[orthoxerox]

> macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO

Linux has low-key become a very valid choice for a desktop OS. You can thank a lot of people for that.

Apple and Microsoft for sandbagging.

NixOS for pioneering the immutable Linux concept.

Valve for heavily investing into making games run well.

GitHub for inventing Electron, the eater of RAM and the great equalizer of UX.

Lots and lots of Linux and distro maintainers and contributors, achieving the opposite of the death of a thousand cuts.

There are some still unsolved problems, like power management and device drivers, but I feel like we're over the hump. There's a critical mass of regular people using Linux as their primary desktop OS on modern hardware, so trying to make Linux work on a 2025 laptop no longer feels like empty struggle.

[altern8]

Linux is great, but IMO macOS is vastly superior to both Windows (by far) and all Linux distros I tried.

It's keyboard-centric and its shortcuts are much easier and quicker to use. For instance, CMD + left/right arrow for home vs having to reach for the home/end button. CMD + Q ("quit") vs. (I think?) alt + F4. CMD + C still works in the terminal, shortcuts are always the same across apps, etc.

It's extremely consistent across apps and dialog boxes, which isn't the case with Windows and even less Linux. For instance, from any app browsing for a file will open the file browser with my preferred settings, bookmarks, and position. All apps handle high-DPI correctly and consistently. Most UIs follow Apple-provided guidelines, shortcuts are consistent across apps, etc.

While not required, it focuses on drag and drop vs. clicking, which is much quicker and 100 times easier to use. For instance, dragging a file from a folder to a "Browse" dialog box to select the file vs. clicking 100 times to navigate to it.

Most importantly, most of the times things just work. To install apps you normally just drag an icon into the Applications folder. Windows still makes you restart in certain cases (because it locks files, I think), Linux still has the problem that app developers don't provide easy-to-use installers.

Obviously this comes down to personal preference.

Windows is just a disgrace despite being the most popular OS for 40 years but it's good for gaming. Linux gives you the freedom to do whatever you want and fix things if you don't like them. macOS normally provides a consistent experience if you just want the thing to work and move on.

[ljm]

If I had a compact Linux laptop for work rather than a MacBook I'd be raw dogging NixOS already rather than using nix-darwin. There isn't really much about MacOS that sets itself apart these days.

The only other thing keeping me hooked in is that I use an iPhone and have an iPad and need a bit more time for that to feel like a sunk cost before I pull the plug on it all.

Same with Windows on my gaming PC but I haven't looked into whether I'd encounter any friction with Nix there.

All that would remain after that is getting off of iCloud for storage and email.

[mbirth]

> There isn't really much about MacOS that sets itself apart these days.

Unless you’re using an iPhone and/or iPad. The Continuity feature, seamless copy&paste between devices, notification mirroring, iPhone mirroring, and being able to move my mouse cursor from my macOS onto the iPad are things I’d really miss when switching to a Linux desktop.

[OhMeadhbh]

Yeah. My last corp engagement forced Win10 on me. At least I can install WSL2 and have a sane dev environment. You can run Leenucks on a MBP in a VM, but why? If I want a machine that randomly can't recognize it's boot drive, I'll get an HP.

[JakaJancar]

Ah yes, Linux on a laptop: wifi, sleep, graphics - pick any two

[orwin]

I've never had any WiFi issues, and I think most people who started using Linux in the mid 2010s have the same experience.

Graphic though, yes (I had as much sleep issues on windows than on Linux). Especially the dual graphics intel/Nvidia. I still have to force environment variables to launch my games with the correct GC

[OhMeadhbh]

Lol. Yes. I would like to say that's not true... and for quite a while my Dell XPS would do all three, but it wasn't a cheap device. I think their driver team isn't supporting my 8 year old XPS anymore as sleeping is... problematic. And power management on linux laptops has always been worse than windows.

But... I will gnaw my left arm off before I go back to Mach or WinNT. (Maybe I'll try using HaikuOS as my daily driver...)

Though... fwiw... I've been running a non-x version of leenucks and then booting into a X and experimental Wayland FreeBSD VM via KVM and it seems to work well. I can halt the machine and save state in about a minute and then turn off the hardware. I come back later and restore. It's not a seamless operation, but I'm happy to live with it. It's also pretty easy to checkpoint the virtual disk before installing the bazillion packages I sometimes have to install to test out various python extensions. So all I have to do is revert to a checkpoint and all that crap is gone. I don't have to worry about remembering which packages I have to manually uninstall.

[Orygin]

It's not 2005 anymore, most distros work 100% on install

[dgan]

Hm i have all three