The reliability of sleep/wake was the original killer app for me on a Mac laptop. I used to carry my Dell around from meeting to meeting flat with the lid half-open, just so that I could get started right away when I sat down.
I borrowed a Macbook and being able to snap the lid shut, carry it normally, then open it and just start typing was so freeing. It sounds like a small thing, but a small thing repeated many times throughout many days adds up.
My wife has a work-issued Dell and it is amazing how loud the fans get while it is sitting, unattended, with the lid closed. We notice it not infrequently… why did the TV get quieter? Oh, actually the background noise got louder.
It’s amazing that “sleep” is still an issue for Microsoft Windows computers today.
As a Linux user I'm shocked stuff has been like this. My first laptop was a Fujtisu p1120 in 2004 & every laptop I've had has slept fine. Various Dell, Msi, Apple, Samsung laptops, all running Linux just fine, all sleeping ok.
Worst situation I had was the last personal laptop, a Haswell-era Dell. The wifi would only come back on every-other sleep, so I'd put it to sleep, wake it, and put it to sleep again, which took all of like 3 seconds. For a bit I was carrying around a swank Alfa USB-WiFi adapter as a workaround, which had the benefit of also providing superb wifi performance, but I figured out the every-other-sleep pattern after a bunch of months & that was that. All in all such a minor caveat, such a small nit amid so much working great across such a long span of time & systems.
I once accidentally hibernated a machine & was shocked it just worked in Linux. It means shutdown & turn on are closer to 10s, but my god, zero battery drain is divine. The thought of a laptop that can't stay off for a month is absurd. My personal laptop has 3/4 a year of "uptime" on it. It should be like this.
There is a lot of security theatre software on Windows. I have frequently seen malware scanner push CPU to max when devices were idling. So depending on the setup of the device...
I recently got a cheap ThinkPad to install Linux on, but it comes stock with Windows 10. As a long time Mac user, this is my first time using Windows since about 2009. It was quite shocking to see what a mess they've made. On one hand, some aspects are fairly intuitive - the start menu command launcher is nice, for example. But the amount of adware bundled in the operating system is incredible. There are ads in my OS user interface!
If you're a Windows user who is fed up with Windows or hesitant to upgrade to Windows 11, I would encourage you to give macOS a try. Even if it's a hackintosh, the experience will be way better than you're used to on Windows.
Mac OS is worse than windows in most respects when it comes to user choice. Things like app store requirements are slowly making their way from the phone to the devices and Apple will continue to lock down their ecosystem.
I strongly encourage windows over macos, and Linux over Windows, if you can get away with the software supporting your use case.
People love to say stuff like this. Meanwhile, I've never opened the App Store, have installed every GUI app on my system with Homebrew, most notable apps aren't even distributed through the App Store...
You're an exception to the rule and Apple will slowly squeeze their ecosystem to capture more control for the sake of "security and user experience". They've already started with the security chips and hardware locks on their laptops.
Apple is and always has been extremely dev-friendly on their desktop platform. Apple employees develop on macOS. More tellingly, so do many Microsoft employees.
That's not going to matter when we are talking about billions of dollars of service and app revenue from customers and the chance to lock developers into the Apple ecosystem as hard as they've locked consumers in.
I love using my macs for development, but I would not say that it's "very similar to linux". Having to go out of your way to install a package manager is one of these things.
WSL is close enough to linux that a lot of docs just add in a little note for WSL users to follow linux instructions instead of windows.
I don't even think it should be a design goal to perfectly simulate the Linux interface. MacOS nix underpinnings are much more BSD than Linux. Yes, a package system like homebrew needs to be installed, but on the plus side you can choose if you want homebrew or macports.
There's no getting around it, we have to individually learn all of the systems that we're on. Every time I'm on a linux system (I mostly use BSD) I'm badly thrown by systemd. This is my fault--I need to learn it--but it's always annoying to have to relearn how to do basic tasks on a similar yet different system.
I agree about the need to simulate Linux isn't always desirable.
However the need for a package manager is obvious, even Windows (itself, not WSL) has come around to recognizing this. Yet we still have to rely on a complete third party for such on mac (thankfully, we have open source options, at the bare minimum). Surely Apple can come up with something! Especially since afaik the brew maintainer failed to get past the interview process at Apple, surely they can do better!
No, you're misunderstanding me. I'm stating that if Apple doesn't even think the maintainer is good enough to get hired, surely they can produce a better solution than him. This doesn't indicate that the 3rd party developer is shit at all, not sure why you would assume such.
Perhaps don't leap to negative conclusions so abruptly.
I don't want user choice, I want a computing appliance that Just Works - I don't want to spend all my time being a sysadmin.
I've found OSX to be the best in that regard, there's a single place to find apps to purchase and download, and they Just Work. OS updates Just Work. I plug in peripherals and they Just Work.
The same for my iPhone - much better experience than Android.
I used to think user choice was important, and then I realized I was sacrificing user experience for a freedom that I never exercised.
I recognize your value system but I feel compelled to point out we are Hacker News. The hacker ethos is flexible open general purpose computing spirit. The hacker ethos is breaking systems & pushing limits.
I don't recognize your values as contributing the the computing universe. I don't recognize them as hackerly.
