I said no and Apple said yes | Hacker News Reader

I said no and Apple said yes

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886 pointsthatslast701 comments

Not trying to start flamewars, but more and more I wonder how much are people willing to put up with such practices. On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased. And spying. Really user hostile environment. No, thank you.

Because Linux is full of sharp edges which nobody seems to find it fit to fix.

I’ve been dabbling in Linux since the early 2000s with Yellow Dog, SUSE, and Ubuntu, tried making it my daily driver in the early-mid 2010s, and for the past 5 or so years have been using it in a secondary/tertiary role.

Recently I’ve been trying to move my gaming box from Windows to Fedora (which I’ve found mostly makes the right tradeoffs to suit my preferences). I’ve gotten things to mostly work, including games that have been blockers in the past, but just yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity. No big deal I thought, just go into settings and add it back, but as it turns out the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky and most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection. No, you have to drop down and use nmcli afterwards to fix things because the UI also doesn’t surface the right checkbox. I wouldn’t have even figured that out if it hadn’t been for a chatbot’s assistance.

This is the exact sort of time-burning nonsense that isn’t a problem on either of the commercial platforms that I tend to encounter under Linux. Is this single instance going to push me to reboot that box back into Windows? No, but if issues like that keep cropping up eventually one will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Desire to avoid continued frustration will win over the logical portion of most peoples’ brains.

While I dont disagree, Mac and Windows also have their own sharp edges that for some reason no one finds fit to fix even though they get paid millions of dollars to maintain the software. The other day my mom told me her Bluetooth speaker no longer worked on her windows laptop. I was like, ok, lets try the normal troubleshooting steps. Turn it off and on again. Restart computer. Unpair and repair. But I couldn't unpair. It just said no.

I installed ChatGPT on her laptop and allowed it to run a certain subset of shell commands and it finally worked.

If im gonna have to muck around in the terminal to do the most basic of tasks, I may as well use Linux so I actually have a semblance of ownership on my computer.

Everything is full of sharp edges. It's just a matter of which ones are more painful to you.

The author's inability to uninstall or fully disable AI features is one for Mac OS. Window management is a common one for people used to other systems.

Windows has many, with (again) AI features that are hard to get rid of, and attempts to coerce users to create an online account being two of the most prominent lately.

So yeah, KDE's NetworkManager frontend is a little janky sometimes, and they should fix that. Is it worse than trying to coerce the user into using services they don't want to? For some people, probably. For me, no.

Inversely, I've ran KDE on bleeding edge for three years now and have only ran into a handful of bugs, and nothing critical that required me to drop to a terminal to fix. The networking issue seems particularly specific and I have never seen this occur across any of my desktop or laptops.

> yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity

While I'm not deeply familiar with Red Hat/Fedora - I'm curious if you know what happened here? What changed to trigger this behavior?

Looking at a few search results - looks like an upgrade to 44 likely exposed/introduced a bug in power management that result in the Ethernet being turned off, and the kernel mode unloaded?

I'm guessing the intention behind the change was to enable more power saving.

But that is certainly a valid concern with most Linux distros - ocationally an improvement (higher resolution, faster, better color depth console or driver) will mess with bootloader, x/Wayland etc.

Still driver yank isn't unheard of with windows upgrades either. With MacOS I'm just going to assume any os upgrade is likely to cause some issues - even when Apple owns both the hw and os.

that's really ignoring two big points. 1. windows and macs don't "just work" either... they have their fair share of pain points that you have to accept and/or workaround. 2. linux is different than windows and is different than macos in the sense that you've spent a long time learning the quirks of windows and macos and have the fixes mostly ready. once you learn the quirks of linux it's basically the same.

After the learning curve of linux desktop(well kde) it's basically the same as macos for me and for most people that would use it. most of the computing is done in the browser and that's basically the same experience in any os.

Anecdotally: I usually run Linux on my desktop and have a windows partition only for one game I play. When I booted into Windows, it didn't see either of my two wifi cards in the system. I ran a cable across the house, updated drivers, BIOS, and eventually saw in device manager > hidden devices that the OS thinks my card is unplugged.

It was there before.

In Linux it's there.

Next step is unseat/reseat the PCI device, check connections to the motherboard, and leave powered off for a few minutes. Hopefully windows will decide the device exists.

The thing you describe with NetworkManager is worse on Windows. I am uncertain how many different user interfaces there are for networking in Windows, and many simple actions take at least 3 screens, and still doesn't fix the problem.

Every time my connected monitor wakes up from sleep it steals audio back from my internal laptop speakers, the only way to fix it is (with the help of a chatbot to write a script) to permanently turn off the monitor speakers.

All of the rough edges with Linux that are legitimately worse are not things that are the fault of Linux. Tools and games and video streaming services which are either not tested or deliberately designed so they cannot function on Linux.

Microsoft Windows is so bad that most consumers just throw away their old computers and buy new ones when Windows stops working. The more persistent ones will search through some forums for solution, or nowadays try to work through something with AI.

If you try again, be less ambitious. Don't try to get KDE or Gnome going.

Do a minimal install. Add just enough packages to get X working.

Configure a simple window manager like openbox or dwm.

I uninstall the networking managers. I wrote a simple bash menu program. In one terminal I used that to launch wpa_supplicant for the current network. In another window, I run dhcp. I have a workspace just for that.

When I stay in a hotel, I need to set up a new wpa supplicant profile, and that takes a few minutes. It's klunky. But system upgrades pass by without me noticing.

It's like running an old car with carburettors and simple electrics. You learn the machine once, there's hardly anything to go wrong.

I have used Windows for decades. Not once have I thought "I should make my own file manager."

I thought that after a few months of using Linux.

Gotta ask what hardware you are running. It makes a world of difference.

> ...most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection.

What are those correct settings? Do you need something particularly special done for your Ethernet connection to function? Given that you were there because you were troubleshooting a NetworkManager failure, I'd also wonder if NetworkManager changed in a way that made that "add interface wizard" not work correctly anymore.

> ...the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky...

As you've discovered, NetworkManager is intermittently horrifically flaky. Every time I think about how it's the default for most Linux distros, I get so angry.

I used to enthusiastically use it for everything until the maintainers released a version that would always attempt to set the interface MTU to 0 after bringing it up, which the OS would clamp to something else... 12xx or 14xx, I can't remember. [0] After that clownshow, I dropped NetworkManager forever and used the "legacy" tools that had been working reliably for ages and continue to work reliably.

In the case of wired Ethernet interfaces, all that needs to be done for pretty much every home user is to bring the interface up and start a DHCP client like 'dhcpcd'. In the case of WiFi ones, you bring the interface up and start wpa_supplicant which can be managed with something like wpa_gui. Not-coincidentally, the Linux distro I use supports using both of these with its network configuration-and-activation tooling.

[0] For those who don't know what MTU is, know that the effect of this misconfiguration is that your network communications will intermittently stop dead for no clear reason at all. Things have gotten quite a bit better since then, and you can run mixed-MTU networks if you're careful about it... but back then, this immediately launched you into flaky network purgatory.

GNOME doesn't have sharp edges

These sharp edges are a lot less annoying with agents to help solve the problem.

Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of any other hardware.

Build quality (aluminum), charging (magsafe), screen resolution, battery life, noise (or lack thereof), trackpad…

It’s like other vendors aren’t even trying.

Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates

Of course it works and is beautiful hardware and all that.

But don't fool yourself. You're subverted to Apple's rules the same as Microsoft users are to Windows.

I prefer to fight a little bit on an update on a unix system on something that is not working 100% to give up choices. When you use Windows, MacOS, Android you do not have choices. Choices are dictated from above, like it or not.

As for me every time I have to interact with something that is not BSD or Linux I suffer miserably.

> Also the OS mostly “just works”

A large portion of the HN crowd woefully underrates this aspect of macOS. The types who would get pleasure tweaking their OS and understanding it intimately are overrepresented here, though props to them.

I don't care what people say; macOS is the only OS I've ever used that has never booted to a black/blue screen with relatively cryptic error after performing an upgrade. Not once ever. Windows today is of course abusive to users and shouldn't be used, and as much as I absolutely love Linux as a server OS and for VM appliances, I get no joy whatsoever trying to figure out why the DE stopped working after letting the OS update itself or debugging subpar rendering from the Wayland compositor or X11. (Linux people still tell me this isn't a problem in 2026 but, guess what, my Ubuntu VM hit a black screen a couple days ago after upgrading with no other changes made to the installation, so they're wrong) That and so much graphical Linux software is written with the attitude of "I'm a freak who thinks context menus shouldn't exist so fuck the user and fuck anyone who tells me I'm wrong", yet so many DEs integrate these apps anyway.

The worst thing that macOS has ever overtly done to me is slightly change the look of its interface over the years, which is incredibly minor compared to all the changes that Windows, Ubuntu, Gnome, and KDE have gone through in the last decade. Does it pull lame crap like phone home? Probably, but these days I assume that just about all software thinks it knows better than I and constantly pings cloud servers. MacOS is not really unique in this regard. I will switch to my own Linux if Apple goes down the road of "use our AI or else", but for now I don't really see the venom towards macOS to be justified when it's incredibly easy to prove that the alternatives are usually very poor.

Oh yeah, and the hardware is excellent. (except for the keyboards which need TPU dam covering them or else dust kills them after a couple years)

This is really the only reason I have a MacOS system around. The M4 Air feels like what I imagined a laptop could be 15 years ago. No fans to block, can grab it and carry it around almost like a tablet, works great as a thin client into a more powerful system over Moonlight, it's light enough that I don't even think about carrying it around in my backpack even when I'm also carrying my work laptop, and it was cheap enough that if anything happens to it I won't be too concerned.

Compared to the last XPS I had, it's substantially better for my use case, since I'll generally be remoting into systems anyway.

You have an interesting definition of "bricked"

That's defined as "the device has become a brick, cannot be recovered". It was mostly popularized by broken firmware updates which effectively destroyed the device, as it could no longer be salvaged.

You calling a borked package install in userspace almost bricked is telling about your technical capability.

