
Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000 - khc
https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2019/10/apple-of-2019-is-linux-of-2000.html
======
nkoren
Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina
Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a
regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I'm
now dual-booting Ubuntu/Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15".

What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks.
The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are very
similar to the problems with 2019-era Linux. External monitors are a
particular pain point for me. I've got an HDPI laptop and I want to plug into
an old non-HDPI era monitor. Doesn't work. Spend the next 10 hours poking
around forums, trying weird XWindows options, installing Wayland, etc. Still
doesn't work. Eventually, give up.

Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs.

I'm not saying that the grass isn't greener on the other side. Macs _are_
regressing, but the grass isn't greener on _either_ side. Let's stop
pretending otherwise.

~~~
llimllib
I was linux-only from 2002 to about 2009, on laptops, when I switched to Mac.
I just set up a linux desktop for kicks the last couple of weeks, and it
doesn't seem to me to be any better than it was a decade ago.

* No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff)

* To make an icon on the favorites bar in gnome, you have to edit a .desktop text file! Madness. I mean, I'm a programmer, so I'm capable of it, but it's seriously annoying

* modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent

* searching for help usually yields results that are half a decade or more old, and it's very difficult to figure out if it's current advice or not

* installing a gnome-shell extension was way more difficult than it should be

* brew isn't the best, but on linux I need to use both brew _and_ apt because you can't reliably get anything approaching up-to-date software with apt

I remain reasonably happy with it, but Mac is still so far ahead of it in
terms of usability it's wild.

~~~
esotericn
Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world. It's
explicitly designed to be boring and not very customizable so that delicate
users don't get scared.

I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard
shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you
can directly bind.

You don't need to go scary tiling WM, Xfce probably works well, it's been
years since I last used it.

If apt is out of date that's probably because you're using a stable rather
than rolling release distro.

All of this requires some research and tinkering. If you're me, you prefer
research to being told what to do.

~~~
msbarnett
> I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard
> shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you
> can directly bind.

This is the kind of hyperbole that Linux advocates like to throw around a lot,
and it’s unfortunate, because it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what
people are asking for when they say things like “I wish there was a decent
replacement for Karabiner”.

i3’s config files let you bind _i3’s config_. That’s not the same thing at
all.

With Karabiner, in 3 seconds, I can have ^w bound to “delete word backwards”
functionality in _every single application globally_. You can’t even remotely
accomplish that in i3’s config by itself — you need to venture into X config
files, and special gtk config files for gtk/gnome apps, and some other set of
config for KDE stuff, and then after that you still have to deal with the
occasional one-off app like Firefox closing a window when you went to delete a
word out of force of habit, and so you get to spend time discovering yet
another way to tell it to respect a key binding.

And then at some point during some random update some random set of apps will
break all over again. It’s a far fucking cry from Karibiner.

~~~
CountSessine
I don't think that there's a general appreciation for the depth and
configurability of the cocoa/nextstep text and keyboard engine among linux and
windows users.

Almost all macos applications use it everywhere, so globally modifying
keyboard bindings in all applications in all circumstances is easy. If I want
to bind Meta-f to jump a word forward, I can have that behavior in _every
single text box or editing region in every single application_. Url bars,
forms, everything!

Accomplishing the same thing in linux typically means descending into the
hoary netherworld of xkb mappings. <shiver/>

~~~
yellowapple
I have a tickling suspicion that if any free-software OS has any chance at
replicating that sort of global unification/consistency across apps, it's
Haiku. Sure, there are plenty of apps that are just straight ports from the
Linux ecosystem, but there are also lots of apps written first and foremost
for BeOS/Haiku (or ported to Haiku exceptionally well) and consequently feel
like they "belong" just as nicely as the ones that come preinstalled.

------
threeseed
1\. Never once seen an issue with USB-C to HDMI or VGA connections. It doesn't
even make any sense since MacBook Pro users with external, third party
monitors are an extremely common combination.

2\. I just downloaded Caret (Markdown editor) from their website and used
Homebrew to install a CLI tool. Nothing has changed between the current OSX
and previous ones.

3\. If you have a tech support issue go into the Apple Store and work with
them 1-1. Very rare to find anything that someone in the store doesn't know.

4\. MacBook Pro has 4 USB-C ports.

5\. If you resort to calling groups of people "condescending elitist hipster
latte drinkers" then pretty sure you've lost the argument.

~~~
fabioborellini
So, Apple products should not be used in countries without an Apple Store.
Sounds about right.

~~~
ollie87
My nearest Apple Store (not a third party reseller - they're bloody useless)
is a 3 hour round trip, and they never have any appointments any way.

Granted that's still better support as non-business you'd get from one of the
PC OEMs, but still crap.

~~~
yreg
>not a third party reseller - they're bloody useless

Where I'm from, all official Apple premium resellers do the job just fine.

~~~
ollie87
They're absolutely terrible here.

------
proverbialbunny
I've been on MacOS since 5 (mac classic). I went to Win 2000 and XP for a
while but came back at 10.3.

On average every 2 years I'd pick up a few distros of Linux, play with it,
then drop it and go back to OS X. This continued until recently. This last
year I've been on Linux for the first time. Specifically, Linux Mint.

OS X hasn't been going in a direction I strongly care for (10.6 was my
favorite, as well as Windows 2000). I'm a power user who just wants things to
work. I don't need all the bells and whistles. I want a low maintenance
experience without bugs, that just works. Right now Linux Mint is that on my
hardware.

The only modification I've done to the system is using the graphics card for
v-sync instead of the cpu. Outside of that, I'm on a 4k monitor that works at
60fps. I've not had a single crash or noticeable bug since installing (except
a bug in Firefox). I haven't had to go deep in the terminal, but I have built
custom versions of software. eg, the version of cmake on the OS is older than
the version needed to build cuda projects that use cmake.

It's a minimum no bells and whistles it just works experience. So I'm happy.
Is it for everyone? No. Are more every day desktop users going to be picking
up Linux in the near future? Probably. Video game support has gotten so good
on Linux that people who play video games have been slowly jumping ship. I've
been surprised.

Though, if they break anything, I'll go back to OSX.

~~~
lzol
Mint is such a wonderful distro for people who want to use Linux but don't
want to mess with things. I'm glad you've been enjoying it so far. Canonical
really dropped the ball with how great a no-config, no-bullshit distro can be.
Ubuntu felt like it was on this path 10 years ago before they started adding
all the unnecessary bullshit. I'm glad Mint is the fork that picked up the
slack.

~~~
proverbialbunny
>I'm glad you've been enjoying it so far.

Thanks for the kind words. ^_^

I might be unusual, but I never cared for Ubuntu, even when everyone was
raving about it.

I like to minimize whitespace. While my monitor is decently sized, too many
distros have a horizontal bar on the top and the bottom of the screen. It
feels like wasted space. Mint doesn't do that, and it's professional looking.
It's dark theme looks and feels great too.

------
esotericn
Well, no, it's not the Linux of 2000, it's worse than that, because it's
closed source.

The GNU/Linux (e.g. the ecosystem) of 2019 is really fantastic. It keeps on
getting better, and better, and better.

There may be a few missteps, maybe you don't like GNOME 3, but you can still
use Xfce, or KDE, or LXDE, or i3 or whatever else if you want, no-one is
stopping you.

By contrast, if Apple or Microsoft update the OS and make it wanky in some way
you're SOL.

It honestly boggles my mind that professional software developers tolerate
that kind of stuff. I guess if you're a web dev or you're 20 years deep into a
career in a specific stack the benefits outweigh the costs.

I'm probably coming up on 15 years of *nix now. I do look back sometimes. It's
universally terrible.

