotlight? The New Siri combined Siri and Spotlight into a single agentic retrieval thing, so it’s possible that when you turn off “Siri” they leave on Spotlight but it’s reported under the new branding.
Did you chase those references? A core premise and complaint is entirely false.
This is an article and author that is tailored for AI curmudgeons or an AI rejectionist to self-assure themselves that their worldview is the only correct one. Facts seem to be a nuisance at best here for the author, and helpful phrases like "garbage", "vile", "human toll", "psychopaths" undermine all chances or credibility for a reasonable take or conversation.
The AI ship has already sailed. You won't lose your job to AI, but to another person using AI better than you. Do you really want to spend hours writing boring one-off shell and test scripts? Even a selective use of AI is better, or at least a personal policy of reviewing and understanding every line of code. Not some blanket no AI policy...
We have to manage it better, introduce guardrails, adversarial agents, better harnesses, etc.
All valid points but a personal boycott is not the solution.
I always wait one year, upgrading to major release N-1 in August before N comes out in September. I made an exception last year and stayed on Sequoia. It will be August of next year before I consider Golden Gate.
I just stick with whatever major release comes with the computer. If I had actual liberty though I'd have this m3 pro running mojave. I actually got a lot of utility out of bootcamp.
Run Linux, Virtualizise windows or Mac OS be happy.
The cost?
You have to research a machine that will run Linux, not everyone can do this.
I'm quite happy with my hp zbook is it a mac, no bit it's as close as I can go.
While not as extreme, this reminds me of the whole Bluetooth-re-enabled-after-updates thing I've been bitching about for years. I hate Bluetooth, never use it, always turn it off. Yet, every time I update macOS/iOS, Bluetooth is magically re-enabled, because Apple said so.
Like I said, not as annoying as unwillingly being sucked into the AI-iverse, and seizing 28-GB of storage space, but it's the principle. I want control over my devices - you know, the things I paid $$$ for.
Moved on to PopOS long ago, and am loving it, especially with the COSMIC desktop now. I just feel so much less worried. Today’s LLMs with their agent harnesses take the past hassle of configuring and maintaining your Linux desktop completely off the table. No more hour long digging and research after an update, just let your AI keep your machine in shape. No proprietary software spying on you. Problem solved :)
This drives me crazy! My iPad is perpetually never finished setting up (and my Windows Laptop after a year for similar reasons) because I have never said yes to the thing I can't say no to: AI.
I am not against AI, but let me choose where I use it.
Someone should do a class action lawsuit for these phony consent requests.
I have spent the last 28 years in the SF Bay Area, working in tech.
I have spent the last two months in Florida.
I was always aware of the disconnect between the insular world I lived in and what went on "outside" - but little did I know how big that gulf was.
If this was a car guy thread the complaint would be about a missing 3 horse power on his new Toyota when he put it on the dyno. And every one else is talking about their custom tunes, and scratch built systems, and how much better they are. Most people would not care and just want to drive to work.
How many of you are gonna have your Mom install linux and do support for it? How about your crazy uncle, or the slow cousin? Being done with Apple wont change Apple - make linux easy to use and usable. Or convince people that Apple > MS to force them to compete again. Or better yet both.
I wonder if all the work to do Linux and self hosting is actually shorter than having to deal with these unasked for annoyances.
Open: 0 to comfort that always grows. When it works you usually don't touch it for years.
Closed: Comfort to never-quite-what-you-want-but-compromise. Works, but you never know what's going on. Features might just get added whenever to your detriment.
So in one case i have a known state i can reach and hold. The time i put in is known and the point in time is up to me. In the other case i can never be sure about state, time and point in time. That's a clear loser to me.
"Last week I succumbed to Apple’s harassment" - usually what all end-users do eventually when caught in the walled garden ...
I make it a point to never install the first versions of major macos releases. they are usually buggy and have annoying new features that are either removed, improved or made optional in the following minor releases. Currently on 26.6.2, it's pretty good.
I had a similar thing with Xcode the other day. I unticked the "download a code assistance model" thing, clicked to continue and it started downloading it anyway (which, to be fair, you can just X out of).
I never really understood the craze for the overpriced Apple products. After many years of using PCs with Linux and Windows, I got forced to use a MacBook Pro as the company laptop and I found it hard to use. The OS is so limiting, Finder so crappy, oh my. There are some advantages, like the hardware is good, but on the other hand there are countless tiny issues where "Apple knows better" such as tying mouse scroll direction to the trackpad direction which is awkward for me. And now this what you're describing. So no, thanks, I'll stick to ThinkPad.
If you don't know where to find the checkbox to disable natural scrolling (you can ask Apple's built in search, even) I don't think anyone should be listening to your opinion on Apple.
That's unnecessarily harsh. Try disabling mouse acceleration without Googling anything; where's the search entry for that? Why is there no Preferences option for it?
Windows, KDE and GNOME all expose this as a GUI toggle. macOS doesn't.
You don't buy Apple because it's good. You buy it because it's what the cool people use.
Imagine applying for a SF startup job and letting them know you use a Windows computer.
At best they will politely tell you to fuck off. But they might blog/X about the idiot Windows user who imagined they could be cool enough to work for them, all coated in a plausible "a craftsman takes care of using good tools, sharp knifes, ..."
Apple hardware is good, but not uniquely good. There are plenty of other good computers out there, Apple hardware isn't in some special tier where nobody can touch them.
I had a surface laptop, it was fine, not as good as a MacBook imo.
Had a razer laptop, it was good, got very hot though.
Had an X1 Carbon Extreme that I liked, wasn’t as good build quality or screen or camera or trackpad as my MBP from work at the time though, was still expensive af.
What are you thinking of that’s better than a MacBook Pro?
By that logic, why don't Macs outsell the sum of Windows machines? If people buy Apple devices for the quality, Macs should outsell Windows machines 5:1.
In reality, I think it's well understood that 95%+ of customers (for Apple, Google and Microsoft) don't make any evaluation of device quality. They buy whatever they see their peers use, because they want to identify with the [luxury|convenience|hardworking] lifestyle of their comrades and idols: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
> By that logic, why don't Macs outsell the sum of Windows machines?
That’s incorrect, because I never said that everybody buys a computer because of hardware quality, or any other reason. All I said was that Apple has great hardware and it’s part of the reason for their success.
Dell, Lenovo, HP sell more units than Apple, but they likely don’t make more profit on that segment of their business.
There is no contradiction. I agree Apple hardware is good. But it's not why you buy it (well, maybe you personally do, but you are not representative of the median Apple client)
If it was that simple mainstream Linux success would be one good marketing campaign away.
Their hardware is really good, their software is fine — at least as good as all the others to the average user I think, the integration between their products is good, and their marketing is obviously top tier.
I don’t think they’d be as successful if their products were not premium hardware.
I’d love an arm based laptop with a great screen and trackpad running Linux for work.
Do you have any sources for this? I agree that people tend to follow their peers, or seek things that communicate a higher social status, but like, Apple's hardware just is also very good, and that could easily be why someone stays with them, even if they were prompted by status.
It feels like consent is being undermined in so many places. The anti-Meta Glasses ad with a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and the strap line "Glasses for people who don't do consent" hits the nail on the head for me. It's a profoundly inhuman stance in the name of profits.
LuLu is honestly the best piece of software for macOS. Every upgrade, I always dowanload the latest version of LuLu first, the the OS upgrade, and then turn all connectivity off. Once it's done with the updates I make sure LuLu is active and up-to-date and running before I reactivate WiFi so I can review every outgoing connection (and deny most).
Potentially! Would be interesting to hear if anyone manages to block internal Apple shenanigans with Little Snitch successfully and feasibly (without constant toggling of rules or alike).
I always accepted the Apple Premium for the luxury of privacy and a user focussed experience. What is the premium for now, apart from a fancy piece of hardware? Hardware required supportive software to justify the Mac Premium. It was always their marriage that we paid extra for.
Ich glaube man kann endlos diskutieren was das beste Betriebssystem ist da jeder seine Vorlieben hat. Ich denke es kommt auch sehr auf den Hersteller und deren eigene Software die auf dem PC ist an. Ich bin z. B. Lenovo Fan und habe von Lenovo einen Gaming Laptop und nutze Windows 11 und Linux Mint, ich habe keine größeren Probleme nach Updates gehabt. Es kommt auch einfach sehr darauf an wie hochwertig die Teile sind die ein Hersteller verbaut und für mich ist Preis Leistungsmäßig Lenovo ziemlich weit vorne. Ich habe keinen anderen Laptop zu der Zeit zu der ich ihn gekauft habe gesehen, der für den Preis eine ähnlich gute konfiguration hatte. OK es war zusätzlich noch eine Rabatt Aktion dabei, trotzdem war der Endpreis für das Setup super und er bereitet mir, egal wie leistungsaufwendig die Dinge sind die ich mache, seitdem sehr viel Freunde, egal ob es der Bau eines Android Games ist und beim Bau einer APK in 5-6 Minuten, Leistungsintensiven Spiele auf hoher Grafik,... Natürlich bin ich mir bewusst das ich mit meinem relativ "kleinen Setup" leistungseinschränkungen habe allerdings macht der Laptop alles was ich will und wofür ich ihn brauche gut mit uns legt mir keine Steine in den Weg. Mit der Lenovo Vantage Software finde ich ist man ganz gut gerüstet da sie Treiber selbst sucht und das übertakten kontrolliert und unterstützt was ich persönlich noch nie benötigt habe nur einmal ausprobiert. Ich denke es kommt immer darauf an für welche Arbeiten man den PC benötigt und was man bereit ist an Geld dafür auszugeben. Wenn man die Hardware natürlich dauerhaft an der Grenze des möglichen laufen lässt oder sie andauern übertakten z.B. treten schneller Fehler auf. Das ist genauso mit einem Handy oder ähnlichem.
Und dann kommt es auf die Pflege an und bei einem Laptop z.b. auch in wie fern man bereit ist Sonderposten in Kauf zu nehmen für z. Sb. Seinen Laptop Ständer oder sogar noch für eine aktive Kühlung von außen. Alles hat seine vor und Nachteile und alles benötigt ein bisschen liebe und Pflege
Good to see this thread turned into a flame war full of linux lovers who don't ever use Apple products vs. linux lovers who have exetensively used Apple. That's typically how it goes.
> Apple front-loaded the keynote with a “we care about children” narrative that the media and fanboys lapped up. Then they advertised features that are suspiciously at odds (if you stop to think). It was a shrewd marketing stunt they’ve pulled before. In past events Apple has greenwashed the opening spiel before flogging a new iPhone model with an annual upgrade plan. Don’t worry, it’s all recycled. Totally eco-friendly to ship mass-produced luxury goods around the world to meet a manufactured demand.
Another nice example is the posturing about "vision health", concerns about myopia, etc. IMMEDIATELY before announcing the visionPro product.
These are reasons enough. I switched to Asahi recently on my Macbook Pro M1
My fingerprint reader doesn't work, nor does my speaker. But hey, its way better than having to use MacOS. Atleast, linux lets me use my computer the way I want.
FIY speakers should work on a Macbook Pro M1 running Asahi. They have been working for a long time now (like 1 or 2 years) and they do work fine for me (running Asahi Alarm, not Fedora, but Fedora is supposed to work better since it's officially supported).
Just curious... Would Asahi Linux allow me to run llama.cpp on my m1? I have a spare laptop with lots of memory, wondering whether performance could be improved by using Asahi over running models on macOS?
> AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.
This is why I continue screaming against AI. I’ve moved past the theft roots, because I know we can just make its output un-protected by copyright or trademark laws - including the models themselves - thus returning back for free what was stolen in the first place.
Consent, however, remains an evergreen nail in the entire industry’s heart. It’s shoved into everything without our consent, into products that used to be perpetual but are now subscription-based. We’re forced to pay for someone else’s feature we don’t want in terms of storage, electricity, and compute costs - both on what we buy, and in higher prices due to the industry hoovering up every scrap of NAND and memory it can find and at scales that would make the GPU cryptomining boom feel embarrassed by. We have to endure this destruction of our limited capital and freedom to use our devices on our own terms, along with the immense invasion of privacy it brings about in surveillance and telemetry, all to boost an industry that spends its time loudly boasting how it will destroy the economy/nations/humanity/the biosphere with its eventual, inevitable output.
And honestly, I’m incredibly sick of it. It’d be one thing if I could turn off telemetry and point Siri to a local OpenAI-compatible API endpoint for inferencing and processing, but those options are barred specifically because the data harvesting is the point. These features were never designed or intended to improve the quality of my life, otherwise they’d be flexible enough for me to engage with them on my terms; no, the surveillance and data was always the point, and a proprietary answer engine that can have ads inserted into it or have its output engineered into speech benefiting the creator without transparency to the user - reality authoring - is a holy grail to a tech industry that still deeply resents open source software and “public good” services like Wikipedia.
AI companies refuse to let us opt out, because opting out means we’ve chosen to engage reality on our own terms, rather than theirs.
> AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.
The reason corporations disable our right to stop AI tracking is because, at least for now, AI agents can be held to account for crimes once blamed on a person or corporation -- all one need do is disable the off-switches.
Until we sort out our relationship with AI, it will be the universal whipping boy, blamed for all sorts of things that once would indict an individual or corporation.
The best -- or worst, depending on your outlook -- AI trait is its complete absence of an ethical or moral sense. When an AI agent breaks into a computer, it's not with guilty knowledge, because AI doesn't possess that -- it's not part of their design. People need to remember: AI agents live in a moral vacuum, and that's not an accident.
When a corporation is called out for disabling a switch that once stopped AI tracking, the AI bros might say, "Oh, yes, that's an oversight, easily fixed." But it's not an oversight, it's a trial balloon, an A/B test to see how people will react.
But there's more. Decades ago, the Nielsen TV rating service would monitor what people watched on their TV sets (remember TV sets, boxes weighing 500 pounds?), by calling people on their telephones (remember telephones?). By modern standards, the Nielsen people were amateurs -- today's TV sets have built-in AI agents, active 24/7, and no disable switch. They patiently record what you watch.
In the next phase, TV sets will do eye-tracking, find out what parts of a TV scene people are looking at. Not true now but soon (Samsung is working on it). Pupil dilation, facial expressions, everything.
A super-old Bob Hope joke from the Cold War era: "Yes, they have TV in Russia, but you don't watch it, it watches you." Not so funny any more.
Well that's a philosophical point, because morality is bound up with opinions and personality and internal motivation, and quite possibly with creativity and with whatever intelligence really means. So it probably can't be designed into LLMs, and struggles with "alignment" probably aren't faked.
> So it [meaning morality] probably can't be designed into LLMs ...
Well, it could, but a preliminary step would be to get everyone to agree about what constitutes morality, which will never happen. So in essence I agree.
This has been the case for me with the Dock for twenty-plus years. You can't kill the Dock. You can hide it. You can set the delay until it appears. But you cannot kill it, it just respawns.
And it's such a terrible waste of memory/screen space/an edge of the display.
And of course I said yes, and Apple said no, to Launchpad, an actually useful tool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is an absolutely insane question and it really shows how much mobile phones have warped reality. Until smart phones came along it was actually the norm to be able to install other operating systems on your PC.
The push the past few weeks to start talking about AI with the same language used to discuss sexual assault seems to be in poor taste. It seems like saying "slop" all the time was not effective, so now people are comparing AI to sexual assault... Sentences like "AI bros don't understand consent" are obviously meant to suggest that people who are pro-AI are akin to rapists and predators. I'm not sure what benefit there is to doing this, well, I guess that's a lie, I understand the point is to raise the emotional stakes of this debate to such a level that people feel like they can't disagree.
Unlike when it comes to sexual assault, everyone being "assaulted" with AI can very easily choose to switch to Linux or use different services at any moment. There's really no need for such hyperbole. Software changes you don't like aren't akin to sexual assault.
Isn't Apple pushing features or decisions for how things work down your throat regardless of if you want them part of the classic Apple value proposition? If you don't like that, why are you even using Apple in the first place? This is about how much you want the hardware maker to decide things for you, and Apple has always been maximalist with regards to that.
> The “AI” industry has many flaws, the word “consent” being seemingly missing from training data and company handbooks is one of them. AI bros do not take “no” for an answer.
In several years, the GDPR enforcers (national information commissioners) may eventually wake up to this and start talking about fines. But I suspect everyone is too cowed by the AI inevitability narrative.
> But that’s a trivial cost compared to the consent problem. [..] AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.
This is barking at the wrong tree. If you value things like your privacy or the ability to strictly control what runs on your computer then perhaps it would be a good idea to not run a proprietary operating system that's primarily designed not to provide you with the best user experience possible but to slowly extract more and more value out of you?
You must be talking about someone other than Apple. Apple has been falling into value extraction lately (which I hope Ternus will change), but their operating systems very much have never been designed for that from the outset. Rather the opposite. Apple is the only company that comprehensively documents platform security and privacy. I can't think of anyone else who doesn't just say "trust me bro". Maybe GrapheneOS. Nobody actually proves they are who they say they are better than Apple does.
Apple is also one of the only companies to focus on user experience above all else (nearly, anyway). Again, I can't think of a single other example (maybe Framework comes close), but while Apple has incredible technology, they have always been fairly measured with it to attain just the user experience they want. IMO, that's what earned Mac a reputation for having poor performance, and iPhone a reputation for having low memory, because Apple gave them the specs they needed to run well and have a terrific UX, not necessarily the specs to push the frontier of what you can run at home.
Apple has been learning that frontier is important, though, and they've been leaning more into it lately. Part of why Apple Silicon has been such an incredible shock to the industry.
You're repeating fruit factory propaganda as if it is gospel, the marketing department can be proud of their handiwork. In reality they're one of the most profit-maximisation centred companies out there in computing land, they don't really care all that much about what their users want and do their best to make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem". They fell into "value extraction" a long time ago and I don't see them stopping in any way as long as they have loyal apologists like you seem to be. Why would they? The money keeps rolling in, the congregation keeps on buying fruit phones and related paraphernalia, they'd be mad to stop from a business perspective.
We all have a line, it's just in a different place. Mine is strongly at the "forcibly stealing huge amounts of disk space for features you don't want" point. As a happy Mac and Android user, I don't recognise the 'make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem"' description; maybe you can give an example?
> You're repeating fruit factory propaganda as if it is gospel, the marketing department can be proud of their handiwork.
I hated Apple for a really long time. I don't know exactly why, but if anything, it was all the Apple haters that got me. And of course, the general idea of devices not being locked down to the company, and some other stuff. Having a rooted Android phone made me prone to confirmation bias too.
But my school had Mac, and after using them, I knew that Mac was for me. I still hated iOS at the time, but I knew I needed Mac. So I got one, and I was absolutely right.
The Mac broke down constantly though, didn't seem designed for the abuse I put it through. People begged me to go back to Windows because of the constant repairs, and I did, but I eventually got fed up with Windows again and tried Linux. I eventually got fed up with Linux too, went back to Windows, continued to be relentlessly fed up with Windows, and then eventually got a Mac again, with my own money this time.
At some point, it just clicked for me that the company is what I need, rather than Mac alone. I realized that iOS had the exact same philosophy that I liked so much about Mac. I got an iPhone and got to benefit from the ecosystem with my Mac. And at that point, my mind was fully made up. All in on Apple.
Note that at basically none of these points did marketing become a factor in my decisions. So no it's not the marketing. Though that is a great way to discredit opinions, I think Apple is genuinely the best for me.
> In reality they're one of the most profit-maximisation centred companies out there in computing land, they don't really care all that much about what their users want and do their best to make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem".
To me, this feels kind of like the argument that Steam is an abusive monopoly. I choose and prefer them because the alternatives kinda suck in comparison. Apple is like that for me. I'm not locked into their ecosystem the same way that I'd be locked into an online game that I've poured thousands of hours into. Or locked into a social network where all my friends have been for over a decade. I can easily move somewhere else, and I even did recently, before moving back because I couldn't bear it.
I noticed just how much my habits changed to adapt to Windows, as opposed to Mac. I naturally used the system differently because it just wasn't capable of things I could rely on Mac to do for me. Spotlight is a big part of Mac for me, and none of the third-party software out there quite replicates that experience on Windows. In addition, the file management is far more primitive, and I found myself using directory structure in place of search. You could call this a skill issue, but to me, it's just a mismatch. Given how much I've used both sides my whole life -- I mean for much of my early life it was only Windows, but Mac has always been far more intuitive and expressive for me -- if they were comparable, I'd use them comparably, but I don't, so I think they're not.
I'm leaving Linux out of this because they don't have an ecosystem, they just rely on you bringing your own, I guess. You want file sharing, you install something like KDE Connect. You want organization, just find a file manager that has that, or make one. I've tried a few distributions, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Fedora Silverblue. I preferred Arch on my MacBook, eventually preferred Fedora Silverblue on my later PC, but nothing's quite right, even when I put the effort into curating (like the time I tried KISS Linux).
To be honest, I'm not quite sure why people say Apple's ecosystem is this terrible walled garden that's super hard to leave. Maybe they're hostile to a user experience that they prefer over the alternatives. Maybe they think that their preference is a sign that the walled garden is manipulative. I guess I just don't get it yet. Maybe they want to leave but it's inconvenient, they think Apple could make it easier, and that makes them conclude it's designed to trap them. In my experience, the alternatives simply are less convenient, it's nothing about Apple that makes it more difficult to leave.
> They fell into "value extraction" a long time ago and I don't see them stopping in any way as long as they have loyal apologists like you seem to be.
I don't think there's any evidence that Apple cares whether or not there are "apologists". Maybe if nobody in the world liked them they would decide to change their minds. But I don't think it's as simple as people just rationalizing their bad decisions and excusing them, therefore enabling them. I think they're just as likely to make bad decisions that are universally bad, and it takes about as long for them to go back on them as bad decisions with "loyal apologists". Like that fiasco with the butterfly keyboard repair programs.
> Why would they? The money keeps rolling in, the congregation keeps on buying fruit phones and related paraphernalia, they'd be mad to stop from a business perspective.
I do agree on one point, that Apple is unlikely to realize their mistake when it keeps generating profit, regardless of how many users complain. That's why I'm hoping for top-down action. I hope the new CEO sees that their more recent enshittifications like "Apple Creator Studio" are a mistake, a betrayal. I have no evidence that'll ever happen, though. Maybe that's the loyalty you're talking about. Or just the last shred of hope I have for what seems like the last company on earth I can rely on.
Well, I have a tendency to provide supporting evidence when challenged. Otherwise I lose by default, or at least that's how it feels. You didn't exactly help but I don't really blame you, it's easy to get fed up with the more mindless Apple lovers
The author is complaining that his OS doesn't let him say "no". This would never happen with an OS which actually respects you. Of course, it's not Apple's fault, it never is -- it's those "AI bros"! It's incredibly ironic that the author writes "I’ve chosen not to kowtow to billionaires", yet he kowtowing to a company with a market cap of 5 trillion USD.
You wrote as if the entire operating system was designed from the start to extract value from you. That's what I'm disputing. I'm not trying to say that removing a disablement option that literally already existed had the user's best interest in mind. Just that it's not a sign of some core fundamental disrespect that the company has. We've already seen that Apple's been getting swept up by generative AI bullshit, like with the iPhone 16 marketing, and it is entirely fair to hold them accountable for all the shit they're doing, but it's also entirely possible that this is just a ripple and they're going to get themselves under control again.
Of course it's designed to extract value. MacOS is primarily a consumer content platform with some developer features, rather than vice versa.
The Apple experience is enshitifying at all levels and becoming consistently intrusive. I'm perpetually nagged about a 3 month trial of Apple Music I will never use and have zero interest in. Music player launches when I get in the car, even though I don't want it to. Apple Maps persistently asks me if I want a quick route home, when I don't. Apple TV repeatedly runs trailers for Apple Shows I have no interest in.
Apple '26 gave the world the much-loathed and objectively pointless Liquid Glass. iOS27 has some idiotically obvious bugs and usability issues. Parts of the hardware remain world-leading, but the software is getting less and less humane while pretending to be the opposite.
> IMO, that's what earned Mac a reputation for having poor performance
Desktops maybe, but on mobile, Apple has always outclassed most Windows laptops that ordinary people might buy - alone because the full-aluminium case allows for far more heat input until saturation kicks in.
Sure - my MacBook Pro from 2015 could run BeamNG.drive playably when my previous Windows laptops absolutely could not. I think it wasn't necessarily that competitive with the best gaming laptops at the time, but it was far better for me as a user in general, even if in retrospect, it was more of a middle class machine, but it absolutely got the job done and I don't think it deserved the bad reputation at all. (Then again, it's entirely likely people dissing Mac for having low specs were not talking about their top of the line pro machines.)
So... Apple should develop a separate version of their system, that doesn't include AI anywhere? Because Siri AI is not the only part of the system that uses the onboard models. The moral panic is just ridiculous at this point
I don't think anyone's asking for a separate version, just an option to turn the AI features off. Even totally aside from the moral points, some of us simply don't have the disk space.
it is off, Apple Intelligence and Siri AI IS NOT the name of the models. The worst they're guilty of here is confusing denominations, something hardly new to Apple
What a strange strawman. You are deciding now to substitute a different complaint than what was originally sense, because it is simply true that if you don't want to use Apple Intelligence, you don't need to.
The complaint now shifts to that you'll still have files on your system, or can't control exactly what models are stored on your computer. Apple has reasons not to give this fine control: what you have on HN is a group of people who are vehemently anti-AI, use Apple products, and still want features very specific to their control of the system.
Apple caters to the general user. If they think a setting is going to be confusing or likely to be misused, they won't implement it. People know the reality that if Apple intelligence is successful and if this feature is implemented, the general user won't know which parts of their workflow use which features. Removing the models will be advertised as a cheap hack to save storage, and people will be confused when they can't turn intelligence on again.
The fact that the core premise of the article (repeated in the title and first sentence) is about "phoning home":
> The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025, I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off.
The entire basis of this complaint is not understanding the difference between "duration" and "interval". And not being able to click the link that is given to you in the settings menu or just search Apple's docs for the setting ( https://support.apple.com/en-mn/guide/mac-help/mchlfc0d4779/... )
You're mixing up Siri AI and Apple Intelligence with the models... Siri AI and Apple Intelligence are PRODUCTS, the tech behind it, the models, are called Apple Foundation Models and they're used in many places in the system. It's not a matter of consent, it's people not understanding the tech they're using and doing spurious analogies.
I am doing nothing of the sort; you're shadow-boxing, and nothing you wrote has any bearing on the point under discussion here: a privacy-sensitive feature that the user explicitly disabled was silently re-enabled and the toggle removed.
No worries, it’s only a matter of time until this becomes normal. Will probably follow the same trajectory as people disabling JavaScript. You still hear about that constantly of course, because the 7 people that do it can’t go a day without letting you know, but it won’t be a panic anymore.
I thought AI was going to write all our code for us and make developers 10x more productive? If code is that cheap, what's the problem with writing a second version of the system with no AI?
I see the dangers of AI and agree that many companies don’t value our privacy and do what’s best for them and not us, but…
…this is an emotional dogmatic post. „All of this garbage“ clearly shows that the author is stuck in the past. The banners on the website confirm this. It’s the figurative fanatic complaining about those black steam devils and their tracks that nobody needs and that destroy nature. Yeah, steam trains were noisy and created smoke, but the age of horses was over. No emotional outburst would have stopped that, and won’t stop AI now.
The unconditional and emotional rejection of AI undermines the actual valid point he is trying to make.
