> In this scenario the macOS firewall does not seem to function correctly and is disregarding firewall rules ... Some examples of apps that do this are Apple’s own apps and services since macOS 14.6, up until a recent 15.1 beta.
This is not new - every time I update macOS, some of the system settings are changed to default including some in the firewall. And I have to painstakingly go through all of it and change it. Also, the few times I've reinstalled or updated macOS, I've always noticed that it takes longer for the installation if your system has access to the internet - so now I've made it a practice to switch of the router while installing or updating macOS or ios. (With all the AI bullshit being integrated everywhere in Windows, macOS and Android etc., I expect this kind of "offloading" of personal data, and downloading of data, to / from AI servers to keep increasing, especially during updates, to "prepare" for the new AI features in the newer OS updates. No internet means the installer is forced to skip it for later, saving you some valuable time, and hopefully you get to change the default setting before it starts up again. Whatever the claims of AI processing done on the Mac or iDevices itself, some "offloading" to their servers, will still happen, especially if the default settings - which you can change only after the OS is installed - also enables analytics and data collection.)
Because all operating systems are terrible but the rest are so incredibly bad that Apple’s are still by far the best, once you add up time saved by features and capabilities and subtract time lost to pain-in-the-ass brokenness.
(Two decades on DOS/Windows home series and NT, at least for gaming and sometimes work, twelve years with Linux as my main desktop OS, started on Android for smartphones, before finally giving Apple a fair chance around 2011 or 2012… because I was issued a MacBook at work and was doing dual-platform mobile dev—FWIW I was rooting for BeOS back when it was still a thing, it was great)
I have used it in the last decade, quite a bit. I try it on the desktop every couple of years. My home server is Debian (too lazy to switch it to FreeBSD when it’s working Ok, I rarely modify it, and the way I use it I never have to mess with Systemd anyway), and nearly all the software I write at work targets Linux one way or another.
Also it’s on my Steamdeck, so I get a good dose of the usual jank any time I have to use the desktop mode for anything.
If you've been on a MacBook since 2011 or 2012, it's definitely time to give modern Linux a try. It has come in enormously long way since then. I am not exaggerating when I say, I have a better out of the box experience with Fedora. Then I do with Mac OS. Mac OS certainly has a lot of features, and visually has a great deal of Polish, but it also increasingly has a lot of bugs.
I try every couple years. I tried KDE on Fedora last time (I hate gnome since 3) and could still crash various KDE apps with drag-n-drop operations—I’d trained myself never to use those outside narrow situations on Windows and Linux years ago because they usually broke things or did something stupid, but am now accustomed to them both working and doing something reasonable, so I spot those issues in a hurry when I use other environments now, and no longer accept that as just the way things are. Among other jank and poor stability, that’s just an example.
IIRC making caps another control anywhere I was logged in—not just in KDE—was weirdly hard, too.
Five or six years ago my Ubuntu tv-attached old desktop forgot how to decrypt the root disk its own installer had encrypted, after an OS upgrade.
My Debian server required manual intervention (busting out my rusty Gentoo chroot grub-installing skills) to install its bootloader. The manual version went the same aa usual and had no problems so no clue WTF the installer was trying to do, but it consistently failed, and this was boring, old business-class Lenovo workstation hardware. That was four or five years ago.
Basically when I try to go back I’m missing lots of features and it’s less stable than what I’m now accustomed to, so end up wasting a bunch of time and regretting it.
Hard in this camp too. The OS tinkering that is as requirement of Linux racks up a massive time investment. When you use your computer for work, that bill gets big quick and sometimes it's an inconvenience you just can't afford.
MacOS, for all it's faults, can be tamed with little snitch and a slower update cycle, and then you have a relatively solid system. There's still some things to hate, like when I take my airpods out if I accidentally click one of the buttons Apple Music opens (no one wants to use Apple Music, ever). But, that little frustraition pales in comparison to the build your own experience a poweruser in Linux faces on a weekly basis.
This randomly came front of mind last night when I thought, I can't remember the last time something broke on my laptop. It's been literal months since I've had anything weird or unwanted that I've _had_ to deal with. Contrast that to the last time I tried to daily Linux, about 2 years ago when I bought a framework and couldn't even log in due to trackpad issues, sleep / hibernate issues, screen resizing issues, issues issues issues.