And I agree that people that are basically technologically illiterate should not use Linux.

They could if someone administers it for them, but if nobody can help them - it's just not the right choice.

> Also the OS mostly “just works”

Apparently it doesn't judging by the tons of articles published after every macOS update.

> just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates

And I am on a run of 11 years of update (since Fedora 25 or 26) without a single issue. Anecdotal evidences are just that. Anecdotal. Some people will have issues, others won't. Putting yourself in a situation where you have less risk of having issues like not using hardware from a company whose drivers are not maintained in the mainline kernel source tree goes a long way.

> “just works”

if you use distros which ship the latest _stable_ release of software

and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up

but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues, something I haven't exactly had with either Windows or Mac

like my current gaming setup from a year ago(roughly) was setup once, I had to fiddle some minor tweaks during setup and since then it "just works tm". No issues, not know how needed, nothing. (At least for the Games I play.) But also not Nvidea which has in recent years increasingly more QA issues across _all_ OSes and _all_ hardware including their supper expensive AI cards... But that is more a Nvidea then a Linux Problem, by now, was different in the past.

I have to agree, unfortunately. Macbooks have their issues, and give me violent tendencies like any piece of hardware every now and then, but when it comes to UX and reliability, they are far, far ahead of anything I tried, and I tried a lot of hardware.

And soldered RAM and SSD, even battery replacement that with other computer is simple is a difficult task. Only USB-C ports, so you have always to carry a stupid adapter for normal things like connecting a USB stick or a network cable. ARM architecture so old software needs emulation to run, emulation that makes computer performance horrible.

Sure, Linux laptops are not "pretty", but I don't need a computer to be pretty, in fact I hope that someone starts to produce again laptops identical to old IBM thinkpads (not the insult to the brand that Lenovo is building) but with modern hardware, a computer that had every port you need on it, no adapter required, that you could have it fall from a ladder and not break, with removable battery, hard drive, with the trackpoint instead of those stupid trackpads, I want it even with a DVD burner fuck it. I don't care it to be small, I care it to be functional.

Not to mention that once you're in this ecosystem, it's usually pretty reliable.

It seems that no other device makers are seeing the value in Apple's many-devices-acting-as-one approach. It makes for some serious vendor lock.

Also don't forget calibrated screens, great speakers, long-life (you can use one for a 7-8 years without even trying), and durable keyboards which doesn't become smeared wear-fests which defaces itself within a single heavy development session.

I always run Linux (Debian primarily) on my desktops and servers with a zealot-ish dedication, but what Mac and macOS brings to the table as a portable machine is irreplaceable with anything else.

Even a top end ThinkPad with a well groomed Linux distribution can't come close, sorry.

Mac build quality is nice indeed. And Nvidia sometimes doesn't play along, but that is a small price to pay for an everyday peace of mind.

My both parents use linux and are happy with it. If you mostly use just the browser and reading e-mails, I don't see any better system even for someone who is non-technical.

We're 30+ years into trackpads on laptops and they're still terrible on Windows machines. Make it make sense.

Every time one of these threads comes up, the replies have the form “you’re not doing x right, or Linux would be fine.”

X is usually “pick hardware with good support in ToT kernel” or “use distribution Y” (where Y is somehow different in every post) or “do you really need feature Z that’s better on Mac? You’re making the wrong trade.”

To each their own but I’d rather not deal with XYZ and just get the thing that works.

p.s. I do hope they put a toggle back for Siri and their on device AI stuff

I might be biased toward ThinkPads, but the only thing I envy about MacBooks is the processor and battery life.

I prefer the X1 Carbon’s body a thousand times over Apple’s unibody design, which I find cold and uncomfortable, and it tends to dig into my wrists.

And I’d take a TrackPoint over Apple’s trackpad a million times over.

Of course, that’s just my personal preference.

I rent a Linux GPU server for AI projects and the NVIDIA driver has broken four times without me doing anything to break it. Nothing like that happens on my Mac. I've run Linux for projects for well over a decade, so not a n00b issue.

> just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU

The ancient wisdom of "never nvidia" when using Linux/BSD continues to ring true into the future.

Back in the day I was doing tech support when OS X was the latest, and this was 100% relevant:

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

ngl Mac users are to computers as Tesla drivers are to cars, they buy them because they don't want to learn anything.

They’re not light years ahead anymore, this is an old assumption.

There are some incredibly good PC laptops out there with the same kinds of features of MacBook Pros and more: long battery life, haptic trackpad, aluminum CNC build, long sleep battery life, etc. Check out Intel core series 3.

I’m a very happy with my Framework 13 Pro.

Agree unfortunately. I hate apple, for the same reasons as everyone else, but I have both a MacBook and iPhone and can’t do much about it. It’s like politics a little, you can only choose the least bad, there is no good.

I have a Linux server, and use cloud Linux machines extensively, but at least the last time I checked, Linux desktop sucks. There are always memory management issues, doing a video call makes my fan sound like a jet taking off, not sleeping, put my laptop in my bag and it gets to hot to touch - that’s just off the top of my head, I’ve tried Linux laptops on multiple occasions and they suck.

I used a macbook for work and the thing would constantly throw me popups, changing any setting was a nightmare, installing software required either a subscription or adding an aftermarket package manager, and the browser would inexplicably leave a frozen, uninteractable duplicate browser window anytime I fullscreened a google meet, which would persist regardless of trying to kill the process and sometimes even helpfully came back after a reboot (though rebooting did generally work)

This "just works" thing is propaganda. Computers never ever do that

> Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates

I pulled the same update, and it was annoying but it came nowhere near bricking itself. The integrated graphics worked, it just disabled the Nvidia open-source driver for the GPU. Simply (re)installing it fixed it. Notably, just asking ChatGPT for the solution worked (after pasting the output of a few commands).

This actually just happened to me... How did you fix it? I just finished proving that my issue isn't my peripherals or cords so it must be the GPU

Tbh I don't think my MacBook air m2 is better than my Asus Vivobook (arm64). They're different (Vivobook is bigger) - but I'd say the OLED screen is much better than the M2 screen.

The apple touchpad is better - but all touchpads suck. Still miss old school IBM ThinkPad stick.

> Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of any other hardware.

> Build quality (aluminum)

This is such an ignorant take. Every other laptop has an Aluminum shell. Dell, HP, you name it. My Sony Vaio came with a metallic shell in the early 2000s. As a Macbook owner, I am still extremely worried about coffee spilling on my keyboard. A problem that was solved decades ago by every other manufacturer but not Apple. My touchID randomly stopped working in under 2 years of owning my laptop too and the hardware needs replacement of the entire logic board. So, tell me again, where is this "build quality" that you speak of?

I'm not sure the hardware is worth the price.

As for the OS, everytime I tried MacOS, I find rapidly major showstoppers. It's like people are just blind to them.

If I'd qualify each platform, I'd say Windows is a toy, Mac is a piece of art, Linux is a tool. I picked my category.

At work we can choose between Apple laptops or Thinkpads, I choose thinkpads, using Windows and WSL.

Previously either VMware Workstation or Virtual Box.

Also I am not speaking from a position of no experience, as some projects require being assigned Mac Books, that I gladly return after delivery.

I find the "Just Works" part of MacOS to be disingenuous. I use old hardware. You could call me a pack rat but I dislike getting rid of old, working technology. Unless you're on the bleeding edge of Apple technology. MacOS in particular doesn't "just work" anymore. In fact it's downright hostile to doing mundane things.

I have an old Macbook Air that's no longer supported by the latest MacOS. Trying to do anything on it is like pulling teeth. The simple act of running a modernish web browser is a horrible experience of "This App is no longer supported".

On Windows a laptop from the mid 2000's is still entirely usable albeit a bit slow. Not so with MacOS. You 100% cannot run a single piece of modern software. You have to dig around for forks that specifically support older versions of MacOS and if you want to run a browser with Plugins, good eff'n luck! Now you're trying to find a fork of Chromium that supports Adblock, but also have to find and old version of Adblock which isn't hip to all the new invasive ad technology.

MacOS is not for poors it appears.

This has changed recently

For example this dell is superb, has tandem oled with 200% scaling and runs linux (dhh runs this on onarchy)

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptop-computers/spd/xps14da...

Thats why i love my Framework 13 pro - amaziong build quality and linux support out of the box. Havent touched my M2 macbook in several weeks.

Windows on laptops also just works, especially for high end ones. It’s the Linux on laptops that’s hit or miss.

Undeniable light years ahead in being overpriced & hardest to repair or upgrade.

I thought other vendors just can't cause it's all patented

Do regular people care about these things or is this a hn thing?

I find a trackpad (even a Mac one) is absolutely infuriating to use compared to a decent mouse.

Battery life/screens/magsafe I'm plugged into a dock 99% of the time so it's irrelevant, but when forced to occasionally, the ergonomics of looking down at a single small 1x in screen is just terrible if doing it for hours and also makes my back feel horrible.

Aluminium is not build quality. It makes lying stuff inside cheap. And feels horrible on skin contact.

The good ThinkPads with Magnesium feel much better (both for hand and lap) and are lighter. And the expensive and complicated build allows maintenance (replacing a keyboard is a bless on the X13). Lenovo is just stupid and also allows to purchase low quality screens, low quality frames and even a Windows. A thing that Apple never allows, you cannot purchase a bad configuration.

The MBAs at Apple figured out much earlier, that a rigid metal frame is cheap and gives the impression of quality.

Aside from that?

Customers are guilty, wanting a shiny and quick solution. And governments and companies by following ultra rigid and outright stupid purchasing guide (ISO craziness and “we can drop Windows, we invested another 300.000 in a Windows only Application).

> Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of [hardware that runs Linux]

There was a discussion on this forum just a few days ago wondering why Apple is so hostile to open source support on its devices. And consensus here was that, no, it clearly wasn't due to competetive pressure.

But clearly it is. Because to many consumers, if you have to run MacOS to get an M6, you'll run MacOS instead of Linux. And that makes enshittifying MacOS as a revenue center very tempting.

