this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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I'm genuinely curious; is her hypothesis that macOS users are less tech literate? Because I definitely know much more computer science people that use macOS than Windows (of course most use Linux, but Windows is on third place).
I don't understand the correlation with technical people on Mac. Like I DONT GET IT 😭
how can you just be ok with not being able to do stuff you want? I tried to use a cracked iPhone before deciding just to buy a new android because I just bout exploded with the corporate shenanigans apple has.
Edit: It would appear that Mac is very different from IOS. Ive never tried it other than 15 minutes of fiddling with a friends once, nice to know it's not as locked down as IOS is.
Many thanks, but I hardly understand this conversation lol
Macs have a decent terminal + CLI interface built in, and decent hardware. Also, for many years apple offered huge discounts for students through their university, so many CS students got a macbook for super cheap and just never stepped out of the ecosystem.
The CLI interface is literally just GNU BASH, people need to understand Apple steals everything slaps a fresh coat of paint on it and boasts how innovative they are.
~full disclosure; I'm super jealous andhave always wanted a Mac Pro or Macbook Pro~
Actually its zsh but yeah nothing special.
Unfun fact: it switched from bash to zsh because Apple was butthurt and paranoid about GPL v3. Fuckin' cowards.
It’s better than power shell or whatever crap is on windows. Even WSL had issues the last time a used it a few years ago. Mac is Unix which Windows will never be.
PowerShell is like the 1 good product Microsoft has made the las 10 years
That is a dangerous opinion. In my mind, Microsoft has made zero good products.
The fact that Microsoft made it is what keeps me from using it as a daily driver. If it were an open source project I'd use it (on linux even) as my login shell in a heartbeat
The main problem is its different from the main POSIX style shells. Just makes it very confusing to use with its own proprietary functions and commands.
But with worse versions of most of the basic utilities.
This is the real reason. And I think they couple it with trying to make interface look and behave not how it is in Linux or Windows, so that once you're used to it, you're less comfortable switching to anything else.
OS X and iOS are completely different beasts, iOS is a closed off nightmare whereas OSX is basically just stable pretty Linux missing a few packages and costing more
OSX is ~~basically just stable pretty Linux~~ literally BSD, including licensing the UNIX trademark to make it official
FTFY.
The fact I had to use iTunes to put music on my phone and the lack of access to the filesystem were extreme deal breakers for me. There is also the impossible hoops you had to jump through to change ownership of a phone. I gave my mother my old iPhone when I changed to Android and it was impossible to scrub my account from it, even with a factory reset.
The environment felt way too sterile for my liking. It treated me, a legitimate tech savvy user, like a malicious imbecile.
So it's doing security correctly.
Lack of access to the file system? What are you talking about?
I think they mean the iPhone. I love my MPB, but I still have no interest in iPhones due to lack of filesystem access, interface for the deranged, and not being able to customize it the way I want.
For tech people, OS X is basically a BSD with a pretty UI that comes preinstalled on nice hardware (which is important mainly because corporate IT procurement is only gonna give you a choice between a Mac or a [Dell|HP|Lenovo] business-line machine running Windows (and with corporate policy that prohibits installing Linux). The Mac is a much nicer choice in that situation.
Also remember that, although they've backed away from it now, there was a time back in the 2000s when Apple was leaning into the UNIX hackability of the OS -- they were coming out with stuff like XServe and Automator and went out of their way to design their machines for toolless upgrades of things like RAM. Some of the popularity of Macs among technical people stems from that era, and memories of it.
iOS, by the way, has always been an entirely different story. Your experience with a cracked iPhone isn't even slightly representative of the experience using an OS X Mac.
I use a Mac precisely because it lets me do what I want. Linux is endless configuration and poorly designed UIs, Windows is an incoherent mess that needs to be wrestled back to a usable state with every major update. Mac does what I need without any fuss.
Truth be told, I have a PC for gaming and a Linux server for Plex, *arr, and home automation. But when I need to get work done, it’s the MacBook. No question.
This is the key difference people miss in this discussion. Being able to do the things you want varies so wildly but the system gets out of the way entirely to let you do things. Not sit and endlessly tweak configurations. While for some that might be what they want to do and believe me macOS also has endless configuration parameters to tweak, the class majority just want to do things with the computer as a tool. It’s a subtle nuance but you said it well, it specifically lets you do whatever you want. Editing configs for hours to customize the desktop environment is not the same as being productive with the system.
have you tried mint
that's the stereotype a lot of people believe but it's just false imo
if your hardware is compatible, then it's as simple as any other os
I’ve been daily driving Debian and arch for over a decade lol.