~~~
bluegreyred
As somebody on a 2015 15" MBP looking to make the switch, how do you deal with
things like Word/Excel documents or updating the firmware of IOT things (not
mine but those of relatives) that only offer proprietary Windows and Mac
updaters/installers? Do you just spin up a KVM and pass through USB, or use a
separate computer?

These edge cases (and the uneasy feeling that there are many others that I
won't discover until I make the switch) are the main reasons holding me back
at the moment. The lack of interoperability because Linux is not an
established consumer OS (yet).

~~~
iwalton3
Im my case, I use Crossover and a VM. They work well for my use cases.

> Word/Excel documents

I run Office 2010 in Crossover, which works very well. (I have a copy of 2016
as well, but it is slower.) You can also try WPS office, which does a decent
job of handling Office documents.

> updating the firmware of IOT things

I have a Windows VM and I use USB passthrough for things like iTunes. I
usually use it less than once a month.

~~~
Fnoord
59 EUR for a year of non-commercial usage [1] is steep IMO.

[1] [https://www.codeweavers.com/store](https://www.codeweavers.com/store)

~~~
iwalton3
I've never liked how much Crossover costs to stay on the latest version. I
only pay for an upgrade when if it breaks. (You can use the last version you
payed for indefinitely.) They also will occasionally have discounts.

Prior to having CrossOver, I used PlayOnLinux. When I last used it, Office
2010 worked, but had some issues such as fonts not being embedded in exported
PDF files.

It may also be possible to install Office through Steam, which has the Proton
compatibility layer based on Crossover. There is some information on using
Proton for non-steam games here:
[https://streamable.com/pukwz](https://streamable.com/pukwz)

Of course, Crossover is just an enterprise supported version of Wine, so you
could probably get Office working in plain Wine, but the automated setup
support a tool like Crossover or PlayOnLinux provides makes it significantly
easier to get things working without unusual and difficult to troubleshoot
issues.

------
ThalesX
I think though it got upvoted, I’m not sure this piece should be taken so
seriously by the commenters.

It’s a play on taking some ballpark similiarities and making it seem like
Apple 2019 and Linux 2000 are alike.

Some might enjoy it, some might not but this is not meant as serious technical
piece.

~~~
monsieurbanana
Trying to write a non-serious article doesn't give you a free pass to say
things like "[linux] fanboys are condescending elitist computer nerds" or that
"[Apple] fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers".

Not that it's illegal, but he shouldn't be surprised if people just dismiss
him whatever message he's trying to send just because he seems insufferable.

~~~
cyborgx7
It's true though.

Note that he says Linux and Apple fanboys. You can still like either while
being realistic about their flaws and shortcommings.

Also, learn to take a joke.

~~~
eumoria
Jokes that hit too close to home are hard to take.

------
song
I do believe that macos is not as stable, performant or well thought out as it
used to be. There are also a few recurring bugs that really annoy me (search
not working in Apple Mail forcing me to reindex for example)

But, I think this article is over the top... I've never had issues with
external monitors (nor know anyone who had some), I never use the App store (I
oppose it on principle) and when

I've had a non standard issue with my mac, the technician proved knowledgeable
and quickly figured I did know what I was doing so didn't baby talk me. It
turned out to be a hardware problem but I was impressed with how well they
diagnosed it.

~~~
mplanchard
FWIW, my new MacBook using an external dock and USB-C to display port has
insane problems. I have to unplug and plug back in at least once per day, and
even worse, sometimes after sleep the monitor will work, but typing and
clicking will be laggy, which I am sometimes able to resolve only by
unplugging the monitor and plugging back in, but other times it requires a
restart.

------
milankragujevic
Note: I had written this comment before I had read the actual article, so it
is only vaguely related to the topic, but it seems wasteful to delete it...

This might be a subjective thing, but Linux when I used it in 2008-9 (I was a
kid then) was unfriendly. My local community was very unfriendly, expecting
you to RTFM three times except often the manual didn't exist or was obsoleted
years ago.

Linux (Debian was what I used then) was rough. I had standard hardware, but I
never got GPU to work without extreme tearing and pink-green lines and
artifacts on the display. It was fast, I'll give it that. I often had to solve
problems by reinstalling it, because I didn't have the resources (most didn't
exist) to fix it "properly". I am not gonna talk about it further, but it was
worse than now.

Ubuntu's 10.10 "Чиста Десетка" (as we called it here) was a release that
started changing things for the better. The purity and exclusive-ness of the
comunity was fading, people became more accepting. I attended meetups, met new
people, made friends and got a lot of my issues fixed and many things
explained.

In parallel with the comunity's development, the OS itself was developing and
improving. IMO Unity was better than Gnome Shell at that time, and it really
gave a friendlier feel to the OS. The kernel got more and more support for
things you would expect to "just work" (especially in Serbia where so many
people were using HSPA+ USB modems such as Huawei E1550 which had awful
support before). GPU drivers got massively improved, new filesystem
improvements reduced unnecessary latency, initiatives to prioritize UI-
responsiveness and fludity came to provide a more awe-inspiring UX than Compiz
cubes...

It just became better, and it keeps getting better.

~~~
afiori
Until 2014-15 it was my understanding that the approved way was to reinstall
the OS every 6-7 months. Things would slowly stop working with drivers and
software installations...

(I briefly switched to Fedora, which is now my most long-lived linux install
at 3-4 years, I gather that also debian and ubuntu got better over time)

------
ratsimihah
> Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work.
> Fanboys are very vocal that this is the fault of projector manufacturers for
> not ensuring that their HW works with every Apple model.

Glad I'm not the only one having issues getting my non-antialiased fonts to
render properly on external monitors. Crossing fingers for 2020.

~~~
bloke_zero
Mine was flickering on a Dell external monitor. It didn't happen so much if
you had it as the main monitor (i.e. the one the tab-application switcher
appeared on). Other wise it would constantly go into power saving mode and
then come back on - works fine with Debian!

~~~
ratsimihah
I guess it shows how proprietary software/hardware hinders speed of
development.

------
yalogin
While I want to sympathize with the author here he hasn't given any examples.
If he/she has come up with blanket statements like "does not work with
external monitors" or "hardware support is a pain" he should substantiate his
claims by telling us what he did and how many monitors he tried.

He also does not mention why having one channel to install software is a bad
thing. I am sure he saw issues but presenting use cases will help his
argument. I do have an issue with the software installation source. On the
whole I see it as a good thing. Linux in 2000 had a problem (one that isn't
resolved even now), there is no one channel that gets you all you want, you
are inevitably forced to go and find software and install from source which
doesn't recognize that dependencies are already solved and will simply install
copies again which will fuck up your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and nothing works. Macs
on the other hand for the most part don't have that problem. If the app store
does not meet your needs, you are most likely a developer and so you would go
through home-brew.

~~~
ubermonkey
He didn't provide examples for monitors or hardware, I suspect, because he
cannot do so in a way that doesn't make it clear his claims are extremely weak
and thin.

------
sarah180
Is this satire of the ridiculous false equivalencies so often employed in
modern rhetoric? Does the author really think using a Mac in 2019 is a
complicated and fiddly as using a Linux machine in 2000?

Or are people just upvoting something because it's the kind of lazy hot take
that's candy for socially ranked sites like this? This is why I believe sites
like HN and Reddit often make their readers dumber despite surfacing good
information.

~~~
Razengan
Whenever something gets upvoted very fast in a manner that doesn't seem
consistent with a site's regular usage, suspect that it's botted/been paid for
by rival companies.

 _Anything_ getting 300+ points in 3 hours is rarely organic. There's almost
nothing else currently on the front page with this kind of votes/time ratio,
besides the post about Google banning accounts.

