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Comment by abhaynayar | Hacker News Reader

When I was planning to buy a phone last year, it could have gone either way, iOS or Android. After a lot of analysis, I settled on iOS for my needs, and while I like Android UX more, there just weren't any good options at the time. My previous two phones were OnePlus, but they have also gone to shit, and last year's Pixel also didn't get any good reviews. And now I'm planning to buy an Apple Watch for its health features.

I'm using Ubuntu on an old HP laptop right now which is working fine for me, but maybe, far off into the future, I will buy one of those Macbooks. I just don't like Apple's software, but as an overall package they're good and I don't see any better options right now, I wish there were better options, like something with Apple's hardware, but with better software.

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I avoid the Apple ecosystem for 3 reasons.

1 - The inevitable conclusion of Apple's walled garden is that once they fail to demonstrate organic revenue growth, they will begin converting their platform control into revenue, at the expense of users. In ways that make the App Store look quaint.

2 - I'm allergic to tech elitism, and I like messing with people who distilled their social litmus test down to the icon colors for non-standard SMS reimplementations.

3 - MacOS and power users are obviously so far off Apple's priority list at this point that relying on it as a work platform is a poor risk decision.

This. Great hardware, probably good software in most cases, but rather toxic elitist culture that you can't discuss with reasonably. And lies, so many lies, not worse than other manufacturers but they don't try to act like saviors of universe/privacy/whatnot, which they aren't if you actually follow things a bit.

I feel this one. I've had an iphone in the past and I didn't like it much. My current phone is a OnePlus which I really like, but their new offerings aren't appealing. Something about Samsung I don't enjoy, possible the ads. Pixel isn't available in my country.

I've ordered a Sony phone. The appeal is 3.5mm jack and a bezel instead of a cutout - I've never used the front camera on my phone so it's obtuseness irritates me. The OnePlus had a pop-up, great solution.

However, if this one doesn't work out or the next time I need a new one the options are poor I think I'll be compelled to switch.

Can you dual boot into linux on a macbook?

Yes. Check out Asahi Linux - major hacking effort, I seriously admire the team behind it.

Well OS X is built on Linux, so what you're probably thinking is to boot into a Linux Gui instead of OS X.

OS X is not built on Linux. Its lineage comes from a different Unix

> OS X is built on Linux

macOS is based on Unix; Linux is Unix-like [1]. Neither macOS nor OS X are based on Linux.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix-like

I think what you mean is that OS X is in the family tree of Linux, but it's more like an estranged third cousin.

> It is a Unix-based operating system

> macOS makes use of the BSD codebase and the XNU kernel,[14] and its core set of components is based upon Apple's open source Darwin operating system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_operating_systems

There are quite a few inaccuracies in this comment for one sentence.

MacOS and before it Mac OS X do not have “Linux” roots. The operating systems are based on Darwin which has roots in FreeBSD (which is emphatically not Linux).

You could say it has Unix roots or BSD roots, although they have diverged significantly. MacOS for example runs on a Mach micro kernel rather than the monolithic kernel you’d find in a Linux or BSD distribution.

As far as the user land goes MacOS does ship a full BSD shell environment and not a GNU/Linux one.

Asahi Linux is daily drivable now. But, iPhone plus a MacBook plus iCloud is pretty nice.

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