> Also the OS mostly “just works”

Article is literally about the OS not working as desired, though.

Macs are for people who think they know how to computer but actually don't know anything at all.

>Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of any other hardware

Can Mac laptops run QubesOS?

They're also incredibly heavy.. and their trackpads are terrible.

I'm in the same boat; been using linux for the last 15 years. Had to get a mac for work this year due to their logging software not being available on linux.

The laptop quality is great; great sound, battery lasts forever compared to mine (framework). Userspace tools and UI is terrible and have no control over but the hardware and the software integration is top notch. (I live in the terminal, and have nix-darwin to bring my existing setup to mac so it's not jarring most of the time)

Won't look back when I can transition back to linux full time; I'll be so happy. But I can see why people go with apple products. I really hope that ARM laptops become a regular thing.

I really hope arm laptops get full linux support as promised - but never delivered:

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/jan-2025-state-of-linu...

> ... but more and more I wonder how much are people willing to put up with such practices.

Apple has rabid fans, they will absolutely put up with this and tell you you're wrong for not wanting to.

i enjoy watching the battles of rabid linux fans vs. rabid apple fans. plenty of entertainment in threads like this.

for some odd reason though, there's not many rabid windows fans.

> On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads.

I've been using Linux since the a.out days and MacOS X since the PowerPC days, and I find MacOS less of an ordeal for day-to-day tasks as my terminal/workstation. I sysadmin Linux (and previously also Solaris and IRIX) servers for a living. It's been several years since I had to daily drive a Windows machine (though I've heard PowerShell and WSL2 are pretty good).

I'm not sure what "ordeal" you are referring to. I'm mostly in Terminals SSHing places, so perhaps my work use cases are not 'advanced' enough to bump into them? (I also use macOS for my personal systems.)

Ubuntu have had a go at devaluing their distro with ads too (a couple of times to my recollection). It would be interesting to see if they got any increase in revenue from it.

Firefox added ads to the browser homepage - maybe now the money-grabbing lawyer who was in charge finished vampirically squeezing it for every cent they could make, perhaps we'll move past that nonsense.

> And ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased.

I’ve used Apple for my daily driver for years and I could not figure out what this was referring to. What ads? The only thing I can think of is if you open the App Store app and see a promo image for some apps to check out?

See the other HN story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49801939

Yeah linux is awesome! … But for me personally after spelunking distros… getting past the immense learning curve… again and again and again… settling , tweaking with stability, getting past foundational philosophical approaches, tweaking some more… and some more and some more… Finally getting somewhere and then… only then after starting to get to a place where i’m feeling some semblance of holy shit this is gonna work!?! Only to sit down and discover that Copy/Paste is this fucking dramatic cluster fuck… that yeah I could go through and I’m sure people have work arounds and it could arguably be solvable… or maybe I just need to get over my muscle memory yeah i’m the problem… Or… I can just build a hackintosh… and would you look at that, even a janky hack that came together in literally two hours just fucking works…and I didnt have to spend six month of my life for it, and omg I can copy and paste across every application with the same key binding that I never had to tweak…

So yeah, I love linux but fucking shit if it aint ridiculous on some pretty fundamental issues that (looking at my watch) were solved forty years ago!

Because the Linux kernel is only usable for regular Joe and Janes, when hidden away underneath a Java based userspace (Android), a Web based userspace (ChromeOS and WebOS), or hidden in consumer electronics firmware (DVD and Bluray players, washing machines, ...)

Regular Joe and Jane, don't care about UNIX experience, want a ready to use computer they can buy down at the local PC store on the shopping mall, being able to share stuff with the neighbours, which also don't have any clue over technology, and so on.

Also when it breaks down, and they don't have a nephew to call in to repair their computer, it should be easily repaired at the same PC store, which usually has employees that only care about Windows or macOS, and do the bare minimum to revive the system, while charging a good deal per hour.

Ah, and for all the mess Apple and Microsoft pull with their desktop programming frameworks, I lost count what is now the full stack framework for doing desktop applications on GNOME, KDE, XFCE, or whatever happens to be the distribution that was taken out of Distrowatch.

Maybe if *nix devs and community actually prioritized putting together cohesive and consistenr systems with usability as a priority these garbage OSes wouldn’t have a market.

Unfortunately, there is too much friction for the average person who just wants to get things done instead of tinker for every specific use case they have.

Thus, it’s just less painful to put up with the hostile ads and spying.

I don't think you're allowed to say that

Linux is permanently hard and unfinished, and no amount of reality will dissuade anyone from this prior belief.

Linux distros would never do something as egregious as, let's say, unturnoffable app updates, would they?

By way of example, Debian has a stable branch which receives only security fixes, and even then, only if you run the update scripts. It will receive security updates for 5 years, and after that, will still be completely usable, provided you don't want new versions of software, or are willing to put in the work to compile them yourself.

Depends on the distro really. Linux (the kernel) doesn't have or require such a concept, but it's quite possible to build a linux-based system whose surrounding operating system is designed to work this way. My Meta Quest 3 is one such example. Linux kernel, but Horizon OS only allows updates to be postponed. It'll automatically install them and in one case soft-bricked itself, forcing me to recover manually. (Great job, Meta.)

This flexibility makes it difficult to make broad sweeping statements about the thing. Certainly however, it's impressive to log into a linux server and see an uptime measured in years. (Impressively horrifying, depending on your security posture, but impressive nonetheless.)

macOS has been on a downward trend since Apple started pushing "Services", basically iCloud. Now it's as bad as Windows when I last used Windows.

It's not just privacy violations. Those are the tip of the iceberg. I used to open the Activity Monitor and see a couple pages of processes. Now it's in the hundreds.

It's stuff that was badly done even before AI. The industry has been drunk on SaaS for way too long, and with SaaS comes the junk/slop and the privacy violations.

I've been doing my part and cancelling all my subscriptions apart from power, water, internet and garbage.

I won't disagree that MacOS has been getting worse, but Windows is even worse than you remember it. It's clearly a race to the bottom, but Windows 11 is full of ads, and you can't even search the Start menu for your installed programs anymore. MacOS hasn't gotten that bad yet, as frustrating as the new "Apps" menu is.

I switched my desktop to Ubuntu about a year ago, and while it's not 100% free of trouble, I still can't imagine running Windows 11 again. My MBP still runs MacOS and I haven't been pushed far enough to want to try installing a Linux distro on it.

I don’t like Apple’s services push either, nor do I like the ads that have worked their way into the App Store, News, and Maps.

That said, I recently bought a Windows laptop (which was wiped to run Linux day 1). Before I installed Linux I had one task I needed Windows for. To create a local account and not connect it to the internet, I had to lookup a keyboard shortcut to show a terminal, lookup a command to run the setup in a different mode for IT departments, then run through setup again to make my local account. Once in the OS, because I wasn’t on the network, 90% of the start menu was full of placeholder icons that needed the internet to download the actual icon… presumably a bunch of cloud services (ads). Then there were basics, like trackpad performance… it was unusable, I had to get a mouse to move around without pain. Once Linux was installed, the trackpad worked great, maybe even better than macOS, it’s close, just a matter of preference.

Compare that to macOS, which still lets you make a local account without jumping through hoops, runs fine without iCloud, and has all local apps that won’t leave you with a bunch of placeholders. The basic hardware, like the trackpad, also works well out of the box.

macOS and Apple aren’t perfect, but are still miles ahead of Windows, imo.

Linux isn’t perfect either. Initial hardware support was very hit and miss depending on the distro. Things I’d consider basic functionality required plugins that I had to hunt for. Other annoying out-of-the-box defaults required plugins + custom scripts to resolve. All of this can be very frustrating. Most people don’t want to tinker this much.

No system is perfect, it’s just a question of which tradeoffs a person is willing to make.

Every major release needs a "feature"… and that gesture-shit that iOS has been constantly rolling out often ends up creeping into MacOS as well.

Mission Control? Launch Pad? App Exposé? Spaces?

Features that I don't want but take over my machine if I accidentally use the track pad wrong.

I'd love to see MacOS cull that crap from decades of feature creep.

As a Mac user and in general an Apple user, it's up to the balance between how much are you willing to take as a user from a bullshit perspective and the things you find good and useful from the device. Unfortunately, even for Apple devices, the balance is starting to shift towards the bad side. The problem is that there is no real alternative. For a laptop/pc, you might say whatever Linux distro, but let's be honest, for the general population there is no real alternative.

There's a huge amount of people who need nothing but, basically, a chromebook. A Linux laptop works great for that.

My wife gave up her Dell Windows laptop because the performance was terrible. I installed kubuntu and started using it, and then she immediately reclaimed it because all she ever needs is a browser and Linux vastly improved the performance. ("Well, it is my laptop...") She knows nothing about Linux, and the only Linux-specific question she ever had was how to recover when it sometimes doesn't wake up from sleep. Overall, much less frustration than Windows.

Microsoft Office. That’s the last reason.

I was using Windows on my personal-but-for-work laptop; it got to the point where I hated it too much so tried Linux. Most stuff was great (even Teams was 90% fine!) but I couldn’t function professionally without installed versions of Office, and I couldn’t find an acceptable workaround.

I then switched back to MacOS and am mostly happy hanging on to Sequoia… but I’m dreading the point at which (for some reason) Apple make it unavoidable to upgrade.

Then… Windows 11 LTSC?

IIRC in Linux you can run the windows version of office via wine or one of the successor/forks. Not sure if AD integration works nicely. And maybe it is just a group policy that somehow blocks it. But running the software should be possible these days.

> I then switched back to MacOS and am mostly happy hanging on to Sequoia… but I’m dreading the point at which (for some reason) Apple make it unavoidable to upgrade.

MacOS 27 is a lot less shit than 26, thankfully. I upgraded from 15 to 27 directly (on a M-series Mac).

I've been a Linux and BSD user for nearly 20 years, and you will take them from my cold, dead hands, but sometimes Linux is just not an option.

Most people are not like you and don’t care about this. They just want something that works.

