I switched from macOS to Linux after 15 years of Apple

The brutal fact is commercial software is essential to the success of any desktop or mobile platform. That’s because it brings massive investment. The total ongoing investment in commercial applications dwarfs that of open source desktop applications, in developer-hours terms, probably thousands, or tens of thousands to one. Getting to that scale means paying people money, and not just developers. Artists, designers, QA and domain experts in the specialist fields niche apps serve. There’s just no way open source apps can possibly compete.

By failing to provide compelling support for commercial application development and distribution, the Linux desktop has starved itself of the breadth and depth of apps needed to succeed. When you’re competing with the Mac, Windows, iOS or Android you’re not just competing with Apple, Microsoft or Google. You’re competing with the hundreds of billions of dollars in app and service ecosystems that have been built around those platforms.

1. What is great about the windows GUI? Virtual desktops depend on monitors, annoying popup notifications that cannot be disabled and its resource intensive. IMHO linux has always been light years ahead of windows for as long as I remember, theres dozens of window managers better than the windows one. I am never 100% comfortable in windows, it's so locked down I feel like I am living in a hotel.

2. I do everything with the google docs these days, even on windows. So do a lot of businesses.

3. Again, most people seem to be using google calendar.

4. I actually found it easier to install on laptops back in the day. UEFI made it more painful.

5. A lot of unix tools are 2nd class citizens on windows. You can use WSL but file access is dog slow compared to the real thing.

Business apps: Google Docs & Microsoft Office both have web versions that are good enough for many people.

Mail / calendar clients: I am a nerd who prefers to use emacs for email, but I’m the weirdo—just like anyone who uses a native Outlook client. I also use Fastmail’s web interface, its iOS app, and the mail app on my iPhone. And even that is weird, because everyone just uses Gmail.

Laptop support: Yes that used to be a problem for Linux for varying definitions of “recently.” Used to be. My corp-issued laptop took to Linux just fine with nothing discernibly less functional than Windows.

The apps that don’t exist on the web are getting more and more niche.

> Open source yadda yadda.

This is it right here. I think this is the main differentiator. At the end of the day whether a person is happy on Linux depends on how much they care about software freedom. I'm willing to put up with the Linux jank because free software is really important to me and aligns with my values.

I honestly don't see what I would gain using Mac or windows , except that hibernation works from the start

Desktop Linux in 2021 is nothing like it was 20 years ago. Plasma Desktop is a great experience these days, and in my opinion, surpasses both the Windows and macOS desktop shell experiences while implementing features from both systems.

I wonder if the arrival of the 3D revolution was just a little too early for computer nerds to embrace an open source ecosystem from the get-go and how different it would've been if "If you want to run DOOM/Quake/Unreal Tournament then install OpenSUSE/Slackware so you don't have to bother Fiddling with drivers on DOS" would've been more commonplace.

From the 80s to the 2000s, video games became a multi-billion dollar industry that inspired two half-generations of kids to pursue careers in technology, but the world of FOSS was so focused on different use cases that the middle ground of "computer curious" kids probably wasn't as big of a revolution as it could've been.

Hopefully, the work Valve is putting into Proton/WINE + Steam Deck will give us a piece of that alternate history.

I think it just comes down to how you uses a computer. I mainly program, web browse, and listen to music. I don't game, watch movies, nor use or want to use 'business' apps. Abiword is about the most business app I use with any regularity. If I -have- to do something else, usually GDocs can handle it.

Re: 5) It might depend on the person. I've only ever used Gimp, and while it has redone the UI multiple times, and some things remain nonintuitive, I find myself around it well enough. When PhotoPea launched with its PS style UI, I wanted to give it a try to see what I was missing. I find myself lost, probably how a PS user feels going into Gimp.

> There were too many projects with none focusing on really making a better gui than mac/windows.

Many of us have preferred Linux desktops for a decade or two.

Calling a desktop gui better when it lacks the basics like multiple virtual desktops is quite a stretch IMO. Same goes for not being able to update your kernel without getting a brand new desktop environment either you want it or not. Same goes for not being able to customize CMD-tab on Mac.

> A lack of bread and butter 1st class "business" apps

so far so good until this:

> OpenOffice is fine, IF you are ok with the janky ui and no one knowing how it works.

In fact for many years OpenOffice, now Libre Office has been less alien to large segments of the user base.

For a number of things it has also been significantly better at times: I remember very well having to import a certain report patched together by four others to use an actually working styling system.

> lack of open source exchange type mail/cal/etc server and outlook-like client)

This was a good point for a long time. I can work around it by using my iPad for this these days.

> Until recently, installing on laptops was an absolute crap shoot.

Having Linux work better on laptops than Windows is the default state for most laptops and have been for a decase. Last big issue was a screen resolution problem solved by installing the 915 driver using synapse on nc6230 or something back in 2006.

Getting a Windows machine to stop lagging unpredictably though, that is job best left for a specialist. Some come working out of the box, but those are the exception.

(Although it should be noted that I hate lagging as much as designers hate misalignment.)

I see at least 25 Windows tickets for every Linux desktop ticket.

Sure I am paid more than an equivalent Windows admin but the ongoing cost of support is far less. Stuff just doesn't randomly stop working like in Windows. It's really nice.

