The only few reason I know so far is software availability, like adobe software, and Microsoft suite. Is there more of major reasons that I missed?
About 20 years ago, I was trying to get audio playing to stay stable, and have audible alarms from KCal. I did everything, recompiled kernels, nothing fixed it.
So I went out and got a G4 Mac mini, set it up with my audio and it worked perfectly. Within a week I’d shut off the Linux trash for good. Mac OS X does everything better.
For servers, I use FreeBSD, it’s dumb to run Linux there, too.
Nothing’s improved, I have the same audio problems on my RasPi in Linux. Linux is bad at just about everything, any other OS or possibly just a dead badger will do the job better.
Linux is bad at audio therefore it’s bad at everything? Interesting. Fair point about audio though, if you’re doing anything to do with that then stay clear of Linux. Raspberry pi audio is bad even by Linux standards, lol
I switched to a Mac a couple years ago but I’ll always at least keep a Linux VM and a separate Linux laptop just in case.
As for why, generally speaking, Apple puts a lot of really, really good work into making a machine that feels immediately productive with little fiddling around, they’re ahead of the pack in some ways, and for advanced stuff it’s “good enough”.
My reasons:
- Cross-device integration (at least with Apple) - I already use an iPhone, iPad, and AppleTV. The integration between iOS and macOS is just really, really good. Android+Linux just doesn’t come anywhere close. And that’s even if you put in the hours it’d take to set a bunch of disparate apps up to try to replicate it. Anyone telling you otherwise is completely full of bullshit or is showing that they actually haven’t used Apple devices.
- Using my iPad as a secondary display takes literally 2 clicks.
- Setting my Apple Watch to unlock my laptop takes literally 4 clicks.
- Casting my screen or even just sound takes 2 clicks.
- Handoff is just magic. If you recently used something on your phone and have the matching app on your Mac, you get a shortcut in your Dock to load whatever you had on your phone on your computer to pick up where you left off. If I am in a Signal chat, I can instantly open the chat I was viewing on my phone. Same for browsing websites, text messages, and a bunch of things.
- Airdrop between devices “just works”.
- If I connect to a wifi access point from my phone, my laptop will prompt me to automagically copy the password over (i think) bluetooth. Or if I’m at a friend’s house and they use an iPhone, they’ll get a prompt to share their wifi network password with me.
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Device restoration - Restoring a Mac is just impressive for how little effort it requires. If someone stole my laptop, I can drive 15 mins to an Apple Store, buy a new laptop, point it at my NAS, and be back running in an hour or less to exactly where I left off. Similarly, If I buy a brand new laptop, copying data from the old one to the new one is incredibly boring – in all of the right ways. All apps/info/config/etc gets moved over. No weird quirks or workarounds or anything needed.
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M-series laptops - At the time, there were no other good options for ARM CPU laptops, especially ones that can be spec’d to 64GB of RAM. The M CPU laptops are crazy fast and efficient. I can literally use my laptop for 9-10 hours in a day going full-hardcore, and still have juice to spare. Yeah I know Asahi Linux works for the most part now, but I don’t have time anymore to beta-test my main box.
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Adequate Unixy bits - The terminal does everything I need, the utilities are fine. I use Nix (and some Homebrew) to maintain various CLI tools.
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Software - I wanted to save this for last since everyone quotes this first. I wanted to meddle with music and Ardour doesn’t really scratch the itch the same way Logic Pro does. Another example: as bad as the Mac version of Microsoft Office is, it’s still far more nicer feeling than LibreOffice and requires much less work to get a good looking presentation/etc. out the door on a time crunch.
It really is, after reading whole threads about people shitting on Apple products for no good reason. Not criticism, but name calling etc
I don’t like Apple because of the close ecosystem and they choose what they believe its best for you. I like to own my devices , and install whatever I want do whatever I want on them.
Apple products are generally fine, its their ethos that sucks. Closed, expensive, proprietary.
Its far too limiting IMO. Open MacOS and it would be quite a compelling option
There are good paid alternatives for music. The question was about Linux, not FOSS. Comparing to Ardour is unfair
Because in yanks number out of ass 87.74% of threads of “why use X? Linux has Y, it’ll do everything you want”
Ardour/LO/etc are great for what they are and have their uses, but there are some apps that just aren’t available on Linux and the claimed alternatives really don’t work.
