Because Linux is full of sharp edges which nobody seems to find it fit to fix.

I’ve been dabbling in Linux since the early 2000s with Yellow Dog, SUSE, and Ubuntu, tried making it my daily driver in the early-mid 2010s, and for the past 5 or so years have been using it in a secondary/tertiary role.

Recently I’ve been trying to move my gaming box from Windows to Fedora (which I’ve found mostly makes the right tradeoffs to suit my preferences). I’ve gotten things to mostly work, including games that have been blockers in the past, but just yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity. No big deal I thought, just go into settings and add it back, but as it turns out the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky and most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection. No, you have to drop down and use nmcli afterwards to fix things because the UI also doesn’t surface the right checkbox. I wouldn’t have even figured that out if it hadn’t been for a chatbot’s assistance.

This is the exact sort of time-burning nonsense that isn’t a problem on either of the commercial platforms that I tend to encounter under Linux. Is this single instance going to push me to reboot that box back into Windows? No, but if issues like that keep cropping up eventually one will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Desire to avoid continued frustration will win over the logical portion of most peoples’ brains.

Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of any other hardware.

Build quality (aluminum), charging (magsafe), screen resolution, battery life, noise (or lack thereof), trackpad…

It’s like other vendors aren’t even trying.

Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates

I'm in the same boat; been using linux for the last 15 years. Had to get a mac for work this year due to their logging software not being available on linux.

The laptop quality is great; great sound, battery lasts forever compared to mine (framework). Userspace tools and UI is terrible and have no control over but the hardware and the software integration is top notch. (I live in the terminal, and have nix-darwin to bring my existing setup to mac so it's not jarring most of the time)

Won't look back when I can transition back to linux full time; I'll be so happy. But I can see why people go with apple products. I really hope that ARM laptops become a regular thing.

> ... but more and more I wonder how much are people willing to put up with such practices.

Apple has rabid fans, they will absolutely put up with this and tell you you're wrong for not wanting to.

Ubuntu have had a go at devaluing their distro with ads too (a couple of times to my recollection). It would be interesting to see if they got any increase in revenue from it.

Firefox added ads to the browser homepage - maybe now the money-grabbing lawyer who was in charge finished vampirically squeezing it for every cent they could make, perhaps we'll move past that nonsense.

> On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads.

I've been using Linux since the a.out days and MacOS X since the PowerPC days, and I find MacOS less of an ordeal for day-to-day tasks as my terminal/workstation. I sysadmin Linux (and previously also Solaris and IRIX) servers for a living. It's been several years since I had to daily drive a Windows machine (though I've heard PowerShell and WSL2 are pretty good).

I'm not sure what "ordeal" you are referring to. I'm mostly in Terminals SSHing places, so perhaps my work use cases are not 'advanced' enough to bump into them? (I also use macOS for my personal systems.)

> And ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased.

I’ve used Apple for my daily driver for years and I could not figure out what this was referring to. What ads? The only thing I can think of is if you open the App Store app and see a promo image for some apps to check out?

Linux is permanently hard and unfinished, and no amount of reality will dissuade anyone from this prior belief.

Linux distros would never do something as egregious as, let's say, unturnoffable app updates, would they?

As a Mac user and in general an Apple user, it's up to the balance between how much are you willing to take as a user from a bullshit perspective and the things you find good and useful from the device. Unfortunately, even for Apple devices, the balance is starting to shift towards the bad side. The problem is that there is no real alternative. For a laptop/pc, you might say whatever Linux distro, but let's be honest, for the general population there is no real alternative.

I originally read the domain name as D-Bus Hell. Fitting for a rant solved by switching to Linux, but Linux remains difficult to use.

I've been a Linux and BSD user for nearly 20 years, and you will take them from my cold, dead hands, but sometimes Linux is just not an option.

macOS has been on a downward trend since Apple started pushing "Services", basically iCloud. Now it's as bad as Windows when I last used Windows.

It's not just privacy violations. Those are the tip of the iceberg. I used to open the Activity Monitor and see a couple pages of processes. Now it's in the hundreds.

It's stuff that was badly done even before AI. The industry has been drunk on SaaS for way too long, and with SaaS comes the junk/slop and the privacy violations.

I've been doing my part and cancelling all my subscriptions apart from power, water, internet and garbage.

Microsoft Office. That’s the last reason.

I was using Windows on my personal-but-for-work laptop; it got to the point where I hated it too much so tried Linux. Most stuff was great (even Teams was 90% fine!) but I couldn’t function professionally without installed versions of Office, and I couldn’t find an acceptable workaround.

I then switched back to MacOS and am mostly happy hanging on to Sequoia… but I’m dreading the point at which (for some reason) Apple make it unavoidable to upgrade.

Then… Windows 11 LTSC?

Everybody now knows M$ or Google are evil. The weird part is that Apple still seems to escape the same judgement. But they're no different. They're exactly like all the others.

I bought my laptop in 2021. macOS was pretty good then and the hardware was spectacular.

My next laptop will not be a Mac, I'll be going back to Linux for sure.

Most people are not like you and don’t care about this. They just want something that works.

I just started getting ads in chats with ChatGPT... Insane.

Removing ads from Windows is still much easier than making sure Linux works on a machine that is not Linux-certified (which, for me, is usually the case, as I have particular hardware preferences), and getting software I need to work. I've used Linux for work for a long time, but I'm still sticking to Windows at home. All else being equal I would greatly prefer Linux, but with the current gap (for my purposes) convenience still trumps ideology.

Personally, I love their hardware and I’m rarely inconvenienced.