Good luck getting multiple different sized monitors to work well out of the box (e.g. laptop + external) on Linux, sometimes even with tinkering you are left with subpar scaling on one. Mac on the other hand just handles whatever combo of monitors and resolutions you throw at it with nothing that you have to do on your side and has done so for a decade now.

Things are much more likely to eventually break if you use an installation too long - I rarely have issues with 5+ year old Windows but most distros don't even support that, and even if they do good luck getting through all the upgrades without having to tinker. Hell, I have to manually mess with PPAs at least once a year just to apply updates.

There's also just too much choice with so many of the options having drawbacks that are hard to distinguish between, especially for non-power users.

There's a ton of other stuff like that that we Linux users are used to so it's not too bad for us but that cause so many people who get a linux machine from a friend to eventually just pay for a Windows install on it since they can't deal with it..

as for apps, I dont know, Linux is superior in many ways for non GUI work. If you need photoshop then yeah this is not the right OS for you. But I would not want to touch anything Adobe with their dirty subscription models. its not true of all categories though. Krita for digital painting is amazing. Blender for 3d work too. The real answer is... it depends.

The second thing (and which you mention) is the laptop install situation, I was never sure if running Linux on whatever laptop would work, and if yes if it would work 100%, meaning no wifi/sound/battery drain issues. That was one of the main reasons that has kept me away from Linux since then. Granted, if Apple goes on its current way of trying to restrict access to its machines I may make the switch back sometime in the near future.

Having recently reentered the world of the full MS and Office stack, janky shit is the standard. Word - the app, online and teams. None of them work right. The meme where someone thinks they’ll just move an image is accurate. Headers and footers, formatting and most other parts are actually broken or have unpredictable behaviour across apps that are presumably supposed to be the same?

I feel like an old man shouting into a void, but it isn’t right how crappy the industry standard has become.

About your #1, well a few tried and for some people they succeeded, but for most people KDE got about equally good some time ago, and both Windows and MacOS kept getting worse and worse. The result is that KDE is much better than those now.

About #2, with the new Office365, Windows is also lacking a reasonably good outlook-like client. The exchange OWA is a much better alternative now, and you can access it from Linux just as easily as from Windows.

I use gimp and inkscape sometimes.

Gnome 3 is perfect for 99% of what I need it to do.

I still own an iPhone, it compliments my Linux laptop well where I do my serious work, the phone is a toy.

Considering picking up and older Mac now that the hardware is finally affordable prices as more of it hits the used market. Not sure if I'll leave MacOS on it or install windows or Linux.

Sadly, it still is. I have a System76 Oryx running the manufacturers distro and I still have issues with hybrid graphics, Wifi breaking randomly, Bluetooth devices not connecting, and the the fans spinning up like crazy and the UI freezing for seconds at a time. On a laptop built for Linux! I still like it but I can't tell anyone it "just works"

Eventually, competitive pressure forced Microsoft to develop ("heavily borrow") a GUI. All sarcasms aside, mWindows has become usable. But this GUI is a heavy cost.

GNU-Linux is a success. For the generations of people who were sold "a GUI", Linux is often seen as too hard. But for people who found easy access to compilers and other tools through GNU-Linux, there is nothing better.

There is room for all these operating systems, obviously. As for which one is best, there is no contest in my mind. The one that does not lock me in and lets me build what I need is an easy winner.

Not really true. Windows has copied loads of stuff from Linux GUIs over the years. I began to notice this around Windows Vista.

> A lack of bread and butter 1st class "business" apps - you know, office. OpenOffice is fine, IF you are ok with the janky ui and no one knowing how it works

This is valid. Shouldn't be so bad today with web apps being a thing.

> lack of open source exchange type mail/cal/etc server and outlook-like client). Holy fudge, I tried to get this going and people just crapped on me for suggesting it.

Yeah, because MS locks other mail clients out. Thunderbird is an excellent email client. Outlook is some proprietary business messaging thing that also happens to support email (badly).

I don't think the target is "better than mac/windows", but I'd argue KDE focuses a lot on making a good UI. Read [1] a bit, you'll see that a lot of work is done on fixing usability bugs and bringing small improvements to an already great desktop environment.

By the way, I've entered in a store that sells computers and noticed the Windows laptops. I was shocked to see myself think "Wait, are they selling computers on Plasma now?". If think it was Windows 11, it's amazing to see that it really resembles Plasma with a white theme.

[1] https://pointieststick.com/

You can use photoshop cc on linux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl3Pa8udFQQ

I flirted with Linux but never used it full time until about 2017 when the C710 Chromebook came out. What I really wanted was a basic laptop that was cheap enough to toss into a bag. So I nuked ChromeOS and started using ChrUbuntu.

Windows 10 had been out for about 2 years by that point and it became an increasing source of frustration, but I also knew I couldn't stay on Windows 7 forever.

What surprised me was that I came to prefer using my ChrUbuntu laptop despite having a much, much, MUCH more powerful desktop.

Windows 10 broke me. Why? How?

Inconsistency in the UI. Still finding old shit buried under several layers of new shit. It was still all shit in the end.

Ads in the Start Menu.

Haphazard driver support.

Forced updates and starts. Kind of a problem when you're trying to do a 17 hour overnight render job, y'know...