If something can't be stopped, does that mean it's good? Reading accounts of the industrial revolution, huge swathes of nature in the north of England were destroyed. This article is an argument that it should be different, and is mostly focused on consent, not whether AI should exist or not (although the author's position on that is pretty clear too).
As a side note, I would argue you're being just as "emotional" (which I don't necessarily see as a bad thing despite your aspersions) by calling it "fanatic".
Agree. Anyone should be allowed to disable generative AI features on their device, especially a general computing device such as Mac. It's not some hysterical outburst about the industry to be upset when you can't do that, especially when the option used to exist but was removed.
If you honestly can't see the blatant and absolute anti-AI rhetoric in his post (I provided a citation) and the banners, then there really is no reason to continue this discussion.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with being against AI. Rejecting his argument that he should be able to control his computer because of that is very silly.
Not trying to start flamewars, but more and more I wonder how much are people willing to put up with such practices. On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased. And spying. Really user hostile environment. No, thank you.
Because Linux is full of sharp edges which nobody seems to find it fit to fix.
I’ve been dabbling in Linux since the early 2000s with Yellow Dog, SUSE, and Ubuntu, tried making it my daily driver in the early-mid 2010s, and for the past 5 or so years have been using it in a secondary/tertiary role.
Recently I’ve been trying to move my gaming box from Windows to Fedora (which I’ve found mostly makes the right tradeoffs to suit my preferences). I’ve gotten things to mostly work, including games that have been blockers in the past, but just yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity. No big deal I thought, just go into settings and add it back, but as it turns out the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky and most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection. No, you have to drop down and use nmcli afterwards to fix things because the UI also doesn’t surface the right checkbox. I wouldn’t have even figured that out if it hadn’t been for a chatbot’s assistance.
This is the exact sort of time-burning nonsense that isn’t a problem on either of the commercial platforms that I tend to encounter under Linux. Is this single instance going to push me to reboot that box back into Windows? No, but if issues like that keep cropping up eventually one will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Desire to avoid continued frustration will win over the logical portion of most peoples’ brains.
While I dont disagree, Mac and Windows also have their own sharp edges that for some reason no one finds fit to fix even though they get paid millions of dollars to maintain the software. The other day my mom told me her Bluetooth speaker no longer worked on her windows laptop. I was like, ok, lets try the normal troubleshooting steps. Turn it off and on again. Restart computer. Unpair and repair. But I couldn't unpair. It just said no.
I installed ChatGPT on her laptop and allowed it to run a certain subset of shell commands and it finally worked.
If im gonna have to muck around in the terminal to do the most basic of tasks, I may as well use Linux so I actually have a semblance of ownership on my computer.
Bluetooth issues are as much on the manufacturers of BT cards and devices as they are on OS vendors. Outside of the Apple sphere the only way I’ve found to mitigate issues with it regardless of OS is to 1) buy Intel BT chipsets (or hardware incorporating such) and 2) avoid no-name BT devices like the plague.
That's fair, but this was an HP laptop with an Intel chip, and her speaker is an Anker speaker. I cant speak to the hardware quality of HP but her old HP laptop worked fine, and the problem was still resolvable via shell commands, which points to software, and I feel like Windows dropped the ball in many ways (i turned Bluetooth off and on and then even though it was on another panel said Bluetooth was off, i naively clicked on troubleshoot this issue and it also reported Bluetooth was off, and simply removing a Bluetooth device should be a fairly simple task regardless of hardware; I've never had an issue like this even with cheap devices)
but mac has software at least
Everything is full of sharp edges. It's just a matter of which ones are more painful to you.
The author's inability to uninstall or fully disable AI features is one for Mac OS. Window management is a common one for people used to other systems.
Windows has many, with (again) AI features that are hard to get rid of, and attempts to coerce users to create an online account being two of the most prominent lately.
So yeah, KDE's NetworkManager frontend is a little janky sometimes, and they should fix that. Is it worse than trying to coerce the user into using services they don't want to? For some people, probably. For me, no.
I think there's a fundamental difference between having things you need to ignore (windows bloat) and having problems that prop up when you try to do things (linux stuff).
I think people are generally more willing to put up with the former.
The defining difference for me is the number of affected users and how much the issue debilitates the system.
Should AI features be easier to switch off? Sure, no argument there, but a problem like a network interface vanishing, breaking internet connectivity, and re-adding not working as expected is much more serious, even if it’s an issue that impacts fewer people. At least the system with unwanted features is still usable for work.
I don't disagree in principle, though I question it in practice. I suspect network interfaces disappearing from KDE on mainstream distributions is rare. That may vary if you're using "Dave's Janky Arch Fork" or some such.
Commercial operating systems aren't immune. I found several people having a similar problem with Windows 11 on Microsoft Q&A, as well as a thousand third-party sites offering instructions to fix it, likely all infested with ads for "fix your computer" programs that will make things worse: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5583596/...
I'd expect Mac OS to be better, in part because it only has to support a few models of computer. Perhaps it is, but it's also not immune: https://superuser.com/questions/1756912/ethernet-interface-d...
I've had computers with interfaces that vanished before. I've found that disabling NetworkMangler or whatever, and just raw-dogging a wpa_supplicant.conf with whatever wifi networks I'm likely to be interested in, cures the problem in near 100% of cases. Yes, it means having to sudo and change the config whenever I connect to a new wifi network. For me this is not a big deal.
GNOME is a project whose manifesto is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck", for a very specific value of not sucking roughly equivalent to "Let's make Unix into a shitty version of Windows". I'm picking on GNOME because its development psychology has infested the Linux ecosystem, yielding horrors like NetworkManager, dbus, frickin' systemd, et weary cetera. There's a sense that Unix-style composability, modularity, and (conceptual) simplicity is something that has to be hidden from the poor end user, but the people who are implementing the means to do so lack the organizational competence to pull it off. So the absolute state of things for Linux desktop use in 2026 is a tradeoff between jank and brokenness on the one hand and being exposed to Linux's technical underside on the other. I don't mind so much because I've never minded getting technical. I'm the kind of guy who still logs in at the VT console and types 'startx' to get a graphical session going because I came up on early Linux and appreciate being reminded of what underlies that UI convenience. And it sure beats being stuck on Windows or Mac, where it works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't you often can do little but shrug your shoulders and say "wellp, them's the breaks".[1] And that's before adding in AI cruft, advertisements, mandatory online accounts and vendor spyware.
The price to pay for having a hot rod is a lack of a luxury interior from the finest Swiss craftsmen. But a) you have a hot rod; b) it won't sell your driving data to insurance companies!
[1] In the 90s I heard stories from hackers about normies who just kind of assumed that computers were flaky, fragile machines that lost your work every now and then and needed to be restarted at least once a day in order to function. And when they heard of Linux or FreeBSD, their minds were blown because they didn't know computers could do that. But the computer wasn't flaky or fragile; Windows 9x was.
Yeah a lot of this comes down to the mindset one came into computers with.
While I have no aversion to CLI use, editing config files, etc where that is the best way to do things, my introduction to computing was Classic Mac OS. As such my platonic ideal OS looks a lot like Classic Mac OS without its well-known weaknesses: practically nothing is hidden or obfuscated away from the user, the filesystem is laid out for humans before computers and is easily navigable by even non-technical users, GUI control panels are treated as canonical configuration rather than a loosely bolted-on layer, and extending and customizing the system is as simple as moving files in/out of designated directories (e.g. /System Folder/Extensions/).
It’s a vastly different mindset than is found on any *nix-based system, and as well as modern macOS works for me even it still doesn’t meet that standard.
[dead]
Inversely, I've ran KDE on bleeding edge for three years now and have only ran into a handful of bugs, and nothing critical that required me to drop to a terminal to fix. The networking issue seems particularly specific and I have never seen this occur across any of my desktop or laptops.
Im on PopOS and I had one boot problem where I had to pop in a ubuntu flash drive to run boot repair on, but that was like 3 years ago. There are definitely issues that come up sometimes when I upgrade to a new kernel version but it mundane stuff like my printer wont scan duplex. But now AI just helps me fix that stuff I don't spend too much time on it.
I wrote an article on my transition [0]
[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/blog/publication-looking-back-w...
There's definitely some rough edges still. I wasn't ever able to get CUPS to work with the specific model of Canon imageRunner printers we had in the office. I also never need to print, so I stopped trying after it wouldn't take a few test prints.
LLMs are great though. I had a physical RAM issue that resulted in a bad pacman upgrade, failing the mkinitcpio process and corrupting that kernel upgrade. I had never ran into this before and it was complicated by LUKS being enabled. Claude was able to get me the right steps to remount the LUKS drives while I was chrooted in on a live USB, from there I was able to reupgrade and all was well.
> yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity
While I'm not deeply familiar with Red Hat/Fedora - I'm curious if you know what happened here? What changed to trigger this behavior?
Looking at a few search results - looks like an upgrade to 44 likely exposed/introduced a bug in power management that result in the Ethernet being turned off, and the kernel mode unloaded?
I'm guessing the intention behind the change was to enable more power saving.
But that is certainly a valid concern with most Linux distros - ocationally an improvement (higher resolution, faster, better color depth console or driver) will mess with bootloader, x/Wayland etc.
Still driver yank isn't unheard of with windows upgrades either. With MacOS I'm just going to assume any os upgrade is likely to cause some issues - even when Apple owns both the hw and os.
that's really ignoring two big points. 1. windows and macs don't "just work" either... they have their fair share of pain points that you have to accept and/or workaround. 2. linux is different than windows and is different than macos in the sense that you've spent a long time learning the quirks of windows and macos and have the fixes mostly ready. once you learn the quirks of linux it's basically the same.
After the learning curve of linux desktop(well kde) it's basically the same as macos for me and for most people that would use it. most of the computing is done in the browser and that's basically the same experience in any os.
Anecdotally: I usually run Linux on my desktop and have a windows partition only for one game I play. When I booted into Windows, it didn't see either of my two wifi cards in the system. I ran a cable across the house, updated drivers, BIOS, and eventually saw in device manager > hidden devices that the OS thinks my card is unplugged.
It was there before.
In Linux it's there.
Next step is unseat/reseat the PCI device, check connections to the motherboard, and leave powered off for a few minutes. Hopefully windows will decide the device exists.
I ran into this too. It blew my mind that I could run Linux just fine but I couldn't even install Windows because it had no wifi driver and it wouldn't install without a network connection.
I tried putting the driver files on a USB stick but the Windows installer refused to recognize those.
The thing you describe with NetworkManager is worse on Windows. I am uncertain how many different user interfaces there are for networking in Windows, and many simple actions take at least 3 screens, and still doesn't fix the problem.
Every time my connected monitor wakes up from sleep it steals audio back from my internal laptop speakers, the only way to fix it is (with the help of a chatbot to write a script) to permanently turn off the monitor speakers.
All of the rough edges with Linux that are legitimately worse are not things that are the fault of Linux. Tools and games and video streaming services which are either not tested or deliberately designed so they cannot function on Linux.
Microsoft Windows is so bad that most consumers just throw away their old computers and buy new ones when Windows stops working. The more persistent ones will search through some forums for solution, or nowadays try to work through something with AI.
The big difference, even if that is the case, is that they can easily find new computers at any random computer shop with Windows pre-installed.
GNU/Linux has had a few moments with netbooks, or selected XPS 13 models, both now past memories.
Goodwill now resells donated PCs with various linux distros pre-installed, probably to avoid paying for the M$ license. If one looks for a stripped down distro while the look maybe quite retro it tends to just work. I've been on antix linux on all my computers for over a decade and I'm far from a power user -- but a reinstall takes less than an hour and updates are either automatic or requested. Which is to say, M$ doesn't take over my appliance for hours every timeI turn it on because it is ancient hardware -- it just works.
On one (15year old MB) we stream videos nightly.
If you try again, be less ambitious. Don't try to get KDE or Gnome going.
Do a minimal install. Add just enough packages to get X working.
Configure a simple window manager like openbox or dwm.
I uninstall the networking managers. I wrote a simple bash menu program. In one terminal I used that to launch wpa_supplicant for the current network. In another window, I run dhcp. I have a workspace just for that.
When I stay in a hotel, I need to set up a new wpa supplicant profile, and that takes a few minutes. It's klunky. But system upgrades pass by without me noticing.
It's like running an old car with carburettors and simple electrics. You learn the machine once, there's hardly anything to go wrong.
> be less ambitious
Yes, don't try to actually get any work done, install anything you care about, or use it in a way that improves your life at all. Just reorient your life around learning this clunky system and don't expect to get any actual benefit from it until you've spent years learning it.
This is the standard Linux pitch, followed by "why doesn't anyone use it!?"
Thank you for saying this. This is how I feel. I used Ubuntu as a daily driver for a while, and then I went back to MacOS and life was so much better.
That's why I use Linux Mint, even if some Linux guys might think less of me.
Switched from Windows 11. My work system is a Mac. I just love how the Linux gets out of the way, everything just works, UI much better and consistent than Windows.
And I'll probably keep receiving security fixes and app improvements in 10 years for my old Thinkpad.
Get it working
Keep it working
Forget about it
That is me on Debian.
I also like old carburetors and simple electronics, but we're in the vast, vast minority. Most people want a car they don't have to think about or understand, looks pretty, and will take it to a shop when something goes wrong.
It’s also possible for a system to both be a “carburetor type” while also being well-considered and elegant in design and function so it’s easy to tinker on if you want to, but doesn’t need that 99% of the time. I just don’t think that’s ever been a serious goal of any desktop-oriented Linux distro or DE. They all embrace the complexity and add to or multiply it.
From my ~25 years of using Gentoo Linux, I'd say that it's exactly what you describe in your first sentence. The complexity is there if you want it, but only if you want it.
Gentoo is quite a bit more work to get set up than other distros, but
* Once you get it set up, it just keeps on going
* If you're already fairly familiar with Linux system administration, the setup process isn't hard... it just involves a lot of waiting, unless you use the distro-provided precompiled packages
* There's really good documentation that walks you through the installation process and leaves you with a computer with a functioning bootloader and kernel, Internet access, and some pointers towards what you might want to install next
I agree about system design, but I think - especially in the context of your networking example - the complexity lives below the OS and not a case where it's a lack of effort.
Networking protocols, connections, error states, etc are inherently complex and require equally sophisticated handling that linux may not always do. Some software chooses not to handle at all and expose directly to the user - but others like KDE simply lack the millions of dev-hours of polish that Windows and Mac have.
Agree that this is an area that this is an area where complexity is unavoidable.
As for KDE polish, the only reason that’s true is because of someone’s choice to not put energy toward that part of the desktop.
Is it that simple though? There could be so many other reasons. Maybe the particular issue is related to a specific hardware or network configuration that the developers have never run into or can't reproduce.
Linux needs polish for sure, but given a finite amount of time, energy, and money the reasons are likely more complicated than "they don't care"
What's a "carburetor"?
A touchstone for people who forget that engines have been fuel injected for decades.
My great-grandfather - a carpenter in the 1930s - apparently had a saying: "If a man can make it, a man can fix it."
While /technically/ still true, I lament that it is increasingly inapplicable to the world around us today.
I’ve tried the minimal tiling WM thing several times. It’s not for me. Too many little QoL holes that require manual setup to fix and the disjointed patchwork of small utilities that don’t work with each other or share config conventions quickly becomes grating.
I spend a disproportionate amount of time tinkering with Linux desktops trying to make them act the way I like anyway, but the amount of tinkering is exponentially higher with a minimal WM setup. I can’t get any work done under them.
I also don’t really care to administer everything via the CLI and don’t find it a good use of my time to write Bash scripts for everything. If I’m going to do that I’d rather just write my own DE, because even if that’s a wildly larger task than writing a few scripts I’m going to get vastly more satisfaction out of it since I can make everything work exactly as I think it should.
To be clear - I agree with your statement that Linux is full of sharp edges that won't get fixed. I got abandoned by a series of desktop systems. Like you I had gone to and from the linux desktop but had found it unpolished. I was with Mac OS X for a while, and then a major upgrade broke my workflows. Finally I gave up on having a nice desktop. Once I had accepted that, I found a kind of contentment. It has been 15 years, I wouldn't go back now.
I don’t think I’ll ever give up on having nice things. I’m very firmly of the opinion that my computer should bend to me and do its absolute best to serve me and my needs. A machine that sporadically requires manual twiddling does not meet that requirement.
I've been in and around hobbyist computer topics for decades, and I'm still not 100% sure if this comment is straight serious or a really well executed humorous trolling. They'd read essentially the same, so IDK...
"Frustrated with how critical details are missing from the GUI, requiring you to learn console commands? Don't be so ambitious, stop using a GUI for these things at all and write your own CLI for them!"
is this a copypasta? _this_ is your answer to "linux is too hard to use for most people"?
No, I replied because I think cosmic_cheese should be more cynical. Linux is hard, and won't get better. The X-Windows clipboard design is awful, the wayland team made a decision not to improve on it. I replied to the frustrations of trying to create a daily driver.
When was the last time someone asked "does it run on Windows"? Probably somewhere in the mid 90s.
I have used Windows for decades. Not once have I thought "I should make my own file manager."
I thought that after a few months of using Linux.
I really can't tell if you mean "Explorer.exe is good enough and I never felt like it needed improvement" or "Oh, I can make anything I want to, with free tools? This is great! I'll make a file manager for my personal usage that's perfect for me."
The former. You use one DE, typeahead triggers full text search. You use another, no metadata like image width/height when selecting images. You use a third one, no folder thumbnails.
Well yeah, different tools are different. That’s the point. You use the one you like. Do you think there is no good file manager available for Linux?
It's baffling that you can't see that what OP is getting at is that there is not in fact any 'file manager he likes'. 50 half baked solutions are just that - half baked solutions.
"Just learn hundreds of different tools, spend dozens of hours reading all their man pages, understand all their limitations, and pick the correct one before starting your task, all so you can accomplish something completely ancillary to the task you actually want done. Geez, it's not hard."
If you don't like something on Linux, it has alternatives you can use instead.
If you don't like something on a proprietary OS, you can save a lot of time by having no way to change it and suffering the problems permanently.
Unfortunately, just because you have choices that doesn't mean those choices are good.
I was forced to the file explorer on Windows, and the file explorer was good so I didn't mind. I was also forced to use MS Paint. And it was good for a long time, until they added layers. Now my primary use case of it (pasting an image and cropping it) doesn't work as well as it used to.
On Linux I don't even have that choice. There are choices, yes, but none of them do what I want anyway.
What truly drives me insane is that if you say "I just want what Windows does" people tell you that it's not Windows, it's "different(tm)." Then you ask why do Linux software sucks in comparison to Windows, and you get told "well, it's because Windows has $ to spend in R&D." So it's double-think. Developers are aware proprietary software spends tons of money they don't have in R&D, and yet they shy away from just copying the results because they don't want to be Windows.
I just want Windows, but with freedom. I don't want "different" if it's not going to be better.
> Then you ask why do Linux software sucks in comparison to Windows, and you get told "well, it's because Windows has $ to spend in R&D."
Are there actually people who claim this? Microsoft has plenty of money but the premise that they use it to improve the user experience seems contrary to evidence.
When something sucks on Linux with no alternatives it's usually because most people don't use the feature you want, e.g. because there is another way to do the same thing and more people are doing it that way, and then no one bothers to make thing you want because their desire to have that is already being satisfied by something else.
Of course, one of the choices you have is to build the thing you want yourself, which is why it works out that way. The chances of someone having done that go up the more people want it to exist. When the number is low, you have to decide if you want it enough for the person who makes it for everyone to be you. And it's fine if your answer is no, but now you know why that thing doesn't exist.
Microsoft actually doesn't have to improve anything because people have been using it for decades. It is muscle memory.
"Choice is bad because I might have opinions and then instead of the computer saying no I might switch to software that better suits my preferences. I just want a corporation to tell me what to want"
It’s more like, “I already have opinions and preferences and despite the various options available, none of them suit me well and so choosing any one results in a high degree of compromise, and so the next best thing is using a different one depending on the circumstance which brings its own compromises.”
Someone did though. Otherwise they wouldn't have created FilePilot. I have never had issues with any file manager in Linux. Explorer on the other hand is annoying as heck. Of course I am not picky with a file manager as I rarely use it on Linux anyway.
Gotta ask what hardware you are running. It makes a world of difference.
This machine is deliberately boring and well-supported. Higher end “prosumer” or “pseudo-workstation” motherboard (Asus ProArt X570 Creator), Ryzen 5950X, RX 9070 GPU. I actually swapped the GPU out for a better Linux experience (was originally running a 3080 Ti). Every distribution I’ve tried supports everything out of the box with no hoop-jumping.
> ...most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection.
What are those correct settings? Do you need something particularly special done for your Ethernet connection to function? Given that you were there because you were troubleshooting a NetworkManager failure, I'd also wonder if NetworkManager changed in a way that made that "add interface wizard" not work correctly anymore.
> ...the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky...
As you've discovered, NetworkManager is intermittently horrifically flaky. Every time I think about how it's the default for most Linux distros, I get so angry.
I used to enthusiastically use it for everything until the maintainers released a version that would always attempt to set the interface MTU to 0 after bringing it up, which the OS would clamp to something else... 12xx or 14xx, I can't remember. [0] After that clownshow, I dropped NetworkManager forever and used the "legacy" tools that had been working reliably for ages and continue to work reliably.
In the case of wired Ethernet interfaces, all that needs to be done for pretty much every home user is to bring the interface up and start a DHCP client like 'dhcpcd'. In the case of WiFi ones, you bring the interface up and start wpa_supplicant which can be managed with something like wpa_gui. Not-coincidentally, the Linux distro I use supports using both of these with its network configuration-and-activation tooling.
[0] For those who don't know what MTU is, know that the effect of this misconfiguration is that your network communications will intermittently stop dead for no clear reason at all. Things have gotten quite a bit better since then, and you can run mixed-MTU networks if you're careful about it... but back then, this immediately launched you into flaky network purgatory.
My network is extremely ordinary and doesn't need any special settings. PC is plugged into an unmanaged switch which is plugged into the router. Super standard stuff.
Specifically, on my machine interfaces created in KDE settings have a flag to prevent automatic DNS resolution toggled on, and this is not represented by a corresponding checkbox in the wizard or when editing the interface. As a result I could ping other devices on the network and external IPs like 8.8.8.8, but not browse the web or do anything else that requires DNS resolution. One has to use nmcli to toggle that flag off.
> ...interfaces created in KDE settings have a flag to prevent automatic DNS resolution toggled on...
By this, do you mean that interfaces created will get their IP addresses via DHCP, but will ignore DHCP-provided DNS & etc servers?
If so, given how incredibly insane that is to be a default, there's no way that the wizard is doing that. Given my past experience with NetworkManager, I expect NetworkManager made a batshit-crazy backwards-incompatible change and didn't bother to tell anyone. I know that that doesn't fix your problem, but maybe it will encourage you to find out how to stop using this fantastically complex network management software that you don't even need and is clearly maintained by a pack of ADHD-addled clowns.
EDIT: And no, I'm very aware that this does nothing but reinforce your point that some of the components that the major Linux distros are using are nothing but boxes of razor blades. I guess I'm just lucky that I came across Gentoo Linux a quarter-century ago.
GNOME doesn't have sharp edges
Gnome's sharpest edge is that it has tried to simplify to the point that it doesn't have a UI for the thing I want to do. There might be an extension, and if I'm really lucky, it isn't broken and actually supports the current version.
I've been using it on my tablet, as I do find it to be a nice UI for the touchscreen, but I may switch to KDE because Gnome's onscreen keyboard is horrid, and difficult to replace.
It has plenty of them, especially for former power users pre-GNOME 3.0, starting with JavaScript for all extensions, famous for its early memory leaks, and the whole deal having to install several extensions to get the old behaviours back.
And then they decided the Windows registry is such a good idea, they should replicate it.
Mate / Cinnamon is quite nice, actually, for those who haven't gotten used to the Mac-style app bar.
These sharp edges are a lot less annoying with agents to help solve the problem.
Perhaps, but even as someone who uses LLMs I don’t like them being allowed to run amok on my machine. I don’t trust them.
They’re also a crutch that shouldn’t be necessary for tasks so commonplace and simple as adding a network interface.
They're the next step in UI for computers. Telling codex to add a network interface is easier than a GUI which is easier than a terminal program which is easier than manually editing a config file. None of those are a crutch. They are increasingly useful tools.
I'm curious how you get codex to do anything when you don't have a working network?
Frankly I find terminal applications considerably easier than most GUIs for most purposes, but I agree that natural language is generally an easier interface layer than either, and that an interface layer to the functions of a computer in general seems to be LLMs' destiny as a technology
I’ve been using command lines for over 25 years now and the thing that rubs me the wrong way about them is that nobody can agree on conventions with regard to how a CLI utility should work, which limits the amount of knowledge that’s transferable between them. Each effectively has to be learned individually which gets old fast.
I mean I think there's about as much convention and overlap as there seems to be for GUIs at least, and with much more discoverable clarification to boot
The issue with manpages is that they need to be pulled up independent of the program, they’re overly verbose, and often don’t include practical usage examples or if they do, bury them under miles of flags I’ll never use.
Sometimes CLI utility help commands fill the gap, but often they’re too spartan or don’t even exist.
Sure, documentation could always be better. My first attempt is usually tab-completion in the shell, then I'll try --help or something, then I usually go to either the archwiki or web search, which increasingly these days is equivalent to asking a chatbot, or asking an llm in a TUI. I find I'm generally not getting past the --help part of that more than 10% of the time, and the web or wiki search solves my problem with one query 99.99% of the rest of the time, but I'm willing to believe this is aided by experience.
No amount of experience using GUIs stops me from about 40% of the time I don't already know how to do something having to find a youtube video that explains what arcane path I need to take through a menu to find a setting, and if the menus have changed I might have to find the part of the video that explains what I'm looking for, watch it, realize it's changed, and hope I can find a more recent one. This goes for both native and web applications, for mobile and desktop, for every operating system I've ever touched. Sometimes there's a text explanation I can find, usually via a web search or llm. Sometimes I can guess at where something might be (Tools > Preferences? Wait maybe it's settings? Is this one a view setting? Hamburger menu? O wait no that one's in account settings. Ah, that one's under a different specific tab because the org that makes the software considers it an integration and also they A/B tested that it's more discoverable in this other place so they moved it since the youtube video I saw about it). On a web browser it's helpful to be able to dig into the page via debug consoles, sometimes I can search for some string I know is the name of the setting, or a value that's probably currently set. I can do all that, if necessary, but I'm certainly not comfortable claiming it's "easier"
In no way is a stochastic system that has zero ability to understand anything "the next step in UI". That's a recipe for disaster and even greater frustration.
fwiw, I haven't had this issue on Fedora on GNOME. Ubuntu/Debian have always been a pain for me, but Fedora has been great.
I see this as IBM/RedHat is a better steward/maintainer than other projects.
Yeah, the install was originally a GNOME one, but I added KDE after because it handles some things better. For example, GNOME tray item extensions will crash some tray-item-spawning programs running under WINE/Proton, which isn’t a problem under KDE.
I think GNOME gets some things more correct (it has a much better grip on design for instance), but I don’t agree with its strictly-minimalist philosophy that makes the macOS desktop look full-featured in comparison.
XFCE and Cinnamon are probably the closest to striking the right balance as far as I’m concerned (and are boring in a good way) but sadly they don’t get a fraction of the development resources that the big guys get.
But what if you switched to Linux to avoid having to use AI?
This is a genuinely incomprehensible take to me. You damn well better learn to use the tool, or you will be obviated by those that do (at least, as long as your job depends on it). Linux or no Linux.