I was going to add the same sentiment with the addendum that normal people seem to find AI really useful, and long for Siri to be a more useful companion. Apple makes a compelling argument of an agent with frontier level smarts, access to your Apple stuff like iMessage, Reminder and Mail, and privacy (which I'm not here to debate how they're handling). Normal people like it, and Siri getting better is an advantage.

> everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal

I use a Mac at work and iPad Pro at home. Never once have I considered either usage “an ordeal.”

Do I just have a really high threshold for frustration or do you have a desire to complain?

Everybody now knows M$ or Google are evil. The weird part is that Apple still seems to escape the same judgement. But they're no different. They're exactly like all the others.

They seem quite distinct to me. Microsoft is focussed on selling to corporations and OEM’s. Google is selling people’s attention to advertisers. Apple is selling premium hardware directly to consumers.

There is some overlap but it isn’t much.

I just started getting ads in chats with ChatGPT... Insane.

I bought my laptop in 2021. macOS was pretty good then and the hardware was spectacular.

My next laptop will not be a Mac, I'll be going back to Linux for sure.

I originally read the domain name as D-Bus Hell. Fitting for a rant solved by switching to Linux, but Linux remains difficult to use.

Removing ads from Windows is still much easier than making sure Linux works on a machine that is not Linux-certified (which, for me, is usually the case, as I have particular hardware preferences), and getting software I need to work. I've used Linux for work for a long time, but I'm still sticking to Windows at home. All else being equal I would greatly prefer Linux, but with the current gap (for my purposes) convenience still trumps ideology.

Well the example given in the article, for example, will not be noticed by just about anyone, and most of those that do notice don't care. Myself included - I already use iCloud, some extra analytics aren't going to kill me. Maybe one day we'll switch away, but I'm doing a lot less tech support now that the whole household is on Apple.

I'm a lunix engineer, probably 25+ years of lunix now (I started on bsd, thats why I say lunix), I've worked on macbook pros for the last 15 years. I had to reinstall macos for the FIRST TIME ever this year because their current version Tahoe is absolute trash that slowed down my M1 Max so my much I finally gave up and wiped it.

I also won't go near an x86 processor ever again after using the mX/arm procs.

We're paying for the hardware. The 100x better screens, speakers, battery life, the apps on macos blow linux apps away even if all of them, even the most simple apps, cost $20+.

But with that said Apple has also priced me out of buying another MBP for a long time with how expensive their 64gb+ versions are. My m1 max was $3500 and I can't believe I paid that, but here I am 7 years later still using it and it cranks. I'd have replaced 3 x86 laptops by now.

Oh, and I had the entire laptop replaced for $99 when its battery got bad and the screen cracked last year thanks to applecare, though that did require me paying for applecare at $99/yr each year. But that still doenst add up to another $3500 laptop. I just drove to the apple store dropped it off and picked it up a week later.

Personally, I love their hardware and I’m rarely inconvenienced.

We’re in a bubble.

Yes, an anti-AI mood had entered the mainstream (anti-data center in particular), but I don’t think people will connect this to that.

For most people, this Apple Intelligence change isn’t a ‘really hostile’ move. They keep the default settings. They have disk space, because most people don’t use terabytes of space, and Macs come with, historically speaking, tons of storage now.

They will upgrade, and if they notice at all, it will be because ‘Siri works way better now’ (and all people who use Siri, whether here or in the general population, complained about Siri not understanding anything complex and seemingly not knowing anything much of anything before). This is probably, on the whole, going to be good for Apple’s reputation.

> They have disk space, because most people don’t use terabytes of space, and Macs come with, historically speaking, tons of storage now.

A Mac mini base model comes with 256G. It is manageable but barely unless used with an external disk.

22.8G as quoted in the article is about 10% of the available space and it is something that cannot be offloaded to external disk.

Many people including myself are going to be furious when their Mac is upgraded.

Windows caused me similar dismay when I was forced to use it at work (2022-25), but macOS - while far from perfect - has been more than fine for my purposes for the last 20 years. I like linux and can choose to use it on my superior apple hardware. Not a fanboi, just a pragmatist.

Ads in macOS? Never once saw one.

It’s the standard enshittification playbook. Get a large market share with a good product, then you can safely degrade it since your users are too reliant on the ecosystem to conveniently switch.

When I'm at home I can afford to waste an hour to debug audio which inexplicably stopped working (LLMs help with it a lot). When I take a laptop with me somewhere, I probably can't afford that, hence a macbook.

Yes, the slow enshittification and the increasingly obnoxious push for services and recurring revenue on MacOS is worrying, but it's also extremely reliable in a way that Linux simply isn't. I love Fedora KDE for freeing me from Microsoft, but there's a new issue every month - usually minor, but sometimes not. As of last month I had to restart plasma-shell multiple times a day because the desktop window would become non-responsive when CPU was under heavy load.

Helps that macbooks have excellent hardware and battery life, too. I just wish users weren't increasingly treated like cattle to be milked.

This is why I sold my macbook and switched back to Linux. I don't want your stupid cloud/ai services. If I want to rm -rf / then the system better do that.

This comes from an ardent Apple/macOS/iOS hater. Yes, I know I am using a very strong word. The short version is: when it comes to laptop hardware w.r.t price nothing comes even remotely close. Like, literally none.

Price as well? Yes. When I bought my first MacBook Air in ~2011-12 I was shocked to see what I got for ~57K INR (no, I am not converting it to USD) I would not have gotten from any other OEM even for fricking 120-130K INR (I had the choice here to instead say 1.2-1.3L :D). And that hasn't changed more or less.

But their OSs are pathetic, their software (even other than the OS part) are downright disgusting. But they sort of have a great personal computing hardware monopoly. Because no one else bothers to make it. For whatever reason.

They make it increasingly hard to make Linux on this. Really really hard.

What else sucks? Repair and repair cost. You are literally using a costly (bank-broken-level) repair affair ticking time-bomb in your backpacks - there is no two way about it.

And people who are going to say, like every time, "but how many times has your Apple device broken down", or even "but why won't you buy a new one after 3-4 years", or something even more stupid like "wait.. so your AirPod stopped working after 3 years.. you wanted it to last for 30 years?", please go and put the head back into the warm sand where it safely was. Anyone saying, "but they give you repair kits", please f-- off!

tl;dr: it's not the right way to buy personal computing hardware, but the the closest right way is a decade behind or at best many years.

if you are happy on Linux, why do you even "try to use a mac or win"?

When those unfortunate ones need my help. Or when teaching kids in school.

my work offers win or mac only.

I can't speak for OP but there can be many reasons. For example, I'm using a Macbook Air for development purposes, it's essentially dumb compilation/notarization machine. I don't use it for anything else because I find the user interface infuriating and can't get around it (which is weird because I used to be a Mac developer but IMHO the UI has gotten much less practical).

Fanboys, including management, push macs down our throats and there's little you can do when apple fanboys are also decision makers, since they don't listen to reason.

Author claims the system setting "Privacy & Security > Apple Intelligence Report > Report Duration" with its 3 options [Off | 15 minutes | 7 days] sends that data to Apple with that frequency. This is wrong - this is a transparency report so that you as a user can see everything that is getting sent to Apple as a part of Apple Intelligence. Nothing additionally is getting sent to apple if you switch this away from "Off".

It's placed right next to a similar report for the user to see which apps generally connect to the internet and to which domains.

Basically, the main point of the article, "I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data" is not true.

The main point of the article is not the report duration toggle, it was the whole activation of Siri and Apple Intelligence.

The author turned it off in a previous version, and as they updated their OS it got turned on again (the "Apple said yes" part of the title)

Worth noting that this “report” can only be viewed through a json data export file, which the average Apple user has no idea how to interpret.

It is designed to not be user-friendly.

> Nothing additionally is getting sent to apple if you switch this away from "Off".

Another way of saying this is “personal data is still being sent to Apple if you switch this to off.”

Alas for Apple in this era of AI dumping that file into a chatbot will give you a fully interactive experience to go through the data.

IF this is true apple has done a horrible job at explaining what this is.

that's not the main point of the article

that's not even the topic of the article

that refers to a post from 2025 that he links to. this is clear from the first sentence of the article. I suspect maybe you didn't actually read the article and spent more time writing this erroneous comment than you might have reading the article.

This is literally the main point of the article: "The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025, I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off."

Disappointing that we have multiple 10-deep reply chains pearl-clutching Apple's disrespect for the user, and no one actually bothered to verify the premise of the article. They just want to be mad.

The problem is, where's the checkbox labeled "keep your 22 Gb of local models off my 256 Gb drive and keep your assistants off my battery" ?

Apple made the thing compulsory so we're not giving them the benefit of the doubt because they don't deserve it.

Welcome to every Apple discussion for the last 25 years.

You ever notice how Apple never really lets the user say "no" to their nudges?

It's always "maybe later" and never "no seriously, I don't want this, go away"

I don't have a solution, but on this topic I let Fable write a browser extension I called "Nee, krijg de tering". It's "No, fuck off" in English, but the Dutch feels more visceral for me. It's really rough, but it tries to find these "Maybe later", "No, thank you" etc. buttons and replace the No button.. I guess it's kind of self-explanatory. Does not really do anything, but it is cathartic (and also messes with a lot of UIs to the point where unfortunately the blocklist of domains this should not be used on is growing a lot :'( ).

I feel this pattern is really abusive. Like I am offering to slap you in the face, giving you two answer options: Yes and "Maybe later/no, thank you". As though you have any obligation to be forced to answer this question again at some late time, or to be very polite while you refuse to be slapped in the face. The correct answer is obviously "No, fuck off".

Sensible. Add in a 'Nee, flikker op met je kutcookies' button for cookie consent banners, and you're golden.

This 'maybe later' dark pattern seems to have gained so much traction that UX folk just use it because everyone uses it. There is probably some handwavy reason for it that amounts to not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive, but it just ends up being another grain of sand on the micro-annoyance pile of today's tech.

(lit. "No, get the tuberculosis".)

I don’t speak Dutch but I agree. The Dutch version sounds way better.

I’ve noticed that most companies do that, not just Apple.

Apple claims to be the privacy king. They deserve scrutiny.

