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honr | 4 years ago
1. Mac has shit for a window manager. When I focus and get in the flow, Mac's window manager becomes a massive showstopper for me. My productivity lives and dies by my window manager customizations and shortcuts. Mac's is just a joke when it comes to controling 20+ windows. I sometimes have 100+ editor, terminal, and browser windows. Linux has many window managers up to the task (i3, xmonad, openbox, and countless more). Mac has the default one which you CAN'T change. There are Window Manager "Apps" which use the default window manager's APIs to tell it to, say, move this window to this area. As a result, I haven't found a usable third-party window manager on Mac that can operate at a fraction of the speed of the simplest window managers on linux.
2. Mac's official builtin package manager is a joke. The community's effort to fix it (Homebrew) is halfway between the debian maintainers community and the nodejs community, closer to the latter. I wouldn't say Homebrew is a joke, but it's not really comparable (and fair to compare) to the many human-years that has been poured into QA and patches the Debian community does. Also, you can touch all aspects of the system with apt/dpkg, unlike the like of ports or Homebrew. For people who want more control there is also Arch, and many other distros to pick.
3. Laptop build quality: IMHO Mac doesn't really have a contender here. Every year I try to hard-force myself to buy a non-mac laptop and fail. There is really no one serious enough (or, to be fair, with the same order-of-magnitude of cash and operations and hardware expertise) to pull of the same build quality. An anecdote (but very generalizable): A while back my non-mac (yet, a very well-known brand) laptop's fan died. I got a fan and replaced it. My wife's mac laptop's fan also died about the same time. I replace that one, too. At one point I had both laptop's open on my desk beside each other. I never want to buy a laptop with _visibly_ poor engineering ever again. Guess you have to compare the internals of a few laptops to get my point.
4. Software compatibility: I think this is a very fragmented area, to be fair to all OSes. A lot of vendors only produce on Windows. Some are Win+Mac. Some are Win+Mac+Linux+ChromeOS+Android+iOS. Also a very (yet very significant in some sectors) are Win+Linux, or Linux-only. So, one has to check the availability of the critical software they need. My gut feeling, lacking any better measurement, is that Mac has far more compatible Apps than Linux, especially Apps for the general public (not taylored to a high-tech profession).
5. Appeal: Mac has clearly undergone far better UI/UX design and QA processes than all existing linux DEs. This is very visible to some people (if not to most people), and does change the personal choice of people.
6. Stability and similar problems with Linux: I use both Mac and Linux everyday, and for me Linux and Mac has been about the same in terms of stability (with linux maybe a bit more stable). This is obviously hardware dependent, and linux runs on a vast number of hardwares, so it's not easy (or reasonable) to compare all Mac and all Linux instances. Or at least I don't care about such a comparison. Only the Linux configurations that make sense (well supported, without undocumented hardware blobs, etc.) matter (to me at least).
Overall, I prefer my Linux machines (not just because of software freedoms, but also because Mac is unusable for me when I work on large/serious software projects), but I simply can't live with current batch of Linux laptops either. Maybe in a few years some decent ones show up (purism could get somewhere, or system76, etc). Or maybe Apple finally works to scale up their window managers and package managers to make them suitable for special-cases and make it a bit less frustrating for some of us.
d3nj4l|4 years ago
This is so much my issue. I love i3wm, it's been a revolution for how I work. I never really understood the "desktop" concept with overlapping windows very much, and i3 works at an abstraction that is very close to how I imagine my desktop. I keep stacks of windows open in an arrangement that might be bizarre to anyone except me, but when I look at it it's 90% how I want it to be, a place no other WM/DM has ever gotten.
But I also don't want to deal with linux any more. Please don't sealion me with "but linux works fine for me!" here, but using linux feels like death by a thousand frustrations. Most recently I had to alias pulseaudio -k to pk because pulseaudio got out of whack so often I got used to killing it. That, plus I can't live with Ctrl-based shortucts anymore: I get serious pinky and wrist fatigue from a full day's work on linux. I can't be bothered to work around an entire missing staircase, so I switched back to macOS, where even if the WM isn't as good I can live with it.
(Incidentally, have you heard of yabai[1] / amethyst[2]? They're tiling WMs for macOS. I've been thinking of trying both out for a while now but I can't spare the time.)
1: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/ 2: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst
honr|4 years ago
The "Caveat" on the yabai's README page has been enough to deter me away (or rather, make it strictly impossible for me to try it). And it's not even yabai's fault that Apple has made the window manager (WindowServer) mandatory.
So, no usable window manager here so far, yet.
bscphil|4 years ago
> Laptop build quality
You're absolutely right here. When I had to take apart a MBP last year it was way easier than I expected from their reputation for being non-serviceable. I certainly wish parts weren't soldered on to the board, but that's an understandable tradeoff, maybe. I think my biggest point of criticism is the battery bags: pretty every older Macbook seemingly has had them expand somewhat, while I still have no issues with my Dell battery (in a solid plastic case that's externally swapable). The choice of Torx screws for the internals is fantastic as well. I'll never order a Mac for myself, but I am ordering Torx screws and the first thing I'll do with the next laptop I buy is going to be replacing all the internal Phillips screws with Torx for long term serviceability.
The externals are really important too: you're pretty much guaranteed to get a high quality screen with a Mac for example.
> Appeal: Mac has clearly undergone far better UI/UX design
Also agree strongly with this, although it's still messy and the inability to configure many things the way you can in Linux is a pretty unfortunate tradeoff. Tiny UX issues still bite: the global menu bar makes multitasking a pain because macOS desktops have a single application global context - you have to switch which application you're working on before you can do anything with it. Likewise, while you can usually maximize windows in macOS, practically speaking it's assumed you'll never actually do this. For example, the dock will change widths depending on how many apps are open, so "maximizing" is not really meaningful (the window size does not change when this happens).
> Software compatibility
This one's kind of messy, as you say. If you use mostly open source applications, there are a ton of them which are Linux-first or Linux-only. macOS has a weird problem where the norm is to sell every desktop application on a slick React website at about the $40 price point. Obviously, it's mostly closed source too. Though as a Linux user, if you need Photoshop, you've pretty much got to dual boot. That alone is an enormous negative in the compatibility bracket.
nikau|4 years ago