------
gmac
_Apple 2019: if your problem is not google-trivial, there 's nothing you can
do. Calling Apple's tech support line does not help, because they will just
type your problem description into Google and read the first hit._

Really? My experience of calling Apple tech support (to troubleshoot something
to do with Messages on my Mac) was that they were surprisingly well-informed,
and they fixed my issue with approximately zero patronising, script-parroting,
is-it-turned-on? nonsense.

~~~
consp
> is-it-turned-on?

Is not nonsense as most simple problems are caused by simple mistakes. Don't
reflect _your_ experience with computers and tools to the average user's
experience.

~~~
gmac
Well, OK, it’s reasonable place to start, but I think most of the HN crowd
will have experienced the frustration of being unable to break out of that
model. Obligatory XKCD: [https://www.xkcd.com/806/](https://www.xkcd.com/806/)

------
tasogare
I had the same issue with XCode update. Today, the download finally started,
progress bar reached 100% then... XCode was not installed. Infuriating. Too
bad Microsoft don’t allow easy access to LTSB and destroyed Windows UI. I feel
the state of commercial OS declined sharply in the last decade.

~~~
jsjohnst
Are you on Catalina or Mojave by chance?

~~~
tasogare
Yes. I installed Catalina for Sidecar, only to discover the feature wasn’t
supported on the 2015 MBP.

~~~
AsyncAwait
Not ideal, but
[http://dev.zeppel.eu/luca/SidecarCorePatch](http://dev.zeppel.eu/luca/SidecarCorePatch)
might help, apparently it works on the release version too.

~~~
tasogare
I tried already. The image quality is not worth using the feature.

------
rwmj
My recollection of Linux in year 2000 was it was very easy to understand how
everything worked. If you were searching for _" terminal commands from
discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best"_ then you were
definitely doing it wrong (in 2000 and now).

~~~
stuaxo
Mine, is that my using my soundcard could randomly freeze my machine needing a
reset.

~~~
rwmj
Most likely to be a driver (or even hardware) bug. I had a SB AWE32 card which
would do that, and I even hacked on the driver for a while to try to diagnose
it before concluding the soundcard was probably taking PCI bus master and
never releasing it, not really something that Linux could do anything about.

It's possible that the equivalent Windows driver - which didn't crash - had a
secret workaround to prevent it from tickling the hardware bug. I used to work
on OS-9 drivers for custom hardware at my first job, and we usually ended up
bodging the driver to fix hardware bugs, because respinning the hardware was
terribly expensive or even not possible in the time available.

~~~
stas2k
Creative was notorious for having chipset-specific PCI bus master issues even
on Windows. The only way to fix it was to disable bus master, and that is what
Creative drivers did on Windows.

On Linux you were expected to be a grown boy and do it yourself in the BIOS.

------
deepGem
"There is only True Way of installing software: using the Apple store. If you
do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad."

Isn't this sentiment a bit excessive. Homebrew is a perfectly safe and
accepted way of installing software.

~~~
heelhook
Not only that, there are and were multiple ways of installing software in
Linux, both back in 2000 and now. Notoriously

    
    
      ./autogen.sh && make && make install
    

wasn't mentioned but installing via `rpm|dpkg|apt|yum` is?

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> Not only that, there are and were multiple ways of installing software in
> Linux

Technically true, but practically false. To this day I get told that I
shouldn't be even trying to use software that isn't in the repo. There are
still a whole lot of applications released with a Windows binary and a tar.xz
of source for Linux.

At DebConf 2014, none other than Linus himself bitched out the community for
how difficult distributing things for Linux was. It should not require an army
of maintainers across a score of repos to distribute software. And it isn't
like the technology to make it simple isn't available. AppImage has been
around since 2004 (it was called Klik at the time) and its existence has and
continues to be largely ignored by the community. Other parts of the community
are openly hostile to the very concept of simple application distribution,
like Drew DeVault.

The situation is so awful, that recently when I wanted to use an application
on my Linux laptop I found it easier to run the Windows version under WINE
than get the Linux version installed.

And the most infuriating thing about it all is how incredibly resistant the
community is to doing anything to change this situation.

~~~
kick
AppImage & snapd & flatpak are poor solutions to a real problem. It's better
to wait until someone comes up with a good solution than accept a bad one.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I would agree about snapd and flatpak, but AppImage is pretty close to ideal.
The only more ideal way I can think of is if AppImage didn't require FUSE and
could embed an icon (there was a proposal for an embedded icon standard in
ELF, which was thoroughly ignored by the community).

It has been 20 years. How much longer should we wait for functionality the
original Macintosh included in 1984?

------
thinkingemote
Good post on hiw to annoy two large groups of hacker news readers, Linux
advocates and Apple enthusiasts.

~~~
mrtksn
I have to say that I was outraged and reminded how much I hate the culture of
machine maintenance glorification culture popular among the Linux people. Top-
notch trolling.

------
pmlnr
/me gets popcorn out

Apple people will be outraged about this post, even if it's mostly a joke.

My conclusion from it is that there are difficult topics, and, apparently,
changing standards fast is not helping at all. (DisplayPort was finally more
or less working, but sure, swap to another display outlet... and the same for
a lot of things).

There is no time to build systems (hw or sw, or god forbid, the two together)
that are _mainly_ bug free with common hardware. Windows XP in it's final days
was close to this. The most stable desktop linux distribution I used was a
short lived Linux Mint release, 10 (Julia), which doesn't make any sense.

Maybe if standards we slowed down a bit and we'd give more time to sand the
rough edges tech history wouldn't constantly run in circles.

    
    
        ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
proverbialbunny
Why was Mint Julia more stable for you? On my end on the up-to-date version
and it's perfectly stable on my hardware. (i5 /w a modern nvidia gfx card)

------
spodek
GNU/Linux is distributed under the GPL and other Free licenses. Apple is
proprietary. Other differences stem from this difference or are cosmetic.

Until Apple releases all its software under Free licenses, the adversarial
parts of its relationship with its users will hold it back.

------
jcbrand
_Linux 2000: There is only One True Way of installing software: using distro
packages. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad._

This isn't true. People have been running `./configure && make && make
install` since long before 2000 and long after 2000 as well.

Also, IIRC "alien" already existed in 2000, letting you install packages
packaged for other distros (e.g. installing rpm on Debian).

 _Linux 2000: if your problem is not google-trivial, there 's nothing you can
do. Asking friends for assistance does not help, because they will just type
your problem description into Google and read the first hit._

My recollection is that in 2000 people were less prone to just do a websearch
and then give up when no relevant results are returned. People would ask in
IRC or mailing lists.

Hell, in 2001 I had Linux on my home machine and I didn't have an internet
connection at all. The only way to get things to work was to rely on friends
and to figure stuff out for myself.

It was also more normal to spend days or weeks on a problem and not expect
everything to be handed to you on a silver platter via Google or
StackOverflow.

~~~
saagarjha
> This isn't true. People have been running `./configure && make && make
> install` since long before 2000 and long after 2000 as well.

And you can still do this on macOS too!

------
Grustaf
Even if this is true, there’s a crucial difference: 90% of what you want to do
in MacOS is very simple and works, on 2000 Linux nothing was simple at all. I
know because I only used Linux back then.

