May be things have changed over the last 10 years but HN comments literally convinced me to switch to a macbook a decade ago and it was literally one of the worst experiences with a product of my life. Everyone who says mac is unix and is just as good as linux is a fool and should never be trusted.

If you want, you can search my username with "macbook" and see my rants since 2015. The worst experience I had with it was it glitching out a hour before a national conference presentation that forced me to remake the slides on another person's laptop. I was sitting in the audience sweating bullets remaking those slides over the course of a grueling hour or so. I have never had the desire to buy another apple product since then and I don't miss it.

Linux just works, especially if you have a machine it works well on. Don't believe the naysayers, learn from my exprience.

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0manrho 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Everyone who says mac is unix and is just as good as linux is a fool and should never be trusted.

Seconded.

> Linux just works

While there are instances where this is the case (System76 hardware w/ PopOS for example), This is certainly not true in the general, and this is coming from someone that's been on linux since the dotcom era. It's very very important you get a well supported device or it most certainly does not "just work", and that's goes triple if you're not using some flavor of ubuntu/debian (in the past fedora generally does pretty good too but I've not been keeping up with the fedora sphere since IBM drove me away from the redhat/fedora/centOS ecosphere). Thankfully, there's never been more options or support for linux on laptop, so it's not as near as difficult to achieve as it once was.

Linux does what it's told, which is why I love it, but if you don't know what you're doing, and/or if the autoconfiguration tools/drivers aren't compatible with the hardware in question, you've got a recipe for frustration for anyone that's new to linux/not in the mood to tinker.

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noufalibrahim 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Thirded!

I jumped from DOS in the mid 90s to Solaris to Linux in about 2001. BEen on it since. I got my first personal laptop in 2004 or so (IBM thinkpad T42). Then went through 2 X series laptops and am currently on an X1 carbon.

I consulted for a company for 2.5 years where I used a mac.

Maybe it's just me but I found the mac ecosystem very crummy. On Debian, when I wanted postgres, I did an apt-get and got it sort of like Trinity in the matrix asking for helicopter pilot skills. With the mac, I installed it using brew. That didn't work so there was an app for it and that had its own quirks. I put it down to my lack of familiarity with the system. I would have invested time to get familiar with it but, and this is my second point, Linux was did "just work" for 95% of what I wanted. All the annoying things about sound drivers, wifi cards, usb, fonts, video etc. from the 90s were not problems anymore. There were a few things that I needed to get running but they weren't deal killers. Definitely not as rough as what I had with postgres on the mac.

Hardware wise, I agree with the OP, I don't think think anything comes close to Apple's offering at that price point. The reason I stay away from it is because of the software. I much prefer Linux. There are also tangential points like working on the exact OS and machine where I'm going to actually deploy/debug production apps on is useful. This is alleviated to some extent by using a Linux VM on a mac if that's what you do.

	▲	ciconia 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Fourthed! I've had Macbooks, I've had Windows laptops, and have been a happy full-time Linux user since 2020. Windows is just impossible for anyone that cares about their digital hygiene. MacOS is slow (for software development) and there's always stuff that doesn't work. For me Linux (plain Ubuntu) hits the sweet spot: it just works and I can do whatever I please, no ads, no walled garden.

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cassianoleal 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have used MacBooks as my main workstation for about 15 years and still do.

My initial transition from Debian to OS X was painful. Once it settled in, it became comfortable. I like a lot of things about it.

I'll keep my M2 Pro for as long as I can but my next laptop is likely to be an AMD Framework to run Debian.

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9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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