I have plenty of complaints about Apple’s stuff, but my consistent experience when I try to use something else, for the last decade+, is that I’m jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Even goes for things like Shield vs Apple TV.
I very much wish they had one or more peers putting them under pressure to do better, but the (tiny—which is likely part of the problem) set of competitors seem to have other priorities than chasing the particular market that Apple does.
>The OS tinkering that is as requirement of Linux racks up a massive time investment.
Huh, strange.
I install Ubuntu as a daily driver on every system in my house and don't have to do any tinkering outside of customizations I want (which I have more freedom to do).
I mean, I understand there are certain proprietary devices or software that are going to require Windows or MacOS, and that's unfortunate. But the idea that everything is breaking all the time? I just don't see it.
I don't get why people still spread the lie that you have to tinker with Linux. Like right now, I can give you a laptop with a clean Linux Mint install, and you never have to touch the terminal for anything system config to do work.
Seriously, its not that hard to say that you prefer MacOS because you like the feel of it. It does a lot of handholding for you, unlike Linux, which makes it way less likely for you to mess something up. You don't have to go the extra lengths to justify it lol.
> I don't get why people still spread the lie that you have to tinker with Linux.
It doesn't feel charitable to call people sharing their experience "spreading the lie". You're all over this thread talking to people that way. If you're trying to make the case that desktop Linux no longer has this characteristic, this isn't the way to go about it.
That really depends on what type of work you are doing and your specific combo of hardware. And yes you can do work, but when sleep and power management doesn't work it's a significant QoL downgrade.
If you want to use CUDA as a simple example, you'll have to go through the process of using nvidia proprietary drivers and I'm far from well versed on it but that gives me random warnings and I don't quite get the compatibility between it and Xorg/Wayland or which combo to use and I have on more than one laptop ended up with a system that works but that the desktop randomly freezes requiring a hard reboot.
I still do use Linux Desktop and try various different Debian based or Fedora distros out but you definitely do end up tinkering. I don't use MacOS fwiw.
The only issue that I have ever had with drivers is when the ubuntu automatic install defaulted to the latest open source ones which weren't being recognized.
For a whole bunch of other installations, following official linux instructions on Nvidia works incredibly well. Im probably up to like 30 installs of linux mint on laptops and desktops, without issues. I had a personal laptop with manjaro that suppored nvidia prime, I didn't even have to do anything special, just installed nvidia-smi, and prime-run worked out of the box.
And generally, for equal comparison, I wouldn't consider laptops with discrete graphics to be in the same family as more business oriented Macs, the more apt comparison would be those with AMD chips with integrated video drivers, for which you don't need to fuck with any drivers.
I don't know maybe I've just been unlucky, but at least for me on a couple of different laptops I regularly get full desktop freezes on Debian & Fedora from using things like VMs / GPU accelerated browser (Chrome) / Other things (I don't actually use CUDA/AI much at all but I suspect the issues come from sharing of GPU resources across apps, could be wrong)
This doesn't happen on Windows nearly as much on the same laptops, I don't use Macs that much. And yes I agree it does seem more of an issue with laptops with discrete graphics.
I do still use Linux desktop a lot, I'm happy to take the trade-off but my point was just that depending on the work you do, or the features of the laptop you want to use, like power mgmt or bluetooth, there will be tinkering. (and yes this is entirely manufacturers fault)
If your "CUDA" needs are pytorch, tensorflow, whatever, pip install (or uv pip install) and you're good to go.
When was the last time you even needed to? If you need to do actual kernel writing and thus actually need CUDA (this is pretty uncommon and I think most people that do that wouldn't be asking this question), then most of the issues are not actually issues.
I'll give an example of my latest CUDA error. I run EndeavourOS (Arch based) and so yes, using bleeding edge drivers. Did an update, reboot, oh no... I get to lock screen, login and black screen (but cursor).[0] What's the solution? Roll back cuda. Didn't work? Roll back kernel. Now it works. The problem? nvidia-560-35.03-9 was incompatible with kernel 6.11. I even was able to find in the forums (quickly) the exact issue[1].