The problems I had in Windows just didn't seem to exist in Linux. The things people said "Oh, you have to go to the command line to fix everything" didn't seem to ring true at all. The memes, stereotypes, the disclaimers and talking points, all of it, were badly out of date. With Ubuntu, I could install from LiveUSB, entirely graphical, go through less steps during the installation process compared to Windows and still install software like Steam, vendor specific drivers and other stuff without ever touching the command line. AND Ubuntu doesn't piss me off by forcing me to restart when I don't want to.

After that, I continued to have BSOD's in Windows 10 with hardware that ran flawlessly under Ubuntu.

Networking, filesystem management was slower in Windows 10. I didn't have any issue getting Samba working in Linux to use with the NAS drives during video editing and transfer.

Google Drive was more than good enough when it came to office file compatibility. In the production house I worked out of, it came to be the preferred method. Gone was the Office shackles... and rightly so, after decades of email attachments being the viral vector for Windows systems, it's safer to just share a Drive link.

It was also because of the overhead of management that the house ended up switching from Outlook/Exchange to GoogleApps completely.

The more we did online, the less it mattered what type of system we were using.

The last, and still current, issue we still had? Adobe. After Apple's Final Cut fiasco, Adobe's failure to provide themselves as an alternative on Linux based setups was a major disappointment.

So, at this point... I have a separate airgapped Windows 7 box that runs my offline Adobe CS apps. They don't get updated and they don't need to be. (Why Win 7? Windows 10 BSODs on that box, too.)

Recently did an upgrade on my main system as well. Had a Ryzen 7 2700X setup that ran great for 3 years. Decided to make that my Windows 10 sidebox for apps that still don't quite work under Wine (though Proton is really helping to reduce that number of apps) and... yep. Have gotten hard freezes and BSODs for the first time when all I did was format the SSD to put Windows 10 on it.

Windows is decades of crap compressed into an OS. Despite having started with MSDos5.0 and Windows 3.0, using WinNT4 through to Win7 as my primary and only OS... I find Windows cumbersome, clunky, kludgy and badly implemented compared to where Ubuntu is today.

Year of the Linux desktop? Fuck off. People repeat that like it's some great joke, but the honest truth is... I use Linux now despite never having had a Linux background because it is less annoying to use than Windows.

Of course, Gimp will never be close to Photoshop because it never aimed to be

Question of taste. Really. If you like an os inspired by sonic the hedgehog, Mac and windows is for you.

2) A lack of bread and butter 1st class

What are you lacking? OpenOffice not good enough? Use softmaker. Does windows actually have an SSH by now?

3) lack of open source exchange type mail/cal/etc

Evolution, Thunderbird and a few proprietary ones

4) Until recently, installing on laptops was an absolute crap shoot.

I had not had a problem in 20 years

5) Just, apps, in general. Gimp is fine, but it has

Fair point. I have used Photoshop with wine for some specific color maps

...and some very expensive (6-figure prices - per year) IC design software is Linux-only. Look at Cadence Virtuoso, for example. Not available on Windows nor Mac.

I'm surprised the photoshop doesn't have the same feature. it would makes things so much easier for online tutorials just to name the tool or setting instead of having to list out the full location in the file menu (which is something that might be subject to change in future versions)

It still is. I mean it will sort of work, but power management, battery management, and even obvious things like swap drives may just not work right after install.

I don't denigrate your approach with Windows but please don't tell me I can't do x because I literally can on Linux.

My Linux devices are often domain joined - I log into an AD (used to be eDirectory but wth) I don't care. AD is quite a decent LDAP directory - not as good as eDir though but I doubt many here are capable of discussing that little number. I make huge use of Kerberos - all my browsers can connect to my Apaches etc with SSO if I so wish. Let's Encrypt and putting AD and vCentre CA certs into the various places like /usr/local/share/whatever and running the maint script keeps the browsers from getting upset.

I used to have email via GroupWise but we moved to Exchange back in the day (2011 from memory) I've used Evolution EWS since then. Provided you get your endpoints and DNS in line then you can use Kerberos, otherwise it's NTLM ... lol. You can put Exchange behind HA Proxy. That gets you loads of extra goodies like being able to hide squidgy bits and upping the SSL/TLS to the point where you can make say Exchange 2013 PCI/DSS compliant.

I have no idea why you fixate on GIMP, there are so many graphics apps available it is quite embarrassing. Have a look at say Krita.

Ditch OpenOffice. LibreOffice is capable and where the development is happening. Back in the day I was a MS Office trainer (and a few other things). I know what leading and kerning actually means and dealing with hanging indents, n and m dashes and all the rest. Upper case used to be stored in the upper row of cases in a printer's workshop, leading was shims of lead to move letters up and down. I taught Lotus 1-2-3 macros to company execs as well as Super Calc and even Excel. I can write macros in more languages badly than I care to recall. I wrote a Finite Capacity Scheduler (yes: finite) in Excel VBA for a pie factory near Plymouth. I'm quite happy with LO. It's quite capable in my opinion.

I've got loads of CAD options - I'm a fan of 3D printing. LibreCAD and OpenSCAD are absolutely belting and getting better every month. Blender is quite capable I'm told. I have not even started on that little number but I gather it is absolutely the dog's nadgers. Apparently film studios use it.

