I absolutely cannot figure out what to do in order to fix an Apple computer when it’s bugging out. Is it a part? The OS? Something external? How am I supposed to diagnose this fucker with so little information? Windows is rapidly heading down the same road. Linux will remain the final bastion of those who fix their electronics themselves
Or do the same basic troubleshooting you would for any other computer. It sounds like the person you're replying to doesn't know how to do that. They should learn. It's not that hard.
macOS is Unix. Everything can be logged and reported through the terminal if you want more debugging information. There are also power tools you can download that give you better GUI-based control over a myriad of things.
Though it’s worse now than it was ten years ago. Apple’s software has been suffering under Tim Cook and it’s probably not going to get better until he’s gone.
Mac is Linux? You debug it the exact same way, except unlike Linux, you don’t have to worry about 50 different distros, so it’s a lot easier to find solutions. Debugging a hardware issue is just as hard as any other platform… what are you even trying?
The one thing I'd agree is that it tends to be harder to fix hardware issues. Well, on the new one's you just don't because it's soldered, but a friend's late 2015 27 inch imac has a borked SSD, and to replace it, we'd need to take off the glued on screen.
Softwarewise, I prefer the issue-finding experience to the windows one, though.
The reason MacOS is seen as a working computer is because if anything breaks about it, it isn't considered a computer anymore by Apple, it is considered e-waste.
I guess I don’t get this attitude about macs. I switched to mac when I was traveling a lot in 2007 and saw how portable they could be compared to other laptops. It’s almost 2025 and I just bought my third one last year. My kids are still using my 13 year old MBA for homework, and the hardware is absolutely solid.
You don't get this attitude about Macs? Are you willfully blind?
Plug a 1080p monitor into a Windows or Linux machine and notice how text is crisp and readable, because they use sub-pixel text rendering, a technique in use for decades to make text readable on lower resolution monitors.
Now plug that monitor into a MacOS computer and notice the text looks like trash because Apple ripped out their sub-pixel text rendering system to force users to buy their fancy high res monitors.
This was a problem when they were selling Apple IIs
MUGs came into being because Apple provided zero support and overcharged for proprietary hardware. So the only recourse was to find a hobbyist, and they were glad to help.
Do you like to throw money at your problems and more money when you're told: 🍎
Do you have a nonconsensual submissive kink with a love for sadistic roughly forced updates destroying what you were working on and ads shoved deep up your home directory: 🪟
Once, when I started a new job, I had to use an Apple laptop until my Linux laptop came. While the Apple laptop was better than I expected, it was still one of the most annoying weeks of my life. The most unbearable part was the keyboard. I could never tell which hotkeys used ctrl and what used alt, and it just wasn't worth the effort of remembering the differences or remapping them.
But besides that, after using Linux for 15 years, the very basic levels of configurability that the Apple window manager provides just made it look like a child's toy compared to Linux. In Linux, there are so many different window managers that it becomes very easy to customize an environment that works perfectly for you. With Apple, you just get what you're given and if it's bad or doesn't work well for your habits, then tough luck, you're stuck with it anyway. So in that respect, Apple computers don't work at all - you work for the computer, whereas it should be the other way around.
But at the end of the day, what it really comes down to is the fact that people just like what they're used to, and it sucks to change. What's best is a matter of preference; none is better objectively better than the other.
Same for me. I can't stand the weird keyboard combinations and I totally hate that I need to watch a 1 second eyecandy animation when I put a window in full screen.
Oh yeah, I completely forgot about the stupid animations. They also happen when moving a window to another virtual desktop, or when you minimize it. Complete waste of time and they just cause me to forget what I was trying to do or why.
Also, on the topic of minimizing windows, I also hate the dock concept where all the windows are grouped together. I like having a taskbar with a full list of windows so I can see how many are open. If I see too many that are open, I start closing the old ones that I don't need anymore, which helps me stay organized. This is much harder to do with a dock instead. But once again, it's just a matter of preference!
Agreed, and it really makes me nervous about changing jobs. If I start a job that requires using something other than Linux, I don't really know what I'll do. I'll probably have to get really good with tmux or zellij or similar because window managers on non-FOSS platforms suck so badly!
Use TextEdit for .txt and .rtf, and get Sublime Text, VS Codium, or any of the other bazillion IDEs out there until you find one you can tolerate. Helix does that for me. (:
Too true. MacOS is the one place you can get a UNIX toolchain in a stable environment. If something works on my Mac, it works on my coworker’s Mac. If something works on Ubuntu but you’re using Nix… Uh, YMMV.
I love Linux, but if you’re gonna use it as a desktop OS, you pretty much accept that you now have a part-time job keeping up on Linux news to deal with the fact that each component of your system is in a perpetual state of “deprecated support for The Old Way, and experimental support for The New Way”.
Yeah, if you have a mixed dev team then I’m sure the odd ones out are gonna have the most trouble.
My point was more that if you have a team of all Macs or a team of all Linux, I’m much more confident in stuff working on everyone’s machine in the Mac scenario.
Even if you stretch it to “the Mac users get to customize the hell out of their machines, and the Linux users only do the minimum to get a fully functional dev environment”, I think the Macs end up in a more consistent state.
MacOS is trash. An OS' primary job is managing applications and their windows and MacOS provides the most utterly unintuitive and non functional UX, the instant you plug in an external monitor.
