My little Linux enclave has some theories about the cognitive effect of all the polish that you find on Apple products, but we can't separate our biasses from good science, especially because there's nobody to ask that knows both worlds.
So I have a question for all of the converts out there: Does switching between MacOS and Linux have any effect on how you think?
I've been using my last 3 Apple laptops on the same balcony, and only the 2018 mbpro has keyboard problems. The older ones, including the 10 year old mb white, work just fine(tm) still.
Most professional users use Ubuntu since it's fairly polished and "just works".
Then one day I was working on my main Linux desktop and something was distracting me. After a while I realized that the "system tray" (or whatever KDE calls it) icons were all removed and readded one by one regularly, instead of just being updated in place. The on screen movement was significant enough to steal my attention from the IDE.
I looked up how to build a hackintosh desktop and sadly I've never looked back. I might even replace the hackintosh with a Mac Pro in the next 1-2 years, now that they actually have a Mac Pro again.
UX wise, Mac OS is the least annoying operating system available now. Same goes for iOS on phones. It's bad because there's no competition, but that's it.
I switched from 2016 macbook pro to dell xps 13 running linux. I spent 2 weeks tinkering. Trackpad never worked half as good as MBP. The simple act of closing the display lid did not even put the computer to sleep reliably.
I went back and paid the Apple tax.
Edit: BTW, Windows was running OK on that machine. Linux was fucked. I guess Microsoft is doing great work on WSL2. It might be the solution for me eventually.
The Arch wiki page for the 9370 really helped, especially since initially the battery was draining on sleep, not after applying the recommendations.
I dock it on USB-C 3.1 dock. The display switches instantly. The Gnome/Wayland fractional scaling is however not good, the image is blurry. I don't use it.
There's a fundamental difference in approach towards hardware and software that's cultivated slowly, gently, and steadily by Apple. The objective is to shell out money to the company and its ecosystem, and starts with vendor lock-in with proprietary tech and cheap but paid apps in a closed-off app store, to reach to the point of an annual budget for Apple expenditures that follows the latest iterations of their products, which are buffed up with New! Shiny! Features! that aren't much thought out, but are nominally innovative.
Now, if you go the Linux/BSD open source/free software path, you'll be hard pressed to find software to throw money at. Best you could do is donate to support your favourite projects, but that's optional rather than mandatory. After settling down with a nice system configuration, you'll similarly be hard pressed to find reasons to waste money on continued "upgrades", instead opting for something that works, and returning to it. People buying couples (or even stockpiles) of, say, x203's is a good example here. They're not buying the marketed "cutting edge", they're rather opting for something that supports their workflow, at a fraction of a price.
This demonstrates a fundamental difference of attitudes, on the one hand people subscribing to an open-ended channel of (fashionable?) updates in hardware and software, and on the other people maintaining and updating a workflow. Perhaps obviously, I'm viewing this from the slightly biased dev angle (and not necessarily webdev either).
Understandably, video and graphics people may come from different tech cultures and have different expectations, where the Apple way is more or less the only (apparent) way.
TL;DR, I see the Apple mentality as bombastic value inflation with more varnish than wood, while the FOSS camp as gradual value increase albeit with the occasional splinters.
Disclaimer: I do make daily use of my MBA 11" 2013, but I'd be hard-pressed to change it. Yet if I'm forced to, I'd probably not go for lustre, but for something equally functional. (Think of a "My other laptop runs OpenBSD" bumper sticker.) When I need to offload a build cycle that'd take too long on the MBA, I do so on a Fujitsu rather than a Mac Pro.
There you go. Downvote a guy to assure a better explanation.
However.... it's also very time consuming, so I basically never do that.
Linux out of the box without tweaking it will have a lot of behavior you may or may not agree with. I found it to be very difficult to adjust away from the cohesive interfaces found on the mac—you can use readline keybindings on all forms, which only very rarely conflict with application keybindings—and you have the same copy/paste keybindings everywhere you can copy/paste. The system keybindings have been consistent for about as long as I've been alive, I think. The built-in terminal is more than good enough for all my needs, and has excellent keybindings too! I can copy/paste/save/whatever with the same keybindings I use in all my other apps.