I have so many high quality options available to me using Linux. I'm 50 years old. I've used computers from ZX80 and I still have a Commodore 64 (with a USB interface now). My first real PC was a 8086. I managed to get a cracked copy of AutoCAD to work on my 80286 with a 80287 co-processor that my parents bought me for my birthday at something like £120 back in 1987ish.

I'm a sysadmin so not too fussed about IDEs but there are an absolute shitload of them available. Bear in mind the real difference between a Linux distro and Windows and Apples: We've always had an appstore and it is part of the system and not a bolt on.

When I type:

  # emerge -Uve --deep --newuse @world
  # yay -Syu
  # apt update && apt upgrade

I've seen Windows updates last for days at worst. At best it takes at least 15 minutes. On average you'll need around 30 mins except for Defender updates.

So:

1) Take your pick - for me KDE 2) LO for Office apps. There are so many first class apps it's hard to create a starting point 3) Evo + EWS. OK I'll accept that there is only one app here. You do get all functionality including calendar. You also have more options for notifications 4) Really? 5) You have access to a ridiculous amount of software from a central source

I think that open source has already surpassed closed source stuff by quite a long way. I own my own company and live and die by my choices. I've been doing IT for about 30 years and for about the last 15 of those I have not used MS software on my personal gear.

I wrote this a while back but I do keep it up to date: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Intranet - might be handy for someone integrating Linux in a Windows world.

Nothing to feel bad about saying. As a mass-market option it absolutely did. There was no flood of new users coming along back then, and there wont be this time around either.

But for me as a developer, I still think a Linux-desktop is the best desktop I can get. So that's what I'm going to use.

And that's all I care about. That the wider masses run Windows or MacOS doesn't really bother me at all. After all, why should it?

Foss projects do need to attract more ux designers though. I was telling a friend the other day about how amazing blender is… but had to admit it was so unintuitive/un-discoverable that you can’t really use the program without going through fairly specific tutorials for what you are trying to do

What the Linux desktops lacked is powerful leadership, period.

Exactly. Except I am quite pleased how OpenOffice is right now, but I digress back to agreeing with you.

I use Linux everywhere, just rarely on bare metal. All the linux I use is in memory somewhere. My bare metal machine recreational and general use machine is Mac. It runs Windows but it hasn't in two years.

The OS isn't the hill I'm here to die on. Its just the fact of life.

Gimp. I shudder at the thought. Honestly at this point, I feel the same about Gimp as I do about people clinging onto to pre-subscription Photoshop. Its like these arbitrary and clueless bragging points they now both have to rationalize life choices - whether it is an attempt to stick it to the man because they became the get of my lawn people resistant to change without realizing it, or because they actually can't afford it and this is also a byproduct of their life decisions. In either scenario, there seems to be a lack of observation that the commercial products are lightyears ahead now and there is no point in intentionally inconveniencing yourself for a cause nobody else cares about.

But that depends on the type of users: for devs & office workers, I think Google suite can replace MS Office and many Internet apps can help with many other types of everyday app that's available on Mac or Window.

On one hand telling a random MacOS/Winows-person to switch to Linux is most probably NOK. Image&video editing & office apps and probably other stuff (doubts about audio apps - I loved Linux+"Jack"+filters when playing guitar as an amateur) are not as good as on those OSs.

On the other hand telling the same to a techy guy/girl >might< be OK. E.g. a huge amount of programming languages can be installed & handled very easily, many different filesystems (with their pros&cons) are available, same for networking stuff (e.g. Wireguard, nfs with multiple connections since kernel ~5.3, bundle multiple separate TCP/IP connections together, etc...), same for virtualization technologies(Xen, KVM, multiple container flavours), etc... is available to be installed&configured&used quite easily, a lot of stuff can be read/dealt through "/sys" and "/proc" (makes it easy e.g. when reversing-engineering a controller), etc... . It's literally "dreamland" if 1) you wish for something like that (or maybe you aren't even aware that something like that can be done easily on this SW-level) and 2) you're able&willing to invest time in it.

E.g. in my case, on the desktop, I'm super happy with Linux+Gentoo; I guess because I'm a pure techy guy + picky hehe:

I don't have a strong need for any "office" app (Libreoffice is more or less ok for the basic stuff that I need, graphics editing is more or less ok with the available apps), at the same time I want some things (e.g. placement of some windows when I start them, remapping of keyboard keys, ...) to be set up "just as I want them to be" which cannot work with Windows (and I'm excluding OSx by default as being too protective - e.g. bought many years ago an iPod nano 6th gen, could not copy to it files from Linux as the iPod storage was encrypted therefore I threw it away) => yes, Linux & the distro is not easy to handle, but that in turn made me learn a lot of stuff, which in turn made me able to handle a lot of extra stuff (e.g. recently to install ~20 different DBs to do tests & in some cases proof-of-concepts, to understand better networking & tunnels to then work around limitations at work, a lot more stuff...), which in turn made me able to handle as well servers.

I don't know but I've always interacted in terminal, making the fact that I use macOS not significant.

Only if you’re not in 99.9% of the computer user base.

(2) Wrong. Just by you saying "Open Office" means that you are out of touch. You are stuck back in 2010. There is no pathos here. If you have not gotten the memo that Open Office is dead and the project that took over and continued improving is called Libre Office, then it is a sign you are out of touch. Libre Office is not janky, and hundreds of thousands of users beg to differ.