~~~
diffeomorphism
Analogy is not perfect therefore I am going to ignore everything you wrote?

~~~
Grustaf
No, but if you compare two case:

Mac: 90% is easy and works, 10% is really hard Linux: 90% is hard, 10% is
really hard

I don’t think that focusing on the really hard 10% is very fair.

------
jussij
> it said that there is not enough free space available to run the installer.
> So I deleted a bunch of files and tried again.

This sounds like the Samsung phone I purchased new some 5+ years ago.

This brand new phone never managed to do an update in all that time.

It would always insist a new update was available but on every attempt it
would fail with some vague recourse issue.

It would even ask for permission to send details of the failed attempt back to
home base.

After a dozen of failed attempts, a dozen approvals for feedback requests, the
purchase of addition SIM memory cards to give it more memory in the hope the
update would work, the online thing that did work was to just take the phone
offline (data offline) and ignore the update request.

Now this was never a top end phone (less than $300 some 5+ years ago) but what
was amazing is how bad this new phone from day one would continually insist an
update was required, with each an every update failing to install.

------
ulises314
This looks a little unfair to 2000's Linux fanboys (which of course included
me): The well maintained, comprehensive, tested list of software, mirrors and
checksums that Debian had and inspired other distros to emulate were a godsend
compared to downloading a code tar file and hunt dependencies manually (when
not modifying code yourself), you were always free to use other channels, but
other channels were just usually worst; all other points seem to have similar
nuances, from a user point of view situation is similar but is actually a real
problem out of scope of developers (Linux) vs. Apple just being jerks.

------
saagarjha
> It consisted of running tmutil from the command line and giving it a bunch
> of command line arguments that did not seem to make sense or have any
> correlation to the thing that I wanted to do.

It’s not completely obvious, but when you delete something it doesn’t
disappear immediately because your Mac will keep it around on a local Time
Machine snapshot so that it can keep decent history even if you’re away from
your backup drive for a bit. And even if this wasn’t the case, with APFS copy-
on-write deleting a file won’t necessarily free up space on your filesystem if
there’s another copy hanging around.

------
noah-kun
I have run into the storage problem a number of times, yeah. Once there was a
`.Trash` file in some hard-to-access place that needed deleting. And if your
Time Machine backups are failing, they can create a big cache somewhere
mysterious in the file system. I have told Time Machine to ignore docker files
as well, not sure if it helped in every case. In one case I deleted all my
node_modules folders, and Time Machine backup succeeded and macOS deleted it's
prepared backup files, freeing up tonnes of space.

We'll see if it occurs again with Catalina.

All the other stuff is almost entirely wrong, in my experience.

------
mvaliente2001
In my experience, when we talk about software (hardware issues are always a
thing on less used systems) Linux is the less black-box of these three OSes.
If you have a non trivial problem with Windows or OSX OSes or apps, you're out
of luck. With Linux, you have the tools to reach the root causes. Or at least,
that used to be the case. New apps in Linux (particularly in Ubuntu) want to
be as "friendly" as Windows or OSX, so they hide how things works, and put
layer over layer of abstraction to the point where nothing is obvious anymore.

------
jasoneckert
Thanks for posting this! Some funny parallels in a humorous blog post is a
great way to start any Monday!

Yes, I can read from the comments that it rubbed people the wrong way - but
lighten up! I did a satirical piece on Apple earlier this year, but had to
remind readers not to get their feathers ruffled beforehand:
[https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/2...](https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/2/2_Cult_of_Mac_eBook.html)

------
juped
I will say that Mac OS is incredibly disk-hungry (and MBPs get vastly more
expensive when you add options like bigger (still not that big) disks). I
don't want to become a Mac OS hobbyist and figure out how this happens (I like
Mac OS overall because it's a BSD and I'm a BSD guy, but it is not my hobby
BSD of choice) so I ended up just spending a few bucks on some "cleaner"
program that purged a surprisingly huge amount of disk the first run and
purges like 5 gigs a week thereafter.

I honestly don't know why it uses so much disk.

~~~
Torwald
What is wrong with using a lot of disk? If apps start faster, run faster, then
using more disk is a good trade-off.

~~~
72deluxe
Because you're tied to an expensive fixed-size SSD that you can't upgrade and
the system hogging disk space reduces the space left to store the colossal 4K
videos that every phone shoots these days and the VM snapshots you need?

Also every iOS virtual image includes identical files so you end up with about
5 GB of identical sample photos and other garbage for each iPhone image. Why
they can't put them in a single directory and symbolically link to them is
beyond me.

I say this with a 2012 MacBook that I've put a 1TB SSD in and a 2016 MacBook
Pro with a fixed non-upgradeable SSD. Constantly fighting for disk space.

------
dilap
I get the frustration 'cuz all of Apple's stuff seems pretty flaky right now,
but there's still a huuuuge difference to the linux of 2000: whatever your
config + problems, there's gunna be a bunch of other people running the exact
same config, w/ the exact same problems.

Which means that there's a pretty good chance w/ time they'll get resolved.
(Especially if you avoid upgrading to the latest and shiniest immediately,
since Apple seems incapable of finding and fixing problems in-house.)

With linux, you could be running a mix of hardware + software that _no-one_
had ever tested before, and whatever your particular config was, it wasn't
shared by everyone -- so whether you could get that mix to function properly
was pretty much an unknown quantity and required a lot of luck and elbow
grease.

I do wonder if at some point as the curve of hardware progress flattens out
and the space of "what should software do" becomes more explored, we'll start
to see more finely crafted software w/ fewer problems. Might be an analogy
here to how in the early days of cars they were quite unreliable, but now
they're pretty amazingly robust, for years on end. We're in the "new & shitty"
stage of software, I think.

------
arminiusreturns
One thing I have to say, in general to many of the posts here about the state
of linux, is that linux is just the kernel, and the vast majority of issues
people tend to have is due to one or a combination of distro choice and DE/WM
choice. I went linux exclusive personally and professionally a few years ago
and have nothing but good things to say about it, but far too often I see
stuff complaining about linux when it's really not linux per se, but the other
software choices.

So, protip, if you are having issues with things like multi-monitors, etc,
start out by trying a different DE like awesome/i3, xfce, etc, rather than the
big 2 (KDE/Gnome), and if that fails try a another distro (such as Manjaro).

I almost always use Manjaro these days because the hardware detector is second
to none, but I used to distrohop habitually and if you get a new laptop it's
almost a requirement to try out different distros until you find the one that
just works, and this especially applies to MacBooks, which I used to triple
boot but started doing linux only on because sometimes it's easier to get a
macbook approved in some companies than the equivalent hardware normal laptop.

One side benefit of going linux only is that I have, besides gaming, almost
completely GPLized my stack. Plus, I believe if you are managing systems you
should be running the OS those systems live on. EG if your core systems are
debian, you should have a debian install somewhere that you interact with
daily. I can't tell you how many times I've had to help devops people recover
from things like MacOS text bunging or outdated bash related problems. I think
they should be doing the dev work at least in a container (lxc, etc) on what
they are working on instead of the native system.

------
rasfincher
Too many of the issues the author cites about Linux are still problems today.
They're not nearly as bad as they were in 2000, but they still exist.

~~~
jamil7
Exactly, especially regarding multi monitor support.

------
spookthesunset
And in typical fashion, this person lists the exact problem I'm having with my
mac (disk space not reclaimed after deleting files) and says "fixed it"
without ever saying what steps they did to actually fix the problem. Now
they'll get indexed by Google and show up on top so the next person with this
problem will find the post, but not find any helpful solution.

------
SkyMarshal
_> After a ton more googling I managed to find a chat buried somewhere deep in
Reddit which listed the magical indentation that purges reserved space. It
consisted of running tmutil from the command line and giving it a bunch of
command line arguments that did not seem to make sense or have any correlation
to the thing that I wanted to do. But it did work and eventually I got XCode
updated._

I had this exact problem recently. There's a simpler, safer solution. Delete
files to free up enough space. They're moved to "Reserved Space", and when the
system fails to delete them to free up space for new installs/updates, you run

    
    
        sudo purge
    

in the commandline.