Microsoft pioneer it with "ask again in 30 minutes". Or maybe someone else, can't tell for sure who was the original bastard.

Or the EU with their online chat control. First round they couldn’t get a majority. Then, they sneakily turned it around so people had to vote to NOT want it. The day they did the second vote, many were on holiday and thus it passed.

Apples sets the example.

a bad example from apple becomes the status quo for other companies.

Most companies did that before Apple, yes. I hate that trend.

I have this one notification asking me if I want to enable the Personal focus when I’m at home. I don’t want my iPhone to care if I’m at home or not, so the past two years whenever it pops up I click Later.

It will probably never stop asking.

It will. Once you accidentally mis-click once and then suddeny there is no way to back out of it.

Not sure about the focus pop up but most/all of Apple’s other nags (like set up Siri, try Apple Music and the like) go away permanently if you go to the settings app and click “later” from there (as opposed to the button in the pop up which has the exact same label).

Google Play Store has a notification to enable notifications. You didn't read that wrong. It shows a badge and everything. I said no for years except that last time. Now I can't find how to turn it off again.

You can delete the Personal focus.

> It's always "maybe later" and never "no seriously, I don't want this, go away"

No? When I'm asked about Apple Pay on an iPhone, it says "Maybe later". In the Settings it has reminder, and if I go in and say "No" it never pops up ever again (maybe on a iOS major version upgrade?).

Generally with Apple it's one "Maybe later" with a reminder flag set someplace, and then that's it.

It's slowly getting worse. For instance, the update nag for Pages and Numbers Applications towards their newer subscription-capable equivalents can't be disabled in the MacOS UI. Selecting "Not Now" still results in the nag appearing every. single. day.

The frog is being slowly boiled.

This hostile behavior has unfortunately grown over the years. Notice how often you cannot really unsubscribe from newsletters, because clicking the small link in the email will only unsubscribe you from 1 of 25 "topics" or whatever and they will gladly re-define the "topics" every 6 months and re-enable them all.

i see this virtually everywhere, and worked at several places where PMs proactively changed text banners to not equate to "no"

severe industry brainrot

I want this on the macOS Settings badge.

Have no intention to upgrade my Intel Mac Pro to Tahoe, so Settings is going to permanently have the "something needs attention" badge I guess.

Many people have a hard time understanding consent.

Jesus Herbert Christo. Literally, not figuratively, literally, as I was reading your comment I got the "iCloud Storage is Full" upsell nag that I have tried to disable a hundred times. I stopped to asked my Lord and Savior Claude to help this time around:

> What I found on your Mac

> Apple Intelligence is ON. com.apple.CloudSubscriptionFeatures.optIn → [REDACTED] = 1 — that number is your Apple Account DSID. ~2.5 GB of models in /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_*, with generativeexperiencesd, intelligenceplatformd, modelmanagerd, TGOnDeviceInferenceProviderService and a Messages Assistant Extension all resident.

> The nag is pure upsell. Every iCloud service that notification names is already off on this Mac — your account has only KEYCHAIN_SYNC and FIND_MY_MAC enabled. Photos, Mail, Backup, Drive: all off. It's nagging you about your other devices' storage. Source is the com.apple.appleaccount.notifications bundle, fed by followupd and com.apple.CloudSubscriptionFeatures.followup.engagement.

> "I said no and Apple said yes" is literally happening. Siri shows Assistant Enabled = 0, yet ten Siri daemons are running. Share Mac Analytics is off (AutoSubmit = 0) — and SubmitDiagInfo still logged LastFullSubmissionSuccess today at 12:36 UTC.

This is absolutely bananas.

Apple has an allergy to fragmentation that can be both admirable and annoying at the same time. As a developer it can be really nice to know that your audience all has access to the same feature set. As a user it can be annoying to be subjected to Apples feature upgrade treadmill.

They have a "rapist mentality" like all the other large tech companies.

And Sync Immediately's only affirmative option is "For Today", so I get to set a daily reminder to remind the setting that I do in fact want it to be ON.

Techbros just can't grasp that "No" doesn't mean "Later." It's not exclusive to Apple by any means. Android update incoming? Your choices are "yes" or "later."

If you can't disable it, it's not a feature.

Microsoft and Google are the same.

I get the annoyance at "ask me again later", but "maybe later" or "not now" is helpful - there's no way to trigger dialogs by yourself, so this is a promise that even if you say "no" in the dialog, you can still go into settings to change your mind. Gives me less anxiety about the choice.

If you want to own your computer, linux is where it's at. Windows is rusty iron chains and MacOS's are gold-plated silver pretending to be gold, but they're still chains.

I would love to move my gaming PC to Linux but until the kernel devs permit kernel-level anti-cheats, or an equivalent, I refuse to give up games that I love. It's nearly impossible to play multiplayer games now without KLAC. The cheating is out of control.

Unfortunately this is an ideological hill that many Linux devs are willing to die on, so we're at an impasse. Valve claimed to be working on a solution, and if there is any company which can negotiate an accord, it's them.

It's very fortunate that Linux devs do not tolerate this DRM crap. What you are asking for is to turn Linux into another Windows, at which point there is not point.

If you're not willing to stop using harmful software that's your problem.

And let's not forget that cheating in online games is only an issue because companies have co-opted what was a social activity between people you know (or at least can get to know) into a more profitable asocial e-peen measuring contest between randoms.

I recently started playing a game that installed "anti-cheat" software that has done absolutely nothing to stop the amount of cheating in the game but it has made my Debian desktop unstable with random gnome and application crashes caused by their poor software. I never had crashes until that garbage got installed. It works exceptionally hard at preventing me from streaming my games I used to not have an issue with

kernel level invasive garbage would be beyond destructive and still not solve the problem

> The cheating is out of control.

There are hardware cheats that are not detectable by KLAC, so it doesn't solve the problem, just improves the situation.

The only way to avoid cheaters is to play with people you trust.

What you can not give up owns you.

If you are fine with that, fine.

If this post bothers you and you feel the need to defend yourself against it or something, realize I'm not the one making it true. Nothing you say to me can change this.

It's worth having a look at https://areweanticheatyet.com/. I found that the most of the games I play which use anti cheat work on Linux. It's also not hard to dual-boot windows as a backup, though I haven't had a use for my windows partition yet.

> I refuse to give up games that I love

But why? They're just video games. Why are they important, especially when a lot of them are designed to be addictive.

A lot of people love smoking but that's not important either and it's better to give it up.

KLAC isn’t the problem so much as lazy or shitty devs refusing to put in the work to support Linux as a platform. They’ll literally have game logic run in encrypted VMs on other platforms but then refuse to do the same on Linux with superior hypervisors like KVM and bhyve. Some developers have explicitly removed EAC support on Linux from their games, despite no open issues with it. Others demand someone else write the APIs needed for their invasive rootkits to run, ignoring that Linux is very much a community effort and that if one will write and publish it, others will use it.

I will 100% give Linux evangelists the guff they deserve on shitty UX in GUIs and their insistence upon a dozen slightly-tweaked solutions to the same core problem that prevents the industry from consolidating into widescale popularity on endpoints, but the incompetence and/or laziness of major devs to support even something like Debian is not a failing of Linux.

I want to clarify to anyone reading this that this only effects high-competitive games, like LoL, Valorant, PUBG, R6S; and not all of them (e.g. Counter Strike).

It does not affect "multiplayer" in general, to the contrary, most multiplayer games are not affected (coop games, MMOs, RTS).

  | It's nearly impossible to play multiplayer games now without KLAC. The cheating is out of control.

Ofc, cheating is also present with KLAC, its just the next level of the cat and mouse game (Driver exploits, DMA access via PCIe, Network Packet analysis, ...)

  | Unfortunately this is an ideological hill that many Linux devs are willing to die on

Nonsense. 1. Almost no anticheat is implemented on Linux in the first place. Most "working" anti-cheat solutions for Linux are just a #if Linux doNothing(); #else ... 2. KLAC requires SecureBoot/ChainOfTrust + closed source code running with highest privileges. This does not make sense for any PC, but I dont see why it would be harder to do on Linux than on Windows, Linux just has a smaller install base in general and a lower acceptance rate for KLAC, therefore its not worth it to implement.

It's your choice, but I refuse to play games that come with a rootkit. I would rather have cheating than compromise my security.

> Unfortunately this is an ideological hill that many Linux devs are willing to die on, so we're at an impasse.

This is no longer the reason, as FLOSS implementation exists now: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20909

It will be an impasse until (or unless) the Linux user base grow big enough that the gaming companies start to prioritize better solutions.

For me, it is no problem at all since the games I play have no issues. That includes the multiplayer games I play.

Are there any games in particular or is this a blanket statement? I've switched and not missed anything. I stopped playing Fortnite, but it's not a very good game anyway. The gaming world is huge with plenty of variety.

There's nothing kernel developers can do to "not permit" kernel-level anti-cheat, anyone can build an anti-cheat kernel module (as long as you honor the GPL licensing requirements naturally).

And chains of Linux have links that break when you update them, or sometimes they just aren't compatible with random metals: "galvanized chains are planned in a future release, please donate"

I don't know if I would say this as much anymore except for Linux distributions steering away from Red Hat/IBM or Canonical attempts at replacing traditional methods, or the BSDs that aren't necessarily in agreement with more recent developments either.

I certainly would not feel I owned my system if I accepted the full suite of attempts by these companies to replace and subvert existing standards. I do feel I have control with non-systemd init and service management, and source based packaging.

FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are your friends too!

Let me know if any of them work well on a laptop that's never than 5 years old.

Linux is still not a viable mainstream desktop OS, unfortunately.

Is Linux where it's at?

Maybe with the rise of immutable distributions like SteamOS, Bazzite, GnomeOS and KDELinux.

But the other "user-friendly" distributions are just not good enough for a non-techy.

We need better and more A/B partitioned immutable distributions and we need a new implementation of Flatpak.