> I used to think user choice was important, and then I realized I was sacrificing user experience for a freedom that I never exercised.
Once given up this is a freedom you will never get back, and when a government leverages this control to do something like erasing apps off your machine or tracking what you do there will be no choice left but to accept it.
Demand usability and choice from your products. The apples of the world have established a false dichotomy.
This is total FUD. Other Apple devices are locked down like you say, but Macs are wide open.
There is nothing preventing me from installing any software I want on it (so long as it is supported by macOS of course). The best, easiest, safest, path of least resistance app install experience is of course through the App Store, but it is not mandatory to use. Windows also has an App Store since Windows 8. That being said, I can download and run any software I please on my Mac without Apple's permission. Notarization is only required to prevent a scary (but easily bypassed) warning from popping up. This is also similar on Windows. Software that has not been properly digitally signed will pop up a similar scary warning.
To top all of this off, macOS is a certified UNIX^tm system, which means I can easily compile software from source and use package managers like Homebrew. Apple has made no indications of removing any of this.
Additionally, they have put no barriers in place to prevent the installation of Linux on Apple Silicon Macs via the Asahi Linux project, so that is always available as the nuclear option if Apple goes full lockdown on my devices.
While Windows has its advantages, you'll get a better experience (e.g. battery life) on Mac OS, partially because Apple is locking down the app experience.
You can still use Linux or Windows if you want. Just don't try to take the choice away from the rest of us.
There are things I dislike about macOS, but most of them seem like issues of personal preference or just some difficulty remembering the macOS way to do things after many, many years using Windows and Linux. Occasionally there are head-scratching decisions about this or that application, and my wife gets completely twisted around trying to manage her windows--there is some impedance between mental models here for some users for sure.
But Windows now? Holy cow, in Windows it feels like they're trying to screw with me at this stage. MacOS issues mostly seem like the people at Apple are trying to make a good product that their users will like. Microsoft seems like serving their end users is secondary to another goal (advertising revenue?) Mind blowing.
Some people are commented about macOS being more locked down. I don't know what the current status is on Windows with regard to this, but the OS is a lot more locked down than an equivalent linux system. You can't dump onto the filesystem wherever you want. This improves system integrity and makes the devices more secure, you might not think this is worth it, but this point is inarguable.
For the moment at least, I have been able to install any utility I want and have not felt constrained in the slightest. It's not a problem for me to install things into the non-system directories and modify my $PATH variable and the like. If this changes, I guess I'd have to regrettably move back to Linux, but while we should be attentive, there's no reason to hate macOS for what we fear it may become instead of what it is.
Have seen more than one report of a modern Dell Windows 10/11 Laptop that melted itself while shut and supposedly "sleeping" in a backpack because it randomly decided to fully wake up and run some CPU intensive process.
I'm not even using Windows, but MS has ruined it for us all. S0 works reasonably well on my ThinkPad X13 G2 with Ubuntu, meaning it goes to "sleep" and wakes up without problems and last a couple days to a week. But is this what I want? I don't need some always-connected bs, thank you! I can wait 5 seconds for my laptop to wakeup and then check for new mail. Seriously, MS, do something.
Edit: Or is Intel to blame here? I don't know.
Edit2: Or maybe Lenovo or all 3? Didn't this work in the past pretty flawlessly
Last edit: ok, ranting about this actually made me look for solutions again (I did when I first got the notebook. Couldn't find anything). As it turns out you supposedly can (Cannot test rn) switch to Linux Sleep (s3) in the BIOS. If this turns out to be true, I take everything back.
As I understand it, it's also the CPU manufacturers, motherboard suppliers, and system integrators. Intel and AMD are not consistently supporting S3, and some motherboards (iirc) toggle it off even when the chip purports to support it. System integrators may also leave the BIOS setting for S3 off even when supported.
As for why? As many know from the history of Linux support for sleep, it's not always been great. Every device in the system has to support it, and there's a risk of corrupting state when execution resumes. It's much easier to keep the system running in a lower power mode. That's true of all of the device drivers and firmware on the system too.
It's frankly shoddy work though that it works so poorly that the order in which one unplugs their laptop and closes the screen affects whether it correctly enters S0ix. I can't believe issues like that have made it out of QA on laptops over and over again, resulting in laptops overheating and reaching 0% charge. The Linus Tech Tips video here goes into the details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c
I gave up trying to fix sleep for now. The problem I was getting was a complete loss of the running session (including unsaved work) when coming back from sleep. I applied some configuration changes that seem to correctly put Windows into hibernation mode instead of sleep, and although there are some things which aren't as reliable in hibernation as they are in sleep, it's better than just losing everything unexpectedly. With SSDs I don't really mind the increased delay when resuming if it means I don't lose anything.
I borrowed a Macbook and being able to snap the lid shut, carry it normally, then open it and just start typing was so freeing. It sounds like a small thing, but a small thing repeated many times throughout many days adds up.
My wife has a work-issued Dell and it is amazing how loud the fans get while it is sitting, unattended, with the lid closed. We notice it not infrequently… why did the TV get quieter? Oh, actually the background noise got louder.
It’s amazing that “sleep” is still an issue for Microsoft Windows computers today.