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Comment by nicetime | Hacker News Reader

For sure, the only reason I’ve been on Apple devices these past few years is because Ubuntu is such an abomination. Windows is plainly unthinkable. And if you have my laptop, the mobile devices fall like dominos. I don’t love iPhones, but even at premium prices it’s worth it to integrate with OS X.

Android really makes me sick though. Touted as free and open, but you still have to root your phone with shady exploits, payloaded over some sketchy USB shell. And then when you do, the custom roms are trash. And I wouldn’t even be rooting these devices if I could just efface some of the stock brand and bloatware, but no, every mobile provider wants me to sign into their analytics package, and billboard their logos all over the place. It’s a wasteland in all directions.

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That's the mobile provider fault, not Android's... And no custom ROMs are necessary for root usually.

Also, what makes you prefer macOS UX than Windows or Ubuntu? They surely have their downsides, but I don't think they're THAT bad to the point of not even touching one.

Not OP, but for me it's the apps. While a good number of apps I use professionally can be used on both Windows and Linux, I prefer using OSX simply because Omnifocus, Fantastical and Spark exist on it. I'm sure there are other people who can use the Todoist/web/web trio or make do with Outlook (if you're in an all-Exchange shop with no CalDAV stuff), I'm just not one of them.

An alternative view is that Linux lacks good GUI apps and Windows blows at the command line (despite Bash on Windows). Windows apps also don't have great UX chops in the areas I'd like them to. 1password on Windows sucked the last time I used it, there's no native equivalent to Omnifocus or Things, there's no great calendar app like Fantastical, there's no great indie devs like Readdle[1] or Nucleobytes[2].

This comes from someone who's used all these OSes as well as FreeBSD and OpenBSD for both work and home.

[1]https://readdle.com/

[2]https://nucleobytes.com/

There's nothing sketchy about it if you buy a phone that is unlocked or unlockable. If you get a Samsung from Verizon, then yeah you're gonna have a hard time.

Exactly, we're going to need a replacement for Google's vanilla Android soon. You can't even take off the Google Now bar - which takes up significant space on all workspaces!

You can replace the launcher to have something very similar to Google's one but configurable.

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