I recently had to repair my parents their Linux Mint installation because it powered off during an upgrade. Apt does not handle that well, Linux Mint has no snapshotting, you cannot apt autoconfigure -a through the UI. Also the UI does not explain why the machine is getting hot while it's building dkms modules for an hour.

Just this week I saw someone with Fedora get a buggy graphics driver that made the whole system glitchy, they had to downgrade the kernel.

The week before I had to repair a manjaro installation from a friend because getting nvidia to work on ArchLinux isn't trivial even if Manjaro pretends it to be.

To be frank, desktop linux is still in a pretty bad state.

I think it's equally likely a windows update breaks a family owned computer and the solution isn't clear to them eg reinstall drivers directly from Vendor.

I'd also rgue Mint is easier to navigate than Windows with it's 3+ different context menus and baked in ads.

For now.

My gut is we'll have to start learning BSD soon.

GPL is a more free license if one cares about having control over their computing. The BSD community cares a lot less about that in my (limited) experience and more about purely technical aspects. Which is fine, I just wouldn't expect them to hold if Linux is no longer an option somehow.

A Linux computer is so many things and also nothing at the same time that's is basically impossible that one or N AI company can impose you something like Apple, Microsoft or Google can.

With that said, also or instead using *BSD won't do any harm.

I don't know what metric Apple implemented that has caused these engagement spam prompts (ads) to appear in their platform, but I want none of it. I've turned Siri off in the latest macOS and iOS because it's so damn slow. I'm bullish on local LLM compute but Apple it's not ready yet or not in the way you've integrated into the user interface! When I am attempting to search for an app on my system I don't want an AI response that takes 2 seconds to start. I want to see the filtered list of apps immediately. When I want to search a term I want the results immediately with any slow AI interpretation fed in asynchronous. It's painful as hell to try and use the new Siri and be resigned to wait a few seconds for any sort of answer. The worst part is you have to wait 2 seconds and then 98% of the time Siri is wrong our outdated and you have to redo the query somewhere else. When it became more convenient to jump into chatgpt or claude I pulled the plug on the new Siri.

The Internet is suggesting a bunch of hacks and undocumented defaults commands to run.

Meanwhile the Mac User Guide explains how to disable Apple Intelligence throughout Golden Gate:

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/turn-restrict-acces...

Here's the version for iPhone:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph3fed3f2c3/io...

For iPad:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/ipad/ipad3b7f1217/ipad...

The biggest thing people seem to be up in arms over is the disk space. I don’t see any of the suggestions on that page freeing the disk space back up, please correct me if I’m wrong.

On previous versions, there was a single "Apple Intelligence" toggle that turned off all of these features. This support doc describes ~10 separate settings, and still doesn't provide any way to turn off certain AI features (e.g. Genmoji).

Having to turn multiple toggles to express the lack of consent is one thing.

However, having to redo it on every system upgrade is another thing. "No" should mean "no", but now the expectation is that you need to constantly shout "No no no no no no" otherwise your previous "no" will turn into "yes".

The speed with which we went from pearl clutching that Apple hasn't added as many AI features as Google and Microsoft have to pearl clutching that they have finally done so is amusing.

Meanwhile, Google just announced "laptops" that are locked down to the Play Store, and the sound of crickets is palpable.

> Google has confirmed to Ars that Googlebooks will enforce developer verification requirements for apps similar to Android phones. Under this system, only apps from developers who have verified their identities with Google will be eligible for installation

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/googlebook-laptops-l...

One solution is likely the same as the one that stops every other iOS update from re-enabling iCloud password sync: Create a profile using Apple configurator <https://apps.apple.com/de/app/id1037126344> that forbids all these AI features and upload it to your devices.

The other solution is to say goodbye to these products that don't respect you.

By the way, if you're annoyed by the new huge "sync" menu entry on Firefox, you can disable it under about:config by setting identity.fxaccounts.enabled to false. Again, a lack of respect, this time by Firefox, for forcing this stuff down our throats. I'm only using Firefox because the alternatives are worse in terms of privacy. Ladybird, we're waiting for you!

Does that work as well as the profile that is supposed to disable the OS update nags but fails?

> The AI industrial complex does not do consent. You will use it.

I posted a thread on thr MacRumors forum making a similar point. I tried to couch it in the language of Apple being inconsistent with Apple Intelligence. You can’t turn it off anymore globally but Apple provides the user the ability to block, not turn off, some parts of it. Even then you can’t block everything, like the Apple Intelligence parts of the Photos app. Even if you turn off Siri that stuff sticks around. But iOS 27 does not require Apple Intelligence to function or anything like that because my 4th gen iPad Air can’t run Apple Intelligence but can run iPadOS 27 just fine.

> The “AI” industry has many flaws, the word “consent” being seemingly missing from training data and company handbooks is one of them

Yes! The most consentless (don't underline this in red firefox!) technology that I can think of certainly.

edit: also install and use Linux

I see non-consensual more often, tbf.

The answer is simple: Regulation to grant users the right to refuse during installation/setup of a system. This must also include updates. This feel like a repeat of the EU browser choice rule!

Even better, refuse is the default.

This is a very interesting shift with Apple where customers are starting to perceive it as hostile company.

That mindset shift surely started quite some years ago? At least in my book they’re actively hindering standards/compatibility with other ecosystems, greenwashing their products, squeezing out third-party developers, and design/UX is also going downhill at least since Liquid Glass (or rather since Jobs left).

The questioning of Apple's approach to consent all started with Tim Cook and that damn "Songs of Innocence" U2 album.

https://fortune.com/2022/10/24/tim-cook-said-free-u2-album-i...

It's been heading this way since they rolled out the butterfly keyboard and soldered RAM in 2015 unfortunately.

I'm convinced we have crossed a threshold where compute is no longer personal, it's platformed. "They" don't want you to have control over your machine as they don't trust you with it. They want you to buy the things they want you to buy, envy the people they want you to envy, submit your data to the collective, so they can control markets and industries for profit and greed.

Linux is our only hope and even that is plagued by corporate interests. I'm going back to 1994 days and only using tech for work. I have shunned social media, youtube, netflix, hulu. I have shunned subscription based SaaS. I'm tired boss.

I feel the same way. I'm not completely against the technology, but please let me say "no" and remove the models and kill the processes.

“Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787535

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/1vlnf13/workarou...

I'm done with Apple. Got rid of my iPhone and back on android (GrapheneOS) and very impresses after playing with Omarchy for a few weeks.

I think we will keep reading more and more of these Apple stories and it feels like shit is getting worse as time goes by

Wait so you got rid of Apple because its baked in AI, and went with Omarchy that is also fully vibe coded and has baked in AI? Furthermore it has built-in ads for the products of DHH, such as Basecamp. Omarchy feels a lot like Windows, with it being slopped together and with built-in ads for products.

What hardware do you run Omarchy on?

> Omarchy

Facepalm.

I don't know about Macs, but under iOS/iPadOS you can set a Siri region to somewhere it's unsupported (e.g. Russia) to truly disable it.

It gets back about 15 gigabytes of storage and removes additional stuffs you couldn't disable by setting Screen Time options, such as the Safari Reader's gigantic "summarize" button.

Heck, even on Macos 26, I have all the Siri and intelligence toggles turned off. Yet all these processes sitting around.

    (me)      11386   0.0  0.1 435334816  22528   ??  S     3:26AM   0:03.89 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/VoiceShortcuts.framework/Versions/A/Support/siriactionsd
    (me)       1099   0.0  0.0 435344416   3360   ??  Ss   27Aug26   0:01.95 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SiriSuggestionsSupport.framework/Versions/A/XPCServices/SiriSuggestionsBookkeepingService.xpc/Contents/MacOS/SiriSuggestionsBookkeepingService
    (me)        941   0.0  0.0 435440384   3776   ??  S    27Aug26   0:04.52 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SiriInference.framework/Versions/A/siriinferenced

I foolishly bought a Macbook Air with only 256GB of drive space. Now whenever I need to "upgrade" OS versions, there's not enough drive space to do so. It sure would be nice to delete all this unnecessary Siri bullshit bloat so that I can use my laptop with the latest updates.

Are these Spotlight? The New Siri combined Siri and Spotlight into a single agentic retrieval thing, so it’s possible that when you turn off “Siri” they leave on Spotlight but it’s reported under the new branding.

Inconsistent & confusing if so.

What's more interesting is his "No AI" policy

https://dbushell.com/ai/

Why do you think it’s (more) interesting?

Because the author's proud ignorance sheds some light on the article's authenticity and validity of claims (or the complete lack thereof).

The AI ship has already sailed. You won't lose your job to AI, but to another person using AI better than you. Do you really want to spend hours writing boring one-off shell and test scripts? Even a selective use of AI is better, or at least a personal policy of reviewing and understanding every line of code. Not some blanket no AI policy...

We have to manage it better, introduce guardrails, adversarial agents, better harnesses, etc.

All valid points but a personal boycott is not the solution.

Why does anyone who seems to be working in the software industry even think that immediately updating to the latest major release is ever a good idea?

He did justify it in https://dbushell.com/notes/2026-09-16T05:01Z/

I develop apps and I needed to upgrade to install the latest Xcode and simulators.

I always wait one year, upgrading to major release N-1 in August before N comes out in September. I made an exception last year and stayed on Sequoia. It will be August of next year before I consider Golden Gate.

Run Linux, Virtualizise windows or Mac OS be happy.

The cost? You have to research a machine that will run Linux, not everyone can do this. I'm quite happy with my hp zbook is it a mac, no bit it's as close as I can go.

Asahi is in a fairly good shape nowadays: https://asahilinux.org/

While not as extreme, this reminds me of the whole Bluetooth-re-enabled-after-updates thing I've been bitching about for years. I hate Bluetooth, never use it, always turn it off. Yet, every time I update macOS/iOS, Bluetooth is magically re-enabled, because Apple said so.

Like I said, not as annoying as unwillingly being sucked into the AI-iverse, and seizing 28-GB of storage space, but it's the principle. I want control over my devices - you know, the things I paid $$$ for.