(3) There are several. Thunderbird and Evolution. However you always have your outlook.com for work email.

(4) Wrong. Recently? Define recently. The last 10 years has been a joyride.

(5) Wrong. Krita for photoshop workloads is amazing. Applications are thriving.

- Companies choose Electron to reduce the cost of supporting Windows and Mac, which has the side effect of making Linux supported easily even if the market isn't there. People sure like to complain about Electron but it has been very beneficial for Linux desktops.

- Selling Linux software has always been hard, mainly due to piracy and a widespread aversion to closed-source software within Linux users. With subscription business models being more popular/acceptable nowadays, which comes along a requirement to be always-online, such services are more easily available on Linux too.

For example Linux has VSCode, Spotify, 1password, Bitwarden, Obsidian, Slack, Discord, Skype, Typora, Simplenote, Inkdrop, Wordpress, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Signal, Atom, Ghost… It has improved drastically from even just 10 years ago, when almost no popular software/service was available.

And that's not mentioning the general shift to using webapps instead of desktop apps (Google Workspace, Office 365, most email services, Jira, Github, Asana…), which obviously makes Linux much more viable.

At this point I've stopped trying to refine my work environment anymore, just because I'm tired of being nickeled and dimed for every little thing

Someone wrote bash. There's no company behind it. It's mostly just Chet. How do you want to pay Chet? I'm not sure he even accepts donations.

Looking through my bash history to see what I use most often, I think of the OpenSSH devs wrote ssh. Then I think that lots of volunteers wrote Emacs. Oh, oauthtool, I use that often. I should figure out who wrote that. I suppose there's all of the Linux hackers who wrote each part of my kernel. Mercurial as my git. Hey, I wrote parts of that, so at least my debt there feels paid. Ah, there's the Mate developers who forked from Gnome 2 long ago and are now mostly doing basic maintenance on that codebase. Some GNU hackers wrote each of the coreutils but that was long ago and someone else is maintaining them now. Oh, Firefox, of course, the OS-within-an-OS. That also has its own few hundred hackers over the decades that should be paid.

How am I supposed to be paying all of the thousands of people who each wrote a little part of my OS? Apple didn't pay all of the people who wrote the free parts of their OS either. Did you?

There simply is no societal structure in place to pay the people who wrote this stone soup of an OS.

Which is fundamentally different to the Apple and Mac platform. It is the polish app and "take my money" market. And for most part it is doing exceptionally well. ( On macOS, not MacBook )

Maybe as Wine advances we'll be able to use more and more commercial Windows software, kind of like what is happening with games. But I'm not holding my breath yet.

https://elementary.io/

However, a lot of open source software projects will also accept donations in addition to code (if you do not have time to contribute the latter) so if you find something lacking there may be an easy way for you to help. I like to pick a few OSS projects every year to make some donations to. I have always figured it would be better to help improve the open source solutions than it is to look for proprietary ones.

Until then, here three quality paid apps for Linux:

* Lightworks - professional video editing with GPU support * Bigwig Studio (like Ableton live, creating EDM style music, midi arrangements etc) * Maya - 3D animation software (Pixar uses this too) * IntelliJ/PhpStorm/Pycharm/Rubymine/etc IDEs for coding

For your office example, try WPS office. Never used it myself but I heard good things. There are paid text editors like sublime or the stuff that jetbrains is building. There is also lots of Linux desktop software in the SFX industry.

I think stuff for you is coming, you're just a little early and a lot of things are in development. That said, Elementary OS was trying to offer the type of thing you're looking for.

It might be time for me to jump back into the desktop app market. I used to make (IMHO) really nice polished Qt apps primarily for Linux but also available for Windows and Mac. I quit doing it because the market collapsed around 2014, but maybe it's time to get back in !!

Coming to it, it is a little weird at first. Note that on Mac at least there's the garage band/imovie/ iphoto apps available for free with the OS too.

Your right though, the everything is free and unsupported (usually the take my money moment is for support) . For example I needed to do some minor video editing, what do I use..? There are some major apps that tend to stand out: LibreOffice/Krita/Gimp among others.

I'm using POPos so I tend to find a list of applications and see what's available pre-packaged for my version of linux.

Even Unreal Engine can build on linux with work. Its a bit of a pain, but maybe I'm used to it now..

There is an age-old axiom that 'free isn't free', and Linux quite literally embodies everything about that for me.

When I can get native, commercial software for Linux; without interpreter layers such as WINE, I, along with the majority of the rest of computer users, will consider it. Until then, there are far too many compromises for me to consider it.

I would so much rather pay for a piece of software I rely on - especially every day - and get the support that comes with it to boot - than have it for free. And so do millions of others.

For me the better thing is also free, it's called markdown.

Agree on trackpad though, someone has probably hacked something together but hardware driver is kind of hard to make as third party.

Ofcourse there are exceptions, and I am surprised there aren't more companies that go with the ardour model. They give away the source but charge for binaries.

I would even like it if they charge for everything but have it be open source, so you can't download an "official copy" unless you pay.

I prefer to keep it mostly free as that was how I could afford it back in the days but there's nothing wrong with using pid products you like.

I also try to give back a bit extra now that I can afford it.