Also, you are now using the tool that is best suited to "use AI". You will hit those rough patches, and it's good to know how to work through them. But sometimes there is just no time for such bullshit, and you now have a tool at your disposal that can just sweep these problems away. It is not without its downsides, but this is a clear "dumping the baby out with the bathwater" scenario.
Your post has the same energy of the old codgers who won't "learn computers" and impotently swim against the tide. It's fine if you want to do that (you do you), but you are swimming in the wrong direction IMO.
(If you don't work in tech, the magnitude of my recommendations would soften towards you in particular, but the velocity would remain the same.)
> "You damn well better learn to use the tool, or you will be obviated by those that do"
These vaguely threatening LLM promoter comments are almost like cultish "believe in $DEITY or you'll go to $PERDITION" preaching. It's just freaky.
I'm genuinely wondering what goes through their minds when they post this.
What goes through my mind is some combination of "Holy shit, this technology is incredible." and "Holy shit, this technology is retarded." and "If I don't stay on top of this shit, I'm going to lose my fucking job.".
On the other side of the fence, the aversion to using the tool seems equally cultish, like not working on the Sabbath.
If it makes you feel any better, I don't think this tech is "AGI" and that it seems to have some fundamental limitations that make it perform worse than a 3-year-old can perform on many tasks. But it's foolish to avoid something that could cause you to be replaced by some idiot that can do untold damage with just a few prompts, all because you didn't (assuming you work in tech) want to stay on top of the tools available to you.
This is actually a great point. I've taken some esoteric issue with my Debian Linux install and gotten exactly the needed fix. Especially when the error is extremely misleading ("/dev/root: Can't open blockdev" was that I forgot to install the actual kernel image itself...) Distros could ship open-weight LLMs that sure, might take a minute to come up with the answer, but they could be preset with the privileges to actually execute the solution.
However, those only exist because real people talk about problems on forums. If we fully integrate an LLM into the desktop and nobody discusses the issues they run into anymore, will LLMs continue to be able to solve the problems?
Agents aren't a panacea: The sharp edges shouldn't be there to begin with.
IE, the ethernet port shouldn't just disappear from the OS; it doesn't matter that now it's a little easier to fix the problem.
If you don't have ethernet the agent isn't going to get a lot done
I had a local model help me to revert a bad kernel last year. I think it was Qwen-3-Coder, and I had no GUI and no network.
Should is a four-letter word, my friend. The sharp edges are there whether you want them to be or not.
Do you need glasses? I count 6 letters.
Yes but we should not need an AI chatbot to solve problems which should be trivial for us to solve ourselves. Linux should just not have these issues, period.
OK, good luck with that attitude. Until the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop finally arrives, you can use the available technology to solve the problem in a practical manner.
-1 because why would someone who is annoyed with AI features in macOS migrate to Linux, where they would then be “forced” (in order to not waste their own time) to use agents to fix breaking OS-level functionality..
I've been a Linux user since at least 2013, I don't think I've ever been forced to use agents to fix anything?
> "These sharp edges are a lot less annoying with agents to help solve the problem."
That applies just as much to Windows and MacOS as it does to Linux.
Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of any other hardware.
Build quality (aluminum), charging (magsafe), screen resolution, battery life, noise (or lack thereof), trackpad…
It’s like other vendors aren’t even trying.
Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
Of course it works and is beautiful hardware and all that.
But don't fool yourself. You're subverted to Apple's rules the same as Microsoft users are to Windows.
I prefer to fight a little bit on an update on a unix system on something that is not working 100% to give up choices. When you use Windows, MacOS, Android you do not have choices. Choices are dictated from above, like it or not.
As for me every time I have to interact with something that is not BSD or Linux I suffer miserably.
We are trading usability & quality for freedom & privacy. We know that, but we're all so busy that we have to make that trade. I've used linux since 2000 for servers, I've used it (and still do sometimes) for workstations, but even 2026 linux workstations & laptops aren't at where macbooks were 15 years ago.
Yes, there is a whole moral discussion to be had, but as much as you win points for doing the better thing, the better things don't really pay bills.
The good news though is that we definitely won the server war. We can spin up VMs and install Linux without licences. We have access to software that works well, security updates, frequent releases, a massive ecosystem of free software, no advertising, very little to no licensing for software, and it works incredibly well. So much so, that we can't even imagine a world in which servers require licence keys or subscriptions or a marketplace account.
Imagine now, if laptops & workstations were as solved as servers are.
That's why we aren't there yet, because they're not.
Some people don’t understand the concept of trade-offs
Some people understand the concept of trade-offs but don’t understand how other people don’t want the same trade-offs as they do
It goes beyond that if you ask me. I think anybody in this discussion knows all these things, but ultimately they fall back to “…and my decision is the correct one.”
That sentiment is rampant on this site.
5000 people skip over an obvious flame bait thread. 1000 people read but don’t comment at all. 7 people who feel they’ve solved the problem of which laptop is best and want to tell everyone why they should switch to Linux/Mac or why Linux/Mac sucks post obvious comments about Mac hardware and nix freedom. But “the sentiment is rampant on hn” is the take away. The sentiment that is rampant on hn is that there is a sentiment rampant on hn.
Eh, I’d say there is a larger than standard proportion of stalwart know-it-alls here. Doesn’t mean your example is wrong. But man some people have everything figured out and still find a way to complain about it all.
> We are trading usability & quality for freedom & privacy.
Are we? Not sure what usability and quality improvement there are in an OS where you have to fight against its vendor's decision.
Most critics against Linux I read come from people who never took the time to choose perfectly supported hardware in the first place but just buy whatever bleeding edge stuff is available running on windows, then hope it will works. It is like criticizing Apple/macOS because it doesn't work well on an hackintosh really and is completely dishonest. I don't criticize windows because it doesn't work on the latest Macbook M8 ultra studio pro nor do I criticize iOS because it doesn't work on my Samsung Note tab 6 or macOS 27 because it doesn't work on a Microsoft Surface.
I haven't had any update nor hardware support issue in the last 15 years because I have chosen hardware based on Linux support compatibility before purchasing them.
I don't even get the "quality hardware" argument. The only hardware I interact with is my high quality mechanical keyboard, trackball, and color calibrated monitor. All are vastly superior to any Apple hardware that I would interact with.
It's mostly about laptops. Most people use laptops. Apple laptops are good and all the other ones are bad.
> Apple laptops are good and all the other ones are bad.
Bad or not as good?
For many people not as good can be good enough.
For instance I am mostly working from home, and will never spend more than 6 hours straight without a pause nor do I work "on the road" so I never cared about having a +11h of battery life. I understand it can be very valuable in some circonstances but it has never been a thing for me and for many people using their laptop mostly at home. I wouldn't trade having a forced siri install or the shitty keyboard that used to come with macbook a few years ago for more battery life than I actually need.
I didn't really interpret this discussion as being about laptops - as opposed to being around Apple hardware and software in general.
It's obviously not about the desktop setting.
> I haven't had any update nor hardware support issue in the last 15 years because I have chosen hardware based on Linux support compatibility before purchasing them.
You're unique! Also I hear what you're saying about the vast choice of laptops available with amazing Linux compatibility
> You're unique!
I don't think so. Critics are usually more vocals than people who have no issues.
My grandmother used linux for years without issue in the late 90's, my ex inherited a computer from me 16 years ago and was still using Linux last I checked 7 years ago, having migrated from slackware to ubuntu on her own without being a particularly tech savy person. She had no wish to get back on windows as it just worked without getting in the way. My current wife migrated to linux without realizing it when the hard drive on her laptop died, she only figured it out when she realized icons of her office suite were different. Using an immutable distro has been painless for her so far in 3 years, same for my daughters, as update are done in the background and system boot simply to new image when started up. I am not even doing any maintenance, just checking once every few full moons that the auto update is still working (which is the case).
> Also I hear what you're saying about the vast choice of laptops available with amazing Linux compatibility
The irony is not lost when I consider this vast choice it is at least bigger than the choice of laptops[1] running macOS at any given time.
[1] currently 8 according to Apple's own comparison table separating model into line, then screen size and cpu.
Isn't the only difference that people using servers are expected to have deeper knowledge? As someone using Linux both on servers and on a desktop, I see little difference.
Apple doesn't even have a tiling window manager as far as I know.
They have one built in now and have had third party ones for over a decade. I used SizeUp to tile windows in Mac OS in 2013. Now the OS has it built in but I find Rectangle to be superior. And it’s free and much better than any window manager I’ve tried in any Linux Distro.
SizeUp isn't a tiling window manager as far as a youtube video showcasing it goes and neither is Rectangle. It's more like an alternative to the Windows aero snap thing.
A tiling window manager is a different concept.
Is this ragebait? In case it isn't...
I'm sorry but objectively macOS window management is wholly subpar compared to the options on Linux.
Rectangle is a literal hack on top that hopefully works when you need it. Rectangle is great, but Rectangle, Yabai and whatnot can only hope that the undocumented private APIs that macOS _allows_ them to use today don't mysteriously break tomorrow.
Meanwhile a Linux window manager actually does its full job unencumbered because it's a _real_ first class window manager and not a hack.
[flagged]
Yabai and AeroSpace
The thing is most people don't care about having a choice, they just want it to work. In fact having choice taken away from them is a good thing.
Probably 99% of Apple / Windows users aren't very tech literate so if they have to fight an update they'll just think it's broken.
It's just basic business practice, cater to the 99%, don't worry about the 1%
Yeah but the 1% can still accomplish whatever they want. It just may require a bit of code. No big deal if you’re in the 1%. And you get the added benefit of automatic security updates that don’t break critical system components like what happens from time to time in every Linux distro I’ve ever used over the last 20 years.
Nobody is fooling themselves about this, we have stuff to do with the device beyond focusing on it
On Windows/Android I certainly have more choises than on MacOS/iOS.
I am satisfied with current set of choices on my Win 10 & Android 13.
That simply isn’t true. You can disable whatever you want. You just may not be able to do it through the UI. I’ve customized my Mac to never phone home. It’s not hard if you know what you’re doing. It’s even easier if you don’t, and just ask Claude code to do it.
You can’t disable “whatever you want.” As the OP explains, in macOS 27 a “Siri AI” process stays running, always, doing who knows what, even if you turn everything off via the UI and CLI. If you know of a way to disable this, please post it because I’m sure many people would be interested in it.
As another example of what you can’t disable: I don’t wish to subscribe to Apple’s paid iCloud offerings. Yet there are several places in the UI both in macOS and iOS where there are non-removable ads for the service under certain conditions. For example, when your local storage fills up. Oh and now there’s a non-removable 20GB+ Apple LLM model now taking up space on my 256GB ssd. Thanks a lot Tim/John.
Delete /Applications/Siri AI.app, or (easier to undo) chmod -x?
Have you actually tried this or are you just guessing?
It's a guess, but I'd try it if I had a Mac.
Please stop guessing.
> Also the OS mostly “just works”
A large portion of the HN crowd woefully underrates this aspect of macOS. The types who would get pleasure tweaking their OS and understanding it intimately are overrepresented here, though props to them.
I don't care what people say; macOS is the only OS I've ever used that has never booted to a black/blue screen with relatively cryptic error after performing an upgrade. Not once ever. Windows today is of course abusive to users and shouldn't be used, and as much as I absolutely love Linux as a server OS and for VM appliances, I get no joy whatsoever trying to figure out why the DE stopped working after letting the OS update itself or debugging subpar rendering from the Wayland compositor or X11. (Linux people still tell me this isn't a problem in 2026 but, guess what, my Ubuntu VM hit a black screen a couple days ago after upgrading with no other changes made to the installation, so they're wrong) That and so much graphical Linux software is written with the attitude of "I'm a freak who thinks context menus shouldn't exist so fuck the user and fuck anyone who tells me I'm wrong", yet so many DEs integrate these apps anyway.
The worst thing that macOS has ever overtly done to me is slightly change the look of its interface over the years, which is incredibly minor compared to all the changes that Windows, Ubuntu, Gnome, and KDE have gone through in the last decade. Does it pull lame crap like phone home? Probably, but these days I assume that just about all software thinks it knows better than I and constantly pings cloud servers. MacOS is not really unique in this regard. I will switch to my own Linux if Apple goes down the road of "use our AI or else", but for now I don't really see the venom towards macOS to be justified when it's incredibly easy to prove that the alternatives are usually very poor.
Oh yeah, and the hardware is excellent. (except for the keyboards which need TPU dam covering them or else dust kills them after a couple years)
> macOS is the only OS I've ever used that has never booted to a black/blue screen with relatively cryptic error after performing an upgrade. Not once ever.
Happened to me years ago. No biggie, installed a backup and noticed I had somehow removed the most important directory with all my work files from the the time machine back up. Hardly Apple’s fault, though, but I got complacent with ”it just works”.
Since then I come to conclusion that the saying should go: ”It works - until it doesn’t”. If it os not the OS, it is myself who messes something up.
These days I almost solely use Linux. I have M1 Mini as a media centre connected to TV and I have to use Windows crap at work. Opening my Linux seems like a hig from an old friend in comparison. I might need to read docs and fight with drivers every now and then, but fuck it, I don’t care. Because this one is mine.
It's funny because I wrote my comment this morning and then an hour later my manager told me unprompted about how his work Macbook updated over the weekend and got stuck in a boot loop! I have a feeling the blame might actually be on some IT department configuration going haywire, but it could be Apple's fault for all I know. That was an amusing coincidence.
And yeah, "It works – until it doesn't" is probably the most accurate statement that can be made about all technology. My original comment also can make it seem like I'm taking a dump on Linux, but my gripe is more about Linux desktop environments. Linux absolutely can be a really stable OS, but I've only been able to truly reach that for myself by compiling my own kernel and composing my own desktop environment from barely-related packages. This is where I totally relate to your sense of "fuck it, I don't care because it's mine." Maybe someday I'll end up completely switching to my own Linux OS.
> I don't care what people say; macOS is the only OS I've ever used that has never booted to a black/blue screen with relatively cryptic error after performing an upgrade.
This happened to me once with a Mac upgrade!
And it’s still fewer times than something has happened to one of my Linux machines, by an order of magnitude.
There are little annoyances with Macs and occasional frustrating problems, but after using them side by side with other operating systems for years it’s what I choose for the daily driver.
Most complaints come from people who have become familiar with one OS for a decade and then get angry when they use something else and it’s not the same as their familiar thing. There isn’t much value in those comparisons.
It's things like this that make me imagine what kind of Linux desktop we could have if one of them had the kind of budget that goes towards Windows and macOS. The kernel itself is great and tons of money is effectively invested towards it and its ecosystem. In my humble opinion, it's the Linux DEs that sometimes get really close to being as equally awesome but never quite get there. MacOS is by no means what I consider a perfect OS, but it's reliable enough that I haven't had to think to myself "what if my computer stops working tomorrow because reasons." I know it happens to people, but it seems relatively rare in contrast to the alternatives. The one big exception might be the removal of Rosetta, but developers and consumers have had an abundance of time to migrate to Apple Silicon. In general, macOS respects me enough such that it isn't constantly trying to make me adapt to new ideas. You know something? I hate that I'm practically kissing the rear end of a gigantic corporation that does other things that are anti-consumer and anti-developer. I don't worship Apple. I think GrapheneOS is better than iOS. But I appreciate that their desktop OS causes me the least number of frustrations. And speaking of GrapheneOS, it essentially benefits from Google's budget towards AOSP, and Linux DEs don't have this advantage. Imagine if they did and we had a Linux DE that was as solid as GrapheneOS, and without the BS that comes with Android.
I know what you mean, but my System 76 laptop comes pretty darn close to 'just works.' Certainly closer than Windows ever did for me.
It's been ages since I've looked at System 76. They have quite an impressive lineup of products now! I'll definitely be checking them out the next time I want a personal computing device that's not tied to Microslop or Apple.
And System76 charges you just as "absurdly" as Apple. But people don't complain about the price there like you see with Apple.
Ya wayland v x11. I ended up having to sideload xcfe+x11 just to do 1) video streaming work 2) kicad
one was a permissions/capability issue, but the other was straight up performance. As someone said above, an AI agent drilled down on both workstreams immediately, so the pivot wasnt too rough
When you say "sideload" you mean... "install packages"?
Yeah I hate the term "sideload", but I'm guessing they meant it in the sense that they installed a separate DE within a distro designed around its original DE. Ideally, the DE that ships with a distro should be able to solve problems like video streaming and KiCAD with relative ease in the year 2026. Although I'd be curious as to why exactly that person decided they needed to change their setup in that way, I also can't say I'm entirely surprised that they would end up needing to do something like that.
The idea of a distro being "designed" around a particular DE has always annoyed me too. I'd hear people saying they wanted to try KDE so they wiped Ubuntu and installed Kubuntu instead and it's like, buddy you could have just... installed KDE. I know some specialized distros are really all about shipping a nicely-configured setup for their specific DE, but your old standbys like Debian, Redhat, Arch, Slackware, these are all infinitely flexible.
The idea, I think, is to provide a sense of GUI unity that Windows and Mac mostly provide. While it's nice in principle, the reality is you're going to install other software, and it's often going to use GUI libraries that don't perfectly match or match at all with your Linux DE. Personally, I've never found the need for a system to be designed so heavily around a DE. Like you said, it's entirely feasible and relatively straight forward to download Debian or whatever distribution and install a DE and chances are it will work ask expected. Well, until you perform an update/upgrade and boot to a black screen, but that's a different story. Once you've got your kernel and init system of choice, you can pretty much do anything you want. A premade DE is hardly even needed if you have a modest familiarity with how Linux works. The only downside is the added work from setting it up and debugging it, but people who use Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, MATE, LXDE, and so forth, end up doing that anyway eventually.
This is really the only reason I have a MacOS system around. The M4 Air feels like what I imagined a laptop could be 15 years ago. No fans to block, can grab it and carry it around almost like a tablet, works great as a thin client into a more powerful system over Moonlight, it's light enough that I don't even think about carrying it around in my backpack even when I'm also carrying my work laptop, and it was cheap enough that if anything happens to it I won't be too concerned.
Compared to the last XPS I had, it's substantially better for my use case, since I'll generally be remoting into systems anyway.
I find my M2 Macbook Pro so much less pleasant to use than my x220 thinkpad (running Debian) that I only use the Macbook for CPU-bound activities to which the x220 thinkpad is unequal.
I find the Apple offering's keyboard worse to type on, its enormous touchpad is a chore to engage with compared to the venerable Trackpoint, and the operating system feels contrived to make simple things difficult.
The x220 thinkpad is 14 years old now. And has a 500 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM. Perhaps in another 14 years Apple will be able to match it feature for feature.
One might well ask why I own Apple hardware at all. The answer is to buy entry into their walled garden as a developer.
You have an interesting definition of "bricked"
That's defined as "the device has become a brick, cannot be recovered". It was mostly popularized by broken firmware updates which effectively destroyed the device, as it could no longer be salvaged.
You calling a borked package install in userspace almost bricked is telling about your technical capability.
And I agree that people that are basically technologically illiterate should not use Linux.
They could if someone administers it for them, but if nobody can help them - it's just not the right choice.
Can these 'technologically illiterate' use Windows?
I've spent the last 2 weeks trying to get Windows to work (hard crash at random times) when it ran flawlessly on Ubuntu.
The issue appears to have arisen because Windows decided to update my graphics drivers, so making them (for reasons AMD perhaps need to sort out) incompatible with Adrenaline. A million reboots later, using arcane programs to clear out hidden installs, hidden config, and trying to get details from a system that will readily tell you it recovered but gets shy about what caused it to crash .. eesh.
My experience is you need far more expertise to run Windows. Maybe if MS tested they're releases so it didn't break itself all the time ...
Your argument is that Linux has better GPU driver support than Windows? Might want to do a bit of research on that one. You don’t remember Linux flipping Nvidia the bird?
Edit: I also experienced the Nvidia driver update that broke a bunch of things on my (Fedora) server last week.
The internet has redefined "bricked" as meaning something stopped working but is still fixable, because they loved the word "bricked" and didn't give a shit that it had a meaning already.
Like many other slang terms, the word "bricked" has been diluted to mean "moderately messed up." It's just how language changes over time.
It's because it means they can't fix it themselves. The actual reason is their acquired helplessness, compared to previous generations.
For the vast majority of people, without much technical capability, “moderately messed up” is functionally equivalent to “bricked” as a purely technical slang term.
People without much technical capability don't use the word "bricked" at all.
> They could if someone administers it for them, but if nobody can help them - it's just not the right choice.
I wonder why? If nobody can help them, they are fucked on any OS.
Yeah, but with Apple they can get help from the genius desk at the Apple store.
For both windows and Linux you'll have to find someone thats willing to help you, essentially. Usually a lot harder for those people. Especially with Linux ime, as even fewer places know enough to help you, even if they may be able to handle windows
I believe there is a whole market dedicated to give assistance to windows.
To use Linux on the desktop you first have to know about it for a start, so you are unlikely to end up with a linux OS without knowing anyone using it or an association/usergroup promoting it.
For both you can just call your local PC shop, which are much more common than Apple stores, at least around here.
In vast parts of America, the "local PC shop" doesn't exist. It's BestBuy's GeekSquad (of dubious quality) or Apple's Genius Bar. There might be a repair shop somewhere, but most of the time, they just repair cracked screens.
I think this highly depends. I would feel comfortable with giving my older relatives a linux mint cinnamon machine.
Sure, but probably only because they can call you if something happens.
It's fine most of the time, so it's not a big deal... But if you're unwilling and they're technologically illiterate: they will not be able to recover. Apple has the genius help desk which will sort them out, with Linux... You're gonna have to find "someone", "somewhere".
Can be done for sure, however once again: I would not recommend
> Sure, but probably only because they can call you if something happens.
I had my parents on Linux for a hot second, and got tired of them calling me for help. So I switched them to Mac, and then I discovered they still call for help. At least with Linux I knew the system well.
Just my 0.02, but Linux is a smarter choice today than it ever was, because AI is extremely good at fixing things. I can fix most anything on my machines, but I still use AI, because it does it while I'm doing other stuff.
Mmh, reading your comment leaves me a little divided inside.
Are you unaware that they likely want to talk with you, and the technological issues are likely just the vehicle for this?
I suggest you just help them and try to savor the time you have with them. The time is likely a lot shorter then you expect. But of course, just a random bystanders perspective
> Are you unaware that they likely want to talk with you, and the technological issues are likely just the vehicle for this?
Not the person you're responding to, but: They may want to learn to communicate honestly. I would find the situation described deeply irritating. Enough to cut contact for a while, even.
You sound like a wonderful person
these days to me a device is bricked if I need to spend +1h recovering it. Happy linux user though through and through.
Maybe we should come up with a new definition for that because bricked definitely means unrecoverable.
Why? That term will also change due to common usage over time
We lost the battle over “literally “ a decade ago and I’m not going to spend my time fighting a bunch of people who would rather scroll through 5 second videos all day than pick up a book.
I think you might be betraying your own technical literacy gaps with that comment. In many Linux distros, your package manager can update your kernel and boot loader, from userspace. Yes plenty of safeguards exist to try to prevent really bad things from happening. Furthermore, brick has become slang for “doesn’t work”. I dislike the linguistic shift just as much as you but we can give the benefit of the doubt that the point is that everyday Linux uses still encounter massive problems like this with higher than normal frequency.
Which is the whole point, no? There would be more Linux everywhere if it didn’t occasionally break in ways that require special expertise to fix.
> i think you might be betraying your own technical literacy gaps with that comment. In many Linux distros, your package manager can update your kernel and boot loader, from userspace.
You think wrong.
I maintain multiple Linux system on the side an know about it well enough.
The Nvidia drivers however are not bios/uefi in case you didn't know. That's what firmware is.
Those can still be flashed from a root Linux booted into a graphical interface, but nonetheless were not the topic of discussion.
Aside from that - a borked kernel can still be easily recovered for most nowadays, as they usually keep the old versions around with a simple picker after an unsuccessful boot.
Still, I'm unable to grasp the point youre making in relation to what I said. I thought I was very explicitly recommending against people without any technological capability to use Linux... You seem to agree?
My impression of you is not something that can be right or wrong. My challenge to you was that a userspace program can brick a machine. I made that challenge because you predicated your ad hominem attack on the idea that a userspace package install couldn't brick a system: "You calling a borked package install in userspace almost bricked is telling about your technical capability." You haven't refuted it, because you can't. And the fact that you missed rebutting my challenge (claiming you didn't see the point) and argued past me with a different point that video card drivers are not the same as the primary bios tells me enough to form an impression.
Anyway.
This thread spawned off of a discussion about how people still use Apple because though Linux may be easier than it's ever been it's still hard for anybody to run a Linux desktop system without occasional downtime and repair when something breaks. That was the point of the comment you initially responded to.
But, you missed it; you responded to:
"and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt"
with:
"well um axually you don't know what bricked means and that's probably a sign that you're too dumb to use linux. people who are too dumb to use linux shouldn't use it".
Even though we agree on the point, I felt like your response wasn't fair or really even apropos. So I replied. To be crystal clear:
1. they did fix their problem, but it was not a fun time for them. I can empathize 1000% with that. Sometimes I just want to do something and Linux (and everything I sign up for when deploying it) itself gets in the way. When an apt update causes a boot failure, irrespective of whether it's a failing driver or a borked firmware, it's annoying and it gets in the way. It's not an issue of technical literacy. You still have to figure out the issue and fix it which costs time and attention that is so scarce these days.
2. "bricked" has evolved colloquially to refer to a spectrum of failure modes covering everything from "the firmware is toast" to "user-space didn't come up". never mind that the author used the term "almost bricked" to indicated they knew it wasn't hard bricked but intended to communicate that it also wasn't functional. your entire attack stems from you rashly misinterpreting the author's intent here. but even if the author had demonstrated clear technically illiteracy, there's a way for you to add commentary about the definition of bricked without the distraction of attacking the person's technical aptitude. I think everyone knows it's almost impossible to inadvertently hard-brick anything these days
All in all, you, me, and the comment you initially replied to do seem to share the same understanding: to operate linux you need to have a level of tolerance to deal with the occasional issues that come with it. And for many (even technical) people that's not the right balance. Everything else you introduced to the discussion detracted from that point.
> Also the OS mostly “just works”
Apparently it doesn't judging by the tons of articles published after every macOS update.
> just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
And I am on a run of 11 years of update (since Fedora 25 or 26) without a single issue. Anecdotal evidences are just that. Anecdotal. Some people will have issues, others won't. Putting yourself in a situation where you have less risk of having issues like not using hardware from a company whose drivers are not maintained in the mainline kernel source tree goes a long way.
Fedora updated my Nvidia drivers 3 days ago and it broke my voice assistant. Yeah I fixed it and it can’t happen again but that sort of thing only happens on Linux (and windows probably)
I repeat: Putting yourself in a situation where you have less risk of having issues like not using hardware from a company whose drivers are not maintained in the mainline kernel source tree goes a long way.
> but that sort of thing only happens on Linux (and windows probably)
Yeah right.
https://support.apple.com/es-es/guide/mac-help/-mchl4e4b758d...
Ironically the website from the company that is supposed to make software "that just works" do not let me put their page in english and force it back to spanish ignoring my choice. Hum.
What piddly little complaints. Do you want those of us who are linux engineers as a day job to post links to every single linux desktop issue that we can find? Because we have decades of those just sitting in our heads and they far, far outweigh the number of macos issues. I wonder if I googled "broken linux window server please help i cant see anything but a terminal" how many pages I would find. Also by whatever bonjour magic I have never had a problem connecting to a printer. We're here for anecdotes right?
