> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users

These threads always end up with veiled insults like this. Can you really not understand people who use Windows, Linux and Macs? They each have their strengths depending on what you are doing.

> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want

I've use Macs since my first G4 PB, Linux for longer, and used to develop for Windows though it's been a very long time. I've never felt stopped for doing what I want.

> by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS

Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro. I'm sure desktop Linux has improved since the last time I tried running it as my main computer, but I just not sure what the point is now.

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rubslopes 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've recently heard that using Linux is an excuse to spend the day tinkering and ricing and do no productive work. It's the same kind of prejudice, but opposite.

I like the freedom to run my machine the way I want, but I also enjoy something that is reliable and seamless. My macbook air's battery lasts forever. It works flawlessly, almost always. "oh with nixos if you brick it you can rollback..." that's great, but it does not beat working great on the first try.

Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.

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ryandrake 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.

Same here. macOS has been death by a thousand little cuts, and I'm finally accelerating my move away from it, as Apple locks it down more and more, and as they spend their engineering talent on crap I ultimately don't care about.

While I've switched most of my computers over to Linux, I still have not moved my daily driver over. There are so many silly little things Linux (and its various desktop environments) gets wrong and are just annoying enough to make me not want to use it every day, like scrolling with a trackpad.

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jbstack 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

NixOS is an extreme case, and I only mentioned it as a counter to the OP's article which was talking about the mammoth efforts required to remove unwanted processes. More generally, there are plenty of Linux distros which "just work" out of the box for most use cases.

	▲	12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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jbstack 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No insult intended. I genuinely wasn't aware of what advantages macOS offers for a power user (by which I mean someone who wants to do tasks more advanced than browsing, email, etc.). From quickly skimming the replies the common theme seems to be a mixture of battery efficiency, hardware compatibility, and Mac-only software.

> Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro.

Yes, but my comment wasn't made in isolation or directed at people with your objectives. The OP's article is about doing exactly this, but in the opposite direction (expending large amounts of effort to remove unneeded processes). See for example: "if we assume that we need to identify just 500 candidates, and each takes an average of one week to research, that would take over 10 person-years".

Starting with that as the baseline (as opposed to starting from your position which is that you're not interested in spending time on this issue), building up from zero is a lot more straightforward. And, if you use something like NixOS, you generally only have to do it once since the idea of "reinstalling" the OS (e.g. for new versions) largely goes away: subsequent effort is just about changing your mind about what software you want, or what version you want (as with any OS).

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dlivingston 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> what advantages macOS offers for a power user

The serious answer is that you get an "it-just-works"⁺ Unix-like operating system that gives you a development experience on-par with Linux.

If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.

If you care about configuration for your window manager, desktop environment, or systemd services: you will not like macOS.

If you are a graphics engineer or a kernel engineer: you will (probably) not like macOS.

If you are a C++/Rust/Python/JavaScript/Java/mobile/desktop engineer who wants a rock-solid developer environment and doesn't care about the above: you will like macOS.

You get all the Unix tools you could ever want, whatever shell you want to use (Zsh, Fish, even PowerShell), clang/LLVM, etc.

Does that answer your question?

⁺: caveat being "it just works" is getting less and less true with every macOS release.

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matwood 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This would be my answer, though I also do sysadmin stuff from macOS just fine. I've used OSX/macOS for a long time, I understand how it works and how to move around, and the ecosystem integration is nice. Adobe products, MS products also all work without any hassle along with any software development I want to do. Then there's the hardware which Apple Silicon has been great for. I bought an M1 Max 64gb laptop on release and it still never feels slow. Battery life is great, trackpad works great, etc...

And I say all this knowing that someone can likely get similar use out of a MS or Linux laptop. At this point, just pick what you know and get on with it.

	▲	zbentley 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I also do sysadmin stuff from macOS MacOS is fine as a client/dispatch node for SSH/Ansible/Terraform/whatnot; I think they meant that you cannot sysadmin MacOS itself as a target with many of the same tools/techniques you would sysadmin a Linux server. I wish that weren't true, as someone who struggles with a lot of cross-platform Puppet tooling that I wish behaved better on Mac. No, Nix doesn't help; not when the goal is "configure other people's machines to a baseline but don't otherwise prescribe how they should use them".

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thewebguyd 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.

Even then, that's debatable. Should say if you like doing sysadmin stuff on your own machine.

I am a sysadmin, and my daily driver is an M4 macbook pro and I wouldn't have it any other way. I admin other machines, I don't want to play sysadmin for my own. But its mostly for the hardware more than any other reason.

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saagarjha 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think a surprising number of kernel engineers like Macs

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browningstreet 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I genuinely wasn't aware of what advantages macOS offers

It's been out for a while.. why are you interested in the debate if you've come this far, have no idea, but want to lead with a counter-assertion?

	▲	jbstack 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Again, my comment wasn't isolated. It was a response to the article. In that article, the person was concerned with tracking down 500+ potentially unneeded processes, and lamenting the difficulty and time consuming nature of doing so. Perhaps I could have phrased my question better, but what I'm really asking is: for that type of user, why would you pick macOS over Linux when such things are trivial (relatively speaking) in Linux by comparison. Note that I didn't ask "what advantages does macOS have?" I qualified it with: "which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?". I wasn't suggesting that there are no advantages at all. Nuance matters here.
	▲	bigyabai 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Why are we making personal attacks, instead of simply listing all of the unique system-selling features in macOS?