I fully get that macOS is not perfect, but checking out "modern" Linux (like a customized Arch) is a bit underwhelming. It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago. And I started with Linux in the mid 90s. Not much has changed or improved on the pure fundamentals. I guess it's fine if all you do is sit doing CLI or spending your day in web browsers.

Day to day macOS driving to me is an absolute joy (granted, I'm still on Sonoma).

I do a lot of work in terminals but I also enjoy other apps, where that uniformity of Cocoa comes into play. And if you go deeper into Mach/Darwin, it's extremely powerful. On the userland .. from the launcher to dtrace and dynamic linker tricks and low level hooks. A lot of cool macOS APIs to experiment with, public or private. AppleScript/Automater, private frameworks like SkyLight (nifty!)

Oh and don't get me started on MLX...

To me, as a developer and as a power user, macOS delivers everything - and more.

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darknavi 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago.

I know this seems like a down side to you but the person you are replying to notes this as something they love about the platform. It not changing over time "just to change" is the point.

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eloisius an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago. And I started with Linux in the mid 90s. Not much has changed or improved on the pure fundamentals.

Point taken, but that is exactly the quality I said I liked about it. I hope that 20 years from now my desktop will be exactly the same. The disjoint UI bothers me to an extent. I mostly use KDE apps or things built with Qt, but you're right that nothing is uniform. That said, I'd take disunity if it means stability. I don't care if the buttons in different apps look different, but don't take them away. Just look at what they did to Mail.app--in 2010 it was beautiful. Last I used it in 2020 it seemed like all the power user features of it were gone or hidden and everything was under a dot dot dot menu instead of out on the toolbar.

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leidenfrost 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sometimes it does change and when that happens is for the worse.

Some developers suddenly realize that X system is old, and then they try to redo it from zero.

And when they do that, they throw decades of feature development down the drain:

- Xorg: Was Wayland worth the 10+ years of manpower needed to catch up?

- Synaptics: Now we have libinput, less configurable and with way fewer features

- Gnome: Something that happens when the devs think "If Apple can, then we can too" but without the money to invest in good UX (Gnome2 had actual UX research done by Sun)

- Systemd: I'll concede that nobody liked SystemV. But we also had OpenRC and strangely got ignored.

Sometimes "developercracy" is terrible, and we spend years arguing if Rust or Not, instead of trying to make good software

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dijit an hour ago | parent [-]

I agree with every point made except there’s two caveats;

1) I am a bonafide systemd hater, and I am bent out of shape about the fact other init systems (more akin to SMF) were (and are) routinely ignored when discussing what was available. But: I feel like Linux desktops are better now for systemd. Even if I can’t tolerate how it spiders into everything personally.

2) Wayland was a “We have pushed X as far as it will go, and now we’re going to have to pay down our tech debt” by the X11 developers themselves.

I know it was “baby with the bathwater”, but in theory we don’t need to do that again for the next 50 years because we have a significantly better baseline for how computers are actually used. The performance ceiling has been lifted because of Wayland; consistent support for multiple monitors and fractional scaling are things we have today because of Wayland.

I won’t argue about security, because honestly most people seem to want as little security as possible if it infringes on software that used to work a certain way, but it should be mentioned at some point that a lack of security posture leads to a pretty terrible experience eventually.

So, yes, Wayland was worth the 10y cost, because the debt was due and with interest. Kicking the can down the road would most likely kill desktop Linux eventually.

	▲	hulitu 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> because we have a significantly better baseline for how computers are actually used. Except, they don't. X was device agnostic. Wayland makes some asumptions which will be wrong in 10 years. And being a monolith does not help.

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jsemrau 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Depends on the role. I build AI Agents for a living and Linux is for this edge case better.

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iLemming 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago.

Like visually? I personally don't care much for animations, transitions, rounded corners (this one I actually hate, because you can't even disable them on mac). I'm not a florist, I am programmer. I want efficiency not the looks, bells and whistles. Although I recently started using Hyprland, and oh my, those window animations and transitions are super nice, not to mention that you can completely control every aspect of them.

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bigyabai an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Oh and don't get me started on MLX...

Your pittance Apple gives you because they refuse to sign CUDA drivers? That MLX?

	▲	sgt 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If you're into LLM's you need to consider using Apple Silicon so you can continue developing on your own machine with MLX. MLX isn't just a replacemnet for CUDA, no way - it's made for the Apple arch. The new M5 chip will likely have serious ANE and ability to use the unified memory. Then we're talking powerhouse. Current Mac Studios are already more cost effective than say RTX 6000.