You might not know this since your main language is spanish, but in America for the last 20 years every single linux engineering job gave me a macbook pro to work from. Big tech, small tech. And the one that didn't, they gave us chromebooks that everybody hated, but you weren't allowed to use apple there and don't you dare complain about the chromebooks because you knew they weren't going anywhere.
Me and my peers who don't live the richard stallman life expect a macbook pro as our work tool and wouldn't take a job somewhere that throws us a $1500 thinkpad or system76 or whatever to do our day jobs. We can have those at home.
> You might not know this since your main language is spanish, but in America for the last 20 years every single linux engineering job gave me a macbook pro to work from. Big tech, small tech. And the one that didn't, they gave us chromebooks that everybody hated.
My main language is not spanish either, and for the record spanish is used officially by 14% of the US population (and is estimated by 18% by other sources) so you are taking a lot of shortcuts to decide where I am and what is my main language.
> Me and my peers who don't live the richard stallman life expect a macbook pro and wouldn't take a job somewhere that throws us a $1500 thinkpad or system76 or whatever to do our day jobs. We can have those at home.
FWIW at the only job I got from a US tech company, we were given Dell laptops on which many dev installed linux. Company before that proposed Macs but many preferred linux running thinkpad due to the crappy experience at the time running docker on thermal throttling x86 macbooks.
So I smell a lot of uncalled for arrogance from your part. Personally I wouldn't expect a "work tool" that force install a local LLM model to fill up my hard drive and a has a barely usable desktop with stupid rounded corners acting weirdly.
Did you have anything relevant to add beyond crying about me assuming you might not be working out of America since you not only don't use Apples for engineering work, but also pointed out that your OS language is spanish? I could not care less what languages you speak, we're talking about corporate laptops.
The "work tools" had no twinkling of an installed LLM until this year. I've used Macbook pros at work for 15 years. I'm writing this on a $3500 macbook pro I bought myself and pissed about the LLM thing.
Completely irrelevant to the conversation until now.
And wow, shocking, you aren't working in American tech.
PS: Here in America, at real tech companies not the ones that let you do whatever you want to your corporate hardware, you wouldn't be allowed to install your own linux distro on a company laptop. You MIGHT be allowed to install their RHEL or something they've prepackaged with their own root accounts and spyware. You doing it yourself? That's an IT security violation straight to a fire just about everywhere that pays a real salary.
So instead of crying about me pointing out that you likely aren't American, maybe you should listen to the people in the field much longer than you who are much more experienced with the whole linux vs mac corporate thing. I will walk out the door if a USA tech company tries to hand me a dell. And now, what, I installed linux on it and have literally no IT support and have to fix my own laptop instead of donig my engineering job. I've was there 20 years ago, never again.
You are simply acting like an arrogant prick who simply confirms this is just a status thing.
And no I didn't get fired from that US tech firm for installing Linux on my laptop, I actually asked about it during my interviews.
As someone who's first language is Spanish, that was completely unnecessary. You may ot know but in America Spanish is the 2nd most spoken language, with almost 20% of the population speaking it.
So in a US centric forum, most likely you'll find bilingual people that live in the US.
Not only that, Spanish is the second most spoken language of the world, behind Mandarin and before English.
I don’t use Mac OS but I do use an iPhone, and holy shit it is buggy. Every update gives me new bugs with crashes, freezes, and strange behavior.
I think a lot of the people who go on about Apple software quality are full of it, frankly. They either just don’t care or don’t notice the bugs.
> Yeah I fixed it and it can’t happen again but that sort of thing only happens on Linux (and windows probably)
Definitely windows. It often forgets things.
That's just not true. I updated MacOS on my work machine and Emacs stopped being able to read the filesystem. Any system breaks stuff on upgrade when that stuff isn't in the core testing path for the folks crafting the upgrade.
> “just works”
if you use distros which ship the latest _stable_ release of software
and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues, something I haven't exactly had with either Windows or Mac
like my current gaming setup from a year ago(roughly) was setup once, I had to fiddle some minor tweaks during setup and since then it "just works tm". No issues, not know how needed, nothing. (At least for the Games I play.) But also not Nvidea which has in recent years increasingly more QA issues across _all_ OSes and _all_ hardware including their supper expensive AI cards... But that is more a Nvidea then a Linux Problem, by now, was different in the past.
> and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
> but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues
These are defining qualities of something that does not "just work"
I've never used a computer that didn't have occasional hiccups. The Mac I have for work has lots of weird bugs. One is that if it has been using WI-FI and I plug-in my dock with an Ethernet cable attached, I lose internet access because MacOS can't gracefully handle the new interface becoming available.
I also find Apple's choice to just continually create 1G swap files until the system locks absolutely baffling.
> One is that if it has been using WI-FI and I plug-in my dock with an Ethernet cable attached, I lose internet access because MacOS can't gracefully handle the new interface becoming available.
macOS has a 'service (priority) order':
* https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/05/service-please-manage-mul...
It's no different that having multiple default gateways in Linux (with different metric/priorities):
* https://superuser.com/questions/1600190/change-order-of-rout...
And when your default route changes so will the TCP connection end-points. This is mostly an issue when you have a stateful session, like SSH, and less so with 'bursty' traffic like web surfing or e-mail.
By default wired connections are higher priority. I've been on Wifi with a MacBook and patched in with the Network Settings panel open and see the change, which is reflected in the output of "netstat -rn". Underneath the hood most of the macOS kernel is (Free)BSD/Unix.
Until we get SCTP multihoming popularized this will generally be an issue on any operating system. Though it would perhaps be nice to perhaps have a socket (TCP) API flag to tell the kernel "keep me on the initial interface as long as it exists" so sessions don't flip over.
I've never experienced this behavior with a Linux or Windows machine.
I'm not talking about sessions dropping. It has the symptoms of an IP conflict, absolutely no traffic can pass until I disable Wi-Fi. Any other laptop I have ever used would just switch, maybe drop an SSH session, but not this.
There's also the fact that I can never trust the clipboard to actually copy when I tell it to. Several of my co-workers have expressed the same issue, so it's not just me. Sometimes, no matter whether I use the context menu or ctrl+c, it just doesn't copy what I have highlighted and paste whatever the last thing I copied was instead.
Can any OS gracefully handle switching between WiFi and Ethernet without at least a blip in connectivity?
Without a blip maybe not but is it noticeable?
I've been regularly plugging/unplugging my usb-c docking connected to ethernet while being on teams video call without issues on both linux and windows but ultimately it depends on the protocol. Web/https stuff is usually more forgiving thanks to sessions being maintained "externally" from the protocol itself. Copying files via sftp be a different experience I reckon because you usually use a different source ip address when you switch and need to initiate a new connection.
if it's just about connectivity then yes, that should be normal, a OS should only switch the default interface _iff_ the interface it switches to is up and ready.
Idk. about desktop Linux, but my phone does the (WLAN -> Mobile) switch just fine.
If it's about _not reconnecting_ (e.g. which for many apps might require some manual pause/resume of streamed data or similar), then things are more complex as you can't keep your IP, so it then depends on weather the application uses HTTP3/Quick or similar protocols in implementations which are designed to be able to freely roll over to different IP addresses.
So both yes and no :)
In my experience Linux can yeah.
It works fine with my Linux Laptop.
By those standards neither Mac nor Windows just work. No modern OS expect maybe ChromeOS just works.
this line
>> > and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
is for how how to have a reliable acceptable Linux experience and I have less issues with rare occasional hick ups then I had on Windows and Mac in the past. But that is long ago. Through just looking at all the AD/snooping issues, how often windows seem to have broken updates etc. this is way nicer on Linux and seem to be still not worse on Linux then Mac.
> > but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues
the example here with my gaming setup _doesn't_ require "have enough Linux know-how",
after the initial setup it so far just did works
The initial setup was just running a trivial install + ~2 simple to do and find through search, but should-be-unneeded initial tweaks (both Steam specific).
through I currently happen to only care about games both available on Steam and running on Linux without Linux specific manual setup/tweaks (like Silk Song, Nine Sols, Detroit Become Human (but all native 4k)). And it's all AMD and no "unusual" consumer hardware components.
> if you use distros which ship the latest _stable_ release of software
> and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
A Linux sysadmin teammate of mine has >10 years of running Linux servers, and chose to install Ubuntu on his work Dell laptop, and in the ~2 years he's been running that thing he's had regular (2-3/month) issues with audio during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meetings sessions. Both Bluetooth and wired headset connections.
At my last job (pre-COVID) I had a Linux workstation at my desk and a Windows laptop. At where I'm currently at we're hybrid and so we get laptops and I chose a MacBook because I knew I could both do my daily sysadmin chores through Terminal and also have access to 'business apps'.
I had very few issues using Pop OS on a Dell for all sorts of corporate stuff. It wasn't perfect - the sleep behaviour was particularly terrible - but it worked well with Teams and Google Meet. I later installed Fedora and that more or less fixed the sleep issue too.
I bounced around between Windows and Linux on my personal computers for the last 20 years. Generally I'd run Linux until something died or I needed Windows, and I'd return for a bit. I've been exclusively using Linux since 2019 or so. I don't think I'm going back.
> issues with audio during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meetings sessions
Could it be due to a poor support of Linux by these proprietary apps? Possibly even intentional.
These are web apps, they are unlikely to use anything other than what the browser/OS provide them. This is most likely due to lousy audio drivers, an issue plaguing desktop Linux since its very inception.
> issues with audio during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meetings sessions
I don't know about the app but it has been a solved problem on linux using the web browser early in 2020 when people started getting sent home due to the covid and remaining bugs were quickly ironed out.
Interestingly, Firefox handles all three like a champ. Even uses XDG portals so I can share a single window or just audio if I want. Chrome took ages to get support, and it's still hit & miss.
Teams refuses to work on Firefox, or at least did so not so long ago (like as in it "tells you no won't try" not as in "has bugs"). Same for slack.
I think to remember that the most absurd thing was that if you tell Teams "this is chrome" (even when it's FF) it did work just fine.
I have to agree, unfortunately. Macbooks have their issues, and give me violent tendencies like any piece of hardware every now and then, but when it comes to UX and reliability, they are far, far ahead of anything I tried, and I tried a lot of hardware.
Reliability, yes. UX, no.
If you look at MacOS with a critical eye, it's nearly impossible to say it has good UX. It's outdated and everything requires more clicks. Finder stuck 20 years ago. Hard to find settings. Poor screen real estate. Hard to read text with transparent everything.
Let's kill this myth that "Macs are more intuitive to use".
I was talking about the hardware. Software sucks, paid little helper this, paid little helper that...
To be fair, the whole thread is about tolerating Apple because how good the hardware is :)
"but when it comes to UX and reliability, they are far, far ahead of anything I tried"
Sounds like you are talking about software also.
Hardware has "UX and reliability" too.
For example, this teapot has bad UX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things#...
Are you trying to imply that UX is something we only measure on software? That'd be incorrect.
Are you talking about macOS 26+? in that case yea. macOS 15 is a lot better, although obviously not perfect.
To each their own, I find the UX absolutely horrible and not intuitive, it's also poorly translated for non-english users (like "Finder", "iCloud Drive" or "Spotlight" not translated in the interface for example).
I have to agree on the hardware quality though but that doesn't do everything as I still have to use the OS
Translating terms that are basically proper names is not trivial, and Apple loves to give these catchy quasi-proper names for their features. Often it can be better to leave them untranslated.
They are translated on your average Linux distribution though, you won't see nautilus but "Files", gnome-software but "Software", Gnome snapshot but "Camera" (I've put the English term here but each term will be translated to your language). See https://apps.gnome.org and switch the language to see.
In comparison, both MacOS and Windows look more amateur with some leftovers not translated. (Like "Windows Update" on Windows for example)
Yeah, but your average Linux environment is translated by amateurs and is maybe 1% as keen on the brand image as Apple.
Well yes it's translated by amateurs but as for the result, both KDE and Gnome are miles ahead in terms of translation quality compared to MacOS or Windows.
And in many more languages too.
And soldered RAM and SSD, even battery replacement that with other computer is simple is a difficult task. Only USB-C ports, so you have always to carry a stupid adapter for normal things like connecting a USB stick or a network cable. ARM architecture so old software needs emulation to run, emulation that makes computer performance horrible.
Sure, Linux laptops are not "pretty", but I don't need a computer to be pretty, in fact I hope that someone starts to produce again laptops identical to old IBM thinkpads (not the insult to the brand that Lenovo is building) but with modern hardware, a computer that had every port you need on it, no adapter required, that you could have it fall from a ladder and not break, with removable battery, hard drive, with the trackpoint instead of those stupid trackpads, I want it even with a DVD burner fuck it. I don't care it to be small, I care it to be functional.
I don’t care about soldered SSD and RAM - just like nearly all other customers. It sucks yes, but I would rather have that then the hot, slow, short battery thinkpad (with a shitty display) that is my Linux box. Especially for the past few years where the m-series chips were dirt cheap.
[dead]
Not to mention that once you're in this ecosystem, it's usually pretty reliable.
It seems that no other device makers are seeing the value in Apple's many-devices-acting-as-one approach. It makes for some serious vendor lock.
Indeed. TBH if I was running a Google- or even OpenAI-scale company (3000+ devices) I'd probably invest into creating a useful Linux distribution and hardware configuration myself (at that scale, it could maybe start to make sense).
Red Hat had most employees running a custom corporate RHEL build or Fedora on Thinkpads prior to 2018 or so, and even then most employees moved to Mac as soon as they were allowed to do so.
I was a true Linux believer, and I still switched to a Mac because I needed things to just work. Poor battery life, awful HiDPI support, strange driver issues all contributed. Yes, I could fix them. I opened bugs and could talk to the engineers responsible to get things fixed ASAP. Even so, it was a second full time job keeping up with it.
Most big tech companies let you pick Mac, Linux, or Windows. Whatever you’ll be the most productive with. Whatever you prefer. Most devs (75%?) seem to pick Macs. To each their own though.
10 years ago Google had Goobuntu internally.
Google just announced Googlebooks, which deeply integrate with Android, even running Android apps from your phone, on your laptop. Both amd64 and arm64 architectures available.
https://9to5google.com/2026/09/21/googlebook-launch/
> It seems that no other device makers are seeing the value in Apple's many-devices-acting-as-one approach. It makes for some serious vendor lock.
Xiaomi certainly does: they have billboards touting it: along the bottom they show phones, dishwashers, cars, laptops, and everything in between.
Also don't forget calibrated screens, great speakers, long-life (you can use one for a 7-8 years without even trying), and durable keyboards which doesn't become smeared wear-fests which defaces itself within a single heavy development session.
I always run Linux (Debian primarily) on my desktops and servers with a zealot-ish dedication, but what Mac and macOS brings to the table as a portable machine is irreplaceable with anything else.
Even a top end ThinkPad with a well groomed Linux distribution can't come close, sorry.
> long-life
> and durable keyboards
It wasn't that long ago they had terrible keyboard lifespans which could be a death knell for the laptop, and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec. They've come far in recent years, and I certainly wouldn't be sad if it was my main machine yet I don't expect them to be an outlier forever.
In some dimension Apple (and any serious manufacturer) is always going to be ahead - and they certainly are in non-gaming portable CPU/GPU combos right now. Alas, they aren't ahead in many other dimensions; my Fedora X1 Carbon is my strong preference over my M4 macbook pro and a large part of that is the basic usability of the system and window manager (sway), which is something Apple will never match until we meaningfully switch interaction paradigms.
> It wasn't that long ago they had terrible keyboard lifespans which...
Yes, their butterfly switch keyboards were really bad. I skipped that generation. I own machines from 2006, 2014 and 2020.
> and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec...
Apple unfortunately does this sometimes, but interestingly just before changing CPU architectures (Power to Intel, Intel to ARM). I sometimes think whether it was semi-intentional. I don't blindly support them, however.
> that is the basic usability of the system and window manager (sway), which is something Apple will never match until we meaningfully switch interaction paradigms.
I'm way faster in my Debian + KDE system as well, but portables are always secondary machines for me, so Mac doesn't bother me much.
Also, I like running different operating systems and paradigms at the same time, so I can learn from all of them while developing some stuff for myself and others. However, as I said multiple times over the years, macOS is the "alternative" OS for me, not the primary one. Linux has that part for the last 20+ years.
I think most of the problems were down to Intel. They were consistently over promising and under delivering. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was what drove Apple to create the M series processors.
Mac build quality is nice indeed. And Nvidia sometimes doesn't play along, but that is a small price to pay for an everyday peace of mind.
My both parents use linux and are happy with it. If you mostly use just the browser and reading e-mails, I don't see any better system even for someone who is non-technical.
> but that is a small price to pay for an everyday peace of mind.
Running an AMD card on my Dekstop system. It's invisible as an Intel on-board graphics card, and this is a great thing.
Much greater than rebooting to a black screen because NVIDIA decided to not support your GPU anymore because it finished its economic life for the company, not you.
>If you mostly use just the browser and reading e-mails, I don't see any better system even for someone who is non-technical.
If thats all you do you might as well just use macos. Something comes up you can just send your parents to the apple store. Probably one of the last places on earth you can get a real life human in a real life building from a real life major company to sit down with you and walk you through your issue. They will do this for free, you only pay for an actual repair job, which you can also of course do there for a relatively fair price all things considered for oem quality work. Not sure where I would take any other laptop for repair. Do people even repair laptops as a business?
For software issues they have a real person - me, and for hardware ones they can be sent to ANY repair service. Just close to them there are like three vendors who do hardware work. But the thing is, for last 5 years or so I do not remember they actually had some issue with their box. Things just work and updates do not overhaul your system out of nowhere.
The major os updates on mac are entirely optional. They still do security releases for the other os's for a long time. This current mac I am on sonoma same as when I got it. That 2012 I kept on mojave. Its just the most polished unix os. The hardware is always set up to work perfectly with it. No driver support issues. Just works. Always works.
[dead]
We're 30+ years into trackpads on laptops and they're still terrible on Windows machines. Make it make sense.
I've never been able to tell the difference between a cheap trackpad and whatever Apple uses, but I hear folks go on about it endlessly.
My guess? Most people don't care, but the discussions are driven by the few who do, because for them, it's a really big deal, and they'll pay accordingly. Similarly for "My code is unreadable unless it's on a 4k display at 220+ PPI" -- I'm sure it's true for them, but for me, a crappy FHD display I can get for $100 is great for coding.
I'm like this with Linux...I pay System76 a premium because I care about how they go about building their systems, both hardware and software. To normal folks, it seems like a crazy thing to pay a premium for, but for me, it's a great deal.
Very interesting point, and substantiated by the fact that every windows laptop user I see in the wild carried a mouse around with them. They do not care about this issue much, clearly.
I pulled out my old windows laptop to debug why my Linux machine is giving me issues, and the mouse was unusable, making clicking anything impossible. It was adding momentum, and any precise movement or click just couldn't be done because it wouldn't move with small touches, and added 'weight' to anything bigger.
Anyway, I was sure something was up, checked settings, and found a new feature akin to 'more accurate mouse'. I disabled it and my trackpad started working again. Everytime I have to use that PC I get angry about something unbearable windows thought was a good idea. Tbh my Linux has been driving me up the walls recently. I think I just don't like computers at all.
I am confused here. While I generally like Mac hardware the trackpads are quite mediocre. Lenovo and Dell have better ones. What are they better at?
because 99% of the time these people are comparing a macbook trackpad to a $300 Acer trackpad on their parents machine they have to fix twice a year.
> While I generally like Mac hardware the trackpads are quite mediocre. Lenovo and Dell have better ones
I find the Mac better for scrolling, clicking, gestures and zooming. It’s rejection of eg palm input and the size of the touch pad are great.
Wild guess is they have to reject palm input mostly because they make them too big. I don't even put my palm on my thinkpad trackpad so I don't even know if it has such functionnality as it isn't even needed.
Gesture is more an OS functionnality but I am not sure how a trackpad can be better or worse for scrolling or clicking. You slide 2 fingers, it scrolls right? you click (or rather tap these days), it clicks? right? Can a trackpad click "less" or even "scroll less"?
OK maybe some handle better wet fingers, that is maybe the weak point of my current trackpad.
> I am not sure how a trackpad can be better or worse for scrolling or clicking. You slide 2 fingers, it scrolls right? you click (or rather tap these days), it clicks?
I laughed. I have a work HP machine. The click is only available on the bottom half or third of the trackpad, with no visual indication of the area. It takes a strong push. It’s bad. The scroll is shiite too.
When you get one that doesn’t work right, you really miss a good one.
I can't say I've ever been impressed by an Apple track pad. Or their insistence on removing actual buttons for them.
The peak was my high school Gateway laptop.
I’m surprised you can tell it isn’t a button anymore, the fake click is very accurate feeling. The lack of moving parts is a good upgrade.
There's no seam, and it depends on being a button by guessing that you're not scrolling.
It's annoyingly non-deterministic.
I've never had a laptop mouse button ever break down on me.
> We're 30+ years into trackpads on laptops and they're still terrible on Windows machines. Make it make sense.
The old Mac trackpads were great. The new Mac trackpads where they increased the size, and made it solid-state feel terrible to use. Make it make sense.
There were issues of dust/crumbs getting between the physically moving parts. I don’t notice the difference anymore.
Every time one of these threads comes up, the replies have the form “you’re not doing x right, or Linux would be fine.”
X is usually “pick hardware with good support in ToT kernel” or “use distribution Y” (where Y is somehow different in every post) or “do you really need feature Z that’s better on Mac? You’re making the wrong trade.”
To each their own but I’d rather not deal with XYZ and just get the thing that works.
p.s. I do hope they put a toggle back for Siri and their on device AI stuff
> To each their own but I’d rather not deal with XYZ and just get the thing that works.
Yes, but the point of the linked article is that this preference inevitably results in your device spying on you. To each their own indeed.
Edit: and of course I see your P.S. note. But that isn't really responsive. Most Linux users would point out (P.S.) that they'd like their hardware to be faster and lower power or their OS to be a little cleaner. But alas, you can't have everything.
I might be biased toward ThinkPads, but the only thing I envy about MacBooks is the processor and battery life.
I prefer the X1 Carbon’s body a thousand times over Apple’s unibody design, which I find cold and uncomfortable, and it tends to dig into my wrists.
And I’d take a TrackPoint over Apple’s trackpad a million times over.
Of course, that’s just my personal preference.
That's the problem with these things. Personal preference plays a huge role. And these discussions bring so many people setting their preferences as THE TRUTH.
we should strive and push to keep having these a alternatives. Which the industry is trying to remove.
I rent a Linux GPU server for AI projects and the NVIDIA driver has broken four times without me doing anything to break it. Nothing like that happens on my Mac. I've run Linux for projects for well over a decade, so not a n00b issue.
> just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU
The ancient wisdom of "never nvidia" when using Linux/BSD continues to ring true into the future.
Back in the day I was doing tech support when OS X was the latest, and this was 100% relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvXZVJXIyqM
ngl Mac users are to computers as Tesla drivers are to cars, they buy them because they don't want to learn anything.
They’re not light years ahead anymore, this is an old assumption.
There are some incredibly good PC laptops out there with the same kinds of features of MacBook Pros and more: long battery life, haptic trackpad, aluminum CNC build, long sleep battery life, etc. Check out Intel core series 3.
I’m a very happy with my Framework 13 Pro.
They never were light years ahead. Apple fans have always drastically overstated how good their hardware is. It's good, yes, but it's not nearly as good as their fans claim. And it never has been.
I used a macbook for work and the thing would constantly throw me popups, changing any setting was a nightmare, installing software required either a subscription or adding an aftermarket package manager, and the browser would inexplicably leave a frozen, uninteractable duplicate browser window anytime I fullscreened a google meet, which would persist regardless of trying to kill the process and sometimes even helpfully came back after a reboot (though rebooting did generally work)
This "just works" thing is propaganda. Computers never ever do that
Agree unfortunately. I hate apple, for the same reasons as everyone else, but I have both a MacBook and iPhone and can’t do much about it. It’s like politics a little, you can only choose the least bad, there is no good.
I have a Linux server, and use cloud Linux machines extensively, but at least the last time I checked, Linux desktop sucks. There are always memory management issues, doing a video call makes my fan sound like a jet taking off, not sleeping, put my laptop in my bag and it gets to hot to touch - that’s just off the top of my head, I’ve tried Linux laptops on multiple occasions and they suck.
Next time you try Linux on the laptop, go with Void.
I don't think "use distribution_name" can be a universal advice, the reality of Linux is that you need to research which particular distribution supports your particular hardware well enough. Or try several distributions until you find one that has the least issues.
That, or make hardware compromises and buy a laptop that provides official Linux support, which is likely to have a more Mac/Windows-like experience of things "just working".
That's horrible advice. Void serves the niche non-systemd userbase. It will always be worse than mainstream distros curated for desktop audience.
> Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
I pulled the same update, and it was annoying but it came nowhere near bricking itself. The integrated graphics worked, it just disabled the Nvidia open-source driver for the GPU. Simply (re)installing it fixed it. Notably, just asking ChatGPT for the solution worked (after pasting the output of a few commands).
This actually just happened to me... How did you fix it? I just finished proving that my issue isn't my peripherals or cords so it must be the GPU
Tbh I don't think my MacBook air m2 is better than my Asus Vivobook (arm64). They're different (Vivobook is bigger) - but I'd say the OLED screen is much better than the M2 screen.
The apple touchpad is better - but all touchpads suck. Still miss old school IBM ThinkPad stick.
> Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of any other hardware.
> Build quality (aluminum)
This is such an ignorant take. Every other laptop has an Aluminum shell. Dell, HP, you name it. My Sony Vaio came with a metallic shell in the early 2000s. As a Macbook owner, I am still extremely worried about coffee spilling on my keyboard. A problem that was solved decades ago by every other manufacturer but not Apple. My touchID randomly stopped working in under 2 years of owning my laptop too and the hardware needs replacement of the entire logic board. So, tell me again, where is this "build quality" that you speak of?
I'm not sure the hardware is worth the price.
As for the OS, everytime I tried MacOS, I find rapidly major showstoppers. It's like people are just blind to them.
If I'd qualify each platform, I'd say Windows is a toy, Mac is a piece of art, Linux is a tool. I picked my category.
Every OS is filled with showstoppers. And yes everyone is blind to their own OSs issues or quirks. You work around them and develop different workflows.
When I first tried macOS I hated it and had a long list of issues I could give. They are all still valid but it turns out they don’t actually stop you getting work done.
For people making a living on western software engineering salaries, why wouldn't (Apple) hardware be worth the price?
A lot of other crafts and jobs need way more expensive hardware. Software engineers "only" need a $1,000 - $3,000 laptop every 5 or so years. That's typically less than 0.5% of that 5 year's salary.
> why wouldn't (Apple) hardware be worth the price?
How about "not worth the cost" instead.
Not worth the cost of losing the freedom to run your own software and make your own choices.
Commodity laptops might be slower and less flashy, but if Linux goes in the wrong direction I can install FreeBSD or OpenBSD or my own vibe-coded OS or whatever.
Western society has for the last few decades surrendered principles for convenience, and the state of modern computing is a microcosm of the consequences. You're all consumers now, instead of users.
At work we can choose between Apple laptops or Thinkpads, I choose thinkpads, using Windows and WSL.
Previously either VMware Workstation or Virtual Box.
Also I am not speaking from a position of no experience, as some projects require being assigned Mac Books, that I gladly return after delivery.
