If you are a developer, and you don't target iOS nor macOS you're right. Otherwise, for people that must use business or graphical (like Adobe CC) apps linux is not a viable option and between macOS and Windows well, choose your poison, but I like macOS more (at least is unix). This is said as a person that used linux, and even Solaris and freeBSD on his machine for years, when I could do it. Not everyone has the same constraints
There are also ads inside Apple News, even if you have a subscription.
For me, the benefit of macOS or Windows is that I can keep an install running. With Linux I always end up stuck with a system that doesn't boot, and trying to figure out what happened on the command line. Maybe I should try Nix or Fedora Silverblue
I can't say I've ever had a problem with NVidia breaking on kernel upgrades, and in general it's easy enough to just wait a day or two until the binary package catches up.
It's much more important for me to have functioning GPU acceleration and in particular CUDA, than it is for me to have the latest and greatest kernel. AMD doesn't come close and still has the same problem with binary blobs, and Intel doesn't work at all, so NVidia it is, although I agree that your requirements may be different from mine.
I’m not willing to adopt CUDA if the cost is having to babysit kernel upgrades and roll back when the GPU stops working.
> I can't say I've ever had a problem with NVidia breaking on kernel upgrades…
It’s definitely happened within the past two years—if I were motivated, I could dig up the specific kernel version ranges and Nvidia driver version ranges. Maybe your kernel version was pinned or something. The experience of using Nvidia on Linux is just beyond terrible, and it’s just such a high price to pay for CUDA when I just want to get work done. I suppose if I were doing lots of ML projects at home, maybe the pain would be justified, but I’m not doing ML at home.
I just want the computer to work, and Nvidia makes it difficult. I had originally purchased an Nvidia card because I had bad experiences with AMD on Linux in the early 2010s, and the situation seems to have flipped—I can just use an AMD GPU + Mesa and it will work well enough. I can get work done instead of playing sysadmin.
I do use Nvidia GPUs through cloud services when I want to run CUDA workloads (ML), and it’s a lot more tolerable because the problems don’t interfere with my desktop. For some reason, CUDA doesn’t work sometimes and I have to reinstall Nvidia drivers or reboot or something like that. This is apparently a known problem.
> I don't see what's hard about "sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-525", but YMMV I guess.
Seems like a pretty dismissive way to phrase it.
It sounds wonderful, that the experience is like that for you, but it’s not the experience for me. I don’t know what is different about your setup, but I have experienced severe issues on three different Linux distributions, using different Nvidia cards, either at home or in the cloud. When I’ve searched for information about it, I’ve come across recent comments of people experiencing the same issues, so I can only guess that these issues are common enough. Of course I know that these issues are not universal, because I sometimes encounter people who don’t have any problems with Nvidia on Linux (some combination of blessed distros, the right hardware, good luck with timing upgrades, I don’t know—I just know that I’ve run into problems with Nvidia+Linux consistently enough that I’m going to avoid it when reasonable, I’m not going to keep trying different things until it works, that sounds like a massive time sink).
I just use a Mac for video editing because it always works.
I’m aware that lots of people get work done with Nvidia hardware on Linux, but lots of people also have IT departments fixing these issues for them and managing software updates + hardware configurations. I don’t have that.
There are ads for paid iCloud features in the iCloud prefpane. It’s not anything as egregious as Windows ads but it’s disappointing for me whose first experience with macOS was Snow Leopard that felt like magic compared to Windows XP.
- Ads in preinstalled Music Player to buy their apple subscription for music
- Ads in App Store when you search for something
- Ads in System Settings advertising their iCloud
- Ads in Subscription Manager advertising their cloud services
....
So basically MacOS has nothing to offer, except watching endless advertising from apple.