I use almost entirely Open Source tools as a game dev for various reasons (some ideological and some practical). All of them get money from me on a monthly basis. It's a security thing; I give them money because I want them to stick around and because there are features that they're working on that I'll need for future projects. Paying them money is much more cost efficient and much safer than trying to build all of my own tools, and much safer and more future-proof than buying into commercial engines.

What I get out of that arrangement is closer relationships with the developers, slightly more input into how software gets built, but mostly just confidence that the products will get better and an increased likelyhood that devs will fix things that are incredibly annoying to me. And some software products (Blender in particular) have shown that this model can work really well if there's enough buy-in from the community. Blender/Krita will even let you sponsor development on specific features if you're willing to pay enough money.

Unfortunately, like with anything else, products suffer if there's not enough funding, and a lot of Open Source products are underfunded. There's an open question in the OS world about how you get people to donate voluntarily rather than forcing them to give money. People don't have the perspective I describe above, it's not an intuitive way to the think about software.

But if you're not in that boat, if you're actually willing to pay money purely to get better software, that's a solveable problem today. Many Open Source products support donations, and at the scale you're talking about (equivalent to Mac, one or two devs make something really good as their job), getting donations to the point where people can work on a project full time would be enough to get the kind of quality boosts you want. Most Open Source projects accepting donations are not at that level yet, but again, if you genuinely want to pay money to increase software quality, you can do that.

But it does require a shift in thinking, you have to break away from the philosophy that the Mac ecosystem has aggressively drilled into you that says you pay for access to things. In Mac, the way you support developers is you pay for access, and as a side effect they build better apps. In Linux, (most of the time) you pay for development, not access. Everyone understands in theory that we pay for software because we want the software to improve. But theory is different than practice, emotionally we buy software because we have to. In Linux with Open Source, if you want software to get better you are forced to internalize the underlying theory -- you have to get your brain to actually believe that you are paying for continued development instead of access to something that already exists. And then at that point, you realize that kicking someone $5-10 a month so that they'll add new scripting APIs to Tiled is actually a really good deal.

Mac's system has the advantage that it forces everyone to participate, so it's easier for Mac developers to get enough money to focus on building really polished products. Mac doesn't require its users to believe that they're paying for development. The weakness of Linux's system is it doesn't force everyone to participate in supporting the ecosystem, so there's way less funding. But while that's a legitimate criticism of Open Source, it's also a purely social/psychological phenomenon. There's no law of nature that means we couldn't collectively pay developers of Open Source apps enough so that they could devote the same amount of time to development as Mac devs do.

And if we did that, then quality would skyrocket, Mac is proof of that. The Mac app ecosystem proves that you don't need giant companies to have great software, all you need are a few developers per-app that can afford to put all of their attention into their apps instead of just their free time.

Linux is for users who don’t value their time.

I did this when I was younger. Now I have more money than time, so I'm prepared to pay to spend less time making stuff do what I want it to do.

> It also means I don't have to do things the Apple way, I can make it work the way I want it to work (within reason).

I used to fine-tune my system with the weirdest shit, every corner of the screen did a different thing, all 3 buttons did different things to windows depending on where you clicked.

Now I just use macOS pretty much vanilla out of the box. If I use Linux, I just use the defaults.

Copying over settings to multiple computers is just way too much bike-shedding for me.

But FaceTime and iMessage? There are plenty of alternatives. More importantly the alternatives have bigger user bases. What is making you feel locked into iMessage?

Interoperability between apple devices and services is good, but any individual service is not actually great. They are only good if you commit everything to apple.

So if you actually wanted to break free, switching from iMessage and FaceTime would be the easiest. Reduce your dependencies of stuff in the walled garden, then leaving that garden get easier.

Apple knows that switching from MacOS/iOS is hard if you use their services that only work on their devices. The solution is don't use their services even if you use their devices.

At home I use VLC for videos, or Chrome/Firefox for Netflix (and other streaming services). I also picked up a Chromebook tablet for various media consumption needs. I can't really think of the last time I needed a non-Linux system for anything.

Attack it piece by piece.

I have some experience de-siloing myself, and I have some insight on this. The first and most important thing is that you should (for the most part) not use anything that's a free hosted cloud service.

Find a cross platform equivalent to those services and start switching to them. Standards based hosted services are much easier to set up than self-hosting, and makes it MUCH easier to switch out later.

The first thing I'd recommend you do is get Signal installed. Figure out which of your friends are on there already, and just start sending them messages from that.

Next, register a domain. Your name is a good start, since you'll need it for email (and for, if the privacy landscape in the US continues on its trajectory, self-hosting)

Here are some good (non exhaustive) cross-platform alternatives that I use or have used:

- icloud photos: Google Drive, Smugmug (my fav), Flickr

- icloud mail/contacts/calendars: Fastmail (mail + card/caldav syncing)

- imessage/facetime: signal (im aware there's other chat clients but signal is me and my friends' go to. Discord, whatsapp, telegram, etc also exist)

- safari: Firefox with account set up

I pay less than $150 a year, and I get phone or email support with a real person for all of the services I use. I use an iphone, apple watch, with windows 10 on a laptop, and desktop linux. It all works together pretty well, and it really wasn't that hard to establish.

But I cant even use it in Firefox on my Mac.

I haven’t connected my iPhone to a PC is 6 years. iTunes is the worst piece of software ever made. Thankfully it hasn’t been needed or even useful for half a decade.