Well the example given in the article, for example, will not be noticed by just about anyone, and most of those that do notice don't care. Myself included - I already use iCloud, some extra analytics aren't going to kill me. Maybe one day we'll switch away, but I'm doing a lot less tech support now that the whole household is on Apple.

Windows caused me similar dismay when I was forced to use it at work (2022-25), but macOS - while far from perfect - has been more than fine for my purposes for the last 20 years. I like linux and can choose to use it on my superior apple hardware. Not a fanboi, just a pragmatist.

We’re in a bubble.

Yes, an anti-AI mood had entered the mainstream (anti-data center in particular), but I don’t think people will connect this to that.

For most people, this Apple Intelligence change isn’t a ‘really hostile’ move. They keep the default settings. They have disk space, because most people don’t use terabytes of space, and Macs come with, historically speaking, tons of storage now.

They will upgrade, and if they notice at all, it will be because ‘Siri works way better now’ (and all people who use Siri, whether here or in the general population, complained about Siri not understanding anything complex and seemingly not knowing anything much of anything before). This is probably, on the whole, going to be good for Apple’s reputation.

Ads in macOS? Never once saw one.

Yeah linux is awesome! … But for me personally after spelunking distros… getting past the immense learning curve… again and again and again… settling , tweaking with stability, getting past foundational philosophical approaches, tweaking some more… and some more and some more… Finally getting somewhere and then… only then after starting to get to a place where i’m feeling some semblance of holy shit this is gonna work!?! Only to sit down and discover that Copy/Paste is this fucking dramatic cluster fuck… that yeah I could go through and I’m sure people have work arounds and it could arguably be solvable… or maybe I just need to get over my muscle memory yeah i’m the problem… Or… I can just build a hackintosh… and would you look at that, even a janky hack that came together in literally two hours just fucking works…and I didnt have to spend six month of my life for it, and omg I can copy and paste across every application with the same key binding that I never had to tweak…

So yeah, I love linux but fucking shit if it aint ridiculous on some pretty fundamental issues that (looking at my watch) were solved forty years ago!

It’s the standard enshittification playbook. Get a large market share with a good product, then you can safely degrade it since your users are too reliant on the ecosystem to conveniently switch.

When I'm at home I can afford to waste an hour to debug audio which inexplicably stopped working (LLMs help with it a lot). When I take a laptop with me somewhere, I probably can't afford that, hence a macbook.

Yes, the slow enshittification and the increasingly obnoxious push for services and recurring revenue on MacOS is worrying, but it's also extremely reliable in a way that Linux simply isn't. I love Fedora KDE for freeing me from Microsoft, but there's a new issue every month - usually minor, but sometimes not. As of last month I had to restart plasma-shell multiple times a day because the desktop window would become non-responsive when CPU was under heavy load.

Helps that macbooks have excellent hardware and battery life, too. I just wish users weren't increasingly treated like cattle to be milked.

This is why I sold my macbook and switched back to Linux. I don't want your stupid cloud/ai services. If I want to rm -rf / then the system better do that.

> everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal

I use a Mac at work and iPad Pro at home. Never once have I considered either usage “an ordeal.”

Do I just have a really high threshold for frustration or do you have a desire to complain?

This comes from an ardent Apple/macOS/iOS hater. Yes, I know I am using a very strong word. The short version is: when it comes to laptop hardware w.r.t price nothing comes even remotely close. Like, literally none.

Price as well? Yes. When I bought my first MacBook Air in ~2011-12 I was shocked to see what I got for ~57K INR (no, I am not converting it to USD) I would not have gotten from any other OEM even for fricking 120-130K INR (I had the choice here to instead say 1.2-1.3L :D). And that hasn't changed more or less.

But their OSs are pathetic, their software (even other than the OS part) are downright disgusting. But they sort of have a great personal computing hardware monopoly. Because no one else bothers to make it. For whatever reason.

They make it increasingly hard to make Linux on this. Really really hard.

What else sucks? Repair and repair cost. You are literally using a costly (bank-broken-level) repair affair ticking time-bomb in your backpacks - there is no two way about it.

And people who are going to say, like every time, "but how many times has your Apple device broken down", or even "but why won't you buy a new one after 3-4 years", or something even more stupid like "wait.. so your AirPod stopped working after 3 years.. you wanted it to last for 30 years?", please go and put the head back into the warm sand where it safely was. Anyone saying, "but they give you repair kits", please f-- off!

tl;dr: it's not the right way to buy personal computing hardware, but the the closest right way is a decade behind or at best many years.

I'm a lunix engineer, probably 25+ years of lunix now (I started on bsd, thats why I say lunix), I've worked on macbook pros for the last 15 years. I had to reinstall macos for the FIRST TIME ever this year because their current version Tahoe is absolute trash that slowed down my M1 Max so my much I finally gave up and wiped it.

I also won't go near an x86 processor ever again after using the mX/arm procs.

We're paying for the hardware. The 100x better screens, speakers, battery life, the apps on macos blow linux apps away even if all of them, even the most simple apps, cost $20+.

But with that said Apple has also priced me out of buying another MBP for a long time with how expensive their 64gb+ versions are. My m1 max was $3500 and I can't believe I paid that, but here I am 7 years later still using it and it cranks. I'd have replaced 3 x86 laptops by now.

Oh, and I had the entire laptop replaced for $99 when its battery got bad and the screen cracked last year thanks to applecare, though that did require me paying for applecare at $99/yr each year. But that still doenst add up to another $3500 laptop. I just drove to the apple store dropped it off and picked it up a week later.

[dead]

if you are happy on Linux, why do you even "try to use a mac or win"?