But why am I saying this is no biggie? Well... I'm fucking running 560 drivers, which are beta. If you worry about these issues, don't. If you don't want that power, don't run Arch, Gentoo, or other bleeding edges. You know the most confusing part of this all? Was people posting their driver versions with `inxi -G` and so you only see `560.35.03` but I had to roll back `560.35.03-9` to `560.35.03-6`. But also, Nvidia could be better about their namings.
I will also concede that there is a lot of shit information out there and actually parsing what the real answers are takes experience. So here's my advice when you run into your next issue:
Getting Information:
- Start with journalctl and dmesg (try `journalctl -b -p 3` and `dmesg -L -l "err+"`. `-b` is only messages since last boot and the other flags are to only give you errors or worse). These are your "logs"
- There are others, and they *should* go under `/var/log` but just like in OSX how random junk goes to {~,/}Library/{Caches,Application Support}
- Check versions, especially if you did an update
- (side note): For all those confused where files should go, try `man hier`
- Good chance you can get through by reading the man page, but this doesn't always apply
- also remember you can do `man 7 man` or `man man.7` (replace second man with any command). Also see `man -a man`
- Don't know what man page you need? Try `man --regex cuda`
- Visit the Arch Wiki (even if you're not on Arch) -- maybe even the Gentoo Wiki. RedHat docs are also pretty good
- After that, try your distro's (or their parent's) forums.
- Archwiki is good, Arch forums are a toxic hellhole occupied by people who's idea of grass is entirely contrived from what is visible on a screen. Use the forums of the children. I'm sorry to those who've experienced that place.
- Then try Google, focusing on things from your logs. This would be up higher, but you can put quotes around things or dates and Google will outright disrespect you now)
- If it is a specific program that looks to be the issue, try the Git{Hub,Lab} issues page too. Feel free to open an issue. Most devs are pretty nice, even to noobs, though there are also many who will insinuate you RTFM after quoting and linking to it. I'm also sorry about this.
Solving issues:
- First try rolling back. If you're not messing with your system, this can make most problems go away VERY quickly.
- If you're on a rolling release distro (like Arch) then this is your goto. Unless you like problem solving. But then why are you on Arch?
- With `pacman` this can usually be done quickly with `pacman -U file:///var/cache/pacman/pkg/thing-you-want`. You can use other tools, but this is good to know, and you know where things cache :) (`downgrade` is the common tool but it just does this) You can even do kernels this way!
- Things like `timeshift` are useful (and the `pacman` or `apt` "autosnap"). But beware if you aren't using `grub` to just not do that option. Also check out `btrfs`
- If need to reinstall an old kernel and it isn't in your cache check out the command `reinstall-kernels` (try `cat /usr/bin/reinstall-kernels`). This is a uncommon task and might only be because you've filled up `/efi` and deleted a kernel.
- Stop fucking with the kernel if you don't know what you're doing. 99% of the time this is ***NOT*** the solution[2]
- For nvidia you might want `nvidia_dr.modeset=1` and ***maybe*** (probably not) `nvidia_drm.fbdev=1`
- Use `find` and `grep`.
- I'm not joking, `find` is a crazy powerful tool and people sleep on it. (Seriously, how do people jump into large codebases blind and get running without `find`, `grep`, `awk`, and such tools?)[3]
But honestly, you'll need to do none of this stuff if you're on a "baby" distro. I very much welcome people to become more experienced at linux but not everyone needs to be and there's no issue with using a distro that holds your hand (OSX and Windows do). But I would strongly encourage any programmer (not just linux users) to become more familiar with the cli. There's an investment cost, but you'll reap >10x rewards from these efforts, even in general programming situations.
[0] For the fun of it, I asked GPT and gave it logs from journal and dmesg, it did not get the answer, and listening to it would have sent me down a rabbit hole where I'd be messing with the kernel (I use systemd and dracut, these were communicated to GPT and it was asking me to run mkinitcpio and mess with grub lol)
[2] For me `/etc/kernel/cmdline` looks pretty much like `nvme_load=YES nowatchdog rw root=UUID=<that> resume=UUID=<blahh> nvidia_drm.modeset=1 nvidia_drm.fbdev=1` It should be short
[3] Here's a free one for you. Got a python project and you forgot to place `__init__.py` in the folders? `find src -type d -exec touch "{}/__init__.py" \;` (replace `src` with your root source directory)
Are you trying to refute my point that you end up tinkering if you are using Linux as a desktop?