In other words, I find the interface to stay out of my way and I can work extremely productively with many windows and processes in flight. It may not be perfect, but dammit, it's about the best level of productivity I can manage, by a large margin.
In GNU/Linux, I'm constantly fighting the interface, so there's an implicit understanding of all sorts of behavior I find very difficult to adjust to. What are those lines under characters in the menu item? Why is my mouse frozen so I can't kill the application that's likely swapping memory? Why does every desktop environment have their own system settings and none of them have a decent gui for configuring trackpad behavior? Why are there two, maybe three different GUI frameworks, and several service layers, so you basically need to install the cores of both major desktop environments to use all the applications? I constantly ran into issues where, for instance, I could configure an app to work with the gnome keyring, but not the kde keyring. It's anarchy in the best and worst way. And don't even get me started on printers, graphics, and wifi drivers. All solvable—eventually. Unfortunately, I only had time for the worst experiences on the clock, and the last thing I wanted to do off the clock was fight the system further. So after two years on linux, after attempting to fight the transition to the touch strip, I switched back.
I did really, really love the paid (pay optional?) app system that was popping up, I found the apps high quality and I contributed to several I "bought", which was an experience that absolutely floored me, and there was some excellent curation involved there on behalf of the folks running the service. Still, the community is still very small.
I hear this from people who choose to use arch and Gentoo then complain that Linux requires much tweaking.
Install Ubuntu and be done with it. Or if you want things to work like a Mac, go with elementary OS.
If you still feel it's not _exactly_ to your liking, then I suggest you move back to osx.
Thinking this is real is a huge problem in the linux community. My entire post was about ubuntu. This is their trackpad guide in 2019: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynapticsTouchpad
Stuff like that makes me wonder who Canonical's target audience is and who they're testing with.
> Or if you want things to work like a Mac, go with elementary OS.
This is a joke, right? It's basically some high quality apps (I can't emphasize that enough) and a skin. The issue isn't the quality of those apps, it's that the desktop paradigm is fundamentally different and wedded to the PC. I can't understand anyone who claims to have switched and gotten up to productivity within a few years—maybe I've been using macs too long.
Also, this type of hostility has a very chilling effect. I have had good experiences with the open source community personally, but public forums are utterly toxic to people who express opinions about gnu/linux/gnome/kde.
That's a clear over generalization. I started with Mac, used everything Mac for about 15 years (various Macbooks, Mabooks Pro, iMacs and one Mac Pro) and then changed to everything Linux about 5 years ago.
I am a scientific researcher, my main activity in the computer is programming, I didn't miss the Mac at all except for a little tool that I used for my personal life (GarageSale) and that I couldn't get anything similar (it's a tool to create eBay auctions in a much easier and nifty way).
Anyway, there is nothing about the Mac itself I miss.
I was impressed with the build quality of the Mac at the time (2012 model? 2013?) but as a Unix system it wasn't among the best. No built-in package manager and the popular option, Homebrew, was messy and temperamental. System updates were terrifying because you never knew what it did to software installed with Homebrew. System core utilities are from BSD or BSD like (forks from old versions?). The file system system hierarchy is a bit unconventional if you are used to *BSD or GNU/Linux. The file manager was clunky (though easily "fixed" with a modern Norton Commander clone). In the end I spent most days with a full screen terminal and a full screen browser. One thing I really liked was the touch pad. The motions make sense and it's pleasant to use even for long periods of time. Screen was also nice (retina).
It wasn't a great sense of loss when I turned that laptop back in, though. I bought a refurbished Thinkpad for probably a tenth of the price and was happy with that. I'd never buy a Mac myself. Maybe if I get into iOS development it would make sense, or really need to use Photoshop or some such software. Until then I see no reason to pay the premium, especially now that other manufacturers have high resolution screens. "It just works" is overstated because when it frequently does not in some slightly off-mainstream use case you have browse some Stack Exchange site or some Apple support forum to figure out how to fix it.
