[how_gauche]

I hate my work-provided MacBook SO. MUCH. I begged them to give me a ThinkPad with Linux instead, and it's been a litany of problems in the three months I've been using it. I did all my dev work on MacBooks between 2007-2013, but my experience this year has completely vindicated my decision to ditch the Mac at home and at work back then.

I see people in this thread complaining that Linux distros are unreliable, but my Linux machines don't do things like beachball for 20s at a time or have complete audio system crashes requiring reboot twice a week. (Always right before a videoconference! I missed fifteen minutes of a call last week scrambling to fetch another device because the audio subsystem died and the Mac decided it had to install updates for a half hour when it rebooted.)

It's not uncommon to see uptimes on my ThinkPads measured in months. The Mac? At least it boots fast. I have to restart it once or twice a week.

Reliability aside -- and I realize that everyone values ergonomic factors differently -- Linux is just a better choice in every regard for me and the kind of work that I do. Interactive performance is much better, the docker-based workflows everyone's using are so much faster when they're native, and there's no mismatch between Darwin's BSD userland and the Ubuntu/CentOS you're probably using in prod.

[bradknowles]

All I can say is that my experience on macOS is completely different from yours. Invasive MDM software from employers not withstanding, I’ve never had major beachball problems that have persisted for days, I’ve never even hated the bad keyboards that much.

I’ve been using Macs since 1984. They’re not perfect, but throughout that time, they have demonstrated over and over again that they are the least horrible hardware/os platform that I have used. Some years are better, but all years have been better on macOS than any other hardware platform I have experience with.