One thing Windows did right is keyboard based navigation. Most of the general public does not know or appreciate how close to productivity nirvana the alt key brings you.
Same is possible in KDE. Combined with hot corners, you can become "blazingly fast".
Once a colleague seeing me work looked at my screen, lifted his head and pointed to my colleague saying "Have you seen how this guy work, he's a maniac!".
Mastering the tool you have always brings speed and smoothness into your process, one step at a time.
I don't feel like I've had much issue with keyboard driven workflows on any OS.
Any app can has its extensive set of keyboard shortcuts, but when it comes to DE itself, it's not always the case.
Microsoft has Meta+ and Alt+ combinations dime a dozen, and it's consistent across versions. KDE has extensive programmability which allows you to design you own. Both allows you to pack so many features into a small number of keys and work across applications or in general without thinking.
A terminal? It appears. A window? You call it without thinking. Ran out of space, a new desktop is just an instinct...
On macOS you can also assign a keyboard shortcut to any tool menu the app exposes. This works without the app knowing about it.
I’m a Mac dude through and through but its shortcuts don’t hold a candle to windows alt shortcuts. In windows, alt shortcuts are progressively revealed to the user and the entire UI is operable without having to memorize a series of hand cramping shortcuts.
I'm slightly aware of that, but I'm not sure how this works in real life where almost half of the "native" applications in macOS are Electron apps.
It's alright, but a step down from tiling window managers that you can use on Linux.
WSL is such a pain compared to just using a unix os from the get, which is of course what macos is. People forget that it is in fact a unix distro.
Unix certification requires things like case sensitive file systems, which MacOS can do, but doesn't so they had to supply a special configuration for certification.
So no. The MacOS you use is not Unix.
No, people don't.
It's just that mishmash of OSFMK (with BSD APIs of 1991 or so) with random additions of newer APIs does not necessarily make it a great Unix to work with in 2026
People really get hard up about it shipping with some older versions of some tools. But if you are really that much of a unix nerd then you'd also know that is solved in 5 mins with a brew one liner.
I am enough of a nerd to know that people will come with assumptions about libc based on Free/Net/OpenBSD and get burned because no, you can't fix the system libc with brew oneliner
If your work is so dependent on a certain libc version then congrats, macos is already a better thin client for connecting to a remote dev box host than windows out the box. You already have ssh and scp and rsync and tmux out of the box and the laptop is genuinely the best in the market from a hardware standpoint. I code like this. Computer can probably chug for 16 hours without hurting for a charger just running an ssh connection.
SSH and co are part of Windows for quite some time now.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
As for tmux, I know UNIX since 1993, went through Xenix, DG/UX, Solaris, NeXTSTEP before GNU/Linux started to take off, worked across Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, OS/X before GNU/Linux really took off.
To this day I don't care tmux exists, just open a couple of terminal windows.
If you are going to mention jobs across sessions, nohup does the job.
If I wanted 16 hours for just SSH, I would have went with X-series thinkpad already back in 2015 or so when it easily reached 26 hours without suspend in my friend's testing. As a thin client it also sucks, because keyboard, never figured if they fixed grounding of the chassis, the "let's make your doctor ask if you're suicidal" hard edges near wrists, and so on.
Except UNIX and GNU/Linux aren't the same thing, which is why so many folks keep complaining about their UNIX experience in macOS.
They buy macOS and then complain macOS isn't Linux, duh!
a UNIX distro which interfaces well with Linux. A fact which makes life way easier in the interoperability department.
I find the "Just Works" part of MacOS to be disingenuous. I use old hardware. You could call me a pack rat but I dislike getting rid of old, working technology. Unless you're on the bleeding edge of Apple technology. MacOS in particular doesn't "just work" anymore. In fact it's downright hostile to doing mundane things.
I have an old Macbook Air that's no longer supported by the latest MacOS. Trying to do anything on it is like pulling teeth. The simple act of running a modernish web browser is a horrible experience of "This App is no longer supported".
On Windows a laptop from the mid 2000's is still entirely usable albeit a bit slow. Not so with MacOS. You 100% cannot run a single piece of modern software. You have to dig around for forks that specifically support older versions of MacOS and if you want to run a browser with Plugins, good eff'n luck! Now you're trying to find a fork of Chromium that supports Adblock, but also have to find and old version of Adblock which isn't hip to all the new invasive ad technology.
MacOS is not for poors it appears.
This has changed recently
For example this dell is superb, has tandem oled with 200% scaling and runs linux (dhh runs this on onarchy)
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptop-computers/spd/xps14da...
> This has changed recently
I've probably heard "this time is different" on the topic of PC laptops catching up to Macs a hundred times over the last decade, but it never is...
It's hard to rebuild trust after selling a computer (without a CD drive) without networking drivers and no indication of which wireless chipset it has, but including a CD with said drivers.
They optimized it for omarchy oht of the box
I will never buy/use DELL again. Even if the company completely reinvents itself, stops selling computers and just rebrands toasters, these combination of letters make me distrust anything they are physically printed on.
I'm not exaggerating, I had so many horrible experiences.
Thats why i love my Framework 13 pro - amaziong build quality and linux support out of the box. Havent touched my M2 macbook in several weeks.
Windows on laptops also just works, especially for high end ones. It’s the Linux on laptops that’s hit or miss.
False. Get one with Linux pre installed (Dell developer edition, system 76, framework) and it just works as well.
Undeniable light years ahead in being overpriced & hardest to repair or upgrade.
I thought other vendors just can't cause it's all patented
Do regular people care about these things or is this a hn thing?
I find a trackpad (even a Mac one) is absolutely infuriating to use compared to a decent mouse.
Battery life/screens/magsafe I'm plugged into a dock 99% of the time so it's irrelevant, but when forced to occasionally, the ergonomics of looking down at a single small 1x in screen is just terrible if doing it for hours and also makes my back feel horrible.
I might be weird but actively prefer the trackpad to keyboard and mouse as I can let my fingers rest on the keyboard at all times and use the thumb when needed to touch the excellent trackpad. That’s better than removing the whole hand to grab the mouse just to click something.
My home setup has both a trackpad and mouse (and a separate keyboard). I like them both. In practice I use 65% mouse and 35% trackpad I think. Trackpad is great for horizontal (or 2d) scrolling and gestures. Mouse has better ergonomics for accurate pointing, and is more natural in some apps (eg KiCAD).
I agree. Trackpads also come with gesture support for things like switching between windows which I found difficult to live without. Unfortunately it's not very ergonomic to use a laptop with it's trackpad when you're using multiple screens.
Aluminium is not build quality. It makes lying stuff inside cheap. And feels horrible on skin contact.
The good ThinkPads with Magnesium feel much better (both for hand and lap) and are lighter. And the expensive and complicated build allows maintenance (replacing a keyboard is a bless on the X13). Lenovo is just stupid and also allows to purchase low quality screens, low quality frames and even a Windows. A thing that Apple never allows, you cannot purchase a bad configuration.
The MBAs at Apple figured out much earlier, that a rigid metal frame is cheap and gives the impression of quality.
Aside from that?
Customers are guilty, wanting a shiny and quick solution. And governments and companies by following ultra rigid and outright stupid purchasing guide (ISO craziness and “we can drop Windows, we invested another 300.000 in a Windows only Application).
YMMV. I never had any issues holding a mac laptop. I know people think they are sharp but I genuinely struggle to replicate this when it comes up. As I am typing this comment the laptop is resting on my chest with the entire weight of either hand resting on the sharp side edge of this mac. When I type I move my right arm so that the soft fleshy part under the wrist is now resting with full weight on the sharp edge of the mac. No pain or any discomfort doing this. Currently pressing down as hard as I can on that edge just so see. Again, no clue what people are doing to be in discomfort here. Lead hands? Skin condition? Not sure.
I haven't abused this m series mac as much. But my old original aluminum unibody from 2012, that thing lasted about 12 years until water damage took it out. It fell to the floor on every corner multiple times. None are perfectly round anymore due to the force of the impacts. Never shattered the screen or affected anything with the computer.
I have a friend who ran over his with his f150. That did end up putting some cracks into the screen, but it still worked and he still used it in that state for a couple years at least.
> Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of [hardware that runs Linux]
There was a discussion on this forum just a few days ago wondering why Apple is so hostile to open source support on its devices. And consensus here was that, no, it clearly wasn't due to competetive pressure.
But clearly it is. Because to many consumers, if you have to run MacOS to get an M6, you'll run MacOS instead of Linux. And that makes enshittifying MacOS as a revenue center very tempting.
> Also the OS mostly “just works”
Article is literally about the OS not working as desired, though.
Macs are for people who think they know how to computer but actually don't know anything at all.
That feels like a `90's take.
It's true - every current cockup in our custom production system comes from Apple-using developers.
All of our Linux stuff is rock solid and is what we actually use to communicate with our satellites. We will explicitly avoid Microsoft and Apple here.
>Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of any other hardware
Can Mac laptops run QubesOS?
They're also incredibly heavy.. and their trackpads are terrible.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
I'm in the same boat; been using linux for the last 15 years. Had to get a mac for work this year due to their logging software not being available on linux.
The laptop quality is great; great sound, battery lasts forever compared to mine (framework). Userspace tools and UI is terrible and have no control over but the hardware and the software integration is top notch. (I live in the terminal, and have nix-darwin to bring my existing setup to mac so it's not jarring most of the time)
Won't look back when I can transition back to linux full time; I'll be so happy. But I can see why people go with apple products. I really hope that ARM laptops become a regular thing.
I really hope arm laptops get full linux support as promised - but never delivered:
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/jan-2025-state-of-linu...
> ... but more and more I wonder how much are people willing to put up with such practices.
Apple has rabid fans, they will absolutely put up with this and tell you you're wrong for not wanting to.
i enjoy watching the battles of rabid linux fans vs. rabid apple fans. plenty of entertainment in threads like this.
for some odd reason though, there's not many rabid windows fans.
> for some odd reason though, there's not many rabid windows fans.
Windows users are the ones who don't want to think about the OS at all. They want to get something else done and have the OS get in their way as little as possible. Linux fans want to dig deep into their OS and play with its internals; Mac fans want the OS to be an experience: trendy, sleek, reassuring. The kind of people who like it when the AI tells them "you're absolutely right!". Windows users generally understand that Windows is awful; the worst operating system, in fact, except for all the other ones.
You seriously believe that Windows gets "in [the] way as little as possible"? The OS that has ads and forces AI into everything?
it really is like the meme..
Apple users to Windows users: I feel bad for you
Windows users to Apple users: I don't think about you at all
> On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads.
I've been using Linux since the a.out days and MacOS X since the PowerPC days, and I find MacOS less of an ordeal for day-to-day tasks as my terminal/workstation. I sysadmin Linux (and previously also Solaris and IRIX) servers for a living. It's been several years since I had to daily drive a Windows machine (though I've heard PowerShell and WSL2 are pretty good).
I'm not sure what "ordeal" you are referring to. I'm mostly in Terminals SSHing places, so perhaps my work use cases are not 'advanced' enough to bump into them? (I also use macOS for my personal systems.)
Ubuntu have had a go at devaluing their distro with ads too (a couple of times to my recollection). It would be interesting to see if they got any increase in revenue from it.
Firefox added ads to the browser homepage - maybe now the money-grabbing lawyer who was in charge finished vampirically squeezing it for every cent they could make, perhaps we'll move past that nonsense.
> And ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased.
I’ve used Apple for my daily driver for years and I could not figure out what this was referring to. What ads? The only thing I can think of is if you open the App Store app and see a promo image for some apps to check out?
See the other HN story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49801939
Yeah linux is awesome! … But for me personally after spelunking distros… getting past the immense learning curve… again and again and again… settling , tweaking with stability, getting past foundational philosophical approaches, tweaking some more… and some more and some more… Finally getting somewhere and then… only then after starting to get to a place where i’m feeling some semblance of holy shit this is gonna work!?! Only to sit down and discover that Copy/Paste is this fucking dramatic cluster fuck… that yeah I could go through and I’m sure people have work arounds and it could arguably be solvable… or maybe I just need to get over my muscle memory yeah i’m the problem… Or… I can just build a hackintosh… and would you look at that, even a janky hack that came together in literally two hours just fucking works…and I didnt have to spend six month of my life for it, and omg I can copy and paste across every application with the same key binding that I never had to tweak…
So yeah, I love linux but fucking shit if it aint ridiculous on some pretty fundamental issues that (looking at my watch) were solved forty years ago!
Because the Linux kernel is only usable for regular Joe and Janes, when hidden away underneath a Java based userspace (Android), a Web based userspace (ChromeOS and WebOS), or hidden in consumer electronics firmware (DVD and Bluray players, washing machines, ...)
Regular Joe and Jane, don't care about UNIX experience, want a ready to use computer they can buy down at the local PC store on the shopping mall, being able to share stuff with the neighbours, which also don't have any clue over technology, and so on.
Also when it breaks down, and they don't have a nephew to call in to repair their computer, it should be easily repaired at the same PC store, which usually has employees that only care about Windows or macOS, and do the bare minimum to revive the system, while charging a good deal per hour.
Ah, and for all the mess Apple and Microsoft pull with their desktop programming frameworks, I lost count what is now the full stack framework for doing desktop applications on GNOME, KDE, XFCE, or whatever happens to be the distribution that was taken out of Distrowatch.
Maybe if *nix devs and community actually prioritized putting together cohesive and consistenr systems with usability as a priority these garbage OSes wouldn’t have a market.
Unfortunately, there is too much friction for the average person who just wants to get things done instead of tinker for every specific use case they have.
Thus, it’s just less painful to put up with the hostile ads and spying.
I don't think you're allowed to say that
Linux is permanently hard and unfinished, and no amount of reality will dissuade anyone from this prior belief.
Linux distros would never do something as egregious as, let's say, unturnoffable app updates, would they?
By way of example, Debian has a stable branch which receives only security fixes, and even then, only if you run the update scripts. It will receive security updates for 5 years, and after that, will still be completely usable, provided you don't want new versions of software, or are willing to put in the work to compile them yourself.
Depends on the distro really. Linux (the kernel) doesn't have or require such a concept, but it's quite possible to build a linux-based system whose surrounding operating system is designed to work this way. My Meta Quest 3 is one such example. Linux kernel, but Horizon OS only allows updates to be postponed. It'll automatically install them and in one case soft-bricked itself, forcing me to recover manually. (Great job, Meta.)
This flexibility makes it difficult to make broad sweeping statements about the thing. Certainly however, it's impressive to log into a linux server and see an uptime measured in years. (Impressively horrifying, depending on your security posture, but impressive nonetheless.)
I was referring to Ubuntu's Snap.
macOS has been on a downward trend since Apple started pushing "Services", basically iCloud. Now it's as bad as Windows when I last used Windows.
It's not just privacy violations. Those are the tip of the iceberg. I used to open the Activity Monitor and see a couple pages of processes. Now it's in the hundreds.
It's stuff that was badly done even before AI. The industry has been drunk on SaaS for way too long, and with SaaS comes the junk/slop and the privacy violations.
I've been doing my part and cancelling all my subscriptions apart from power, water, internet and garbage.
I won't disagree that MacOS has been getting worse, but Windows is even worse than you remember it. It's clearly a race to the bottom, but Windows 11 is full of ads, and you can't even search the Start menu for your installed programs anymore. MacOS hasn't gotten that bad yet, as frustrating as the new "Apps" menu is.
I switched my desktop to Ubuntu about a year ago, and while it's not 100% free of trouble, I still can't imagine running Windows 11 again. My MBP still runs MacOS and I haven't been pushed far enough to want to try installing a Linux distro on it.
> (...) Windows 11 is full of ads, and you can't even search the Start menu for your installed programs anymore
Windows has always been weird like that. Relevant HN post from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599481
I don’t like Apple’s services push either, nor do I like the ads that have worked their way into the App Store, News, and Maps.
That said, I recently bought a Windows laptop (which was wiped to run Linux day 1). Before I installed Linux I had one task I needed Windows for. To create a local account and not connect it to the internet, I had to lookup a keyboard shortcut to show a terminal, lookup a command to run the setup in a different mode for IT departments, then run through setup again to make my local account. Once in the OS, because I wasn’t on the network, 90% of the start menu was full of placeholder icons that needed the internet to download the actual icon… presumably a bunch of cloud services (ads). Then there were basics, like trackpad performance… it was unusable, I had to get a mouse to move around without pain. Once Linux was installed, the trackpad worked great, maybe even better than macOS, it’s close, just a matter of preference.
Compare that to macOS, which still lets you make a local account without jumping through hoops, runs fine without iCloud, and has all local apps that won’t leave you with a bunch of placeholders. The basic hardware, like the trackpad, also works well out of the box.
macOS and Apple aren’t perfect, but are still miles ahead of Windows, imo.
Linux isn’t perfect either. Initial hardware support was very hit and miss depending on the distro. Things I’d consider basic functionality required plugins that I had to hunt for. Other annoying out-of-the-box defaults required plugins + custom scripts to resolve. All of this can be very frustrating. Most people don’t want to tinker this much.
No system is perfect, it’s just a question of which tradeoffs a person is willing to make.
Every major release needs a "feature"… and that gesture-shit that iOS has been constantly rolling out often ends up creeping into MacOS as well.
Mission Control? Launch Pad? App Exposé? Spaces?
Features that I don't want but take over my machine if I accidentally use the track pad wrong.
I'd love to see MacOS cull that crap from decades of feature creep.
As a Mac user and in general an Apple user, it's up to the balance between how much are you willing to take as a user from a bullshit perspective and the things you find good and useful from the device. Unfortunately, even for Apple devices, the balance is starting to shift towards the bad side. The problem is that there is no real alternative. For a laptop/pc, you might say whatever Linux distro, but let's be honest, for the general population there is no real alternative.
There's a huge amount of people who need nothing but, basically, a chromebook. A Linux laptop works great for that.
My wife gave up her Dell Windows laptop because the performance was terrible. I installed kubuntu and started using it, and then she immediately reclaimed it because all she ever needs is a browser and Linux vastly improved the performance. ("Well, it is my laptop...") She knows nothing about Linux, and the only Linux-specific question she ever had was how to recover when it sometimes doesn't wake up from sleep. Overall, much less frustration than Windows.
Microsoft Office. That’s the last reason.
I was using Windows on my personal-but-for-work laptop; it got to the point where I hated it too much so tried Linux. Most stuff was great (even Teams was 90% fine!) but I couldn’t function professionally without installed versions of Office, and I couldn’t find an acceptable workaround.
I then switched back to MacOS and am mostly happy hanging on to Sequoia… but I’m dreading the point at which (for some reason) Apple make it unavoidable to upgrade.
Then… Windows 11 LTSC?
> I then switched back to MacOS and am mostly happy hanging on to Sequoia… but I’m dreading the point at which (for some reason) Apple make it unavoidable to upgrade.
MacOS 27 is a lot less shit than 26, thankfully. I upgraded from 15 to 27 directly (on a M-series Mac).
IIRC in Linux you can run the windows version of office via wine or one of the successor/forks. Not sure if AD integration works nicely. And maybe it is just a group policy that somehow blocks it. But running the software should be possible these days.
> Not sure if [...] works nicely.
This is the billion dollar question for corps though. Windows and MacOS are first class citizens of the corporate IT universe and all the weirdness of corporate IT works. MDM, identity/auth, Office, LOB apps, video, document signing, data labeling, everything.
Linux has taken huge, heroic strides, and has caught up to about 2005. Corporate IT simply will not sanction Linux desktops unless they are provably as well versed in the entire ecosystem as Win/Mac, barring a "political" decision made at the top to make it happen.
To change this would require a profoundly deep, expensive, and continuing investment in all aspects of the 'Modern Work' experience, plus genuine commitment from Microsoft to make it happen (which would likely require lawsuits and enforcement).
The situation today is that a few orgs are playing catchup on some features, but that will never be enough to match a platform that has been dedicated to corporate life for 40+ years, and from a company infamous for extending their advantages to extinguish the competition.
AFAIK, Wine/equivalent only works for older versions (up to 2016?) - newer versions +/- AD require a VM of some variety. (This was originally where I noped out and switched to MacOS instead.)
I've been a Linux and BSD user for nearly 20 years, and you will take them from my cold, dead hands, but sometimes Linux is just not an option.
Most people are not like you and don’t care about this. They just want something that works.
I was going to add the same sentiment with the addendum that normal people seem to find AI really useful, and long for Siri to be a more useful companion. Apple makes a compelling argument of an agent with frontier level smarts, access to your Apple stuff like iMessage, Reminder and Mail, and privacy (which I'm not here to debate how they're handling). Normal people like it, and Siri getting better is an advantage.
> everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal
I use a Mac at work and iPad Pro at home. Never once have I considered either usage “an ordeal.”
Do I just have a really high threshold for frustration or do you have a desire to complain?
Everybody now knows M$ or Google are evil. The weird part is that Apple still seems to escape the same judgement. But they're no different. They're exactly like all the others.
They seem quite distinct to me. Microsoft is focussed on selling to corporations and OEM’s. Google is selling people’s attention to advertisers. Apple is selling premium hardware directly to consumers.
There is some overlap but it isn’t much.
I just started getting ads in chats with ChatGPT... Insane.
I bought my laptop in 2021. macOS was pretty good then and the hardware was spectacular.
My next laptop will not be a Mac, I'll be going back to Linux for sure.
I originally read the domain name as D-Bus Hell. Fitting for a rant solved by switching to Linux, but Linux remains difficult to use.
Removing ads from Windows is still much easier than making sure Linux works on a machine that is not Linux-certified (which, for me, is usually the case, as I have particular hardware preferences), and getting software I need to work. I've used Linux for work for a long time, but I'm still sticking to Windows at home. All else being equal I would greatly prefer Linux, but with the current gap (for my purposes) convenience still trumps ideology.
Well the example given in the article, for example, will not be noticed by just about anyone, and most of those that do notice don't care. Myself included - I already use iCloud, some extra analytics aren't going to kill me. Maybe one day we'll switch away, but I'm doing a lot less tech support now that the whole household is on Apple.
I'm a lunix engineer, probably 25+ years of lunix now (I started on bsd, thats why I say lunix), I've worked on macbook pros for the last 15 years. I had to reinstall macos for the FIRST TIME ever this year because their current version Tahoe is absolute trash that slowed down my M1 Max so my much I finally gave up and wiped it.
I also won't go near an x86 processor ever again after using the mX/arm procs.
We're paying for the hardware. The 100x better screens, speakers, battery life, the apps on macos blow linux apps away even if all of them, even the most simple apps, cost $20+.
But with that said Apple has also priced me out of buying another MBP for a long time with how expensive their 64gb+ versions are. My m1 max was $3500 and I can't believe I paid that, but here I am 7 years later still using it and it cranks. I'd have replaced 3 x86 laptops by now.
Oh, and I had the entire laptop replaced for $99 when its battery got bad and the screen cracked last year thanks to applecare, though that did require me paying for applecare at $99/yr each year. But that still doenst add up to another $3500 laptop. I just drove to the apple store dropped it off and picked it up a week later.
Personally, I love their hardware and I’m rarely inconvenienced.
We’re in a bubble.
Yes, an anti-AI mood had entered the mainstream (anti-data center in particular), but I don’t think people will connect this to that.
For most people, this Apple Intelligence change isn’t a ‘really hostile’ move. They keep the default settings. They have disk space, because most people don’t use terabytes of space, and Macs come with, historically speaking, tons of storage now.
They will upgrade, and if they notice at all, it will be because ‘Siri works way better now’ (and all people who use Siri, whether here or in the general population, complained about Siri not understanding anything complex and seemingly not knowing anything much of anything before). This is probably, on the whole, going to be good for Apple’s reputation.
> They have disk space, because most people don’t use terabytes of space, and Macs come with, historically speaking, tons of storage now.
A Mac mini base model comes with 256G. It is manageable but barely unless used with an external disk.
22.8G as quoted in the article is about 10% of the available space and it is something that cannot be offloaded to external disk.
Many people including myself are going to be furious when their Mac is upgraded.
Windows caused me similar dismay when I was forced to use it at work (2022-25), but macOS - while far from perfect - has been more than fine for my purposes for the last 20 years. I like linux and can choose to use it on my superior apple hardware. Not a fanboi, just a pragmatist.
Ads in macOS? Never once saw one.
It’s the standard enshittification playbook. Get a large market share with a good product, then you can safely degrade it since your users are too reliant on the ecosystem to conveniently switch.
When I'm at home I can afford to waste an hour to debug audio which inexplicably stopped working (LLMs help with it a lot). When I take a laptop with me somewhere, I probably can't afford that, hence a macbook.
Yes, the slow enshittification and the increasingly obnoxious push for services and recurring revenue on MacOS is worrying, but it's also extremely reliable in a way that Linux simply isn't. I love Fedora KDE for freeing me from Microsoft, but there's a new issue every month - usually minor, but sometimes not. As of last month I had to restart plasma-shell multiple times a day because the desktop window would become non-responsive when CPU was under heavy load.
Helps that macbooks have excellent hardware and battery life, too. I just wish users weren't increasingly treated like cattle to be milked.
This is why I sold my macbook and switched back to Linux. I don't want your stupid cloud/ai services. If I want to rm -rf / then the system better do that.
This comes from an ardent Apple/macOS/iOS hater. Yes, I know I am using a very strong word. The short version is: when it comes to laptop hardware w.r.t price nothing comes even remotely close. Like, literally none.
Price as well? Yes. When I bought my first MacBook Air in ~2011-12 I was shocked to see what I got for ~57K INR (no, I am not converting it to USD) I would not have gotten from any other OEM even for fricking 120-130K INR (I had the choice here to instead say 1.2-1.3L :D). And that hasn't changed more or less.
But their OSs are pathetic, their software (even other than the OS part) are downright disgusting. But they sort of have a great personal computing hardware monopoly. Because no one else bothers to make it. For whatever reason.
They make it increasingly hard to make Linux on this. Really really hard.
What else sucks? Repair and repair cost. You are literally using a costly (bank-broken-level) repair affair ticking time-bomb in your backpacks - there is no two way about it.
And people who are going to say, like every time, "but how many times has your Apple device broken down", or even "but why won't you buy a new one after 3-4 years", or something even more stupid like "wait.. so your AirPod stopped working after 3 years.. you wanted it to last for 30 years?", please go and put the head back into the warm sand where it safely was. Anyone saying, "but they give you repair kits", please f-- off!
tl;dr: it's not the right way to buy personal computing hardware, but the the closest right way is a decade behind or at best many years.
[dead]
if you are happy on Linux, why do you even "try to use a mac or win"?
When those unfortunate ones need my help. Or when teaching kids in school.
my work offers win or mac only.
I can't speak for OP but there can be many reasons. For example, I'm using a Macbook Air for development purposes, it's essentially dumb compilation/notarization machine. I don't use it for anything else because I find the user interface infuriating and can't get around it (which is weird because I used to be a Mac developer but IMHO the UI has gotten much less practical).
Fanboys, including management, push macs down our throats and there's little you can do when apple fanboys are also decision makers, since they don't listen to reason.
Author claims the system setting "Privacy & Security > Apple Intelligence Report > Report Duration" with its 3 options [Off | 15 minutes | 7 days] sends that data to Apple with that frequency. This is wrong - this is a transparency report so that you as a user can see everything that is getting sent to Apple as a part of Apple Intelligence. Nothing additionally is getting sent to apple if you switch this away from "Off".
It's placed right next to a similar report for the user to see which apps generally connect to the internet and to which domains.
