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What kind of vendor lock in are you talking about?? I use Mac and Linux and don’t feel at all locked in by Apple.
 help



Try and export a few thousand Notes entries with images.

Change how you like your day to day workflows in terms of window management

Share a home made app with some friends without helping them install it

Fix a bug in the vendors software by writing a patch


> Try and export a few thousand Notes entries with images.

Not a problem, I don’t use Apple Notes on my Mac.

> Change how you like your day to day workflows in terms of window management

Not a problem, I can just customize my hammerspoon config to behave differently

> Share a home made app with some friends without helping them install it

That depends more on what my friends are using than what I use. Me using Linux wouldn’t make it any easier if they are using Windows or macOS.

> Fix a bug in the vendors software by writing a patch

Not being able to fix a bug in an OS doesn’t lock me into that OS. And there are bugs in any Linux distribution that are way too complex to fix even if theoretically possible. So it doesn’t make any difference.

A MacBook is pretty much locked to macOS even if it’s theoretically possible to boot a different OS but that doesn’t make me locked into macOS. I can sell my MacBook for a very reasonable price and buy whatever I want.


> And there are bugs in any Linux distribution that are way too complex to fix even if theoretically possible. So it doesn’t make any difference.

It does now with LLMs


This doesn’t sound like vendor lock in to me, but user preferences.

Running an OS of your choice? Easily? That kind?

The OS is mostly invisible to me. Except for the desktop manager but both Mac and Linux have options for that, I just don’t even feel the need to change the defaults. If I really need Linux for whatever reason, Docker makes that extremely easy on my Mac. I really can’t understand what Linux gives you that you would feel a need to change your OS on Mac.

> I really can’t understand what Linux gives you that you would feel a need to change your OS on Mac.

- Native Docker support in-kernel

- High-performance Vulkan drivers

- CUDA support (macOS doesn't sign CUDA drivers for some reason)

- Support for NTFS, FAT32 and other common filesystems without using FUSE

- Better package management with versioned rollback

- System updates that don't force breaking changes

Those are just the ones that stop me from returning to macOS (I left after Catalina).


Interesting how people find reasons even when they make no sense. When did you experience problems with Docker on Mac?? I couldn’t care less it’s not native, it just works. About CUDA, mac has great GPUs , so much so that it’s a fad now to buy mini Macs to run LLMs. I don’t know about why you would use those file systems, am I missing something so great about them? Package management is awesome on Mac with brew, people are even using Brew on Linux lately since it’s one of the best. About system updates, I don’t remember being forced to do it, quite the opposite, my old Macs stopped being able to update after 8 years I believe. Which is fine with me, they get pretty obsolete after so long , and I believe Linux Wasabi works on old Macs if I need it ( but I don’t , I have a Dell with Linux that I could use if I wanted Linux, but I never need it and that laptop was just headache for me, which is why I choose to only use my Macs now ). But to each its own though.

> When did you experience problems with Docker on Mac??

On my 16gb Macbook Pro, compiling a monorepo for my job. Between the APFS slowdowns and the virtualization overhead, it was faster to build everything in a VPS and download the artifacts onto my Mac.

> About CUDA, mac has great GPUs , so much so that it’s a fad now to buy mini Macs to run LLMs.

Mac GPUs are close to the worst on the market. There's a reason why AMD and Nvidia are being put in datacenters while Apple Silicon isn't. Apple's GPU designs are a waste of electricity for LLM inference. My RTX 3070 Ti cost $500, is fabbed on Samsung's 8nm node and beats the 5nm M2 Ultra's GPU in power efficiency. That's how bad Apple Silicon GPUs are for compute.

> I don’t know about why you would use those file system

NTFS and ExFAT are the two most-common filesystems of all time. Almost all flash drives and external drives are formatted like this, not HFS or APFS.

> Package management is awesome on Mac with brew

Brew is a dependency graph nightmare. You should be using Nix on macOS if you're a developer, it handles things like side-by-side package versioning and environment isolation much nicer than Homebrew does. Brew works okay for simple app installation, but is basically a torture device if you use it professionally.


You seem to be in a completely different universe than me.

Mac GPU, for consumer products, is absolutely the best when you need LLMs which require a lot of memory and consumes much less power (it's funny that you seem to believe otherwise when that's literally that biggest advantage of Mac silicon which absolutely no one who knows anything about computers doubts).

Real world, proper comparison here: https://www.thinkdifferent.blog/blog/the-truth-about-mac-vs-...

If you think Nix is great but Brew is not, I really don't know what to tell you. One is a UX nightmare, the other just works. Nix is cool, I admit, but for day to day usage, it really is not ready for real world usage.

Your comments are like a parody of a professional, I highly doubt you're a professional, you're a teen, aren't you? I should've guessed it when you mentioned "High-performance Vulkan drivers" :(.


> The OS is mostly invisible to me

I always thought I was missing something on the Macs. That must be it. Cheers.




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