Each is good at its own thing. I don't understand the game of picking exactly one hill to die on.
I spend about 60% of my time on Apple operating systems, and 40% elsewhere. Windows really does suck from a UX perspective, but if you are trying to make money doing things professionally with a computer, it's hard to beat. Running outlook and office on Mac just doesn't hit the same way.
I switch around enough that I try not to do crazy amounts of personalisation in my desktop OS. Probably this evens out the OSs and there are aspects I like and dislike about each. I guess I prefer KDE Plasma to Windows or MacOS. I choose that for my own computer, but I spend far more time in Windows. I'm not sure I agree it it much worse from a UX perspective. It allows keyboard only usage very easily, which is something I struggled with in MacOS.
1) I'm only focusing on the UI - there are some things I struggle to forgive, like not being able to set add my own ringtone or alarm tone, or not being able to have the volume of a ringtone increase as the phone rings like on every ancient feature phone.
I really should have included the recent escalation in hostility towards users in my thoughts - built in ads, pushing unwanted products, trash news in new tab pages etc.
Still use it on my server though.
I might try a MacBook air at some point, but they are quite expensive when you need 1TB disk for your music files. But for now my ThinkPad T14 Gen1 still runs fine. I don't need more battery or power. No fan could be cool.
The real crime, by a lot, it middle click. I did not realize how often I use middle click scroll until I switched to Linux and it didn't work anymore.
You can fault Linux as the primary desktop environment for a few things, but that it’s different to MS is not one of those.
Do you also rant about having no windows key on a MacBook?
Also you can turn on Firefox specific middle click scroll feature "autoscroll" which is the same thing. They may have similar stuff for other browsers. Long story short, in less clicks than it takes you to turn off stupid notifications and ads on Windows, you can get a semi decent middle-click-scroll feature where you need it the most.
I'm a dev, I don't game. No issues.
Why people find this hard to believe is kind of puzzling to be honest. As if everyone's experience simply HAS to match your own.
My windows machine is also “fine” for the most part because i turned off whatever I could and tried to mod whatever I could not. Even so, every once in a while, typing “code” and being taken to an edge bing search makes me want to rip it to shreds.
And I delay every update as far as possible and am filled with dread when it finally wont let me postpone it.
It isn’t that fine now that I think about it.
And it scans every executable and command run and sends a hash to motherbase. I don't know how people put up with this. There's probably some dangerous way to disable that like, let me guess, disabling SIP...
And it sucks at gaming.
Linux on the other hand is great for power users!
So you're right, it's great for power users, it's also great for other users.
I'm a gnome user myself, I do enjoy the year on year refinement they have going there, but I completely understand and respect the XFCE crowd.
Gaming: that's a fact but again doesn't matter to most people. Most people play video games on phones/tablets/consoles if they play games at all. PC gaming is a relative minority, and (regular) Windows laptops can only do lightweight gaming anyway. The amount of people who decides what "everyday computer" they should buy based on whether they are going to play games on it is very small. Plus, you get much better ROI by buying a PS5+Macbook Air than spending the same amount of money on a gaming laptop.
I'm perfectly happy with my "vanilla" macbook. Runs Baldurs Gate 3 and my final fantasy ps2 emulator just fine, and even trackmania was quite easy to get installed and runs well.
Can't comment on that hash thing, but I don't see why that would be a problem? It's not linked to your name or something. Windows does a ton of things too that I find inexcusable, such as changing settings or permissions after updates, those have an actual impact on my daily experience with these things
100% this.
For debugging I installed Bazzite (Linux gaming distro) assuming compatibility would be shit but I can at least test native linux builds of some games to see if there is a hardware issue. The thing runs perfectly. I've been playing propert windows games on Proton with higher / more consistent FPS. It is kind of funny at this point. Granted I do not play any competitive / multiplayer games.
I guess Valve did a great job on the Steam Deck sw.
I switched from Windows 10 to Fedora recently. Most of the games I play work without issue but I know there are some which categorically refuse to work (mainly some specific anti-cheating software reasons).
- All core services and apps experience significant performance degradation (to thenpoint that Spotlight regularly fails to find installed apps) which are currently only offset by the insane performance of the M* series chips
- Services become more and more pervasive, with ads throughout the system
I'm really afraid of that one. MacOS engineers don't have to worry about performance optimizations anymore, because the chips gobble it up anyway. Ever more powerful hardware is how we ended up with the awful performance of modern-day computing.
Yeah, spotlight has been rough for years, I grant you that.
I haven't seen a single ad in my system. Where do you see them?
I don't even know what iCloud is, and I have seen zero ads. I don't understand such comments.
Does it make one especially edgy to pretend to use an Apple device while never having heard the name of their single cloud offering? Whatever floats your boat, mate.
I admit that my comment was a bit over the top. But all I know about iCloud is that it's similar to OneDrive. Never used it.
Not just glass. It started with Big Sur at least. It's forcing narrow and/or devoid of controls interfaces into every app, breaking decades-old system behaviours (misbehaving controls, wrong or non-functioning keyboard shortcuts, mobile-like interfaces in desktop apps etc.). It's eschewing MacOS-native development for shoddy half-assed ports of iPhone software even for first-party apps. Etc.
> I haven't seen a single ad in my system. Where do you see them?
I've seen notifications for Apple Music, and I've seen ads in the System Settings
As for MacOS, I just hate it.
"It sucks"
Ha!
There, fixed it for you.
It's not like Linux is the blocker here.
I dont know any private person in my circle that actually sold their laptop until it wasnt broken or so painfully old that the used value was mostly for spare parts. That may change a bit with the skyrocketing pc part prices but still.
When I hear these arguments I just think these people are simply chained.
Also Linux isn't flawless either, Fedora broke sleep on my full AMD PC since like a month now and no agent could successfully debug it.
This hasn't been true for at least a decade. And it's especially not true for the M* series Macs.
Even Macbook Neo can handle editing several layers of 4k video files in several apps while running everything else https://youtu.be/Mo6o8RKn7jE?is=opeCYMDbt7bUAdvS Try that on "the same performance/ram" Windows Machine