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WestCoadertoday at 1:09 AM2 repliesview on HN

>Apple's software is really buggy compared to Android and Linux.

Anyone making this statement is not a serious person.

I have been around Mac, Windows, and Linux for both desktop, personal, containers/server (yes, even OS X Server) at a large scale, etc. use and there's no way this is a serious take from anyone with any breadth of real world experience, especially not in the desktop world.

The Apple/macOS experience is even now still above the rest by a serious margin that cannot be ignored.

The Linux experience on server/container, etc. is King.

The Windows experience is...well, yeah, still somewhat stable and they're doing their best to alienate anyone they can. But still a more stable experience by a slim margin than Linux.

I've used Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Gentoo, Arch, Mandrake before Mandriva, macOS since before it was macOS, Windows since 95, and beyond. I'm writing this on a Nobara install right now, because my entire goal is to eradicate Windows from my life, which within the first minutes of setup already showed more quirks than even Windows 10.

Is the Linux Desktop experience better now? Yep, it's miles ahead of what it was, and yet it's still buggy as hell. I have intentionally gone between iOS and Android over the past decade-ish and a half and Android is a Playskool mobile OS compared to iOS. And yes, I even have used GrapheneOS.

I'm really tired of the Linux fanbase, and I include myself in that group, constantly lying in every thread about what it is and what it isn't. If you lie to people and tell them that it's better than Windows and macOS, they're going to immediately have a bad time and end up in a world of hurt because they're listening to nerds who barely go outside talk about how Arch is the greatest thing in the world and will solve all your computing problems.

Don't set people up to be disappointed if you actually care about Linux becoming a thing.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, I apologize if this comes off a bit harsh.


Replies

ndriscolltoday at 3:16 AM

Maybe you're just used to your flavors of jank so you don't see it? Your goal is to get off windows, but I've had only Linux on my home computers for ~10 years and it's been working great the whole time. Literally nothing I can think of to complain about.

It's been a few years since I had to use OSX for work, but last I used it, you couldn't maximize windows without a 1+ second animation playing when you cmd+tabbed, which made maximizing completely useless. Docker was also super slow. There's no package manager and the usual recommendation (brew) for a third party one is trash that will update programs you didn't ask it to when you're installing something else. IIRC external monitors are completely unusable from blurry text.

I used a windows laptop recently for a year or so for work. Absolute jank. Sleep was just broken. Like wouldn't sleep/spin down the fan with the lid closed unless I unplugged it. Often completely frozen requiring hard reboots when opening the lid. Leaving it "sleeping" for an extended period would still heavily drain the battery. WSL barely works. For some reason I have to care whether things are in my Windows or Linux home directory. Wrong one and git commands take seconds. I'd get environment mismatches where the terminal in VSCode would fail to run commands that run in a normal CLI, etc. DNS would break inside WSL because it wouldn't propagate config from DHCP. UI is just slow to respond to anything. If you start typing in the start menu search (e.g. "shut down" or "power off"), the menu replaces itself with a different one, and you can't find the power options until you close and reopen the menu.

zackbtoday at 4:10 AM

I agree with your sentiment, but I want 100% Linux about a year ago and it's been much better than OSX. Yes, there are downsides - I really miss the iPhone "continuity". But the bugs, gatekeeper, liquid glass, ads in system settings, etc in OSX dwarf the rough edges on Linux desktop.

For non-power users OSX is still a no-brainer, but for a programmer I feel like Apple's left us no alternative.