story
Thing is, Mac OS isn't as great as it used to be either. They used to be brilliant developer laptops, but Apple seems to want everybody in their walled garden.
That would be System 76 https://system76.com/laptops/adder with their pop OS linux distro https://system76.com/pop
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5umefi/system76_refr...
At the end, I went for a Lenovo V330 on sale since I couldn't justify the price of System76 plus shipping outside the US at the time.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with System76 in any way and have never owned a System76 laptop.
Their hardware, though, seems to be meh. Give me this on some high quality hardware.
- Application support for graphics editors that people need in 2019... you can either run macOS or Windows for this
- Built-in cross-device syncing like iCloud/CloudKit
- Smooth integration with peripheral devices (e.g, HandOff)
This list could be extended for quite a ways, as people seemingly want to ignore part of what still makes macOS great - you have very well done product integration across the entire stack. I want it to "just work" in 2019 so I can live my life instead of tinkering with an OS/hardware combo.
The analogy I like to give people is that buying a Macbook is kind of like buying a BMW after years building your own tuner car. I'll always enjoy building my own, but man... if my daily driver breaks, I just wanna pay someone to fix it. Gimme the luxury feel already.
> Thing is, Mac OS isn't as great as it used to be either.
That's 100% true. MacOS gets a little worse with each new release.
But there is still one area where MacOS shines: backup and restore. I've had the same user account on five different machines now, because I just restore from a time machine backup every time I buy a new Mac.
And I cannot think of an easier way to backup my wife's laptop than pointing it at our time machine server and letting it just work.
Time machine is the biggest thing keeping me on MacOS right now. If your fancy Linux distro solved that, I'd be very tempted to switch.
It has plenty of differences from Mac OS, but most of them are positive.
If Google could get Adobe on-board with Linux support, and built a consumer foot-print a la Apple, I'd probably go there.
Dealing with their crappy third-party resellers is just a non-starter. It says that Google doesn't stand behind their own product with their own customer service, and I just can't abide that.
Like what? The lack of all desktop software? It is only even halfway decent if you live out of a web browser.
Google may convince Adobe to make one for Android like in iPad Pro which will function fine on Chromebook, there's no reason for Adobe to start supporting Linux.
That is probably not because Mac developers are inherently more "design affine" but because there is a very clear design standard on MacOS while Linux is basically a complete clusterfuck with 20 different desktops etc. So it's not as much a matter of getting Mac devs to also make stuff for Linux as getting Linux to be more standardized.
What surprise me is on the laptop keyboard layout has dedicated Print Screen and Insert keys but no Home and End keys.
Also, does macOS have a Unix shell that you can just start using for your work out of the box or do you have to use something like Homebrew to bring it up to modern standards first?
Usability is certainly an opinion. I can get a Unix shell on any OS, have been able to for decades. But we don't just want a shell do we? We want a decent desktop environment with a good system for managing application windows... We want updates that don't cause problems. We want a good file browser.
macOS has none of these things, not out of the box and not even with third party utilities to fix things and fill in missing features.
I have no problems with access to working "Unix like" shell either. My laptops and desktop are beastly and have no problem running Ubuntu in VM. WSL works like a charm as well. But I rarely use either since for Linux development work and for running servers I use real Linux computers in headless mode running NoMachine for remote access. Windows being used for developing Windows GUI software duh, and for productivity tools, Video, Photo, CAD, PCB design etc. etc.
The two things that break Windows are spaces-in-filenames, and max-filepath-length. Urgh.
MacOS is broken in a different way: no more 32-bit (so the death of legacy applications) and notarization (need an Apple thumbs-up to run programs).
I see a restart prompt about once every two months on my sole remaining w10 laptop, and it hasn’t forced a reboot on me in the middle of my work in over a year. Ubuntu prompts me to restart more often.
That's like comparing current MacOS with one from years ago which also has some weird UI things going on. In Windows, certainly some of these have been fixed but aside from being visual anomalies everything works.
The kicker for me is Apple hiding / removing the things I use, such as Keychain in the menu bar. OSX / MacOS is slowly getting worse.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/09/12/huawe...
They did, they're Pixelbook from Google. Once you build a competitive 'mass market' laptop with Linux, you'll inevitably end up with something like ChromeOS.