Wait 20m or so and the Reserved Space should be emptied and your hard drive
free space again.

[http://osxdaily.com/2013/11/14/use-purge-command-os-x-
maveri...](http://osxdaily.com/2013/11/14/use-purge-command-os-x-mavericks/)

------
beokop
I haven’t thought of it this way before but I think you’re right. External
monitor support does break randomly and hardware support through dongles is
extremely flakey.

A small excerpt from my personal list of woes:

\- Using a USB-c <-> DVI cable gives the monitor a purple hue. An HDMI cable
does not. Also, this isn’t an issue in bootcamp.

\- Can’t use the serial debugger of a Particle Photon because it can’t use the
dongle’s USB-A interface directly.

\- Sometimes the Touch Bar goes completely unresponsive for ~10s. Sometimes,
after a reboot or after waking from sleep, it just doesn’t start at all.

\- At one point the speakers started blasting white noise at the loudest
volume for no apparent reason. Closed the lid, opened it, same thing. Rebooted
the machine and never encountered that problem again.

\- If a certain kind of network error occurs when setting up Time Machine then
System Preferences will hang completely for ~5 minutes.

In many ways the experience is what I would expect if I could run Linux on
this machine: Hardware kind of works with lots of random bugs.

~~~
mjlee
For your first problem, perhaps some monitor auto detection has gone crazy
with a colour profile. Have a look under System Preferences -> Displays ->
Colour (you need to have the monitor plugged in to tweak it.)

~~~
beokop
Thanks for the tip. I’ve tried that before, without success, but someone else
reading this might have better luck.

For what it’s worth this happens both with a 15” and a 13” MBP from different
years.

~~~
mjlee
Maybe one of the pins in the DVI connector is dodgy? Have you tried another
connector/DVI cable/DVI source to rule out the display? I know you said it
didn't happen in bootcamp but perhaps there's some deep magic happening.

------
mfer
There are some call outs in this worth talking about...

> Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for
> popular devices like Android phones.

Is the Android issue on Apple or on Google. Each is very much into ecosystem
lock-in. Who is failing to write the integration software?

IMHO, it would be far better for consumers if these things were like plumbing
or electrical. You can mix and match from different manufacturers because of
standard sizes and interfaces.

> Apple 2019: if your problem is not google-trivial, there's nothing you can
> do. Calling Apple's tech support line does not help, because they will just
> type your problem description into Google and read the first hit.

How much of this is UX and expectations. I imagine the person writing this
isn't an average consumer. Is the expectation someone who can do level 4 tech
support rather than the tech support reps on the front lines? Those front line
people trained to handle general consumers rather than people who read HN.

------
_bxg1
> This felt exactly like using Linux in the early 2000s.

In my experience (I have personal machines running all three OSes), macOS has
certainly declined over the last few years, but I would say it just feels like
Windows now. Windows has always had the occasional nonsensical problems you
had to find an incantation online to solve. Fortunately, the platform (and its
pitfalls) are consistent enough across different platforms and users'
experiences that it's generally not super hard to find the right fix. The same
is usually true for Macs.

The thing with Linux, even in 2019, is that most of its problems are _sensical
in isolation_ , there are just _more_ of them. If you really know your system
you actually have hope of solving them on your own, whereas you're going to
have a much harder time finding a magic fix from someone else who had your
exact issue, because there's a good chance nobody else has had your exact
issue.

Pick your poison.

------
mikestew
_Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work._

Is this true? Because I'll tell you a story about my early days of using Mac
OS. We've all sat in meetings waiting for someone to do the Fn-F5/Ctrl-Alt-F3
dance trying to get the laptop to output to the projector. I had to do a
presentation, and using Mac OS for the first to do so. "Oh, shoot, I don't
even know the keyboard dance to do to hook it up. Meh, plug it in, figure it
out in a minute." Plugged it in and...it just worked(tm). As soon as cable
touched plug, it output to the projector. Fuckin'-A. And here's the kicker:
Mac OS was running on a Hackintosh, not real Apple hardware. That right there
was enough to sell me on Mac OS. I don't connect to random external monitors
much anymore, but I've never had a problem getting output to any random
display I've hooked a Mac to.

~~~
ubermonkey
It's not true. I've traveled & presented with Mac laptops for 20 years, and
never had a problem.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I enjoyed that. Thanks!

Well, I've hitched my wagon to the Apple packtrain, so I'm in for the ride.

I know a number of folks that work for Apple, and have confidence that they
will get their stuff together, sooner or later.

I'm not sure they have managed the transition from "brink of failure upstart"
to "big ol' blue chip" too well.

------
reallydontask
I guess this is one way of inflaming 5/6 of Hacker News.

------
least
In many cases the things he claims are past linux behavior remains the same
today. Perhaps he hasn't used Linux in recent years?

> External Monitors

Plugging in monitors in linux today frequently does not behave as you expect.
The chances of errant behavior is significantly higher on linux than any other
operating system. I can't speak to apple computers not working with
projectors, but it seems like he's comparing apples to oranges here.

> Software Installation

The "One True Way" of installing software is still the case in linux.
Installing outside of the native package manager's repositories is
discouraged. Installing of any software on mac is 'discouraged' in that you
need to authorize just about every installation you do on the app store.
Homebrew does not require sudo to install applications, though GUI
applications will generally still need an okay from the user to open and use.
The outlier in software installation is Windows, where it is still encouraged
to install executables downloaded on the internet.

> Hardware comaptibility

Linux and MacOS both bake hardware compatibility into the kernel. You will
still run into weird cases where a display port out on your graphics card
won't work with linux for some indiscernible reason. This is admittedly
significantly better than it was in 2000, however.

> Laptop features

Linux didn't have dedicated laptops in 2000. The fact that they lacked USB
ports has nothing to do with Linux.

Current macbook pros have 4 usb ports (other than entry level mbp 13). Retina
macbook pros had 2. I'm certain he's talking about usb-a ports, however. This
isn't unique to Apple laptops, however. Most PC laptops manufactured today
lack more than 2 usb type a ports. It's very difficult to find.

> Advocate behavior

It's pretty remarkable how someone can be so condemning of condescending
elitist behavior while simultaneously being a condescending elitist jerk.

~~~
garethrowlands
> The outlier in software installation is Windows, where it is still
> encouraged to install executables downloaded on the internet.

Windows is definitely a laggard with respect to package management. But even
Windows has choco these days, [https://chocolatey.org](https://chocolatey.org)

~~~
treypitt
does anyone actually use choco for cross platform dev work?

------
fouc
Everyone knows this is a nice juicy troll blog post.. not meant to be taken
100% seriously. Right? :)

------
gambiting
"Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to
fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and
hope for the best" that's still Linux for me, nothing has changed in the last
19 years.

------
alwillis
By default, files that you delete, even after emptying the Trash, stick around
for 30 days, incase you change your mind.

You can change that behavior if you want or you can delete the files by:

1\. Select About this Mac from the Apple menu

2\. Click on the Storage tab

3\. Click on the Manage… button

4\. Click on the Trash icon

You can now delete the files permanently.

------
interlinkedcell
I use Ubuntu with Cinnamon when I can. It supports almost everything, and is
endlessly flexible, looks nice. Supports a full data science stack + GPU.

My work provided me with a Macbook pro which is fine since I run everything in
docker anyway, the hardware looks nice but the keyboard sucks. Each key has
like .5mm clearance and one grain of dirt will stop it from working. I would
never buy another mac because their walled garden policy is terrible.

I use windows for gaming, but hate developing on it. What can I say, it works
as a casual desktop. Except if you want to move it to a new drive, or do
anything beyond web browsing and video games.

They are all okay, not sure why there is so much vitriol in this thread.

