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Rule (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/196@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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[–] 47 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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).

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  • [–] 31 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (10 children)

    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

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  • [–] 41 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Actually its zsh but yeah nothing special.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    PowerShell is like the 1 good product Microsoft has made the las 10 years

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    That is a dangerous opinion. In my mind, Microsoft has made zero good products.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    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.

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Lack of access to the file system? What are you talking about?

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    how can you just be ok with not being able to do stuff you want?

    Huh? What do you mean?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    As of MacOS 15.1 Sequoia, that is no longer possible.

    In answer to your question, though, off the top of my head:

    • Use a different desktop environment
    • Uninstall OS components that I don't need for a lighter weight system
    • Be absolutely certain that Apple isn't spying on me instead of just stopping Facebook from tracking me and then doing it themselves instead
    • Run 32-bit apps after Apple ended support for them
    • Play video games (the MacOS version of Steam is a joke and everyone knows it)
    • Take my laptop or desktop to a repair service that isn't sanctioned by Apple, or (horror of horrors!) replace the components inside it myself
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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    As of MacOS 15.1 Sequoia, that is no longer possible.

    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…

    • Use a different desktop environment
    • Uninstall OS components that I don't need for a lighter weight system

    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.

    • Run 32-bit apps after Apple ended support for them

    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.

    • Play video games (the MacOS version of Steam is a joke and everyone knows it)

    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.

    • Take my laptop or desktop to a repair service that isn't sanctioned by Apple, or (horror of horrors!) replace the components inside it myself

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Option click is still possible, it just works slightly differently. I literally did it yesterday on my Sequoia work system.

    use a different desktop environment

    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.

    uninstall OS components…

    Like what? You mean like running without a login screen or do you mean uninstalling something like systemd?

    be absolutely certain…

    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.

    run 32 bit apps

    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.

    play video games

    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.

    take my laptop

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    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.

    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?

    For example you could be running a hackintosh.

    Aren't hackintoshes virtually dead with the latest release of MacOS?

    Soon as they force 11, I’m switching back to a Linux desktop, but honestly I’m not looking forward to it.

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I'm a pleb, barely literate in computers, just pretty okay at finding things I need on Google and blindly copying commands

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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