Basically, the main point of the article, "I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data" is not true.
The main point of the article is not the report duration toggle, it was the whole activation of Siri and Apple Intelligence.
The author turned it off in a previous version, and as they updated their OS it got turned on again (the "Apple said yes" part of the title)
Worth noting that this “report” can only be viewed through a json data export file, which the average Apple user has no idea how to interpret.
It is designed to not be user-friendly.
> Nothing additionally is getting sent to apple if you switch this away from "Off".
Another way of saying this is “personal data is still being sent to Apple if you switch this to off.”
Alas for Apple in this era of AI dumping that file into a chatbot will give you a fully interactive experience to go through the data.
>Concerned about what Apple AI is collecting so I'll dump it all into another corporate AI to find out what it is
We've finally achieved AI Inception here. And I'm sadly sure we're going to go deeper.
Very boxer rebellion-coded. "We won't use the tools of the enemy"
The Siri AI app does not support uploading JSON files to chat.
How far we’ve fallen from the “it just works” era of Apple.
They can’t even make a JSON reader, and require their users to understand the jargon generated by third-parties training on your personal Apple data.
IF this is true apple has done a horrible job at explaining what this is.
that's not the main point of the article
that's not even the topic of the article
that refers to a post from 2025 that he links to. this is clear from the first sentence of the article. I suspect maybe you didn't actually read the article and spent more time writing this erroneous comment than you might have reading the article.
This is literally the main point of the article: "The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025, I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off."
Disappointing that we have multiple 10-deep reply chains pearl-clutching Apple's disrespect for the user, and no one actually bothered to verify the premise of the article. They just want to be mad.
The problem is, where's the checkbox labeled "keep your 22 Gb of local models off my 256 Gb drive and keep your assistants off my battery" ?
Apple made the thing compulsory so we're not giving them the benefit of the doubt because they don't deserve it.
When I updated, I had to actively sign up for new Siri and even make space for it. Until update, my phone had the "old" Siri. Not sure what the issue is
Maybe that we're talking about laptops and desktops :)
Welcome to every Apple discussion for the last 25 years.
You ever notice how Apple never really lets the user say "no" to their nudges?
It's always "maybe later" and never "no seriously, I don't want this, go away"
I don't have a solution, but on this topic I let Fable write a browser extension I called "Nee, krijg de tering". It's "No, fuck off" in English, but the Dutch feels more visceral for me. It's really rough, but it tries to find these "Maybe later", "No, thank you" etc. buttons and replace the No button.. I guess it's kind of self-explanatory. Does not really do anything, but it is cathartic (and also messes with a lot of UIs to the point where unfortunately the blocklist of domains this should not be used on is growing a lot :'( ).
I feel this pattern is really abusive. Like I am offering to slap you in the face, giving you two answer options: Yes and "Maybe later/no, thank you". As though you have any obligation to be forced to answer this question again at some late time, or to be very polite while you refuse to be slapped in the face. The correct answer is obviously "No, fuck off".
Sensible. Add in a 'Nee, flikker op met je kutcookies' button for cookie consent banners, and you're golden.
This 'maybe later' dark pattern seems to have gained so much traction that UX folk just use it because everyone uses it. There is probably some handwavy reason for it that amounts to not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive, but it just ends up being another grain of sand on the micro-annoyance pile of today's tech.
Consent-O-Matic handles those kutcookies for me, but an interesting feature would be to use these fancy new "decision models" to determine the correct explitive to use in the No,-button text based on (the context of the element on) the current page.
> not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive
In their refusal, while (accidental) acceptance is always definitive...
EDIT: In another thread this is called the ratchet of consent. Apt.
(lit. "No, get the tuberculosis".)
Dutch is fairly unique in how it uses diseases as expletives, whereas most other languages use body parts or excrement. TB even has the honour of having two expletives named after it (tering and pleuris).
Whenever "shit hits the fan" we say "Tuberculosis broke out" ("de pleuris brak uit/is uitgebroken").
I don’t speak Dutch but I agree. The Dutch version sounds way better.
I’ve noticed that most companies do that, not just Apple.
Apple claims to be the privacy king. They deserve scrutiny.
What does privacy have to do with nudges?
The principle of respecting user autonomy.
Tangential IMO. Apple isn't surreptitiously pilfering your data via persistent nudges.
Well, if that's the bar we're arbitrarily setting, then I guess so.
Arbitrary indeed – I noted above that privacy and nudges are unrelated.
Privacy requires immense trust. Ignoring user preferences the minute there’s some money to be made erodes that trust.
One of primary reasons people value online privacy is because advertisers are incessantly “nudging” them to do things that aren’t in their interest.
It’s exhausting.
People don’t want to be nudged. They want to be respected.
Those are 2 different and often conflicting things.
Other companies claim to care about the consumer, they deserve scrutiny too.
Microsoft pioneer it with "ask again in 30 minutes". Or maybe someone else, can't tell for sure who was the original bastard.
Or the EU with their online chat control. First round they couldn’t get a majority. Then, they sneakily turned it around so people had to vote to NOT want it. The day they did the second vote, many were on holiday and thus it passed.
Apples sets the example.
a bad example from apple becomes the status quo for other companies.
Most companies did that before Apple, yes. I hate that trend.
I have this one notification asking me if I want to enable the Personal focus when I’m at home. I don’t want my iPhone to care if I’m at home or not, so the past two years whenever it pops up I click Later.
It will probably never stop asking.
It will. Once you accidentally mis-click once and then suddeny there is no way to back out of it.
I think this should be called the ratchet theory of consent because it only tightens.
I beat you to it by a couple of years :)
https://jacquesmattheij.com/dark-patterns-the-ratchet/
Haha! Great minds think alike. (Although they do also say that fools seldom differ...)
I've got bad news for you then :)
Not sure about the focus pop up but most/all of Apple’s other nags (like set up Siri, try Apple Music and the like) go away permanently if you go to the settings app and click “later” from there (as opposed to the button in the pop up which has the exact same label).
You can delete the Personal focus.
Google Play Store has a notification to enable notifications. You didn't read that wrong. It shows a badge and everything. I said no for years except that last time. Now I can't find how to turn it off again.
Can’t you just disable notifications for the Google Play Store app? Maybe it’s because I’m on GrapheneOS, but I can just enable/disable notifications like any other app.
This is like an in app Envelope icon thing.
> It's always "maybe later" and never "no seriously, I don't want this, go away"
No? When I'm asked about Apple Pay on an iPhone, it says "Maybe later". In the Settings it has reminder, and if I go in and say "No" it never pops up ever again (maybe on a iOS major version upgrade?).
Generally with Apple it's one "Maybe later" with a reminder flag set someplace, and then that's it.
It's slowly getting worse. For instance, the update nag for Pages and Numbers Applications towards their newer subscription-capable equivalents can't be disabled in the MacOS UI. Selecting "Not Now" still results in the nag appearing every. single. day.
The frog is being slowly boiled.
My favorite one on iPhone is the Apple Health app. Marginally useful to track some trends, so I was using it occasionally. Every 2 weeks it will nag you to "Make sure the Health features on your iPhone and Apple Watch are set up the way you want them" with a banner that takes up 1/3 of the screen. There's not even a "maybe later". No matter what you do, it comes back every 2 weeks. Sure, I can "just" close it. After 5 years, I've closed this stupid nag close to 150 times.
This hostile behavior has unfortunately grown over the years. Notice how often you cannot really unsubscribe from newsletters, because clicking the small link in the email will only unsubscribe you from 1 of 25 "topics" or whatever and they will gladly re-define the "topics" every 6 months and re-enable them all.
If you are using a big tech mail service like Gmail then just mark them all as spam. If you run your own, block the whole domain.
i see this virtually everywhere, and worked at several places where PMs proactively changed text banners to not equate to "no"
severe industry brainrot
Feature: Apple does not phone home. Enable this feature?
Would you like to enable the feature where you opt out of disabling telemetry?
[dead]
I want this on the macOS Settings badge.
Have no intention to upgrade my Intel Mac Pro to Tahoe, so Settings is going to permanently have the "something needs attention" badge I guess.
Many people have a hard time understanding consent.
Jesus Herbert Christo. Literally, not figuratively, literally, as I was reading your comment I got the "iCloud Storage is Full" upsell nag that I have tried to disable a hundred times. I stopped to asked my Lord and Savior Claude to help this time around:
> What I found on your Mac
> Apple Intelligence is ON. com.apple.CloudSubscriptionFeatures.optIn → [REDACTED] = 1 — that number is your Apple Account DSID. ~2.5 GB of models in /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_*, with generativeexperiencesd, intelligenceplatformd, modelmanagerd, TGOnDeviceInferenceProviderService and a Messages Assistant Extension all resident.
> The nag is pure upsell. Every iCloud service that notification names is already off on this Mac — your account has only KEYCHAIN_SYNC and FIND_MY_MAC enabled. Photos, Mail, Backup, Drive: all off. It's nagging you about your other devices' storage. Source is the com.apple.appleaccount.notifications bundle, fed by followupd and com.apple.CloudSubscriptionFeatures.followup.engagement.
> "I said no and Apple said yes" is literally happening. Siri shows Assistant Enabled = 0, yet ten Siri daemons are running. Share Mac Analytics is off (AutoSubmit = 0) — and SubmitDiagInfo still logged LastFullSubmissionSuccess today at 12:36 UTC.
This is absolutely bananas.
Apple has an allergy to fragmentation that can be both admirable and annoying at the same time. As a developer it can be really nice to know that your audience all has access to the same feature set. As a user it can be annoying to be subjected to Apples feature upgrade treadmill.
They have a "rapist mentality" like all the other large tech companies.
And Sync Immediately's only affirmative option is "For Today", so I get to set a daily reminder to remind the setting that I do in fact want it to be ON.
Techbros just can't grasp that "No" doesn't mean "Later." It's not exclusive to Apple by any means. Android update incoming? Your choices are "yes" or "later."
Techbros are just the ones happy to implement it. Which is of course a black mark all on it's own, but the ones explicitly rejecting the very concept of consent are sales, marketing, management, project leaders, etc. IE the people who are actually legally in charge of making these decisions.
Frankly, most of these people at high levels in these companies seem pretty apathetic to the concept of "Consent" at all, because I don't think they think we have a right to it.
Remember, LG owns the glass. Not you. Not the person who purchased it and has the legally respected rights under the first sale doctrine, but instead the company who bought some code that runs on it.
Linux people aren't techbros? What are they called?
If you can't disable it, it's not a feature.
Microsoft and Google are the same.
whataboutism
I get the annoyance at "ask me again later", but "maybe later" or "not now" is helpful - there's no way to trigger dialogs by yourself, so this is a promise that even if you say "no" in the dialog, you can still go into settings to change your mind. Gives me less anxiety about the choice.
A much better way would be “Yes” and “No” with a small message of “you can change this later in the Settings”.
Or have three buttons: “Yes”, “No”, “Remind me Later”. Apple does stuff like that in other parts of the OS, like when asking for app permissions, so they clearly know how to do it.
"Remind me later" means "bug me again with a dialog in the future", which is not what I want. I don't need to be reminded, but if I change my mind in the future, I want to be able to proactively go and change it.
Yes, more text can be another way to provide the message, but if you've ever done any user testing, you'll know that people at best scan through your UI. I know I wouldn't read that, or at least would prefer not to have to read that.
I guess I don't see why "No" combined with "You can change this later in settings" is so much less offensive than "Not now".
> "Remind me later" means "bug me again with a dialog in the future", which is not what I want.
But it is what Apple and others do, and what the conversation is about. Sounds like you want what everyone else does (a “no”) but are just arguing over the specific wording of the message.
Yes! Somehow people seem to assume I'm arguing for different behaviour, which I'm explicitly not. I'm saying "Not now", and the ability to manually go into settings or wherever to change the setting later, is better than "No", while doing the same thing as "No".
And as I said in my first post, "Ask me again later" and the associated behaviour is annoying.
How about a choice: both "no, maybe later" and "no, never"
And "no, never" would irreversibly remove the option from settings?
Have you ever seen an app where upon responding to a dialog, an option is irrevocably removed from settings? The conversation is about “no” meaning “don’t bother me again with this question unprompted” (which used to be the norm), not “rewrite your own binary to remove the choice”.
Of course not, that's why I was surprised with the suggestion - if that's not what it should do, then it's no different from what I was proposing.
I was agreeing with you that indeed, I don't want software to bother me again with the question unprompted. Additionally, I appreciate the reassurance that the dialog isn't my last opportunity to set the setting (because sometimes that is the case).
So tl;dr: label the button "Not now", and don't prompt me again.
It would never prompt again.
That's is the same as what "Not now" and "Maybe later" would (should) do.
Only "ask me again later" is the one that prompts you again. That's why I do mind that one, and appreciate the other ones.
“Maybe later” doesn’t explicitly say that you’ll never get the prompts again, so even if it did work that way, PMs would be able to weasel out and change it back to nagging you with the next update. (In reality, the wording like that is used precisely for this reason already, and that’s why we hate it.)
And it doesn’t really help the user. If I click “Not now” and later decide that I do want the feature, how do I find it? If you want to reassure the user, just say that:
"No, thanks" is also insulting and unacceptable. I want "No, fuck off", so let's compromise on a plain "No" like we used to get in the era when computers were made for the users.
I agree that telling me exactly where I can change it can be helpful, although I'm also sure I won't remember that.
But we're comparing to the case where it just says "No", in which case "Not now" at least tells me I can look up how to change it later now - or more importantly, that I don't need to give this further thought now.
Yes, PMs (or anyone) making software doing dumb shit is dumb anyway, but that also holds true if it were labelled "No".
Then build better interfaces. Don't ask stupid or nefarious questions.
I don't know what metric Apple implemented that has caused these engagement spam prompts (ads) to appear in their platform, but I want none of it. I've turned Siri off in the latest macOS and iOS because it's so damn slow. I'm bullish on local LLM compute but Apple it's not ready yet or not in the way you've integrated into the user interface! When I am attempting to search for an app on my system I don't want an AI response that takes 2 seconds to start. I want to see the filtered list of apps immediately. When I want to search a term I want the results immediately with any slow AI interpretation fed in asynchronous. It's painful as hell to try and use the new Siri and be resigned to wait a few seconds for any sort of answer. The worst part is you have to wait 2 seconds and then 98% of the time Siri is wrong our outdated and you have to redo the query somewhere else. When it became more convenient to jump into chatgpt or claude I pulled the plug on the new Siri.
If you want to own your computer, linux is where it's at. Windows is rusty iron chains and MacOS's are gold-plated silver pretending to be gold, but they're still chains.
I would love to move my gaming PC to Linux but until the kernel devs permit kernel-level anti-cheats, or an equivalent, I refuse to give up games that I love. It's nearly impossible to play multiplayer games now without KLAC. The cheating is out of control.
Unfortunately this is an ideological hill that many Linux devs are willing to die on, so we're at an impasse. Valve claimed to be working on a solution, and if there is any company which can negotiate an accord, it's them.
It's very fortunate that Linux devs do not tolerate this DRM crap. What you are asking for is to turn Linux into another Windows, at which point there is not point.
If you're not willing to stop using harmful software that's your problem.
And let's not forget that cheating in online games is only an issue because companies have co-opted what was a social activity between people you know (or at least can get to know) into a more profitable asocial e-peen measuring contest between randoms.
So only play multiplayer games for which you know enough people who also want to play that same game and on a schedule that works for you?
Really you just need to bring detected servers back. That left people with a community that they tended to police themselves because they owned it. But those community run servers meant they couldn't control/shutdown old multiplayer games at will so they got rid of those. Then they started whining that they needed ever more draconian tools to police the online games that they needed to have 100% ownership of so badly.
Although impractical, wouldn't that be nicer?
If that's the tradeoff, then yes. I don't know. I keep a Windows partition for Fortnite to play with one of my friends, and I miss the days of CS:S with 64 player zombie mod.
I don't know if enabling KLAC in Linux can happen without opening nasty doors for other software. If it existed, perhaps one could have different kernels to boot into: One for the invasive software that one boots into for gaming and a secure kernel for normal work, perhaps even with different userspaces.
Online cheating as existed for as long as online games have existed. Long before companies cared about online gaming as a serious generator of revenue. There is a certain percentage of the population which enjoys hurting others and making them have a bad time. The anonymity of online games allows them to be antisocial with very few social repercussions.
I think equating having the option of KLAC with Windows is totally disingenuous. There are countless other differentiators. You would be free to just not use KLAC if you so desired.
The "anonymity of online games" is much greater than it used to be. It used to be standard practice for people to host their own private servers and play with people they knew. This naturally filtered anti-social behavior because people knew they wouldn't get invited back. And public servers were a more casual environment, where the occasional cheating wouldn't ruin any serious competition.
I recently started playing a game that installed "anti-cheat" software that has done absolutely nothing to stop the amount of cheating in the game but it has made my Debian desktop unstable with random gnome and application crashes caused by their poor software. I never had crashes until that garbage got installed. It works exceptionally hard at preventing me from streaming my games I used to not have an issue with
kernel level invasive garbage would be beyond destructive and still not solve the problem
If it's on Linux then it wasn't kernel-level anti-cheat, and therefore mostly useless. It's not surprising that it did nothing to slow down cheating. Even KLAC can be circumvented. It increases friction and cost for cheaters but it doesn't solve the issue completely.
Ideally you would be free to not play KLAC games, and I would be free to play KLAC games. I just hope for the option one day, as I would very much like to make the move to Linux.
Your anti cheat doesn't stop others' cheating, so whether they had KLAC running is irrelevant to whether they encountered cheaters.
It stops a lot of people cheating and usually keeps it at a manageable level. This isn’t a binary choice where we can only expect perfect solutions, and in their absence, we throw up our hands and declare the problem intractable. KLAC is much better, and I’ll take that.
No, you're missing the point; if I'm on Linux, not running KLAC, it doesn't affect whether other people are cheating.
I think you're missing my point: there is no KLAC for Linux, therefore if you wish to play a game with less cheating, you choose a game which requires KLAC. Therefore, you do not use Linux. Your comment is a non-sequitur.
Except that some games use KLAC on Windows, but also have Linux versions that don't use it, so whether you use Windows or Linux is irrelevant.
If you choose to play Windows-only games because you think that is protecting you from some nebulous group of cheaters who moved to Linux to aid their cheating, I think you don't know the cheat landscape well.
Cheat makers primarily operate on Windows, not because it's easier, but because that's what most players still use. This idea that you're going to avoid cheaters by staying on Windows is honestly the opposite of true. MP games with Linux clients are not the games with massive cheating problems.
> The cheating is out of control.
There are hardware cheats that are not detectable by KLAC, so it doesn't solve the problem, just improves the situation.
The only way to avoid cheaters is to play with people you trust.
The real problem is that servers are now entirely the domain of the companies running the anti-cheats. We used to run the servers for most of these and could ban cheaters. But the game companies demand we play the game their way, not our way. We've really lost something.
I agree, it's a curve. I don't think we'll ever completely eliminate cheating, but we can make it so difficult and expensive that most people don't do it. That's good enough for me.
I don't really understand why people insist on treating cheating like something that has to stop. Back in the days before the Internet was a thing, just playing board games, cheating also happened. There are even board games designed around the concept of deception.
Play single player games, then you can complain about cheating AI opponents.
Because people want to have fair fun competition? How is that hard to understand?
What you can not give up owns you.
If you are fine with that, fine.
If this post bothers you and you feel the need to defend yourself against it or something, realize I'm not the one making it true. Nothing you say to me can change this.
It's worth having a look at https://areweanticheatyet.com/. I found that the most of the games I play which use anti cheat work on Linux. It's also not hard to dual-boot windows as a backup, though I haven't had a use for my windows partition yet.
Thanks. I intentionally avoid games without KLAC now because the cheating is so bad. The most recent example is Arc Raiders. Such a fun game at launch, very quickly overrun by cheaters. They eventually added KLAC but because they also offer a Linux build, they could not stop the cheating. The game is mostly dead now, [down to just 6% of its peak.](https://steamcharts.com/app/1808500#All)
> I refuse to give up games that I love
But why? They're just video games. Why are they important, especially when a lot of them are designed to be addictive.
A lot of people love smoking but that's not important either and it's better to give it up.
It's very simple: I like the games more than I want to move to Linux. Playing Fortnite isn't going to give me lung cancer.
But why do you like them? What do you get out of them? What's the benefit?
I've watched people play slot machines. They sit there and pump money into the machine for no real benefit to themselves. Why are video games any different to that?
I get fun out of them. I don't mean to sound snide, but do you really not understand why people play video games? I derive fun from many places, like hiking, reading, movies, music, and video games. Do you not derive fun from your hobbies?
No! And that’s how I like it!
[flagged]
A video game allows you to develop your skills and use your brain in a complex way (especially true of competitive multiplayer games). A slot machine is played by mindlessly pulling a lever.
> develop your skills and use your brain in a complex way
What skills? I don't think there's anything complex about button mashing to make blinking lights blink differently.
In that case, you should have no difficulty winning any major esports tournament and claiming some easy prize money.
To be equally reductive, how is any hobby more than playing a slot machine? It’s just pulling a dopamine lever.
I do not believe a hobby needs to yield social value. I believe it is sufficient to derive enjoyment from the activity itself. You don’t need to personally enjoy my hobbies, just as I don’t imagine I would enjoy yours.
> To be equally reductive
I'd say it's less reductive and more the objective reality.
> I do not believe a hobby needs to yield social value
I didn't say anything about social value. I'm talking about value to you individually.
I don't think you've answered that question. I don't see there is any value. I think you're pushing buttons to make the blinking lights blink differently, just like a slot machine.
Why do either of those things matter to you if the person in question enjoys them?
Any activity you enjoy is enjoyed because it produces a dopamine release (for someone who enjoys it).
People who enjoy reading get the same dopamine reaction from that as people who enjoy video games. Or slot machines.
The difference with slot machines is that the purpose of them is solely to tie that dopamine release to giving away money predicated on deception (specifically, both by not disclosing actual odds, and by lying about them).
A slot game that requires no money to play isn't a problem, because it's not tricking old people into giving away their pensions.
> to tie that dopamine release to giving away money predicated on deception (specifically, both by not disclosing actual odds, and by lying about them)
So just like loot boxes in video games.
> A slot game that requires no money to play isn't a problem
So similarly you should only be playing opensource and freeware video games that aren't designed to extract money from you.
Which is why people have specific problems with loot boxes, yes. But most video games don't have loot boxes.
> So similarly you should only be playing opensource and freeware video games that aren't designed to extract money from you.
"Paying to purchase a game", and "paying to wager money on or in a game" are 2 different things.
I'd also have no issue with someone buying an actual slot machine to sit in their house, so they put in money but also keep the money they put in. But people don't do that because they're not playing for the gameplay, they're playing for the gamble.
What if those games are the only games they and their friends play together? I wouldnt want to stop that.
Having to give over time and money to a video game company to maintain friendships sounds more like a symptom than a cure.
When your grandkids ask you what you did with your finite time, is "I pwned noobs" the answer you want to give?
> When your grandkids ask you what you did with your finite time, is "I pwned noobs" the answer you want to give?
You are being ridiculous. First, unless the person was a professional gamer they would probably answer with the time they spend at work and time time they spend raising their family. But let's assume the grandkids specifically asked what they did for entertainment.
The answer would then be something like "I got together with my friends and we played the popular online games together". They would probably also mention any other things they did a lot of entertainment, too.
> Having to give over time and money to a video game company to maintain friendships sounds more like a symptom than a cure.
Sure, let me just quickly hop on a plane to australia to meet with some. I assume youre paying?
> When your grandkids ask you what you did with your finite time, is "I pwned noobs" the answer you want to give?
Yes? What kind of question is that? Youre just gonna start talking about the value you created for shareholders or your business?
> What kind of question is that?
The question is what value are video games. The answer seems to be "not much".
They look much more like addictive distractions than anything valuable.
Wow, you really dont understand the concept that people are different and have different opinion do you. You are entitled to think what you want, but why tell other people they are wrong in what they think and like?
Feel free to list out all of your hobbies and what you do in your free time and we will all critique it for you.
This can literally be said of any entertainment.
Ultimately, everyone spends their time on what they enjoy; there's no award when you die for doing more x than y while you were alive.
I enjoy playing games, gardening, and riding motorcycles. My cousin enjoys socializing at bars, playing games, and doing woodwork.
Is one of our hobby sets more legitimate than the other's?
> Is one of our hobby sets more legitimate than the other's
How are video games a hobby? Is playing slot machines also a hobby?
What's the difference between video games and slot machines? They look real similar to me.
How is Exapunks[1] anything like a slot machine? Or Slay the Princess[2]? Or Minecraft? A blanket statement like "video games = slot machines" just doesn't work. I won't deny that there are many games that are predatory/mindless, but video games are such a broad medium.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/716490/EXAPUNKS/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1989270/Slay_the_Princess...
Playing slot machines absolutely is many peoples' hobby, unfortunately.
As others have said, why don't you list out your hobbies (as I did mine), so we can understand exactly what recreational activities you think constitute "valid" hobbies? That will also make it easier for me to explain the difference between video games and slot machines to you.
Go play something like pathologic and come back to tell us how its like a slot machine.
In your case it would seem to be “arguing with strangers on HN”!
I'd say it's more like I'm trying to get something coherent out of people and there's nothing to be had.
Video games don't even appear to be productive of good discussion.
What are you on about? You clearly don't like video games and think they're a waste of time, which is fine. Other people do like them and find them fulfilling for whatever reason, which is also fine.
Why are you trying so hard to "prove" that someone's hobby is a waste of time?
"But don't you see?! Someone has the wrong opinion on the internet" he said as he frantically replied to every comment.
> Other people do like them and find them fulfilling for whatever reason
That's the question. What is the reason?
People also play slot machines. Are slot machines fulfilling?
How is cheating a problem that needs a technological solution when playing with friends?
Because I'm not friends with all 64 players in the lobby.
I don't want kernel level anti-cheat, though. All the games with it have cheaters anyway.
>They're just video games
True story: I know a woman who built a relationship with her tween nephew on the other side of the world mainly by playing Fortnite with him ever week for two years - all for free because she never bought a skin.
KLAC isn’t the problem so much as lazy or shitty devs refusing to put in the work to support Linux as a platform. They’ll literally have game logic run in encrypted VMs on other platforms but then refuse to do the same on Linux with superior hypervisors like KVM and bhyve. Some developers have explicitly removed EAC support on Linux from their games, despite no open issues with it. Others demand someone else write the APIs needed for their invasive rootkits to run, ignoring that Linux is very much a community effort and that if one will write and publish it, others will use it.
I will 100% give Linux evangelists the guff they deserve on shitty UX in GUIs and their insistence upon a dozen slightly-tweaked solutions to the same core problem that prevents the industry from consolidating into widescale popularity on endpoints, but the incompetence and/or laziness of major devs to support even something like Debian is not a failing of Linux.
There is no doubt an economics problem here, where it might not make sense to invest a lot of effort into a system from which less than 1% of revenue is derived.
However, KVM does not solve the problem. In fact, Riot explicitly explains why virtualisation can make the problem worse: if Vanguard runs inside a guest, a cheat can run on the host and manipulate the VM in ways the anti-cheat cannot see. Riot says Linux currently does not give it sufficient ability to attest the boot state or kernel modules, with distro differences making the problem harder.
Linux also deliberately does not provide a stable in-kernel ABI for proprietary out-of-tree drivers. The kernel documentation explicitly says there is neither a stable binary kernel interface nor a stable internal kernel interface. The preferred model is for drivers to be upstreamed and maintained with the kernel, which is almost the opposite of how closed-source kernel anti-cheat is normally deployed.