Because it's Unix, and Windows isn't, and they refuse to try Linux because it's ~~not backed by a corporation~~ too much of a headache to use day-to-day
Huh? What do you mean?
There are a lot of things that Apple just straight up tells you you can't do -- I don't use a Mac often enough to make a list, but I can tell you that running apps made by people who aren't giving Apple $99/yr for code signing was recently added to it -- and using MacOS means being okay with that.
You don’t need code signing though. Just hold option when you open the app the first time and you’re never bothered about it again. Like the other person said, give us a list of things you can’t do on Mac, that you can on Linux.
As of MacOS 15.1 Sequoia, that is no longer possible.
In answer to your question, though, off the top of my head:
Did you read the page you linked to? You can still run unsigned code. You have to review it in the system settings, but you’re not blocked from doing it. I’m doing it right now on the latest version of Sequoia…
Valid, but these are things the vast (and I mean >98% VAST) amount of general computer users are not capable of understanding and should not attempt regardless.
If you care about privacy on any OS, you should be using a local firewall—something you can do on macOS. I use Little Snitch, which absolutely can block traffic to Apple’s domains.
This is the single most annoying thing about macOS. I’ll give you that. However, that being said, I haven’t actually run into an issue with it in the last two years.
Similar to others have said, I daily drive my MacBook for basically everything except playing games. I do still play Minecraft, or any (usually smaller) games that I can install on my MacBook natively, but I play most games on my desktop PC—in fact that’s about all I use it for these days. Funny enough, that hasn’t changed since years ago when I used Linux Mint on my laptop and Windows on my PC.
I work at a small, locally owned, computer shop. We order Mac parts and install them all the time. I’m literally doing a MacBook Air screen replacement tomorrow morning, and we’re not AASP. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Option click is still possible, it just works slightly differently. I literally did it yesterday on my Sequoia work system.
Fair, I think this is one of the worst parts of the Linux “ecosystem”, as it completely fucks anyone that doesn’t know to use whatever the “current hotness” is, but I understand a lot of people like it.
Like what? You mean like running without a login screen or do you mean uninstalling something like systemd?
You can do that with plenty of network scanning apps, and you shouldn’t be doing that on device anyway. Not sure how Linux would stop that when you could install a bad package, or run apt update on something that has had a supply chain vulnerability.
Fair. I haven’t needed this since about two months after Apple made the change, because Apple sure does a good job of getting developers to update their code, but I’m sure there are still some apps people wish worked that never updated.
Yeah video games on Mac are terrible, no argument there. Literally the only reason I still have a windows computer. Soon as they force 11, I’m switching back to a Linux desktop, but honestly I’m not looking forward to it.
You can do that now and you could before, Apple just didn’t like it and they made it as hard as possible. I agree it’s a shit policy, but I’m mostly asking about the operating system here. For example you could be running a hackintosh.
If you're willing to consider supply chain vulnerabilities when considering whether someone is spying on you, who's to say there's not a supply chain attack against Wireshark that hides the malicious traffic?
Aren't hackintoshes virtually dead with the latest release of MacOS?
I don't know when you last used Linux, but I can virtually guarantee that the new user experience is better than you remember it being. The last time I had a driver issue with anything apart from my graphics card (and that was easily resolved) was roughly ten years ago. As for the new user experience and just getting everything set up without using the terminal, confessedly, I'm an Arch user, so I'm a bit out of touch with the newbie side of the Linux distro world, but from what I've heard, Bazzite makes the transition fairly painless.
I'm a pleb, barely literate in computers, just pretty okay at finding things I need on Google and blindly copying commands. Like I'm obviously extremely tech literate by the standards of the wider world solely by virtue of having a home server that runs things I use, but it's still using unraid because I'm an idiot who needs a helpful community space and forum so I can search how to fix problems confident that other idiots have also broken the thing the same way I did and I will find step by step directions on how to unfuck it
All that said, when it came time for my roughly annual reinstall of Windows just to clear house, they threw up an ad for Windows 11 and it pissed me off so bad I googled "gaming Linux", made a bootable USB of Garuda (I like the bird logo and didn't know what "Arch-based" meant except that it would make me a superior human) and within 15 minutes of getting mad I was installing, and it's just worked out of the box since
I think that's enough for most of things, really. I'm supposed to be a power user, but I just do the same: google whenever I need to do something
Like whenever you connected Bluetooth headphones to the MacBook, they started Music app. The ~~official~~ solution to stop this was to reboot in safe mode and rename Music app, because it was baked in so hard, or install third party software to prevent Music from starting. That's not to mention that I don't need Music app at all and would uninstall it but it will get restored back.
