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.
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
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)
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 are not going to 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.
vitro · · focus · HN ↗
tomp · · focus · HN ↗
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
ravenstine · · focus · HN ↗
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)
cdaringe · · focus · HN ↗
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
floren · · focus · HN ↗
ravenstine · · focus · HN ↗
floren · · focus · HN ↗
ravenstine · · focus · HN ↗