------
blablabla123
Actually in the 90s with Linux you could destroy your external screen by
setting the wrong parameters. [1] It was really easy to destroy your partition
table or mess up your whole configuration. I think this is the core difference
with MacOS and Linux, really messing up your system is quite difficult. (And
destroying hardware was never a thing with Apple :))

[1]
[https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6614/can-...](https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6614/can-
the-wrong-sync-frequency-really-destroy-a-crt-monitor)

------
SomeOldThrow
Can’t we just admit all three major OS’s suck badly for various reasons? Why
do we need to pick winners when they all have major usability issues?

* Apple and Microsoft don’t care about your needs at all and provide no route to changing or fixing the software you use. If you aren’t a large corporation you’re nobody. They will NEVER ask your needs but tell you them.

* BSD/Linux with X11 is still working to catch up with basic Windows usability and may already be a suitable replacement for you, but if you want changes they will take years for the community to invest in.

* There are no other options for getting work done.

------
folkhack
There were so many bits of this that I found weird but this one stood out:

> Linux 2000: There is only One True Way of installing software: using distro
> packages. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad.

I was in my "dating phase" of testing Linux distros out as a kid in those
days, and I _never_ felt "bad" building something from source when not
available from aptitude (or portage, or whatever)...?

I feel like being able to build one-off software has always been part of the
ethos of Linux due to the whole "freedom" aspect and all =/

------
bitL
On a MacBook with Catalina I can't update XCode at all; it downloads ~4GB then
resets the progress and starts re-downloading until it reaches 100% where it
resets progress again and repeats.

~~~
stefano
I had the same problem. I ended up downloading the xip archive from the
developers center and installing that, bypassing the app store.

------
rafaelvasco
Had some laughs. And yes, it's all true, at least to an extent. Unfortunately
no OS nails everything, all have their shortcomings. I like Linux, Mac and
Windows for different reasons and dislike them for different reasons as well.
Where one falls short the other excels. And so on. But if I were to pick only
one, it would have to be Windows. Pick two, it would be Windows and Linux;
Only thing I like about Mac is the overall quality of their apps. Several of
them are unmatched in Windows and specially in Linux;

------
thrower123
Linux was something you downloaded for $0 and half the fun was tinkering on
it.

Apple is a proprietary product that you pay a hefty premium compared to other
available options for.

It's getting to the point where even the most full-throated Apple advocates
have to admit that things are not going in the right direction, and normies
are starting to bitch and moan about their Macbooks more than Windows laptops
that cost half to a quarter. They really need to focus on quality, if they
want to remain a viable platform.

~~~
noah-kun
Apple laptops are incredibly good. But I did notice, switching to a 2012
temporarily, that I only missed like... half a dozen things. It was half the
speed, twice the mass, but it got the job done shockingly well. I hated the
old hinge trackpad, and the keys weren't to my liking. A few apps (mostly iPad
ports) had typography that was hard to read on a non-Retina display. I
switched back to the 2018 and yes it was a huge relief, but I could have
switched back to my 2018 model 3 or 4 days ago and that says something.

------
sgjohnson
Why did this even get upvoted? Every point is factually incorrect.

~~~
rf15
Because it is a humourous interpretation of the problems of the latest MacOS
update and general imperfections of the platform. Humour is not a lost art,
and please accept the fact that the update wasn't smooth sailing for many
people. Maybe not the majority, but many.

------
mcv
I guess what I really want to know is: is there a 2019 Linux distro which is
the Mac OS of 2011? One where stuff just works, looks good, and works
smoothly.

~~~
zucker42
Either Mint, or Arch with i3, or Ubuntu, or Manjaro with xfce, or Fedora with
KDE, or Elementary depending on who you ask.

------
youdontknowtho
I know what this guy is trying to say about Apple, but it should be said that
Linux isn't that way any more.

Really the last time I installed a Linux distro on a laptop it went
wonderfully. I'm not even a Linux fan boy. I'm also not usually complimentary
about things like this that should just be the norm. All that said, client
side Linux is so much better than it used to be. It's a dramatic improvement.

------
lelf
> _After a ton more googling_

I believe the author is exaggerating it a little bit. Local time machine
snapshots are not arcane secret knowledge (man 8 tmutil).

~~~
gpvos
You first have to know that something like those snapshots exists, otherwise
you won't look at tmutil. The author may not have very good Google-Fu.

------
skarap
> Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to
> fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and
> hope for the best.

Depends on whom you ask. There are people who use it exactly because when
"things break at random" they absolutely can understand the reasons and
actually fix it in contrast to some other OSes (or Linux from more recent
years).

------
kabdib
When my 2014 era MacBook Pro dies, I have an XPS15 waiting in the wings.

Unless Apple makes significant design improvements, I'm not going back.
Windows is terrible in a number of ways, but it's improved dramatically in the
last few years and I can get work done on it without raising my blood
pressure. Apple's seriously screwing the pooch with developers and designers
and doesn't seem to care.

------
travbrack
As someone who's run both desktop Linux for a couple years and OS X for the
last 5... Not even close. Desktop Linux is an exercise in insanity.

------
CharlesColeman
> Apple 2019: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their
> system is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said
> fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers.

Apple has always had an unusually strong contingent of people like this. But I
guess if you were going to stick with them in the 1990s, you had to have an
irrational attachment to their brand.

------
jamil7
Kind of a tiny point but it drove me nuts when using Arch. Did anyone who's
tried switching from macOS to linux manage to get comparable trackpad
behaviour? I fiddled with this for far too long before more or less settling
for something pretty underwhelming. I know it's not the most important detail
but it's hard after using a rMBP trackpad for years.

~~~
mr_isomies
When I saw that it required more than a 5m fix on my Lenovo I just accepted
this as my new setup and committed to only using the trackpoint instead.
Ironically, as a programmer the trackpoint has now become crucial to my setup
(easier on the wrists/thumbs; faster), and made it a lot easier to go "all the
way" with tiled windows managers. So the lack of decent trackpad support made
me really consider other setups that now I realise work better for me. Obv,
your mileage may vary

~~~
jamil7
Programming wise I'm all onboard with window managers and spend most of my
time in vim + tmux but reading articles and browsing documentation or pull
requests I really like the trackpad. But maybe you're right and it's a matter
of better exploring and accepting other workflows.

------
webjac
Apple 2019: Siri remind me to call mom when I get home Linux 2000: …

Apple 2019: Use my iPad as a secondary screen wirelessly Linux 2000: …

Apple 2019: AirPlay to my TV this content Linux 2000: …

Apple 2019: Sync my contacts, notes, calendars, wirelessly with all my devices
Linux 2000: …

Can we stop being ridiculous now or do I have to keep lowering myslef to the
stupidity of the writer of this?

~~~
yboris
Look up "charitable interpretation" or "Principle of charity"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity)

Basically -- don't assume the person is stupid, figure out a way to interpret
it better.