It looks like this behaviour changed somewhere in 14, as I no longer see Music starting, but it worked that way for longer than it should, really.
Upd: can't find the support thread where they offered this solution, so it must've been not the official one. Officially you didn't even need a solution because it's not a problem.
Hmm that’s really weird. Thank you for the example, but I wonder if that was just on your computer or something. I’ve been using Mac for work computers since 2016, and my Bose QC-35s never once have caused the music app to open. Or any app for that matter. I’ve had my headphones since 2016 and been using them on every Mac since then and haven’t seen that behavior.
That's a bit weird thing to assume if you have only your machine to check, and I have only mine, so both of us are exactly one case to encounter. But since there are numerous questions and articles about this, it's maybe not only on my machine.
It is possible that it's not tied to an OS version, because I have switched to a different MacBook, too, and it may have been this what stopped music from launching.
I have had 4 different Macs in that time and currently have three that I do not have that problem on. One of the comments on that post points out that it’s not supposed to do that. It really does sound like a very small portion of users are affected by that. I will say that none of my current or former coworkers have ever had that happen (I’ve seen them on video calls put on headphones and it didn’t launch anything), so I’m very inclined to think this was unintended behavior affecting your device. That’s not to say it wasn’t a problem for you, I completely understand shitty Mac bugs ruining things. For example one that won’t let my computer go to sleep because the monitor it is connected with continually wakes it back up. It’s specifically a Mac issue, and only affects a very small fraction of a percent of users.
Well, I thought it was intended and more common, now I will think otherwise, you really have much more experience indeed
I’ve never had a real answer asking that question…
Does macOS have namespaces? Can you modify the kernel? An equivalent to Linux Security Modules? ConfigFS? FunctionFS? I haven't used it in decades so genuinely asking.
If I remember correctly you have to do some funny business to change things in the root directory too?
They're completely different operating systems, there will of course be differences. In my experience Linux definitely gave more freedom to do whatever you wanted though. It'd be a bit disingenuous to argue otherwise. They serve different purposes, and that's ok.
But oof repairing things on those logic boards... Everything soldered on makes the hardware a nightmare. I swore off Mac after trying to get one repaired. Had to trash the whole logic board and lose everything. I think that design is almost criminal tbh.
What stuff do you think you can’t do on Mac? It’s essentially just Linux with better (and more supported) apps.
I’m always confused by people who don’t seem to understand that MacBooks and iPhones run different OSs. Why would they run the same OS?
You can install pretty much anything on a MacBook via the open-source package manager brew. I’ve been exclusively using Linux at home for almost 20 years, but on my work computer, which is a MacBook, I really don’t find much is missing. I use the same oh-my-zsh profile on both, brew install the real version of most utilities, and I move on with my life and get work done.
Apple doesn’t lock down the bootloader at all, so it’s trivial to install Asahi Linux now if you want to. I did this on my home computer because I like the screen, battery life, and keyboard layout.
It’s kinda simple actually. As much as I love patching the Linux kernel or debugging it, or anything really it takes a lot of the one resource in life I have less of each day, time. Generally on macOS I can just upgrade and not bother worrying about breakage. Not always sure but if you’ve ever had to deal with python libraries or c libraries and updating source you start to go if I’m not getting paid for this crap why bother.
My entire network is almost all Linux but I generally just use macOS mostly cause safari battery life is insane. Plus zsh as my shell I live in the terminal and use emacs I can pretty easy migrate off either but video apps and audio are so much better on macOS it’s not even funny. Maybe now that the realtime kernel patches are in mainstream Linux audio can get closer to macOS audio latency but I won’t hold my breath.
I can’t speak to windows though I don’t really use it outside of work related usage which is minimal as I work for a company that sells a Linux distribution.
Could be, could also be she is generally actually curious about it. I would actually think its the opposite since your problem solving skills are exercised more on a windows than a mac. Computer science people will engineer a solution from the ground up while the rest of us will problem solve and be happy with something held together with duct tape.
I think computer science is related to problem solving though. Especially programming is just basically solving one new problem after another and being able to figure out new solutions to errors you don't know.
I think that's the gist of it. Apple is so hell bent on proprietary everything and keeping their hardware locked that there isn't all that much you can tinker with when using a Mac. Aside from the high price of apple products, the customizability of PCs (and the access to games) are what kept me on windows.
What stuff do you think you can’t tinker with on a Mac?