I still have a few people on Messages, but they contact me through my iPhone, so I'm not losing anything. It baffles me why anyone on this site would use services that are not available across all major platofrms.

I switched back to a Mac with an M1 Mac and the battery lasts for days. I almost never use it plugged in now. I can go many days with normal use, not even compromising to conserve battery. On linux you need to use PowerTop and tweak it to the performance/endurance ratio you want. You are constantly thinking about it. The new M1 Mac doesn't require those compromises or even the need to think about it.

Also i'll add that you can TOTALLY get by on Linux. Linux users are quick to offer solutions like:

- "run that windows program in WINE"

- "there's a Gnome extension that does that"

- "I found a binary on github that will do what you want"

- "all you have to do is make a script and it'll do the same thing"

- "use [FOSS Program] instead of [Evil Corporate Program I really want], it works basically the same"

- "the native version of that program doesn't exist on Linux, but you can use the web version which is basically the same"

But when I switched back to Mac I remembered how I didn't have to make compromises anymore. I could have the programs I wanted, without the weird open source versions that weren't quite as good. Programs just installed, I didn't need to compile them or get the right installers or anything like that. You don't get weird incompatibilities of certain programs and your WM. You didn't worry about battery life or drivers anymore. I didn't need to use web versions. Yes I had to re-purchase some license keys for many apps but this doesn't bother me. I don't mind paying for software that improves my quality of life.

This isn't to shit on Linux. I actually use Linux all day long for work, just ironically I am SSH'd in via my Mac. Linux makes a great server. Its also a Good desktop. But Mac makes a better desktop. Call me a fanboy or a sellout. But I the experience isn't as polished as Mac and in many ways not even as "polished" as Windows (and that was hard for me to type out). Also don't tell me I am too stupid for Linux or didn't give it a chance or didn't learn it enough to enjoy it. I have a RHCA and LPIC-2 certifications. I work in Linux via the terminal 8 hours a day. I know how linux works, but as a graphical system I really would rather have Mac.

However to be fair, I run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on my work computer and that is the closest Linux distro to the Windows/Mac world that you will find. Virtually everything works out of the box and is reliable. It is worth the license fee IMO. You still compromise on app selection, but it does solve many of the annoyances around drivers and compatibility that other distros suffer with. It is far harder to customize, but if you just want something that you can install and start using like you would with Windows, then RHEL is the solution.

Just to make the point that it doesn't have to be one person.

And if you don't like it, you're wrong. Not because your opinion is not valid, but because that's what you're requesting essentially.

Agreed. At this point it is just a matter of which brand of brokenness you tolerate best.

But once you do learn it and fully prepared your set-up, it's amazing. Around a month ago I switched from Arch to NixOS after using the former for around a decade and I'm very happy with it despite its warts.

1. You need space for the Nix store, so it's not appropriate for every system (I like building small embedded appliances).

2. A six month release cycle can get a bit tiresome after a while. I know it's personal preference, but I wish it was a bit longer.

3. Or, in order to contribute to the project, you need to chase the dragon with the unstable channel.

4. Forcing all the system state through the funnel of a single config file is great, except that it doesn't cover home directories. I found that I ended up with a massive unmanaged blob of state in my home directory which I couldn't capture (I never tried out home-manager, maybe I should have).

This is not to detract from NixOS! NixOS is great, and I remain a massive fan :-). But on my personal systems I find myself using macOS and Debian these days. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

EDIT: Line spacing

Is there a version of this future where I don't have to learn a new language just to effectively use a computer?

Solus has that on lock for me and initially I didn't see it as particularly special, I too thought distros didn't matter much anymore. I thought I could switch away from it to any number of capable distros, but it never worked out and I returned to Solus every time.

NixOS looks neat, but holy hell I absolutely do not have the time to deal with the learning curve OR the implicit abandonment of all the tools I use to do my job.

and staying at hotels can be annoying sometimes, like having the room cleaners bother you, or in the restaurant trying to enjoy your dinner in peace the but the waiter keeps bugging you every 5 minutes!

Mac Docker is insanely resource-heavy since it runs through that virtualization layer instead of being native. Definitely a major source of frustration unless you keep your Docker stack very, very small or have an absolutely max-spec Macbook Pro.

By "tinkering" do you mean every once in a while something really important completely stops working and you have to pull your hair out in the middle of some important work in order to get that thing fixed so you can use your computer properly again, which usually involves a series of incomprehensible steps you found on the 17th page of a phpBB forum thread?

Or...?

Because, that being one primary reason many people choose macOS over Windows, it would really suck.

Asking because the article was interesting, Gnome looked great, and it'd be genuinely fantastic if this assumption on my part was wrong.

Are you using stock Terminal.app or iTerm2? The latter is notably improved and might benefit you if you haven't tried it.

I think it's the opposite, and the errors that you encountered are a good example of why, since they all appear to be Mac/Homebrew-specific.

> On my Mac, I tried to install ffmpeg with rubberband support. When trying to compile it, brew gave cryptic error messages and eventually failed.

The FFmpeg in my distro's packages (OpenSUSE) and in Ubuntu's packages comes with rubberband already enabled. They are binary packages - no compilation needed, and it all just works. When I last used Homebrew I was surprised at how often it needed to compile things. For Linux users, compilation is rare.