Moved on to PopOS long ago, and am loving it, especially with the COSMIC desktop now. I just feel so much less worried. Today’s LLMs with their agent harnesses take the past hassle of configuring and maintaining your Linux desktop completely off the table. No more hour long digging and research after an update, just let your AI keep your machine in shape. No proprietary software spying on you. Problem solved :)

I have spent the last 28 years in the SF Bay Area, working in tech.

I have spent the last two months in Florida.

I was always aware of the disconnect between the insular world I lived in and what went on "outside" - but little did I know how big that gulf was.

If this was a car guy thread the complaint would be about a missing 3 horse power on his new Toyota when he put it on the dyno. And every one else is talking about their custom tunes, and scratch built systems, and how much better they are. Most people would not care and just want to drive to work.

How many of you are gonna have your Mom install linux and do support for it? How about your crazy uncle, or the slow cousin? Being done with Apple wont change Apple - make linux easy to use and usable. Or convince people that Apple > MS to force them to compete again. Or better yet both.

There is a business here.

Tru about moms. I'm going to have to keep supporting her 2 Windows (10 and 11) and paying for microsoft 365. :(

This drives me crazy! My iPad is perpetually never finished setting up (and my Windows Laptop after a year for similar reasons) because I have never said yes to the thing I can't say no to: AI.

I am not against AI, but let me choose where I use it.

Someone should do a class action lawsuit for these phony consent requests.

I make it a point to never install the first versions of major macos releases. they are usually buggy and have annoying new features that are either removed, improved or made optional in the following minor releases. Currently on 26.6.2, it's pretty good.

I wonder if all the work to do Linux and self hosting is actually shorter than having to deal with these unasked for annoyances.

Open: 0 to comfort that always grows. When it works you usually don't touch it for years.

Closed: Comfort to never-quite-what-you-want-but-compromise. Works, but you never know what's going on. Features might just get added whenever to your detriment.

So in one case i have a known state i can reach and hold. The time i put in is known and the point in time is up to me. In the other case i can never be sure about state, time and point in time. That's a clear loser to me.

"Last week I succumbed to Apple’s harassment" - usually what all end-users do eventually when caught in the walled garden ...

I had a similar thing with Xcode the other day. I unticked the "download a code assistance model" thing, clicked to continue and it started downloading it anyway (which, to be fair, you can just X out of).

I never really understood the craze for the overpriced Apple products. After many years of using PCs with Linux and Windows, I got forced to use a MacBook Pro as the company laptop and I found it hard to use. The OS is so limiting, Finder so crappy, oh my. There are some advantages, like the hardware is good, but on the other hand there are countless tiny issues where "Apple knows better" such as tying mouse scroll direction to the trackpad direction which is awkward for me. And now this what you're describing. So no, thanks, I'll stick to ThinkPad.

If you don't know where to find the checkbox to disable natural scrolling (you can ask Apple's built in search, even) I don't think anyone should be listening to your opinion on Apple.

That's unnecessarily harsh. Try disabling mouse acceleration without Googling anything; where's the search entry for that? Why is there no Preferences option for it?

Windows, KDE and GNOME all expose this as a GUI toggle. macOS doesn't.

You don't buy Apple because it's good. You buy it because it's what the cool people use.

Imagine applying for a SF startup job and letting them know you use a Windows computer.

At best they will politely tell you to fuck off. But they might blog/X about the idiot Windows user who imagined they could be cool enough to work for them, all coated in a plausible "a craftsman takes care of using good tools, sharp knifes, ..."

> You buy it because it's what the cool people use.

I apparently define cool people differently :joy:

> Imagine applying for a SF startup job

No, thanks :joy:

> You don't buy Apple because it's good

You do, because their hardware is very good. Denying this is just silly.

Good to see this thread turned into a flame war full of linux lovers who don't ever use Apple products vs. linux lovers who have exetensively used Apple. That's typically how it goes.

Kinda off topic here, but you deleted the comment I was responding to so I thought I'll try to ask in an old thread where "nobody else" would notice.

Any good discord community suggestions?

I've been missing a coder community since I've kinda lost touch with anyone's else that likes to code - both with and without llms.

And none of my current day job coworkers actually like to nor can code well. Neither with nor without llms

It feels like consent is being undermined in so many places. The anti-Meta Glasses ad with a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and the strap line "Glasses for people who don't do consent" hits the nail on the head for me. It's a profoundly inhuman stance in the name of profits.

Why Did You Buy An Iphone/Mac If You Wanted Freedom?

LuLu is honestly the best piece of software for macOS. Every upgrade, I always dowanload the latest version of LuLu first, the the OS upgrade, and then turn all connectivity off. Once it's done with the updates I make sure LuLu is active and up-to-date and running before I reactivate WiFi so I can review every outgoing connection (and deny most).

Maybe Little Snitch can be helpful in this sort of case ? Consent or not, it must be possible to kill the phone home line.

Potentially! Would be interesting to hear if anyone manages to block internal Apple shenanigans with Little Snitch successfully and feasibly (without constant toggling of rules or alike).

I always accepted the Apple Premium for the luxury of privacy and a user focussed experience. What is the premium for now, apart from a fancy piece of hardware? Hardware required supportive software to justify the Mac Premium. It was always their marriage that we paid extra for.

Ich glaube man kann endlos diskutieren was das beste Betriebssystem ist da jeder seine Vorlieben hat. Ich denke es kommt auch sehr auf den Hersteller und deren eigene Software die auf dem PC ist an. Ich bin z. B. Lenovo Fan und habe von Lenovo einen Gaming Laptop und nutze Windows 11 und Linux Mint, ich habe keine größeren Probleme nach Updates gehabt. Es kommt auch einfach sehr darauf an wie hochwertig die Teile sind die ein Hersteller verbaut und für mich ist Preis Leistungsmäßig Lenovo ziemlich weit vorne. Ich habe keinen anderen Laptop zu der Zeit zu der ich ihn gekauft habe gesehen, der für den Preis eine ähnlich gute konfiguration hatte. OK es war zusätzlich noch eine Rabatt Aktion dabei, trotzdem war der Endpreis für das Setup super und er bereitet mir, egal wie leistungsaufwendig die Dinge sind die ich mache, seitdem sehr viel Freunde, egal ob es der Bau eines Android Games ist und beim Bau einer APK in 5-6 Minuten, Leistungsintensiven Spiele auf hoher Grafik,... Natürlich bin ich mir bewusst das ich mit meinem relativ "kleinen Setup" leistungseinschränkungen habe allerdings macht der Laptop alles was ich will und wofür ich ihn brauche gut mit uns legt mir keine Steine in den Weg. Mit der Lenovo Vantage Software finde ich ist man ganz gut gerüstet da sie Treiber selbst sucht und das übertakten kontrolliert und unterstützt was ich persönlich noch nie benötigt habe nur einmal ausprobiert. Ich denke es kommt immer darauf an für welche Arbeiten man den PC benötigt und was man bereit ist an Geld dafür auszugeben. Wenn man die Hardware natürlich dauerhaft an der Grenze des möglichen laufen lässt oder sie andauern übertakten z.B. treten schneller Fehler auf. Das ist genauso mit einem Handy oder ähnlichem. Und dann kommt es auf die Pflege an und bei einem Laptop z.b. auch in wie fern man bereit ist Sonderposten in Kauf zu nehmen für z. Sb. Seinen Laptop Ständer oder sogar noch für eine aktive Kühlung von außen. Alles hat seine vor und Nachteile und alles benötigt ein bisschen liebe und Pflege

I’m considering linux full time going forward and just keeping a mac mini for ios builds.

Thank goodness Linux exists.

You just have to persuade your Mac that you are in the EU, and AI won’t work at all anymore. Changing language to non-English also helps.

Looks like I'll never upgrade past Sequoia.

The AI pilled industry is all people who don't understand consent. And refuse to acknowledge and respect other humans

I'm switching to Linux desktop. I'm done with Windows and Apple. Both these companies do sleazy dark patterns.

Is this happening only when upgrading the os or does it force enable apple intelligence on clean re-installs too?

> Apple front-loaded the keynote with a “we care about children” narrative that the media and fanboys lapped up. Then they advertised features that are suspiciously at odds (if you stop to think). It was a shrewd marketing stunt they’ve pulled before. In past events Apple has greenwashed the opening spiel before flogging a new iPhone model with an annual upgrade plan. Don’t worry, it’s all recycled. Totally eco-friendly to ship mass-produced luxury goods around the world to meet a manufactured demand.

Another nice example is the posturing about "vision health", concerns about myopia, etc. IMMEDIATELY before announcing the visionPro product.

WWDC 2024: https://youtu.be/GYkq9Rgoj8E?t=4625

These are reasons enough. I switched to Asahi recently on my Macbook Pro M1

My fingerprint reader doesn't work, nor does my speaker. But hey, its way better than having to use MacOS. Atleast, linux lets me use my computer the way I want.

FIY speakers should work on a Macbook Pro M1 running Asahi. They have been working for a long time now (like 1 or 2 years) and they do work fine for me (running Asahi Alarm, not Fedora, but Fedora is supposed to work better since it's officially supported).

"Should work" is fine but, in my machine (2020 Macbook Pro M1 running Asashi Fedora Remix) it "doesn't work".

Microphone does though!

Just curious... Would Asahi Linux allow me to run llama.cpp on my m1? I have a spare laptop with lots of memory, wondering whether performance could be improved by using Asahi over running models on macOS?

On other side, people are crazy (in a good sense) that Omarchy have built-in AI. Go figure out...

> AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.

This is why I continue screaming against AI. I’ve moved past the theft roots, because I know we can just make its output un-protected by copyright or trademark laws - including the models themselves - thus returning back for free what was stolen in the first place.

Consent, however, remains an evergreen nail in the entire industry’s heart. It’s shoved into everything without our consent, into products that used to be perpetual but are now subscription-based. We’re forced to pay for someone else’s feature we don’t want in terms of storage, electricity, and compute costs - both on what we buy, and in higher prices due to the industry hoovering up every scrap of NAND and memory it can find and at scales that would make the GPU cryptomining boom feel embarrassed by. We have to endure this destruction of our limited capital and freedom to use our devices on our own terms, along with the immense invasion of privacy it brings about in surveillance and telemetry, all to boost an industry that spends its time loudly boasting how it will destroy the economy/nations/humanity/the biosphere with its eventual, inevitable output.