Yeah :/
I almost wonder how far (as an example) System76 or someone could get by mirroring Apple’s approach: build a range of devices and focus aggressively on gluing them together without a care in the world for anything else.
I know Samsung tries for their devices with Windows, but their software always felt like there’s an internal competition for who can add the most number of controls to each UI and it comes across as very clunky.
I’m not really sure the demographic that cares enough to find an alternative to Windows or Mac is the same demographic that would be ok in a walled garden.
My understanding is that one of the selling points for products by System76 and other similar brands is the modularity and ability to upgrade the hardware.
Regarding point 2, this was why deadmau5 used Mac for a long time during his live gigs. He likes the predictability of a Mac, it makes it easy for him to get back going if something goes wrong.
He’s had to stop using it for the Cube stuff though, since it requires a lot of Windows software.
This is going to sound weird, but what WiFi system do you use?
I currently use an ASUS mesh system and it’s utter trash with Apple devices.
I’m using a EnGenius EWS377AP and don’t have any complaints.
I had Ubiquiti gear but had some quirks and still wanted something a bit advanced. I don’t know how well meshing works though.
Ooh. Sweet! Thank you!
They’re on the research list.
I almost bought into the Ubiquity ecosystem when I looked last time, but folks complained that the company seemed to be shifting focus a bit, and the first glimmers of them requiring user accounts started to appear. I wound up deferring until it unexpectedly became an emergency issue with a rushed replacement from a big box store.
.
When did they give up? Lemmy is literally crawling with people that won’t shut up about linux.
I’ve used Linux since about 1996, when only Slackware worked for me ( Red Hat didn’t work right, & I never tried Yggdrasil ).
Ian began his Debian distro sometime around then ( Deb was his partner, hence the distro’s name )
About a year ago, I was using openSUSE, both Tumbeweed & their more-stable LEAP.
They removed the drivers for my wifi adapter, in an update.
They broke my desktop.
Again.
I’ve been told by Steam support ( in 2023, iirc ), directly through their system, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family of Linuxen.
UbuntuStudio stuck with XFCE for YEARS, even though XFCE is rigged to prevent one from being able to grab the corner of a window, because almost-all of its different options ( themes? ) permit only a 1px thick window-grabber, and that isn’t usable.
Why??
Try installing Haskell Stack on Void Linux for ARM.
You can’t:
Haskell Stack requires GMP lib, for arbitrary precision arithmetic, and you can’t get that to work on it.
They won’t add it, to make Haskell Stack installable.
So, if the only machine you’ve got is ARM based, and you need to learn Haskell, go get a different distro.
( “Haskell Programming From First Principles” requires Stack )
I used Ubuntu Server on ARM, for awhile, and the Ruby it included was broken, with a hard-coded bit in one of its scripts that had the wrong-location for one of the basic things in Linux…
can’t remember what it was, perhaps it was /usr/bin/mv instead of /bin/mv or something … it was stupid, though, and it was in the Ubuntu version of Ruby, which was a deprecated version of Ruby … so…
the upstream Ruby maintainers wouldn’t fix it, because they only maintain the maintained versions of Ruby, AND…
Ubuntu wouldn’t fix it, because they insisted it was upstream’s problem, even-though they wouldn’t include a maintained version of Ruby.
Fuck idiocy.
On & on & on.
Fix 1 thing, & break 3 more , seems to be the “religion” of the various Linuxen.
I’m old, & tired of being beaten-on by “friends” and “allies”.
Abusers are abusers.
IF I ever succeed in fixing my health, breaking ( permanently ) my health-obstacles,
THEN I want to do a linux-distro that simply excludes all bullshit, & enforces correctness-of-function.
Funtoo seems to be part of The Right Answer ( it is the evolution of Gentoo ), in that people get the benefit of whatever hardware they’ve got, instead of a dumbed-down version which is more sluggish than need-be.