Surely the author is aware of the inaccuracies in a direct comparison. The
author is implicitly pointing out that a multi-billion dollar corporation is
putting out a product that is not polished in several ways, while people who
love the product do mental gymnastics to defend against any flaw rather than
admitting that such flaws exist.

~~~
chooseaname
> Surely the author is aware of the inaccuracies in a direct comparison. The
> author is implicitly pointing out that a multi-billion dollar corporation is
> putting out a product that is not polished in several ways, while people who
> love the product do mental gymnastics to defend against any flaw rather than
> admitting that such flaws exist.

It's like the people on Reddit ios/apple/mac subs who run iOS 13 or Catalina
betas and claim they haven't experienced a single bug. I don't understand that
mentality. One, you're defending a corporation. Two, even if they make your
favorite devices/software, it's OK to say something negative.

------
hota_mazi
As a JVM developer, to me, Windows became a superior developer operating
system to both MacOS and Linux about five years ago.

I still use both Windows and MacOS on a daily basis and dislike my MacOS time
more and more each day, due to a mix of hardware reasons and software issues
like the ones described in that article.

------
ubermonkey
Wow, this article is bad -- like, literally WRONG on nearly every boldfaced
point.

1\. "External monitors don't work". Wrong. I present often, and frequently use
hotel projectors or monitors. I've never had a problem connecting to a
monitor.

2\. "You can only install software from the App Store". Wrong. Software
installation is simple. Sure, you can use the App Store, but you absolutely do
not have to.

3\. "Only a limited number of hardware works out of the box". I have yet to
run into a hardware compatibility problem. I use non-Apple keyboards and non-
Apple mice, non-Apple cameras, non-Apple mass storage, Sennheiser headset,
etc.

4\. Tech support with Apple is better than I've had with any other major tech
vendor, including Dell -- where we pay out the wazoo for supposedly gold-
plated support -- with only one actual problem: Apple doesn't sell the 'we fix
it RIGHT NOW' plan Dell offers. (Of course, Dell tends not to actually meet
this promise, so ...)

5\. "It is very difficult to find a laptop with more than 2 USB ports." Wrong.
Apparently the author didn't look very hard, because the 15" Macbook Pro has 4
USB-C ports. Here, he seems to be mad that the other two models -- marketed as
compact and slim over powerful -- have made more tradeoffs to be small than
the 15".

So yeah, forgive me if I don't take his comments terribly seriously. It's not
that there aren't some very legitimate criticisms to be made about Cupertino,
even if you don't take a position on proprietary software. There definitely
are. But absolutely none of these are valid.

However, I'm absolutely certain that the Apple-hating contingent on HN will
eat it up with a spoon. :(

~~~
diffeomorphism
1\. "Works for me" is not an argument.

2\. Not the argument made.

3\. "Works for me" is not an argument.

4\. Not the argument made.

~~~
ubermonkey
As predicted, the anti-Apple contingent, and right on time -- and with exactly
the sort of paper-thin rebuttal I was expecting, too.

1\. The argument he made was "plugging an external projector will most likely
not work." All that is necessary to disprove this is to show examples where it
does work. I do that all the time, in a variety of locations with a variety of
ages and brands of projectors and monitors, and never see an issue, it seems
that pointing out my experience is relevant. The author has made a blanket and
unsupportable statement easily disproved with one counterexample, so there's
not a lot that needs to be done here.

2\. In point of fact, the author made NO argument. His (erroneous) complaint
is "there is only one true way," but this is also easily disproved with a
cursory survey of major vendors, nearly all of whom provide direct-download
installers today just as they have done for 20+ years.

3\. See #1. "only a small number of things work" is not an argument, either.
He can claim this, but it's not true; as many, many other folks have pointed
out, Mac hardware is broadly compatible with peripherals from a wide range of
makers. In 20+ years of using Mac laptops, I've never had a problem with a
peripheral not working.

4\. Yeah, it is. Tech support with Apple, by phone or in person, is far
superior than the support you'll get from any major hardware vendor without
purchasing a pricey service plan, and probably better than you'll get even if
you do. That the author contends it's no better than random Googling means
either s/he didn't try Apple support, or that s/he is fantastically
inexperienced with (e.g.) Dell or HP service.

~~~
diffeomorphism
>All that is necessary to disprove this is to show examples where it does
work.

No, the opposite of "likely won't" is definitely not "sometimes will". And
your other descriptions are not even close to what is written in the article.

I don't care one way or the other about the complaints raised (and of course
they are exaggerated, it is supposed to be humorous), but you are discussing
stuff nobody said.

------
IsNullAValue
"Apple 2019: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their system
is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said fanboys are
condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers." \- sounds much like
the Sonos discussion forum.

------
Annatar
"Linux 2000: There is only One True Way of installing software: using distro
packages. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad."

That is absolutely correct and if one is installing software in any other way
than packaging it into an OS package, one is hacking in the worst possible,
amateurish way, with the added bonus that every experienced UNIX system
administrator will hate one's guts come time to automate the installation of
one's software. It's enough to make my blood boil and suddenly get violent and
I don't even work as a system administrator. This is not an issue specific to
Linux, it's one quarter laziness, one quarter ignorance, one quarter
incompetence and one quarter amateurism: if, as a programmer, one considers a
programming tool like OS packaging too hard or too complicated, one is truly
in the wrong profession.

~~~
cyberpunk
So all those sysadmins installing oracle rdbms, websphere stuff or basically
any other kind of enterprise software in the last 10 years are in the wrong
profession?

I'd best tell them...

~~~
Annatar
There are a lot of people in that subprofession which have no business being
there. Go to any larger non-Silicon Valley enterprise and the first thing
you'll run into are system engineering departments doing work Oracle should
have done 40 years ago -- system engineering OS packages out of Oracle's
products. Oracle RDBMS is the #1 product Oracle's customers have a system
engineering department for; it's just yet another blight on that company's
long list of screw-ups.

------
kokey
I suppose having problems with external monitors makes it like Linux, since if
you want to support monitor hardware on your immutable headless Linux server
instance deployed in the cloud you are doing something wrong.

------
Philipp__
I see a lot of people here bitchin about bad Linux desktop experience and they
I see they were all using Gnome. Just give KDE a try people. It is very light,
clean NixOS KDE5 installation consumed 450MBs of RAM.

------
bsg75
A critical difference is that Linux circa 2000 was on a path of improvement.

macOS 2019 seems to be sacrificing usability for those of us that frequent HN,
in an attempt to be more useful for the iPad crowd.

~~~
ubermonkey
In what way?

------
akerr
Sure. I was using Linux in 2000 and now I’m using Apple in 2019.

~~~
yoz-y
Sounds about right. I switched to Mac in 2009 (from linux) and still have not
found any reason to go back. I agree that a lot of stuff in the macOS world
could be better. But things would have to get a lot worse before switching
would make sense.

------
bluedino
Mac user since 2010. At the time the laptop hardware was just so far ahead of
anything else when it came to battery life and sleekness.

I still like it for general use (web, development, terminal stuff).

But the hardware is driving me away. Un-repairable, expensive, non-
upgradeable, failure-prone...

I have a 2 year old MacBook Pro with a fan that gets annoying
clickity/clackity, $500 repair from the Apple store. No thanks I will live
with it.

One of my biggest pet peeves with MacOS is that even though it's so nice to
use, it's just so damn slow. Everything is slow. When I user a lesser Windows
10 or Ubuntu machine, it feels like a rocket.

The only thing that feels fast on a Mac is Safari.

------
kaonashi
Got fed up recently and ordered a windows laptop for dev work; I'm hoping WSL
will meet my needs and I can get away with a VM for osx, but we'll see.

------
kerkeslager
Apple's strength has been hardware/software integration for a long time. If
you have an Apple product, you can be reasonably sure that if you connect it
to another Apple product, it will work well with minimal work.

Linux's biggest weakness (for the situations where one would use an Apple
product) is hardware/software integration. If you have a Linux laptop for a
while, you've probably spent hours tinkering with hardware drivers, and are
still not happy with the results.

System76 seems to at least recognize the problem and be trying to work on it
in Pop!OS, which I'm excited about.

------
te_chris
I just came here to say that lattes haven't been cool for a very long time.
Offtopic, yes, but about the most substantial allegation made in the post.

------
acoye
… without the openness. Soon RIP OpenCL, and OGL. Also non existing bare metal
Vulkan kext. (I know about moltenVK … but this is 3rd party metal wrapper)

------
wyclif
_I managed to find a chat buried somewhere deep in Reddit which listed the
magical indentation that purges reserved space_

I think he meant 'incantation'.