It's an OS designed for people writing word docs on their laptop at Starbucks, not for getting real work done.
Hell, try and enable viewing hidden files and folders in all finder and file picker windows. Oh wait, you can't!
You can use a terminal command to enable them in basic finder windows, but they'll still always be hidden in application's file pickers which use Finder, because lord forbid Apple treats their users like adults.
Hard disagree, I’m a huge fan of the way spaces work on Mac. Windows is a nightmare, and linux is good but takes a lot of time to tune and maintain. I honestly haven’t ever noticed the hidden files issue because I use a terminal for launching anything that would need them, though it does sound annoying if you do.
Where MacOS shines is being able to customize the important parts of your workflow, while ignoring the basic parts because those all “just work” in a standard way. The biggest win is all of the a11y APIs they’ve added for apps, they really let you get in there and change almost anything. I use Karabiner to layer on custom keymappings, capslock is an extra modifier that turns my home row into arrows/delete, hold down command is jump by subword, and many more optimizations. And that is system-wide, it works the same in every single app. I basically have Emacs style macros universally across the entire operating system, every app, and it’s awesome (oh, and I don’t need an external keyboard for it, so I can work on the train and have the same keymaps).
You might not like the base OS’s UX, but it does “just work” for what it is, and that lets you focus on layering on so much more.
MacOS is trash. An OS' primary job is managing applications and their windows and MacOS provides the most utterly unintuitive and non functional UX, the instant you plug in an external monitor.
How is MacOS’s window and external monitor behavior different from everything else?
it's a part time job only if you make it one
That's why so many people also like Linux, you can find both simplicity and customisability and pick between each
The Wikipedia page is your best friend here. In short was an operating system written from the ground up by a brilliant, bipolar and occasionally psychotic man who was named named Terry Davis. It is important to mention when talking about Terry Davis to note he stalked several women and he probably took his own life.
It was Terry's belief that a way to speak to God was through computers. So he built an operating system from the ground up to act as God's temple. It's actually a pretty nifty achievement truth be told and an interesting view into the mind of someone suffering from psychosis. It is not suitable for every day use, but people have taken the foundations of his OS and ran with it making equally interesting operating systems.
“if you don’t use linux you are literally unintelligent and there’s no other reason why someone wouldn’t want to spend hours configuring a personal device” — one inevitable comment under every post like this for some reason
Microsoft's telemetry isnt ideal, but they're not selling your Windows usage data. That is explicitly just used for the OS developers to diagnose issues and evaluate what features are being used.
Your bing data and shit they are absolutely selling, but it has a different privacy agreement.
Almost no company is selling your data. They're selling services that they can offer based on the data collected about you. The data itself is too valuable to be sold, as their monopoly on it is the basis for their business model. That's why all these "we're not selling your personal data" statements are pointless at best and dishonest at worst.
cope and seethe. Haven't had an issue with either my debian desktop nor my debian laptop in the 5 years I've been running it on them. Sounds like you're just mad your OS constantly advertises paid services to you, and mine doesn't.
Been running Arch for probably ten years now, or soon, too. It's no work to maintain. Just run the package manager update command and let her rip. Check what packages are updating. If it seems like something you don't know or understand, or something system critical, check the website if something manual needs to be done.
It's honestly no more work than any other distro. More like less work, because the system is improving at a faster rate than more "stable"/stale distros. And I don't remember how many times I had to reinstall Ubuntu when I was running it. The system upgrade just not finishing as it should for whatever reason.
Happily using a system that doesn't run out of space unless I make it so. That does my bidding rather than some company's.
It's an amazing piece of technology made as a hobby project by the absurdly talented Terry Davis. He gradually lost his world, house and evetually his life to debilitating mental illness, so it makes me sad to see posts like this using "mentally unstable lol" as a punchline.
Temple OS is an impressive feat for a lone dev, no argument there, but it is hardly an amazing piece of tech because of it. It is a barely functioning skeleton OS that looks like it was made in the eighties. There's only the barest minimum of token apps available and there's a breaking lack of basic features. The main selling point is of course the bible-related crap but that hardly makes it "amazing tech" or even unique.
This makes me suspect that what you are actually defending is christianity and you take affront to the use of a christian symbol to exemplify mental illness. Sure, the dev had issues, but how many people knows this? Luckily you are here to point out that it is the dev that was mad, his christian OS is a fine thing actually and has nothing at all to do with madness. Please use Ubuntu Satanic edition to convey madness in future memes.
I don't know about macOS, but from experience, neither Linux nor Windows are actually "just works". Although it will depend on distro, I definitely have different experience on Arch and Manjaro than say Mint users. Mint worked for me well, although older dependencies have also killed "just works" a few times.
Do you want a working computer? Yes
To play games? Yes -> Windows
|--- No
|--- Will you just browse the internet and maybe work with some sort of Office document? Yes
|------ chromeOS
He was also incredibly racist and extremely homophobic even before his schizophrenia got bad. I don't want to play suffering Olympics here but you can suffer from mental health issues and still be an awful person.
After being forced to use an iMac in collage, I'll admit it's fine and definitely better than windows. But it's still annoying. I wouldn't call not being able to use the F key row, just because I dare to use a non apple keyboard a "working computer", just as a most in my face example, there's much more. It works and it does so looking pretty, as long as you have literally zero personal preferences.