I’d want it to be based entirely on Haskell, & Julia, leaving-out pretty-much all other languages ( Haskell’s correctness & Julia’s ruthless-efficiency ).
Notice how there is a huge push to replace X.org with Wayland?
Wayland removes ability to run The Linux Terminal Server Project, so you can’t have little arm-terminals stuck on the backs of displays, and 1 single real-computer in the back, with an ocean of RAM, for all the students to use for their real apps…
This “improvement” forces all to either have a powerful-enough desktop or … not be allowed to run the modern distros/Linuxen at all.
War against inclusion of people in poorer places, where it is much more doable to afford a bunch of RasPi-terminals than it is to afford dozens & dozens of x86-64 machines, is warring for … fashion & class-status??
The X Window System works. Through it, TLSP works.
It enables people to have their Blender-renderer machine in the other room, where its fans-noise isn’t going to bother them.
Fashion-motivated or fad-motivated “strategy” consistently solves the wrong problem.
Same as breaking people’s wifi solves the wrong problem.
WTF “loyalty” for a distro can ANYone have,
… once one has been “punched-in-the-face” by them, enough times??
I’ve read OpenBSD’s statement that “lack of a manpage IS A BUG”.
That IS PROPER.
They GET it.
There are development/programming methods that hold-to the same kind of properness:
Behaviour-Driven Design, e.g.
Test-1st.
As somebody pointed-out, of all the “agile” methods, XP included engineering-processes, like test-1st whereas … the rest, like Scrum, don’t…
That difference-in-religion, XP’s objectivity MATTERS.
Any “improvement” which breaks the functionality-tests or behaviour-tests, and you don’t get the “improvement” in.
Nobody has the integrity to do that, at the distro-level?
I wouldn’t permit any desktop-environment which is hard-coded to have 1px window-grabbers to be included in a distro, hence XFCE would have to get fixed, or it would be locked-out, explicitly for that usability-defect.
I wouldn’t permit breaking of people’s network-access to be an official update’s component.
MAKE IT WORK RIGHT.
That needs to be SOME distro’s spine, that is usable-by-most, and efficient, and including the capability that people actually need to get stuff done…
I want low-vision people being able to use it.
I want blind-readers working in it.
I want deaf people having full function through it.
I want quadraplegics being able to work through it.
I want TLSP working, so a single x86-64 machine, plus a batch of displays & RasPi’s stuck on their backs, give a classroom the ability to teach calculus with Julia which is the proper way to be learning algebra or calculus ( seriously, try Julia: it’s wonderful ).
Anyways, you’re seeing a tiny sliver of the decades-of-abuse that operating-system makers have put in us, that is in me.
I won’t willingly run any MS software ever again, due to their religion of molestation-of-priivacy & abuses ( I was one of the ones stung by their stolen from STAC disk-compression tech, in DOS 6.20, and their Vista era sending all searched-terms from the desktop to Microsoft violated privacy-law for both health-care sytems & for police systems, but … they’re “too big” to make accountable?? etc. )
But the Linux world seems to have one hell of a religious-problem against stable usability.
Distro-runners need to read a book by Al Ries: “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding”, and understand that that stability/identifiability is a REQUIREMENT for a userbase to be not-sabotaged by one’s distro.
DON’T KEEP CHANGING THE WAY EVERYTHING WORKS, and expect your userbase to love you for it.
KDE 3.5 had much right-idea, but nowadays … wtf??
Too complicated to be allowed to see where one is, within the menu-system??
That isn’t a “feature”, that is “fashionable” mental-illness.
And I despise the Apple-style contextless GNOME way.
/grouch
just an opinion, of an old, useless bastard, who’s tired of being obstructed/abused by distro-decisions.
_ /\ _
I thought Debian addresses most of your complaints. And LMDE is a good option for people that want a different flavor of it.
I’m using regular Mint, but plan of switching to LMDE in the future, when it’s no longer an experimental option. Their Cinnamon desktop is very polished, accessible and sensible. I was surprised I didn’t need to configure and hardware - wifi, Webcam, Bluetooth keyboard, mouse and headset… It was all detected and configured properly. I chose Btrfs and the installer set up a subvolume for /home and sensible backup policies.