And this isn't just Riot. EA actually supported EAC through Proton for Apex and then removed Linux access because its anti-cheat team said Linux was being used for impactful cheats, that Linux cheats were harder to detect, and that they couldn't reliably distinguish a legitimate Steam Deck from a malicious Linux client pretending to be one.
Valve itself tells developers that Proton's recommended solution is user-space anti-cheat and that kernel-space anti-cheat is “not currently supported and is not recommended”.
So I guess it's technically possible for a game dev to effectively create their own Linux distro, but I hope we agree that's never going to happen. They're game devs, not Linux devs. Anti-cheat needs a trust chain that the hostile user cannot control and not just an API through which it can inspect the system. Linux deliberately gives the machine owner far more control over the kernel and environment, which is exactly what makes strong client-side attestation difficult.
FYI bhyve isn't a Linux hypervisor. It's part of FreeBSD.
> Riot says Linux currently does not give it sufficient ability to attest the boot state or kernel modules, with distro differences making the problem harder.
Why would a game developer have the power to approve what I boot on my hardware?
Especially a peddler of live service free to play.
Attestation is not permission.
Have you talked to those people running de googled Android phones lately? Apparently they're excluded from banking and government apps because of "attestation" that's not permission.
You are confusing your right as an individual to do what you want with your OS, and the rights of developers to do what they want, with their software. You have the right to use whatever software you like. They have the right to not sell or give you their software if you don't want to abide by their rules.
I want to clarify to anyone reading this that this only effects high-competitive games, like LoL, Valorant, PUBG, R6S; and not all of them (e.g. Counter Strike).
It does not affect "multiplayer" in general, to the contrary, most multiplayer games are not affected (coop games, MMOs, RTS).
Ofc, cheating is also present with KLAC, its just the next level of the cat and mouse game (Driver exploits, DMA access via PCIe, Network Packet analysis, ...) Nonsense. 1. Almost no anticheat is implemented on Linux in the first place. Most "working" anti-cheat solutions for Linux are just a #if Linux doNothing(); #else ... 2. KLAC requires SecureBoot/ChainOfTrust + closed source code running with highest privileges. This does not make sense for any PC, but I dont see why it would be harder to do on Linux than on Windows, Linux just has a smaller install base in general and a lower acceptance rate for KLAC, therefore its not worth it to implement.I would like to respond because you're speaking authoritatively but this is mostly your opinion.
> I want to clarify to anyone reading this that this only effects high-competitive games, like LoL, Valorant, PUBG, R6S; and not all of them (e.g. Counter Strike).
It affected a game I really care about: Arc Raiders. That's not a "high-competitive" game. It's PvPvE, shooting at funny robots and scavenging rubber duckies. Cheating killed the game. [It's down to 6% of its peak.](https://steamcharts.com/app/1808500#All) Just because this hasn't affected the games you love doesn't mean it's not affecting many games. See Titanfall, H1Z1, and The Cycle: Frontier, among many more.
> It does not affect "multiplayer" in general, to the contrary, most multiplayer games are not affected (coop games, MMOs, RTS).
I was going to ask you to back that up, but I realise I made a broad claim and can also not back it up, so we're just giving each other our opinions, I suppose.
> Ofc, cheating is also present with KLAC, its just the next level of the cat and mouse game (Driver exploits, DMA access via PCIe, Network Packet analysis, ...)
Indeed. The goal is to reduce cheating to a manageable level. It is impossible to eliminate.
> Nonsense. 1. Almost no anticheat is implemented on Linux in the first place. Most "working" anti-cheat solutions for Linux are just a #if Linux doNothing(); #else ... 2. KLAC requires SecureBoot/ChainOfTrust + closed source code running with highest privileges. This does not make sense for any PC, but I dont see why it would be harder to do on Linux than on Windows, Linux just has a smaller install base in general and a lower acceptance rate for KLAC, therefore its not worth it to implement.
Linux does not properly support KLAC because its architecture and development philosophy work against it. For example, Valve explicitly recommends user-space anti-cheat for Proton and says kernel-space anti-cheat is “not currently supported and is not recommended”.
The Linux kernel also deliberately does not provide a stable binary kernel-driver interface. Kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has said that Linux has neither a stable in-kernel API nor a stable binary kernel interface, because maintainers want the freedom to change kernel internals rather than permanently support proprietary out-of-tree drivers.
Riot is on the record as explaining that Linux does not give Vanguard sufficient ability to attest boot state and kernel modules. They also claim that distribution differences make enforcement harder, and that cheats can potentially operate outside an emulated environment where the anti-cheat cannot see them. Riot is on the record saying that anti-cheat is “extremely hard on Linux by design”.
So you're technically correct, but I think you misunderstand a lot of the architecture which underpins this issue, and the ideological boundaries which many developers prefer to enforce around security, FOSS, and ownership.
I do wonder if AI could be used to statistically identify likely cheaters, but as with all statistics, some innocent people will be caught, and many guilty people will not be caught. Existing server-side anti-cheats have been trying to use some variation of statistical analysis for at least a decade, with poor results. It's not hard to program movements based on statistical modeling of pro players and ensure the movements remain within a standard deviation of that. Aim bots are particularly difficult to statistically identify, assuming the bots have been competently programmed. The end-game is cheaters running around with pro-level skills.
To be clear, I welcome the attempt, but I think it just results in the same cat and mouse arms race we've seen for 20 years. Inference has been beaten time and time again. Until it is proven to work I will stick with the best options we have right now.
These stats should not auto-ban, but flag for human review.
ImO, the goal is to find the statistic cheaters will skew since they are cheating.
Lets say, one is wall-hacking in Counter-Strike. In Counter-Strike, many maps have a central location/lane called "mid". There is often a kind of mind-game of limited information going on:
Any wall-hacker will be a major outlier regarding not running into mid while the enemy sniper is watching.If you can accurately dissect/classify/log player behavior, I expect the statistics to look similar to those of poker players who cheat and know the cards of the other players on the table: https://media.pokertube.com/uploads/2025/12/5d96fe17d39043a0...
Doesn’t Arc use KLAC? Sounds like it did not accomplish its goal. And I’m not sure how you trace direct causation between cheating and decline in popularity. Plenty of games with rampant cheating (Tarkov) do just fine.
Only on Windows (and only after the game had already lost around 80% of its player base), which makes it effectively useless. Because they have a Linux build, there is no way to prevent cheating at a larger scale.
It's fair to argue I have no evidence of the cause of decline. I cite my frequent interactions with hundreds of players in the community, and streamers like Burnt Peanut. However this is qualitative, not quantitative. Me and my friends stopped playing because of the cheating, and so did every other one of my friends who picked it up. It wasn't that we wanted to stop playing the game. It was the cheating.
Well, a quick perusal of some Reddit threads about this leads me to believe that the decline in playerbase is more about lack of content than cheating. (And may not be out of the ordinary for this sort of game.)
But I don't know since I don't play Arc. I'm just aware of a number of other games rife with cheating that remain wildly popular.
It's your choice, but I refuse to play games that come with a rootkit. I would rather have cheating than compromise my security.
Ideally we would both have a choice.
To be honest I don’t really understand the hysteria re KLAC. Installing something in kernel space requires trust, but so does installing something in user space. If you don’t trust the developer, don’t use their software. A malicious app installed in user space can steal, encrypt, delete or exfiltrate anything the user can access. It can abuse their applications, credentials and resources. Kernel access is worse, but both are very bad.
> Unfortunately this is an ideological hill that many Linux devs are willing to die on, so we're at an impasse.
This is no longer the reason, as FLOSS implementation exists now: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20909
[dead]
It will be an impasse until (or unless) the Linux user base grow big enough that the gaming companies start to prioritize better solutions.
For me, it is no problem at all since the games I play have no issues. That includes the multiplayer games I play.
Are there any games in particular or is this a blanket statement? I've switched and not missed anything. I stopped playing Fortnite, but it's not a very good game anyway. The gaming world is huge with plenty of variety.
There's nothing kernel developers can do to "not permit" kernel-level anti-cheat, anyone can build an anti-cheat kernel module (as long as you honor the GPL licensing requirements naturally).
And chains of Linux have links that break when you update them, or sometimes they just aren't compatible with random metals: "galvanized chains are planned in a future release, please donate"
I don't know if I would say this as much anymore except for Linux distributions steering away from Red Hat/IBM or Canonical attempts at replacing traditional methods, or the BSDs that aren't necessarily in agreement with more recent developments either.
I certainly would not feel I owned my system if I accepted the full suite of attempts by these companies to replace and subvert existing standards. I do feel I have control with non-systemd init and service management, and source based packaging.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are your friends too!
Let me know if any of them work well on a laptop that's never than 5 years old.
Running FreeBSD on a Lenovo Thinkbook 16 G7 ARP that was bought brand new less than a year ago. Everything except the wifi works flawlessly (daily driver for working).
And the wifi is easily fixable either buying a non expensive dongle or waiting for the next release.
Also running bhyve as daily driver with Ubuntu for development purposes. Everything works without issues, perfectly.
That's valuable and good to know, but I meant a machine that's actually new (not one you just bought recently). That laptop is about 2.5 years old specs wise at this point. I use mine for anything from programming to video editing to AAA gaming on Linux. I don't think a machine like that could be my primary one, but looks like a decent secondary.
I don't know what you consider "actually new" hardware. The machine I use to work has 16 Gb of RAM. Ryzen 7 and an AMD GPU. For me that's a pretty decent and recent hardware.
If you meant the lastest of the latest GPU, processor, chipset and so you you might better off with Linux.
But the fact that the computer that was given to me was boxed from factory and bought after two weeks after started is a sign of recent hardware. I haven't tried it but two other person where I work have high end brand new ThinkPads and I'm confident FreeBSD can be run on those well too.
If Zen3+ vs Zen3 is a significant architectural difference, than it would slightly miss the 5 year mark, since it was released 4.5 years ago.
By new hardware I mean CPU, GPU, WiFi etc. that was released by their manufacturer within the last 1 year or so, I don't even mean hardware that was just released.
The laptop mentioned is fine. But it is hardware that is just at that mark where I'd normally replace it.
As I said, I think it's still OK if my goal is to run FreeBSD. But if my goal is to get the best hardware now that will last me the next 3-5 years then it's dated and I'll have to compromise just to be able to use FreeBSD with it. I don't have to do that with Linux.
I think if I am going to compromise on hardware because I want a particular OS on it, it'll probably be Haiku over one of the BSDs because I don't get the sense BSD offers enough of a difference vs Linux to justify that compromise.
Psst. Macos is bsd in a trenchcoat. Don't let the others see this comment or they will get angry.
Perhaps, but the BSD developers do not fully invite themselves into your home and network through use of their operating system. I do appreciate however that macOS is BSD somewhere under the hood and switched to zsh as default shell (even if it was supposedly only for licensing reasons, but I believe it's the correct decision practically or legally)
The post is `I said no and Apple said yes` so not sure how much being a BSD protects you there. Apple still controls it.
Is Linux where it's at?
Maybe with the rise of immutable distributions like SteamOS, Bazzite, GnomeOS and KDELinux.
But the other "user-friendly" distributions are just not good enough for a non-techy.
We need better and more A/B partitioned immutable distributions and we need a new implementation of Flatpak.
I recently had to repair my parents their Linux Mint installation because it powered off during an upgrade. Apt does not handle that well, Linux Mint has no snapshotting, you cannot apt autoconfigure -a through the UI. Also the UI does not explain why the machine is getting hot while it's building dkms modules for an hour.
Just this week I saw someone with Fedora get a buggy graphics driver that made the whole system glitchy, they had to downgrade the kernel.
The week before I had to repair a manjaro installation from a friend because getting nvidia to work on ArchLinux isn't trivial even if Manjaro pretends it to be.
To be frank, desktop linux is still in a pretty bad state.
I think it's equally likely a windows update breaks a family owned computer and the solution isn't clear to them eg reinstall drivers directly from Vendor.
I'd also rgue Mint is easier to navigate than Windows with it's 3+ different context menus and baked in ads.
Windows isn't where it's at either.
Desktop computing is just in a bad state.
And I agree, Linux Mints DE (Cinnamon) is very user-friendly!
For now.
My gut is we'll have to start learning BSD soon.
GPL is a more free license if one cares about having control over their computing. The BSD community cares a lot less about that in my (limited) experience and more about purely technical aspects. Which is fine, I just wouldn't expect them to hold if Linux is no longer an option somehow.
I've seen people in #freebsd attack GPL like it was thought up by satan.
That's the problem with BSD, the community holds a large amount of radical ideologies that led them to BSD. Like a deep hatred for systemd or the GPL.
Not the core developers though, just the community surrounding them.
I had many conversations about this and it always came down to business. GPL is indeed restrictive if your priority is the free market. Pretty much every serious BSD person I know of runs it as part of their business, so from their pov GPL is restrictive.
However in the context of the constant restrictions of general purpose computing, GPL has my back. BSD at best doesn't care about restrictive forks and at worst even welcomes them as 'good business'.
Two different approaches, they both have their place but as a user, I feel GPL was written for me. BSD (license) was written for the developer.
This is an oversimplification. I'm sure that some people think like you mention, but it is by no means all. I personally choose permissive licenses because I find the GPL to be hypocritical in the way it restricts freedom while talking about promoting freedom. If I'm giving a gift to the commons, then I want it to be a true gift, not something with strings attached. So for me, permissive licenses are the way to go. It hurts nobody if someone chooses to make a closed source fork - software is a non-rivalrous good, so whatever someone else does cannot take away the free version that I have provided. So I see no reason to deny others the freedom to use my software as they see fit, even if they use it in ways I don't personally agree with.
Thanks for sharing your POV, but that's basically how I understand it. It's the old individual freedom (BSD) vs collective freedom (GPL). The BSD is certainly less hassle and just a simpler way to give something away.
> I find the GPL to be hypocritical in the way it restricts freedom while talking about promoting freedom. If I'm giving a gift to the commons, then I want it to be a true gift, not something with strings attached.
The right to free speech is a freedom too, yet it has strings attached. Namely it's no longer a freedom the moment it crosses a certain line into endangering someone else and their freedoms. That's sort of the view the GPL takes, but it gets into how different political philosophies view the concept of freedom. Is it freedom to pay whatever the free market (in practice monopolies) demand for commodities critical to survival (BSD view of freedom) or is it freedom not to have to worry about not being able to afford commodities critical to survival (GPL view of freedom).
I do agree the BSD freedoms is simpler to grasp.
> It hurts nobody if someone chooses to make a closed source fork - software is a non-rivalrous good, so whatever someone else does cannot take away the free version that I have provided
True in theory, trickier in practice. 'It hurts nobody' only goes so far because if a closed source fork starts collecting telemetry then it actively hurts its users, unless very much opt in. Now how many average computer users are going to know that there's an open version that doesn't do that? A small number. Trickier still, because the fork is closed, it's likely going to be quite hard to replace it or block the telemetry, at least without loosing some features. So again, the difference is in what is viewed as the commons. BSD views the commons as everyone, including capital interests best in a position to take that the software and twist it into a tool in the ongoing war on general purpose computing, ability to repair etc. GPL views the commons as the users, so it aims to grants freedoms to them, even at the cost of restricting the freedom of capital in the process.
In short, I do understand and even appreciate the BSD concept of freedom and its simplicity, yet I find it insufficient to protect my freedom in a system full of monopoly power, corruption and exploitation.
In an ideal world where the behaviour the GPL aims to protect doesn't exist, I'd agree the BSD is more free. In the current world, I'd argue that BSD gives freedom to exploit computer users to those with the means to do so.
A Linux computer is so many things and also nothing at the same time that's is basically impossible that one or N AI company can impose you something like Apple, Microsoft or Google can.
With that said, also or instead using *BSD won't do any harm.
The Internet is suggesting a bunch of hacks and undocumented defaults commands to run.
Meanwhile the Mac User Guide explains how to disable Apple Intelligence throughout Golden Gate:
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/turn-restrict-acces...
Here's the version for iPhone:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph3fed3f2c3/io...
For iPad:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/ipad/ipad3b7f1217/ipad...
The biggest thing people seem to be up in arms over is the disk space. I don’t see any of the suggestions on that page freeing the disk space back up, please correct me if I’m wrong.
Try it and find out? If it doesn't now, I bet it will in the next version or two, due to all the attention it's gotten.
I'd test it myself but I use and enjoy Apple Intelligence and don't want to ruin my config.
On previous versions, there was a single "Apple Intelligence" toggle that turned off all of these features. This support doc describes ~10 separate settings, and still doesn't provide any way to turn off certain AI features (e.g. Genmoji).
I believe these new settings are to turn off specific undesired functionalities.
Clicking "Turn off Siri" should still act as the overall switch.
Seems to behave this way on my 27.2 Beta 2 test Mac anyway.
Having to turn multiple toggles to express the lack of consent is one thing.
However, having to redo it on every system upgrade is another thing. "No" should mean "no", but now the expectation is that you need to constantly shout "No no no no no no" otherwise your previous "no" will turn into "yes".
The speed with which we went from pearl clutching that Apple hasn't added as many AI features as Google and Microsoft have to pearl clutching that they have finally done so is amusing.
Meanwhile, Google just announced "laptops" that are locked down to the Play Store, and the sound of crickets is palpable.
> Google has confirmed to Ars that Googlebooks will enforce developer verification requirements for apps similar to Android phones. Under this system, only apps from developers who have verified their identities with Google will be eligible for installation
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/googlebook-laptops-l...
I have met zero people and read zero accounts of people wishing there was "more AI" in Apple devices.
Your first sentence of this reply doesn't make any sense to me.
And I don't see how your second sentence relates to the first.
One solution is likely the same as the one that stops every other iOS update from re-enabling iCloud password sync: Create a profile using Apple configurator <https://apps.apple.com/de/app/id1037126344> that forbids all these AI features and upload it to your devices.
The other solution is to say goodbye to these products that don't respect you.
By the way, if you're annoyed by the new huge "sync" menu entry on Firefox, you can disable it under about:config by setting identity.fxaccounts.enabled to false. Again, a lack of respect, this time by Firefox, for forcing this stuff down our throats. I'm only using Firefox because the alternatives are worse in terms of privacy. Ladybird, we're waiting for you!
Does that work as well as the profile that is supposed to disable the OS update nags but fails?
> The AI industrial complex does not do consent. You will use it.
I posted a thread on thr MacRumors forum making a similar point. I tried to couch it in the language of Apple being inconsistent with Apple Intelligence. You can’t turn it off anymore globally but Apple provides the user the ability to block, not turn off, some parts of it. Even then you can’t block everything, like the Apple Intelligence parts of the Photos app. Even if you turn off Siri that stuff sticks around. But iOS 27 does not require Apple Intelligence to function or anything like that because my 4th gen iPad Air can’t run Apple Intelligence but can run iPadOS 27 just fine.
> The “AI” industry has many flaws, the word “consent” being seemingly missing from training data and company handbooks is one of them
Yes! The most consentless (don't underline this in red firefox!) technology that I can think of certainly.
edit: also install and use Linux
I see non-consensual more often, tbf.
The answer is simple: Regulation to grant users the right to refuse during installation/setup of a system. This must also include updates. This feel like a repeat of the EU browser choice rule!
Even better, refuse is the default.
This is a very interesting shift with Apple where customers are starting to perceive it as hostile company.
That mindset shift surely started quite some years ago? At least in my book they’re actively hindering standards/compatibility with other ecosystems, greenwashing their products, squeezing out third-party developers, and design/UX is also going downhill at least since Liquid Glass (or rather since Jobs left).
The questioning of Apple's approach to consent all started with Tim Cook and that damn "Songs of Innocence" U2 album.
https://fortune.com/2022/10/24/tim-cook-said-free-u2-album-i...
It's been heading this way since they rolled out the butterfly keyboard and soldered RAM in 2015 unfortunately.
I'm convinced we have crossed a threshold where compute is no longer personal, it's platformed. "They" don't want you to have control over your machine as they don't trust you with it. They want you to buy the things they want you to buy, envy the people they want you to envy, submit your data to the collective, so they can control markets and industries for profit and greed.
Linux is our only hope and even that is plagued by corporate interests. I'm going back to 1994 days and only using tech for work. I have shunned social media, youtube, netflix, hulu. I have shunned subscription based SaaS. I'm tired boss.
I feel the same way. I'm not completely against the technology, but please let me say "no" and remove the models and kill the processes.
“Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787535
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/1vlnf13/workarou...
I'm done with Apple. Got rid of my iPhone and back on android (GrapheneOS) and very impresses after playing with Omarchy for a few weeks.
I think we will keep reading more and more of these Apple stories and it feels like shit is getting worse as time goes by
Wait so you got rid of Apple because its baked in AI, and went with Omarchy that is also fully vibe coded and has baked in AI? Furthermore it has built-in ads for the products of DHH, such as Basecamp. Omarchy feels a lot like Windows, with it being slopped together and with built-in ads for products.
What hardware do you run Omarchy on?
> Omarchy
Facepalm.
I don't know about Macs, but under iOS/iPadOS you can set a Siri region to somewhere it's unsupported (e.g. Russia) to truly disable it.
It gets back about 15 gigabytes of storage and removes additional stuffs you couldn't disable by setting Screen Time options, such as the Safari Reader's gigantic "summarize" button.
Heck, even on Macos 26, I have all the Siri and intelligence toggles turned off. Yet all these processes sitting around.
I foolishly bought a Macbook Air with only 256GB of drive space. Now whenever I need to "upgrade" OS versions, there's not enough drive space to do so. It sure would be nice to delete all this unnecessary Siri bullshit bloat so that I can use my laptop with the latest updates.
Are these Spotlight? The New Siri combined Siri and Spotlight into a single agentic retrieval thing, so it’s possible that when you turn off “Siri” they leave on Spotlight but it’s reported under the new branding.
Inconsistent & confusing if so.
What's more interesting is his "No AI" policy
https://dbushell.com/ai/
Why do you think it’s (more) interesting?
Because the author's proud ignorance sheds some light on the article's authenticity and validity of claims (or the complete lack thereof).
Proud ignorance? With such many references to support his point it looks pretty informed to me.
Did you chase those references? A core premise and complaint is entirely false.
This is an article and author that is tailored for AI curmudgeons or an AI rejectionist to self-assure themselves that their worldview is the only correct one. Facts seem to be a nuisance at best here for the author, and helpful phrases like "garbage", "vile", "human toll", "psychopaths" undermine all chances or credibility for a reasonable take or conversation.
The AI ship has already sailed. You won't lose your job to AI, but to another person using AI better than you. Do you really want to spend hours writing boring one-off shell and test scripts? Even a selective use of AI is better, or at least a personal policy of reviewing and understanding every line of code. Not some blanket no AI policy...
We have to manage it better, introduce guardrails, adversarial agents, better harnesses, etc.
All valid points but a personal boycott is not the solution.
Why does anyone who seems to be working in the software industry even think that immediately updating to the latest major release is ever a good idea?
He did justify it in https://dbushell.com/notes/2026-09-16T05:01Z/
I develop apps and I needed to upgrade to install the latest Xcode and simulators.
I always wait one year, upgrading to major release N-1 in August before N comes out in September. I made an exception last year and stayed on Sequoia. It will be August of next year before I consider Golden Gate.
I just stick with whatever major release comes with the computer. If I had actual liberty though I'd have this m3 pro running mojave. I actually got a lot of utility out of bootcamp.
Do you upgrade your computer when the major release goes out of support?
Run Linux, Virtualizise windows or Mac OS be happy.
The cost? You have to research a machine that will run Linux, not everyone can do this. I'm quite happy with my hp zbook is it a mac, no bit it's as close as I can go.
Asahi is in a fairly good shape nowadays: https://asahilinux.org/
Not from looking at this graph it's not please don't mislead people https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m1/
While not as extreme, this reminds me of the whole Bluetooth-re-enabled-after-updates thing I've been bitching about for years. I hate Bluetooth, never use it, always turn it off. Yet, every time I update macOS/iOS, Bluetooth is magically re-enabled, because Apple said so.
Like I said, not as annoying as unwillingly being sucked into the AI-iverse, and seizing 28-GB of storage space, but it's the principle. I want control over my devices - you know, the things I paid $$$ for.
Moved on to PopOS long ago, and am loving it, especially with the COSMIC desktop now. I just feel so much less worried. Today’s LLMs with their agent harnesses take the past hassle of configuring and maintaining your Linux desktop completely off the table. No more hour long digging and research after an update, just let your AI keep your machine in shape. No proprietary software spying on you. Problem solved :)
This drives me crazy! My iPad is perpetually never finished setting up (and my Windows Laptop after a year for similar reasons) because I have never said yes to the thing I can't say no to: AI.
I am not against AI, but let me choose where I use it.
Someone should do a class action lawsuit for these phony consent requests.
I have spent the last 28 years in the SF Bay Area, working in tech.
I have spent the last two months in Florida.
I was always aware of the disconnect between the insular world I lived in and what went on "outside" - but little did I know how big that gulf was.
If this was a car guy thread the complaint would be about a missing 3 horse power on his new Toyota when he put it on the dyno. And every one else is talking about their custom tunes, and scratch built systems, and how much better they are. Most people would not care and just want to drive to work.
How many of you are gonna have your Mom install linux and do support for it? How about your crazy uncle, or the slow cousin? Being done with Apple wont change Apple - make linux easy to use and usable. Or convince people that Apple > MS to force them to compete again. Or better yet both.
There is a business here.
Tru about moms. I'm going to have to keep supporting her 2 Windows (10 and 11) and paying for microsoft 365. :(
I wonder if all the work to do Linux and self hosting is actually shorter than having to deal with these unasked for annoyances.
Open: 0 to comfort that always grows. When it works you usually don't touch it for years.
Closed: Comfort to never-quite-what-you-want-but-compromise. Works, but you never know what's going on. Features might just get added whenever to your detriment.
So in one case i have a known state i can reach and hold. The time i put in is known and the point in time is up to me. In the other case i can never be sure about state, time and point in time. That's a clear loser to me.
"Last week I succumbed to Apple’s harassment" - usually what all end-users do eventually when caught in the walled garden ...
I make it a point to never install the first versions of major macos releases. they are usually buggy and have annoying new features that are either removed, improved or made optional in the following minor releases. Currently on 26.6.2, it's pretty good.
I had a similar thing with Xcode the other day. I unticked the "download a code assistance model" thing, clicked to continue and it started downloading it anyway (which, to be fair, you can just X out of).
I never really understood the craze for the overpriced Apple products. After many years of using PCs with Linux and Windows, I got forced to use a MacBook Pro as the company laptop and I found it hard to use. The OS is so limiting, Finder so crappy, oh my. There are some advantages, like the hardware is good, but on the other hand there are countless tiny issues where "Apple knows better" such as tying mouse scroll direction to the trackpad direction which is awkward for me. And now this what you're describing. So no, thanks, I'll stick to ThinkPad.
If you don't know where to find the checkbox to disable natural scrolling (you can ask Apple's built in search, even) I don't think anyone should be listening to your opinion on Apple.
That's unnecessarily harsh. Try disabling mouse acceleration without Googling anything; where's the search entry for that? Why is there no Preferences option for it?
Windows, KDE and GNOME all expose this as a GUI toggle. macOS doesn't.
You don't buy Apple because it's good. You buy it because it's what the cool people use.
Imagine applying for a SF startup job and letting them know you use a Windows computer.