And honestly, I’m incredibly sick of it. It’d be one thing if I could turn off telemetry and point Siri to a local OpenAI-compatible API endpoint for inferencing and processing, but those options are barred specifically because the data harvesting is the point. These features were never designed or intended to improve the quality of my life, otherwise they’d be flexible enough for me to engage with them on my terms; no, the surveillance and data was always the point, and a proprietary answer engine that can have ads inserted into it or have its output engineered into speech benefiting the creator without transparency to the user - reality authoring - is a holy grail to a tech industry that still deeply resents open source software and “public good” services like Wikipedia.

AI companies refuse to let us opt out, because opting out means we’ve chosen to engage reality on our own terms, rather than theirs.

I thought this was posted on a Dbus hate website when I saw the URL.

I literally thought this website was about DBUS Hell and I was all for it.

Alas.

> AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.

The reason corporations disable our right to stop AI tracking is because, at least for now, AI agents can be held to account for crimes once blamed on a person or corporation -- all one need do is disable the off-switches.

Until we sort out our relationship with AI, it will be the universal whipping boy, blamed for all sorts of things that once would indict an individual or corporation.

The best -- or worst, depending on your outlook -- AI trait is its complete absence of an ethical or moral sense. When an AI agent breaks into a computer, it's not with guilty knowledge, because AI doesn't possess that -- it's not part of their design. People need to remember: AI agents live in a moral vacuum, and that's not an accident.

When a corporation is called out for disabling a switch that once stopped AI tracking, the AI bros might say, "Oh, yes, that's an oversight, easily fixed." But it's not an oversight, it's a trial balloon, an A/B test to see how people will react.

But there's more. Decades ago, the Nielsen TV rating service would monitor what people watched on their TV sets (remember TV sets, boxes weighing 500 pounds?), by calling people on their telephones (remember telephones?). By modern standards, the Nielsen people were amateurs -- today's TV sets have built-in AI agents, active 24/7, and no disable switch. They patiently record what you watch.

In the next phase, TV sets will do eye-tracking, find out what parts of a TV scene people are looking at. Not true now but soon (Samsung is working on it). Pupil dilation, facial expressions, everything.

A super-old Bob Hope joke from the Cold War era: "Yes, they have TV in Russia, but you don't watch it, it watches you." Not so funny any more.

> moral vacuum, and that's not an accident

Well that's a philosophical point, because morality is bound up with opinions and personality and internal motivation, and quite possibly with creativity and with whatever intelligence really means. So it probably can't be designed into LLMs, and struggles with "alignment" probably aren't faked.

Apple has always been a hellacious nag! It is obscene.

You said yes when you agreed to their walled garden.

> That was a rather explicit “no”, no?

God I love puns...

Some comments from last year poking fun at how Big Tech does not understand the concept of consent:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45111416

Guess it's time to switch back to Linux... Shame, I'll miss the macbook build quality.

Is it normal that I am enraged by this new process…is there a MacBook version of Graphene or something we can use if things keep boiling this way?

Asahi Linux. It'll take some years to reach the latest devices, but the effort is helping the whole of the Linux ecosystem on Apple silicon.

This is an absolutely insane question and it really shows how much mobile phones have warped reality. Until smart phones came along it was actually the norm to be able to install other operating systems on your PC.

Isn't Apple pushing features or decisions for how things work down your throat regardless of if you want them part of the classic Apple value proposition? If you don't like that, why are you even using Apple in the first place? This is about how much you want the hardware maker to decide things for you, and Apple has always been maximalist with regards to that.

This has been the case for me with the Dock for twenty-plus years. You can't kill the Dock. You can hide it. You can set the delay until it appears. But you cannot kill it, it just respawns.

And it's such a terrible waste of memory/screen space/an edge of the display.

And of course I said yes, and Apple said no, to Launchpad, an actually useful tool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The push the past few weeks to start talking about AI with the same language used to discuss sexual assault seems to be in poor taste. It seems like saying "slop" all the time was not effective, so now people are comparing AI to sexual assault... Sentences like "AI bros don't understand consent" are obviously meant to suggest that people who are pro-AI are akin to rapists and predators. I'm not sure what benefit there is to doing this, well, I guess that's a lie, I understand the point is to raise the emotional stakes of this debate to such a level that people feel like they can't disagree.

Unlike when it comes to sexual assault, everyone being "assaulted" with AI can very easily choose to switch to Linux or use different services at any moment. There's really no need for such hyperbole. Software changes you don't like aren't akin to sexual assault.

You said yes when you bought their shit

Don't know when he bought his devices, but Apple Intelligence is not yet 2 years old so it might no even have existed when he bought his Mac.

> Call me a radical but I’ve chosen not to kowtow to billionaires.

I wonder when the author will be switching from his Mac.

What does Elon Musk have to do with Apple Intelligence? Why is that in this article?

Do you mean Epstein? I missed the Elon bit.

> Despite Pledges From Musk, Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X

I'm not sure how this has anything to do with Apple or Apple Intelligence (which is based Google technology, also unrelated to X / Musk)

> The “AI” industry has many flaws, the word “consent” being seemingly missing from training data and company handbooks is one of them. AI bros do not take “no” for an answer.

In several years, the GDPR enforcers (national information commissioners) may eventually wake up to this and start talking about fines. But I suspect everyone is too cowed by the AI inevitability narrative.

> The AI industry is vile

Or is this just Apple looking no less vile than usual?

people in this thread are so fucking pretentious.

> But that’s a trivial cost compared to the consent problem. [..] AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.

This is barking at the wrong tree. If you value things like your privacy or the ability to strictly control what runs on your computer then perhaps it would be a good idea to not run a proprietary operating system that's primarily designed not to provide you with the best user experience possible but to slowly extract more and more value out of you?

You must be talking about someone other than Apple. Apple has been falling into value extraction lately (which I hope Ternus will change), but their operating systems very much have never been designed for that from the outset. Rather the opposite. Apple is the only company that comprehensively documents platform security and privacy. I can't think of anyone else who doesn't just say "trust me bro". Maybe GrapheneOS. Nobody actually proves they are who they say they are better than Apple does.

Apple is also one of the only companies to focus on user experience above all else (nearly, anyway). Again, I can't think of a single other example (maybe Framework comes close), but while Apple has incredible technology, they have always been fairly measured with it to attain just the user experience they want. IMO, that's what earned Mac a reputation for having poor performance, and iPhone a reputation for having low memory, because Apple gave them the specs they needed to run well and have a terrific UX, not necessarily the specs to push the frontier of what you can run at home.

Apple has been learning that frontier is important, though, and they've been leaning more into it lately. Part of why Apple Silicon has been such an incredible shock to the industry.

"good dog, here's a cookie"

You're repeating fruit factory propaganda as if it is gospel, the marketing department can be proud of their handiwork. In reality they're one of the most profit-maximisation centred companies out there in computing land, they don't really care all that much about what their users want and do their best to make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem". They fell into "value extraction" a long time ago and I don't see them stopping in any way as long as they have loyal apologists like you seem to be. Why would they? The money keeps rolling in, the congregation keeps on buying fruit phones and related paraphernalia, they'd be mad to stop from a business perspective.

The author is complaining that his OS doesn't let him say "no". This would never happen with an OS which actually respects you. Of course, it's not Apple's fault, it never is -- it's those "AI bros"! It's incredibly ironic that the author writes "I’ve chosen not to kowtow to billionaires", yet he kowtowing to a company with a market cap of 5 trillion USD.

> IMO, that's what earned Mac a reputation for having poor performance

Desktops maybe, but on mobile, Apple has always outclassed most Windows laptops that ordinary people might buy - alone because the full-aluminium case allows for far more heat input until saturation kicks in.

So... Apple should develop a separate version of their system, that doesn't include AI anywhere? Because Siri AI is not the only part of the system that uses the onboard models. The moral panic is just ridiculous at this point

I don't think anyone's asking for a separate version, just an option to turn the AI features off. Even totally aside from the moral points, some of us simply don't have the disk space.

Do you believe that adding a "no" button _and then honoring it when the user clicked on it_ requires developing a separate version of their system?

Regardless: they already did, because Apple intelligence is not available in the EU.

No worries, it’s only a matter of time until this becomes normal. Will probably follow the same trajectory as people disabling JavaScript. You still hear about that constantly of course, because the 7 people that do it can’t go a day without letting you know, but it won’t be a panic anymore.

I thought AI was going to write all our code for us and make developers 10x more productive? If code is that cheap, what's the problem with writing a second version of the system with no AI?

They should provide a kill switch to kill the AI slop. People. Don't. Want. It. Listen to customers.

I see the dangers of AI and agree that many companies don’t value our privacy and do what’s best for them and not us, but…

…this is an emotional dogmatic post. „All of this garbage“ clearly shows that the author is stuck in the past. The banners on the website confirm this. It’s the figurative fanatic complaining about those black steam devils and their tracks that nobody needs and that destroy nature. Yeah, steam trains were noisy and created smoke, but the age of horses was over. No emotional outburst would have stopped that, and won’t stop AI now.

The unconditional and emotional rejection of AI undermines the actual valid point he is trying to make.

If something can't be stopped, does that mean it's good? Reading accounts of the industrial revolution, huge swathes of nature in the north of England were destroyed. This article is an argument that it should be different, and is mostly focused on consent, not whether AI should exist or not (although the author's position on that is pretty clear too).

As a side note, I would argue you're being just as "emotional" (which I don't necessarily see as a bad thing despite your aspersions) by calling it "fanatic".

He's not talking about AI in general. He's talking about a device he owns.

> The unconditional and emotional rejection of AI undermines the actual valid point

No it doesn't, one can hate LLMs with a passion and still not want features they don't use take 20GB of the storage they paid a premium for.

The "unstoppable" narrative may or may not be correct but it's certainly maximizing the backlash.

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