------
dschuetz
No, it's not. Most prominently Apple costs thousands, Linux is a community
driven kernel and software distributions on top of it, which commonly are free
of charge. From that perspective his comparisons are nil. Linux doesn't make
computers that have problems. Apple has its own closed ecosystem of hardware
and software, Linux is Open Source Software. To say that modern Apple systems
are just as bad as Linux systems 20 years ago is making Linux look bad, it's
an unfair comparison. Remember Apple 20 years ago? It was even worse than
today!

------
peterwwillis
Don't ever let anyone tell you HN is only for insightful, interesting
articles. Keep those nerdbaiting shitposts comin'! #spicytake

------
cmrdporcupine
With the rise of mobile predominance, innovation on desktop platforms has
essentially stalled. Consumers don't really care.

------
Razengan
macOS is still light years better than subjecting yourself to Windows or Linux
and the Escheresque nightmare they call a GUI.

Maybe once they have figured out how to scale for high-DPI displays without
looking like something stretched up in Deluxe Paint*, I might tolerate giving
them a second glance.

(Not a jab at DP, it was the bomb and I miss it dearly.)

------
epx
Had to free space with tmutils for XCode 11 as well. TBH it is a rather anemic
machine (Air with 128GB SSD).

------
panpanna
> Linux 2000: it is very difficult to find a laptop with more than two USB
> ports.

Was this really a Linux problem in 2000?

------
coldtea
Sorry, the article is BS.

> Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work."

Yeah, no.

> Software installation

That was not true for Linux in 2000 (alas, I know, I had to manually compile
tarballs for all kinds of stuff, and download binaries of others), and is not
true for macOS in 2019. Notarization != the app store.

> _Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even
> for popular devices like Android phones._

Yeah, no.

~~~
AsyncAwait
I definitely had problems with external monitors, (not even projectors), being
either blurry, using the wrong color profile or not being recognized until
some time after I log in, so "Yeah, no" might be the answer you wish was true,
but isn't.

------
brookhaven_dude
What's a good replacement for icloud keychain? Something that will fill
passwords on my iPhone?

~~~
rhodysurf
1password

------
sascha_sl
That's a really low effort wide brush no subtlety post, why does this have
~340 points again?

------
loktarogar
None of these are the experiences I have. The most concrete example - my
laptop has 4 USB-C ports.

------
makz
I can do a lot more stuff on macOS on 2019 than on any linux distro in 2000.

------
RocketSyntax
My thunderbolt monitor is struggling to be detected after update >,<

------
bytebuster
This is so shallow it feels like it was written just to create buzz.

It's so easy to build a shallow and polarized list like this about ANYTHING.
All I can take from this article is that this guy doesn't seem to be good at
argumentation. 2/10 on Apple whining.

Here, take your buzz.

------
davidgrenier
I must be really bad at this because to me this is the linux of today.

------
radres
Are you telling me Apple is gonna grow 100x in 10 years? shit!

------
jason_slack
So what was the mysterious command that was run??

------
g105b
The sad truth is simply that all software sucks.

------
rdiddly
Does this mean we've passed Peak Computer?

------
40four
Brace yourself for an infinite stream of angry 'fanboys' (or girls :p), who
will point by point, try to dismantle this 'agrument'

Or in other words... cant take a joke!

------
xtat
dang I have trouble wrapping my very linux centric head around this -- seems
like a weird comparison

------
jlg23
TL;DR: A user is as frustrated with the Apple experience in 2019 as s/he was
in 2000 with Linux. Then that user goes on to rant about some things that
frustrate him/her, completely ignoring that one is FOSS and by no means a
hardware manufacturer while the other is proprietary and primarily a hardware
manufacturer.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
Spot on. The smugness it takes to compare a paid product that spies on you to
a gift from [paid and unpaid] volunteers.

~~~
umanwizard
Do you have any evidence that macOS spies on users?

~~~
maxhille
Wasn't there just something about Apple sending browsing data to Tencent?

------
devsmt
entertaining and well written.

------
kd3
The Linux of 2019 is still pretty much the Linux of 2000. Apple caught up.

------
ubu7737
Very happy with Windows 10 and WSL.

------
ChuckNorris89
redacted

~~~
Jonnax
Perhaps they don't care because your issues with Apple are not their issues?

~~~
ChuckNorris89
They will be once their warranty is out.

------
csomar
> Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work.
> Fanboys are very vocal that this is the fault of projector manufacturers for
> not ensuring that their HW works with every Apple model.

I just setup a new Macbook Pro with Catalina (one day ago). Plugged three
monitors. (Adapters were cheap knock-off from China). And it worked fine.

> Apple 2019: There is only True Way of installing software: using the Apple
> store. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad.

I'd say the state of OSX is much better than Linux. Apple doesn't favor the
Apple store as far as I'm aware but just signing apps. Apps in MacOS are
simpler. They are a "single" file bundle (but the bundle is mostly non-exposed
to the user). Uninstall is also simpler: you just remove the file from your
applications folder.

In the longer run, this should make you trust your applications more although
signed by apple doesn't mean it's not going to harm your setup. This might
prevent average users from installing apps but more sophisticated ones will
just go around it.

> Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for
> popular devices like Android phones. Things either don't work at all, have
> reduced functionality, or kinda work but fail spuriously every now and then
> for no discernible reason.

I already have the whole laptop working from the get-go. That's already an
advantage over Linux. I have my old printer working. Ledger worked out of the
box with no drivers setup. Maybe I'm in the minority.

> Apple 2019: it is very difficult to find a laptop with more than two USB
> ports.

Macbook Pros come with 4 usb-c ports. That's more than enough considering that
you can run multiple things on parallel on a single usb-c port.

> Apple 2019: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their
> system is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said
> fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers.

Stop talking to retarded people. Your quality of life will increase
considerably.

------
mrtksn
Yes but no because it is 2019. It's simply a list of things that Linux sucked
at and Apple is now dropping support as it no longer matters or things that
affect a very small number of its users.

I remember when I tried to use Linux as my desktop operating system because it
was up and coming to destroy Windows.

>External monitors

I don't know how you can have a problem with that. I have a 10gbp dongle from
Amazon with HDMA, DVI and VGA output and works with no configuration. On
Linux, I had to do some hacky stuff on the terminal to get a monitor to
somewhat work(wouldn't turn off, would come back from sleep mode etc.)

>Software installation I don't feel any pressure to use Mac Appstore, in fact,
I never use Mac Appstore. I also, in fact, know that people don't actually use
Mac Appstore because here are many stories about Mac Appstore being useless
for developers

>Hardware compatibility The given example is an Android phone. That's nothing
like the given example of not being able to use your graphics card on Linux.
The Android phone is not an integral part of the Mac user experience, it is a
separate computer that you may choose not to use if that computer's vendors
are not providing decent support.

>Technical support I would agree that Apple lacks on the phone support but Mac
power users are much more polite on the internet than the grumpy Linux gurus
out there that will not hesitate you to tell you how stupid you are for not
being able to solve that basic problem. Also, there are Apple stores where you
can hand over your computer and get it fixed.

>Advocate behaviour Oh god, this is no comparison. Lunux power users are the
worst. They are out there to get you down, they are angry, unfriendly and
arrogant. They are on a mission. Maybe they should seek help just as Linux
Trovalds.

~~~
braindeath
Right. Because external monitors and installing software are things no longer
relevant in 2019.

~~~
mrtksn
Plugging a dongle or clicking on a DMG file and dragging an icon is no
comparison to fiddling in the terminal following precise commands where
mistakes can brick your machine.

