I can use it to get stuff I need to do work and I don't remember the last time I couldn't. Upgrades sometimes leave me broken but it's usually ironed out fast because everyone is using it. If my dependencies are that locked down I'm using docker and special environments anyway. Linux can get tedious with upgrades breaking or dependency mismatches. Homebrew is probably the largest homogenous community - if you're doing something relatively popular there will be a lot of noise when stuff breaks. Linux is spread out across various distros/repos/package managers, overlap of users with your problem is a lot smaller.

Beats all the package management experiences I've had on Windows, admittedly I have not tried to use Windows for work for >1 year.

I mean, it installs stuff more or less reliably for me so I’d say that’s pretty great. I’m sure it has issues (I’ve had problems trying to install old versions of packages for example) but I don’t think I’ve ever had “brew install <whatever>” fail to install what I wanted

The experience is really seamless, mostly it just works… which IMO is nothing special as they mostly support installing the latest and maybe a couple of other versions, and software that requires weird stuff will likely be packaged in a self contained way.

They mean they haven’t tried another package manager for Mac, like pkgsrc or macports.

Perhaps they are talking about Homebrew the package manager [1].

[1] https://brew.sh

You ever give OrbStack a go? I used Docker Desktop before it but find OrbStack to be a lot faster and native feeling.

> But most it’s still very niche.

I'd say that the whole containerization topic is niche

> Is there a way to make a separate partition of MacOS and have one copy with SIP and one without?

I think you can install macOS VM on your macOS host and disable SIP _inside VM_.

> i haven't found any issues with it that i could not get over in the past 2+ years of m1.

I'm currently running a Journal of Open Source Software x86 container on aarch64 and it's terribly slow. Takes 12GB of RAM and 3 minutes to build a LaTeX document, see https://github.com/openjournals/inara/issues/30. Any tips?

I'm running Linux everyday and I really wouldn't recommend it for any serious audio stuff.

There is great audio software coming to Linux (Bitwig, Reaper, etc) which is great but the underlying infrastructure is a mess.

There are like 3-4 audio subsystems running, I never know which one is it, setting latency is wizardry and sometimes it doesn't run at all. It's usually fine when I run stuff like Spotify, VLC, or Youtube in Firefox, so for user-level audio, Linux is fine IMO. But when I run something where I care about latency and multichannel output, it's hit or miss. It runs fine one day and then I get no sound on another or distorted sound or sound playing at wrong speed and wrong pitch (yay, 44,1 vs 48).

Maybe it's the distros I'm using, maybe there are some that work better, but the UX isn't as great as with macOS. On Manjaro, update sometimes get audio notification removed from tray and I can't change volume using mouse or dedicated keys. Then I have to look for few hours for a solution only to have the same thing happen again three months later (same with brightness keys on laptop). On Ubuntu Studio with an external soundcard, I get randomly distorted sound or no sound at all. So it's easier to use some shitty onboard sound, great.

I like Linux, I use Linux daily, but sound on Linux is terrible. It's much better than it was, yes, but still terrible. For anything more than "play a song here", macOS is much better.

Anecdotal evidence, but here it goes.

I moved from Linux to M1 MacBook recently. I know my greps and vims, but I was tired of audio glitches during high CPU usage, system not waking up from sleep, total OS freezes, super loud fans, and so on.

Now I get none of that. I don't think I've ever heard the fans. Audio just works, everything is super snappy. It always wakes up. I'm no longer afraid of bluetooth.

And on top of that, setting my $DAYJOB VPN took three minutes and it just works, where on Linux I had constant problems with DNS breaking, and setting it up was always an hour of work, praying I got the config files right this time.

It really seems to be "unixy desktop with working sound", the best of both worlds.

There's only a 1% chance these days on Linux that your sound won't work or your computer won't sleep when you close the lid or your wifi won't work, or your ethernet, or your cooling, or a peripheral, or CPU/memory spikes.

And a 90% chance it'll be at least one such thing.

The sound is an internal meme where the linux devops would regularly have to drop off calls to talk (restart to unmute :)).

On my desktop I couldn't even boot installer without running with safe mode, otherwise I'd just get stuck on a blank screen (ancient 1050 TI GPU and standard desktop components otherwise, so not exotic/new stuff).

I've used linux desktop for >decade and Gnome shell feels like home but these days I feel like I don't have the time for linux adventures. Maybe I'll mix it up with my next device, but I'm not reading great things about AMD power modes and Linux.

> In my experience, this has not been an issue for the past 10-15 years atleast. Before that there were some problems with few (external) soundcards or random cpu spikes with the mixers.

May be some confusion. To run linux on a newer Mac with "Apple Silicon" (ARM based), you need to go through a lot of hoops and much work needs to be done still for a stable environment. Check out https://asahilinux.org/about/

Or maybe you thought they meant running linux in general on a PC (Intel x86 32/64 bit)? In that case I agree - driver issues like that have been mostly ironed out by now.

I'm getting early PulseAudio vibes with PipeWire though. BT audio devices stuttering and sometimes losing audio completely regardless of output devices unless I restart the daemon. I guess it stabilizes again during next few years.