> For something else, I tried installing qemu, also using brew. There were a load of errors telling me I'm using an outdated OS and should feel bad about it, and again, it failed after 156 minutes with some libiconv error that I don't even totally understand, never mind know how to resolve.

libiconv is not a thing in GNU/Linux. In Linux, iconv() is part of libc. libiconv is only used to port software to platforms which don't have iconv, or have an iconv() which is deficient in some way. Also, again, my distro and Ubuntu both include a binary package for qemu - no compilation needed.

> Whether it's brew, apt-get, yum, pip, npm, or whatever other package manager you wish for - recompiling all my software is extremely slow, and by the time it's finished I've already moved on to something else. [...] Requiring this for every software package on Linux is what's pushing me away from the platform.

I think you have the wrong idea about apt-get and package managers on Linux. Most distro package managers do not compile your software. Almost all the popular distros have binary package managers, which means compilation errors (on your machine) are not possible. Ironically, Homebrew (and Cygwin) users spend a lot more time compiling than Linux users do, so don't let your experience with Homebrew colour your opinion of Linux. They are not alike.

You say that recompiling software is slow and errors during compilation are normal on Linux. I don't find myself compiling software very often. Most things are grabbed as binaries by the package manager. For everything else there's the AUR (which I rarely experience issues with.)

[Goes on to illustrate all the problems he's had... On MacOS.]

> For as long as software continues to be distributed as binaries for Mac,

Apparently it isn't, is it, since you've been compiling so much?

> in a dmg or pkg, I'll continue using my Mac.

So when are you quitting?

> I do still have to recompile sometimes, but it's something I dread, because of the huge amount of time it takes.

On MacOS. So you're dreading Linux. Impressive logic.

> Requiring this for every software package on Linux

[Citation needed]

> is what's pushing me away from the platform.

The wrong one. All the shit you've been whining about should logically be pushing you away from MacOS.

I personally prefer Gentoo's way: user-owned "overlib"s for special stuff (and you would check the overlib's history to understand how committed the owner is), the rest merged into the main repository (if if manages to be merged, depending on QA).

Hard disagree. The best way to install software of all the OSs I've ever used was the original Macintosh way: Just copy a single file. The same thing was used in RiscOS, NeXT, and a few others and is the inspiration for AppImage.

Its even worse if you buy an OEM device or get stuck with Windows 10 Home.

With Home, once your PC finds out you have WiFi, it will not let you set up the device without a Microsoft Account, and it will remember your WiFi details even if you kill the OOBE and restart. (among countless other extremely user-hostile features Microsoft has added)

- homebrew is slow and brittle, between 10x and 100x slower than pacman in my experience, and the only package manager I've used that breaks at least every year

- homebrew is only a userspace package mananger, many applications have their own update mechanisms. I greatly prefer being able to update my entire system with one command.

- xcode is a fragile 10GiB pig that I don't want, but homebrew needs it

- docker has a significant performance overhead on macOS

- the tiling window managers available on macOS are less reliable and don't have the features I value

- some terminal based software is significantly slower on recent versions of macOS, even on a 2019 macbook. I'm not sure what's causing it but there is noticeable lag that I don't get on much older hardware with linux

- documentation; in my experience searching for error messages on macOS results in something like "paste this command into a terminal, no one knows why, and it will break again on the next OS release" or "plug the charger into the left usbc port not the right". Where as on linux I end up on the arch wiki with a fix that makes sense, and I've learned something I find valuable or interesting

- I don't like how macOS is visually turning into iOS, I like that I have the option to use what looks like a "desktop" on linux

I'm learning nix at the moment, and hopefully that can solve a lot of the problems I have with maxOS/brew.

macOS is good, linux is good, as always it depends on what you need.

I have a thinkpad and I have been pretty impressed with the linux support. I get firmware updates through my package manager, which makes for a nice experience keeping it up to date.

I plan on moving back to Linux once the core apps cease to operate — iMessage, easy transfer of music/audiobooks to iPhone, FaceTime.

Also, I’m pretty sure Dell and Lenovo have OoB support for Linux. Lenovo especially since RedHat is under the same umbrella.

It's the only OS I know of that's remotely close to MacOS in terms of aesthetic, and with Proton I can play pretty much every game on Steam.

If you're lucky, it's smooth as butter. Personally I'm in the unlucky group (i3-6100U + HD 520).

Work is being done to improve the situation: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441

The article makes it look great to anyone familiar with macOS, which while it has faults is generally regarded as a pretty good OS GUI.

Is there something bad about Gnome the article is missing?

Do you mean that they're not compatible with a macbook keyboard? control-c / x / v work fine on all of my Ubuntu computers, but I might be misunderstanding what issue you are running into.

https://jpscaletti.com/p/5/til-remap-copy

"Obvious"? Typical conceited Mac user. It's not as if the Mac were dominant in the computer or OS market.

> I seem to recall the cut and paste keys aren't even compatible with Windows.

Depends: Your whine doesn't mention what these "incompatible" keys you're whining about actually are. If they're [Ctrl]-[Ins], [Shift]-[Ins], and [Shift]-[Del], then those are actually the Windows CUA standard ones. The silly [Ctrl]-[C|V|X] alternatives copied from Apple are not standard.