I used MacOS as my personal daily driver for a while, and in my 1st and 3rd industry jobs, and I used to think running GNU/Linux on my daily driver was more hassle than it was worth (see this post from ~5 years ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17239471 YMMV, but in my experience the quality of MacOS is degrading fast, and GNU/Linux keeps getting better driver support and has become so much more stable __and__ usable (for work, I run Fedora with GNOME on a Framework laptop, and my personal Framework runs Ubuntu for now) since that post 5 years ago that I’m increasingly seeing MacOS as an annoying OS which, among devs, should only be used if developing for Apple platforms. GNU/Linux doesn’t just have feature parity, in so many way it’s __better__ than MacOS. For example: – I don’t have to make any changes to my dev environment after updating Fedora, whereas XCode command-line tools usually need to be updated manually to get new installs of Erlang & Elixir to pass the compilation stage. – 2x pixel scaling is so atrocious, it literally hurts my eyes on MacOS (at least on my x86 Mac Mini from 2020), while it works perfectly on Fedora. – On MacOS, if I want to completely terminate a program, I have to right click on its icon in the dock and then select quit. On Fedora (and every combination of distribution and desktop env I’ve tried), clicking the close icon actually terminates the program (imagine that), and no more processes are running unless there’s still another window running the same program. It seems like GNU/Linux follows the Principle of Least Astonishment while Apple does not. GNU/Linux in general, and Framework in particular, still need to improve battery reliability and power management. In just about every other way, Apple (with its tightly integrated supply chain and platform) is being upstaged by a disparate network of developers, suppliers, and hardware vendors, none of whom can easily bend the others to their will.
Story Published at: February 24, 2023 at 10:25PM
Story Published at: February 24, 2023 at 10:25PM