At best they will politely tell you to fuck off. But they might blog/X about the idiot Windows user who imagined they could be cool enough to work for them, all coated in a plausible "a craftsman takes care of using good tools, sharp knifes, ..."
> You buy it because it's what the cool people use.
I apparently define cool people differently :joy:
> Imagine applying for a SF startup job
No, thanks :joy:
> You don't buy Apple because it's good
You do, because their hardware is very good. Denying this is just silly.
Apple hardware is good, but not uniquely good. There are plenty of other good computers out there, Apple hardware isn't in some special tier where nobody can touch them.
Isn’t that what I said? That it’s very good?
I had a surface laptop, it was fine, not as good as a MacBook imo.
Had a razer laptop, it was good, got very hot though.
Had an X1 Carbon Extreme that I liked, wasn’t as good build quality or screen or camera or trackpad as my MBP from work at the time though, was still expensive af.
What are you thinking of that’s better than a MacBook Pro?
By that logic, why don't Macs outsell the sum of Windows machines? If people buy Apple devices for the quality, Macs should outsell Windows machines 5:1.
In reality, I think it's well understood that 95%+ of customers (for Apple, Google and Microsoft) don't make any evaluation of device quality. They buy whatever they see their peers use, because they want to identify with the [luxury|convenience|hardworking] lifestyle of their comrades and idols: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
> By that logic, why don't Macs outsell the sum of Windows machines?
That’s incorrect, because I never said that everybody buys a computer because of hardware quality, or any other reason. All I said was that Apple has great hardware and it’s part of the reason for their success.
Dell, Lenovo, HP sell more units than Apple, but they likely don’t make more profit on that segment of their business.
There is no contradiction. I agree Apple hardware is good. But it's not why you buy it (well, maybe you personally do, but you are not representative of the median Apple client)
If it was that simple mainstream Linux success would be one good marketing campaign away.
Their hardware is really good, their software is fine — at least as good as all the others to the average user I think, the integration between their products is good, and their marketing is obviously top tier.
I don’t think they’d be as successful if their products were not premium hardware.
I’d love an arm based laptop with a great screen and trackpad running Linux for work.
Do you have any sources for this? I agree that people tend to follow their peers, or seek things that communicate a higher social status, but like, Apple's hardware just is also very good, and that could easily be why someone stays with them, even if they were prompted by status.
Why Did You Buy An Iphone/Mac If You Wanted Freedom?
It feels like consent is being undermined in so many places. The anti-Meta Glasses ad with a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and the strap line "Glasses for people who don't do consent" hits the nail on the head for me. It's a profoundly inhuman stance in the name of profits.
LuLu is honestly the best piece of software for macOS. Every upgrade, I always dowanload the latest version of LuLu first, the the OS upgrade, and then turn all connectivity off. Once it's done with the updates I make sure LuLu is active and up-to-date and running before I reactivate WiFi so I can review every outgoing connection (and deny most).
Maybe Little Snitch can be helpful in this sort of case ? Consent or not, it must be possible to kill the phone home line.
Potentially! Would be interesting to hear if anyone manages to block internal Apple shenanigans with Little Snitch successfully and feasibly (without constant toggling of rules or alike).
Uncertain, doubtful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49791435
I always accepted the Apple Premium for the luxury of privacy and a user focussed experience. What is the premium for now, apart from a fancy piece of hardware? Hardware required supportive software to justify the Mac Premium. It was always their marriage that we paid extra for.
Ich glaube man kann endlos diskutieren was das beste Betriebssystem ist da jeder seine Vorlieben hat. Ich denke es kommt auch sehr auf den Hersteller und deren eigene Software die auf dem PC ist an. Ich bin z. B. Lenovo Fan und habe von Lenovo einen Gaming Laptop und nutze Windows 11 und Linux Mint, ich habe keine größeren Probleme nach Updates gehabt. Es kommt auch einfach sehr darauf an wie hochwertig die Teile sind die ein Hersteller verbaut und für mich ist Preis Leistungsmäßig Lenovo ziemlich weit vorne. Ich habe keinen anderen Laptop zu der Zeit zu der ich ihn gekauft habe gesehen, der für den Preis eine ähnlich gute konfiguration hatte. OK es war zusätzlich noch eine Rabatt Aktion dabei, trotzdem war der Endpreis für das Setup super und er bereitet mir, egal wie leistungsaufwendig die Dinge sind die ich mache, seitdem sehr viel Freunde, egal ob es der Bau eines Android Games ist und beim Bau einer APK in 5-6 Minuten, Leistungsintensiven Spiele auf hoher Grafik,... Natürlich bin ich mir bewusst das ich mit meinem relativ "kleinen Setup" leistungseinschränkungen habe allerdings macht der Laptop alles was ich will und wofür ich ihn brauche gut mit uns legt mir keine Steine in den Weg. Mit der Lenovo Vantage Software finde ich ist man ganz gut gerüstet da sie Treiber selbst sucht und das übertakten kontrolliert und unterstützt was ich persönlich noch nie benötigt habe nur einmal ausprobiert. Ich denke es kommt immer darauf an für welche Arbeiten man den PC benötigt und was man bereit ist an Geld dafür auszugeben. Wenn man die Hardware natürlich dauerhaft an der Grenze des möglichen laufen lässt oder sie andauern übertakten z.B. treten schneller Fehler auf. Das ist genauso mit einem Handy oder ähnlichem. Und dann kommt es auf die Pflege an und bei einem Laptop z.b. auch in wie fern man bereit ist Sonderposten in Kauf zu nehmen für z. Sb. Seinen Laptop Ständer oder sogar noch für eine aktive Kühlung von außen. Alles hat seine vor und Nachteile und alles benötigt ein bisschen liebe und Pflege
I’m considering linux full time going forward and just keeping a mac mini for ios builds.
Thank goodness Linux exists.
Good to see this thread turned into a flame war full of linux lovers who don't ever use Apple products vs. linux lovers who have exetensively used Apple. That's typically how it goes.
You just have to persuade your Mac that you are in the EU, and AI won’t work at all anymore. Changing language to non-English also helps.
The AI pilled industry is all people who don't understand consent. And refuse to acknowledge and respect other humans
Looks like I'll never upgrade past Sequoia.
I'm switching to Linux desktop. I'm done with Windows and Apple. Both these companies do sleazy dark patterns.
> Apple front-loaded the keynote with a “we care about children” narrative that the media and fanboys lapped up. Then they advertised features that are suspiciously at odds (if you stop to think). It was a shrewd marketing stunt they’ve pulled before. In past events Apple has greenwashed the opening spiel before flogging a new iPhone model with an annual upgrade plan. Don’t worry, it’s all recycled. Totally eco-friendly to ship mass-produced luxury goods around the world to meet a manufactured demand.
Another nice example is the posturing about "vision health", concerns about myopia, etc. IMMEDIATELY before announcing the visionPro product.
WWDC 2024: https://youtu.be/GYkq9Rgoj8E?t=4625
Is this happening only when upgrading the os or does it force enable apple intelligence on clean re-installs too?
On other side, people are crazy (in a good sense) that Omarchy have built-in AI. Go figure out...
These are reasons enough. I switched to Asahi recently on my Macbook Pro M1
My fingerprint reader doesn't work, nor does my speaker. But hey, its way better than having to use MacOS. Atleast, linux lets me use my computer the way I want.
FIY speakers should work on a Macbook Pro M1 running Asahi. They have been working for a long time now (like 1 or 2 years) and they do work fine for me (running Asahi Alarm, not Fedora, but Fedora is supposed to work better since it's officially supported).
Just curious... Would Asahi Linux allow me to run llama.cpp on my m1? I have a spare laptop with lots of memory, wondering whether performance could be improved by using Asahi over running models on macOS?
> AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.
This is why I continue screaming against AI. I’ve moved past the theft roots, because I know we can just make its output un-protected by copyright or trademark laws - including the models themselves - thus returning back for free what was stolen in the first place.
Consent, however, remains an evergreen nail in the entire industry’s heart. It’s shoved into everything without our consent, into products that used to be perpetual but are now subscription-based. We’re forced to pay for someone else’s feature we don’t want in terms of storage, electricity, and compute costs - both on what we buy, and in higher prices due to the industry hoovering up every scrap of NAND and memory it can find and at scales that would make the GPU cryptomining boom feel embarrassed by. We have to endure this destruction of our limited capital and freedom to use our devices on our own terms, along with the immense invasion of privacy it brings about in surveillance and telemetry, all to boost an industry that spends its time loudly boasting how it will destroy the economy/nations/humanity/the biosphere with its eventual, inevitable output.
And honestly, I’m incredibly sick of it. It’d be one thing if I could turn off telemetry and point Siri to a local OpenAI-compatible API endpoint for inferencing and processing, but those options are barred specifically because the data harvesting is the point. These features were never designed or intended to improve the quality of my life, otherwise they’d be flexible enough for me to engage with them on my terms; no, the surveillance and data was always the point, and a proprietary answer engine that can have ads inserted into it or have its output engineered into speech benefiting the creator without transparency to the user - reality authoring - is a holy grail to a tech industry that still deeply resents open source software and “public good” services like Wikipedia.
AI companies refuse to let us opt out, because opting out means we’ve chosen to engage reality on our own terms, rather than theirs.
Apple has always been a hellacious nag! It is obscene.
I thought this was posted on a Dbus hate website when I saw the URL.
I literally thought this website was about DBUS Hell and I was all for it.
Alas.
> AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.
The reason corporations disable our right to stop AI tracking is because, at least for now, AI agents can be held to account for crimes once blamed on a person or corporation -- all one need do is disable the off-switches.
Until we sort out our relationship with AI, it will be the universal whipping boy, blamed for all sorts of things that once would indict an individual or corporation.
The best -- or worst, depending on your outlook -- AI trait is its complete absence of an ethical or moral sense. When an AI agent breaks into a computer, it's not with guilty knowledge, because AI doesn't possess that -- it's not part of their design. People need to remember: AI agents live in a moral vacuum, and that's not an accident.
When a corporation is called out for disabling a switch that once stopped AI tracking, the AI bros might say, "Oh, yes, that's an oversight, easily fixed." But it's not an oversight, it's a trial balloon, an A/B test to see how people will react.
But there's more. Decades ago, the Nielsen TV rating service would monitor what people watched on their TV sets (remember TV sets, boxes weighing 500 pounds?), by calling people on their telephones (remember telephones?). By modern standards, the Nielsen people were amateurs -- today's TV sets have built-in AI agents, active 24/7, and no disable switch. They patiently record what you watch.
In the next phase, TV sets will do eye-tracking, find out what parts of a TV scene people are looking at. Not true now but soon (Samsung is working on it). Pupil dilation, facial expressions, everything.
A super-old Bob Hope joke from the Cold War era: "Yes, they have TV in Russia, but you don't watch it, it watches you." Not so funny any more.
> moral vacuum, and that's not an accident
Well that's a philosophical point, because morality is bound up with opinions and personality and internal motivation, and quite possibly with creativity and with whatever intelligence really means. So it probably can't be designed into LLMs, and struggles with "alignment" probably aren't faked.
> So it [meaning morality] probably can't be designed into LLMs ...
Well, it could, but a preliminary step would be to get everyone to agree about what constitutes morality, which will never happen. So in essence I agree.
You said yes when you agreed to their walled garden.
> That was a rather explicit “no”, no?
God I love puns...
Some comments from last year poking fun at how Big Tech does not understand the concept of consent:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45111416
Guess it's time to switch back to Linux... Shame, I'll miss the macbook build quality.
This has been the case for me with the Dock for twenty-plus years. You can't kill the Dock. You can hide it. You can set the delay until it appears. But you cannot kill it, it just respawns.
And it's such a terrible waste of memory/screen space/an edge of the display.
And of course I said yes, and Apple said no, to Launchpad, an actually useful tool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Is it normal that I am enraged by this new process…is there a MacBook version of Graphene or something we can use if things keep boiling this way?
Asahi Linux. It'll take some years to reach the latest devices, but the effort is helping the whole of the Linux ecosystem on Apple silicon.
This is an absolutely insane question and it really shows how much mobile phones have warped reality. Until smart phones came along it was actually the norm to be able to install other operating systems on your PC.
The push the past few weeks to start talking about AI with the same language used to discuss sexual assault seems to be in poor taste. It seems like saying "slop" all the time was not effective, so now people are comparing AI to sexual assault... Sentences like "AI bros don't understand consent" are obviously meant to suggest that people who are pro-AI are akin to rapists and predators. I'm not sure what benefit there is to doing this, well, I guess that's a lie, I understand the point is to raise the emotional stakes of this debate to such a level that people feel like they can't disagree.
Unlike when it comes to sexual assault, everyone being "assaulted" with AI can very easily choose to switch to Linux or use different services at any moment. There's really no need for such hyperbole. Software changes you don't like aren't akin to sexual assault.
Isn't Apple pushing features or decisions for how things work down your throat regardless of if you want them part of the classic Apple value proposition? If you don't like that, why are you even using Apple in the first place? This is about how much you want the hardware maker to decide things for you, and Apple has always been maximalist with regards to that.
You said yes when you bought their shit
Don't know when he bought his devices, but Apple Intelligence is not yet 2 years old so it might no even have existed when he bought his Mac.
> Call me a radical but I’ve chosen not to kowtow to billionaires.
I wonder when the author will be switching from his Mac.
What does Elon Musk have to do with Apple Intelligence? Why is that in this article?
Do you mean Epstein? I missed the Elon bit.
> Despite Pledges From Musk, Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X
I'm not sure how this has anything to do with Apple or Apple Intelligence (which is based Google technology, also unrelated to X / Musk)
> The AI industry is vile
Or is this just Apple looking no less vile than usual?
> The “AI” industry has many flaws, the word “consent” being seemingly missing from training data and company handbooks is one of them. AI bros do not take “no” for an answer.
In several years, the GDPR enforcers (national information commissioners) may eventually wake up to this and start talking about fines. But I suspect everyone is too cowed by the AI inevitability narrative.
people in this thread are so fucking pretentious.
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
> But that’s a trivial cost compared to the consent problem. [..] AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.
This is barking at the wrong tree. If you value things like your privacy or the ability to strictly control what runs on your computer then perhaps it would be a good idea to not run a proprietary operating system that's primarily designed not to provide you with the best user experience possible but to slowly extract more and more value out of you?
You must be talking about someone other than Apple. Apple has been falling into value extraction lately (which I hope Ternus will change), but their operating systems very much have never been designed for that from the outset. Rather the opposite. Apple is the only company that comprehensively documents platform security and privacy. I can't think of anyone else who doesn't just say "trust me bro". Maybe GrapheneOS. Nobody actually proves they are who they say they are better than Apple does.
Apple is also one of the only companies to focus on user experience above all else (nearly, anyway). Again, I can't think of a single other example (maybe Framework comes close), but while Apple has incredible technology, they have always been fairly measured with it to attain just the user experience they want. IMO, that's what earned Mac a reputation for having poor performance, and iPhone a reputation for having low memory, because Apple gave them the specs they needed to run well and have a terrific UX, not necessarily the specs to push the frontier of what you can run at home.
Apple has been learning that frontier is important, though, and they've been leaning more into it lately. Part of why Apple Silicon has been such an incredible shock to the industry.
"good dog, here's a cookie"
You're repeating fruit factory propaganda as if it is gospel, the marketing department can be proud of their handiwork. In reality they're one of the most profit-maximisation centred companies out there in computing land, they don't really care all that much about what their users want and do their best to make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem". They fell into "value extraction" a long time ago and I don't see them stopping in any way as long as they have loyal apologists like you seem to be. Why would they? The money keeps rolling in, the congregation keeps on buying fruit phones and related paraphernalia, they'd be mad to stop from a business perspective.
We all have a line, it's just in a different place. Mine is strongly at the "forcibly stealing huge amounts of disk space for features you don't want" point. As a happy Mac and Android user, I don't recognise the 'make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem"' description; maybe you can give an example?
> "good dog, here's a cookie"
Ha, funnily enough that's not far off. (Vulpine)
> You're repeating fruit factory propaganda as if it is gospel, the marketing department can be proud of their handiwork.
I hated Apple for a really long time. I don't know exactly why, but if anything, it was all the Apple haters that got me. And of course, the general idea of devices not being locked down to the company, and some other stuff. Having a rooted Android phone made me prone to confirmation bias too.
But my school had Mac, and after using them, I knew that Mac was for me. I still hated iOS at the time, but I knew I needed Mac. So I got one, and I was absolutely right.
The Mac broke down constantly though, didn't seem designed for the abuse I put it through. People begged me to go back to Windows because of the constant repairs, and I did, but I eventually got fed up with Windows again and tried Linux. I eventually got fed up with Linux too, went back to Windows, continued to be relentlessly fed up with Windows, and then eventually got a Mac again, with my own money this time.
At some point, it just clicked for me that the company is what I need, rather than Mac alone. I realized that iOS had the exact same philosophy that I liked so much about Mac. I got an iPhone and got to benefit from the ecosystem with my Mac. And at that point, my mind was fully made up. All in on Apple.
Note that at basically none of these points did marketing become a factor in my decisions. So no it's not the marketing. Though that is a great way to discredit opinions, I think Apple is genuinely the best for me.
> In reality they're one of the most profit-maximisation centred companies out there in computing land, they don't really care all that much about what their users want and do their best to make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem".
To me, this feels kind of like the argument that Steam is an abusive monopoly. I choose and prefer them because the alternatives kinda suck in comparison. Apple is like that for me. I'm not locked into their ecosystem the same way that I'd be locked into an online game that I've poured thousands of hours into. Or locked into a social network where all my friends have been for over a decade. I can easily move somewhere else, and I even did recently, before moving back because I couldn't bear it.
I noticed just how much my habits changed to adapt to Windows, as opposed to Mac. I naturally used the system differently because it just wasn't capable of things I could rely on Mac to do for me. Spotlight is a big part of Mac for me, and none of the third-party software out there quite replicates that experience on Windows. In addition, the file management is far more primitive, and I found myself using directory structure in place of search. You could call this a skill issue, but to me, it's just a mismatch. Given how much I've used both sides my whole life -- I mean for much of my early life it was only Windows, but Mac has always been far more intuitive and expressive for me -- if they were comparable, I'd use them comparably, but I don't, so I think they're not.
I'm leaving Linux out of this because they don't have an ecosystem, they just rely on you bringing your own, I guess. You want file sharing, you install something like KDE Connect. You want organization, just find a file manager that has that, or make one. I've tried a few distributions, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Fedora Silverblue. I preferred Arch on my MacBook, eventually preferred Fedora Silverblue on my later PC, but nothing's quite right, even when I put the effort into curating (like the time I tried KISS Linux).
To be honest, I'm not quite sure why people say Apple's ecosystem is this terrible walled garden that's super hard to leave. Maybe they're hostile to a user experience that they prefer over the alternatives. Maybe they think that their preference is a sign that the walled garden is manipulative. I guess I just don't get it yet. Maybe they want to leave but it's inconvenient, they think Apple could make it easier, and that makes them conclude it's designed to trap them. In my experience, the alternatives simply are less convenient, it's nothing about Apple that makes it more difficult to leave.
> They fell into "value extraction" a long time ago and I don't see them stopping in any way as long as they have loyal apologists like you seem to be.
I don't think there's any evidence that Apple cares whether or not there are "apologists". Maybe if nobody in the world liked them they would decide to change their minds. But I don't think it's as simple as people just rationalizing their bad decisions and excusing them, therefore enabling them. I think they're just as likely to make bad decisions that are universally bad, and it takes about as long for them to go back on them as bad decisions with "loyal apologists". Like that fiasco with the butterfly keyboard repair programs.
> Why would they? The money keeps rolling in, the congregation keeps on buying fruit phones and related paraphernalia, they'd be mad to stop from a business perspective.
I do agree on one point, that Apple is unlikely to realize their mistake when it keeps generating profit, regardless of how many users complain. That's why I'm hoping for top-down action. I hope the new CEO sees that their more recent enshittifications like "Apple Creator Studio" are a mistake, a betrayal. I have no evidence that'll ever happen, though. Maybe that's the loyalty you're talking about. Or just the last shred of hope I have for what seems like the last company on earth I can rely on.
To downvoters: should I have answered this differently, and if so, how?
They probably thought your reaction was too long and pressed that annoying get-rid-of-things-they-do-not-like button.
Well, I have a tendency to provide supporting evidence when challenged. Otherwise I lose by default, or at least that's how it feels. You didn't exactly help but I don't really blame you, it's easy to get fed up with the more mindless Apple lovers
The author is complaining that his OS doesn't let him say "no". This would never happen with an OS which actually respects you. Of course, it's not Apple's fault, it never is -- it's those "AI bros"! It's incredibly ironic that the author writes "I’ve chosen not to kowtow to billionaires", yet he kowtowing to a company with a market cap of 5 trillion USD.
You wrote as if the entire operating system was designed from the start to extract value from you. That's what I'm disputing. I'm not trying to say that removing a disablement option that literally already existed had the user's best interest in mind. Just that it's not a sign of some core fundamental disrespect that the company has. We've already seen that Apple's been getting swept up by generative AI bullshit, like with the iPhone 16 marketing, and it is entirely fair to hold them accountable for all the shit they're doing, but it's also entirely possible that this is just a ripple and they're going to get themselves under control again.
Of course it's designed to extract value. MacOS is primarily a consumer content platform with some developer features, rather than vice versa.
The Apple experience is enshitifying at all levels and becoming consistently intrusive. I'm perpetually nagged about a 3 month trial of Apple Music I will never use and have zero interest in. Music player launches when I get in the car, even though I don't want it to. Apple Maps persistently asks me if I want a quick route home, when I don't. Apple TV repeatedly runs trailers for Apple Shows I have no interest in.
Apple '26 gave the world the much-loathed and objectively pointless Liquid Glass. iOS27 has some idiotically obvious bugs and usability issues. Parts of the hardware remain world-leading, but the software is getting less and less humane while pretending to be the opposite.
IIRC you can dismiss the three-month trial in Settings and it never comes back.
And IME the app that launches in the car is the last app you had open. Open Apple Maps and then it shouldn't launch Music every time.
Liquid Glass was one person, who thankfully has already left. iOS 7 was the same deal, terrible at launch.
I do agree that the services are pretty bad. Like, advertising Apple's new pet movie through the fucking Wallet app? Should be straight to jail.
Technically correct then, he's kowtowing to trillionaires.
> IMO, that's what earned Mac a reputation for having poor performance
Desktops maybe, but on mobile, Apple has always outclassed most Windows laptops that ordinary people might buy - alone because the full-aluminium case allows for far more heat input until saturation kicks in.
Sure - my MacBook Pro from 2015 could run BeamNG.drive playably when my previous Windows laptops absolutely could not. I think it wasn't necessarily that competitive with the best gaming laptops at the time, but it was far better for me as a user in general, even if in retrospect, it was more of a middle class machine, but it absolutely got the job done and I don't think it deserved the bad reputation at all. (Then again, it's entirely likely people dissing Mac for having low specs were not talking about their top of the line pro machines.)
So... Apple should develop a separate version of their system, that doesn't include AI anywhere? Because Siri AI is not the only part of the system that uses the onboard models. The moral panic is just ridiculous at this point
I don't think anyone's asking for a separate version, just an option to turn the AI features off. Even totally aside from the moral points, some of us simply don't have the disk space.
it is off, Apple Intelligence and Siri AI IS NOT the name of the models. The worst they're guilty of here is confusing denominations, something hardly new to Apple
So if I upgrade to the next version of the OS, I absolutely won't get that 20GB+ file downloaded against my wishes, absolute guarantee?
What a strange strawman. You are deciding now to substitute a different complaint than what was originally sense, because it is simply true that if you don't want to use Apple Intelligence, you don't need to.
The complaint now shifts to that you'll still have files on your system, or can't control exactly what models are stored on your computer. Apple has reasons not to give this fine control: what you have on HN is a group of people who are vehemently anti-AI, use Apple products, and still want features very specific to their control of the system.
Apple caters to the general user. If they think a setting is going to be confusing or likely to be misused, they won't implement it. People know the reality that if Apple intelligence is successful and if this feature is implemented, the general user won't know which parts of their workflow use which features. Removing the models will be advertised as a cheap hack to save storage, and people will be confused when they can't turn intelligence on again.
The fact that the core premise of the article (repeated in the title and first sentence) is about "phoning home": > The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025, I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off.
The entire basis of this complaint is not understanding the difference between "duration" and "interval". And not being able to click the link that is given to you in the settings menu or just search Apple's docs for the setting ( https://support.apple.com/en-mn/guide/mac-help/mchlfc0d4779/... )
Do you believe that adding a "no" button _and then honoring it when the user clicked on it_ requires developing a separate version of their system?
Regardless: they already did, because Apple intelligence is not available in the EU.
You're mixing up Siri AI and Apple Intelligence with the models... Siri AI and Apple Intelligence are PRODUCTS, the tech behind it, the models, are called Apple Foundation Models and they're used in many places in the system. It's not a matter of consent, it's people not understanding the tech they're using and doing spurious analogies.
I am doing nothing of the sort; you're shadow-boxing, and nothing you wrote has any bearing on the point under discussion here: a privacy-sensitive feature that the user explicitly disabled was silently re-enabled and the toggle removed.
No worries, it’s only a matter of time until this becomes normal. Will probably follow the same trajectory as people disabling JavaScript. You still hear about that constantly of course, because the 7 people that do it can’t go a day without letting you know, but it won’t be a panic anymore.
Thanks, that does help
I thought AI was going to write all our code for us and make developers 10x more productive? If code is that cheap, what's the problem with writing a second version of the system with no AI?
They should provide a kill switch to kill the AI slop. People. Don't. Want. It. Listen to customers.
I see the dangers of AI and agree that many companies don’t value our privacy and do what’s best for them and not us, but…
…this is an emotional dogmatic post. „All of this garbage“ clearly shows that the author is stuck in the past. The banners on the website confirm this. It’s the figurative fanatic complaining about those black steam devils and their tracks that nobody needs and that destroy nature. Yeah, steam trains were noisy and created smoke, but the age of horses was over. No emotional outburst would have stopped that, and won’t stop AI now.
The unconditional and emotional rejection of AI undermines the actual valid point he is trying to make.
If something can't be stopped, does that mean it's good? Reading accounts of the industrial revolution, huge swathes of nature in the north of England were destroyed. This article is an argument that it should be different, and is mostly focused on consent, not whether AI should exist or not (although the author's position on that is pretty clear too).
As a side note, I would argue you're being just as "emotional" (which I don't necessarily see as a bad thing despite your aspersions) by calling it "fanatic".
He's not talking about AI in general. He's talking about a device he owns.
Agree. Anyone should be allowed to disable generative AI features on their device, especially a general computing device such as Mac. It's not some hysterical outburst about the industry to be upset when you can't do that, especially when the option used to exist but was removed.
If you honestly can't see the blatant and absolute anti-AI rhetoric in his post (I provided a citation) and the banners, then there really is no reason to continue this discussion.
It's there for sure. However, it's not particularly relevant to the following two points:
1. The author should be able to do whatever he wants with his own device. That he owns.
2. The author should be able to decline consent for data-gathering activities and general AI stuff that he doesn't want.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with being against AI. Rejecting his argument that he should be able to control his computer because of that is very silly.
> The unconditional and emotional rejection of AI undermines the actual valid point
No it doesn't, one can hate LLMs with a passion and still not want features they don't use take 20GB of the storage they paid a premium for.
The "unstoppable" narrative may or may not be correct but it's certainly maximizing the backlash.