I don't want to run bleeding edge, I don't want to compile my OS from source, I did with slackware as a teenager, I just want to play around with SD and other AI models without it causing me to end up with my laptop randomly freezing to a hard reboot until I go down a rabbit hole of driver/kernel/window manger combos.
If I want to do it on Windows it works and I don't get random hard freezes. Trust me I'd prefer to use Linux and do quite a lot but I really don't think you are refuting the point of 'you need to tinker a lot on Linux' with your post.
> Are you trying to refute my point that you end up tinkering if you are using Linux as a desktop?
Yes and no. Most of my point was about if you're on a tinkering distro like Arch (which the OP is). If you're on Ubuntu, Pop, Mint, or similar you can just not tinker and be totally fine. I did add too much about how to actually problem solve on linux because a lot of people go to the wrong sources and that's one of the biggest barriers to entry (and my frustration with Google).
> I don't want to run bleeding edge, I don't want to compile my OS from source, I did with slackware as a teenager, I just want to play around with SD and other AI models without it causing me to end up with my laptop randomly freezing to a hard reboot until I go down a rabbit hole of driver/kernel/window manger combos.
Use Pop_OS. You do not need to tinker. Things should work just as smoothly as Windows.
I'm not sure how old you are, but if "teenager" is 19 and you're even just 25, the landscape is completely different. Honestly, I think that's probably a true statement if we're talking about even a 3 year difference.
I’ll put this out there, currently there’s no better platform than macOS on apple silicon for developing ai systems.
I’m not a stranger to Linux or the command line. I own, use, configure servers as part of my business, including the dreaded on metal cuda install. In fact, the terminal integration in macOS is one of the biggest things over windows for me.
But, every time I try linux desktop, for the past 20 years, it’s been a horrible time sink and has driven home the point that building a competent and most importantly consistent gui based os is harder than everyone gives it credit for.
I stopped using Linux mint after installing it on my desktop and having the screen saver require a hard reboot -sometimes- when trying to wake.
>there’s no better platform than macOS on apple silicon for developing ai systems.
Lmao WHAT?
The ANE system isn't even remotely useful, since is primarily designed for running Apple AI stuff. This is why its integration is so spotty. IIRC, Tinygrad is faster on apple silicon than pytorch at this moment, solely because they did a whole bunch of reverse engineering.
Laptops for ML is just a lost cause as far as matrix multiply is concerned. Nobody is actually doing any serious work on ML stuff on laptops.
>In fact, the terminal integration in macOS is one of the biggest things over windows for me.
Which is funny, because Windows has WSL2 which works incredibly well, has native CUDA integration for ML tasks thats quite good, has an X server that lets you run GUI apps, and is actually linux (not BSD), without anything to get in your way, and its better because its an isolated system that you don't have to worry about bricking and not having a usable computer.
> stopped using Linux mint after installing it on my desktop and having the screen saver require a hard reboot -sometimes- when trying to wake.
The standard argument of "here is a particular bug that doesn't exist on Macs, therefore Macs are better" lol.
Like I said, its not really that difficult to say that you just prefer the Mac OS experience and end it there. You don't have to go on these weird tangents.
>Nobody is actually doing any serious work on ML stuff on laptops.
Was just training a 52gb radiology model. Please point me in the direction of any other platform that can do that for 5k.
>Windows has WSL2
Macos can run VMs too.
>here is a particular bug that doesn't exist on Macs
Yes, my laptop doesn't require a hard reboot after closing the lid. Linux fans won't understand this. If you want more particular bugs, network drivers, amd video cards, trackpad not clicking on the login screen, screen resizing, external monitors via usbc, TweaksUI as a concept. There's no point pretending this isn't a thing, everyone has a story.
As I said, I'm not new here. I've been using linux for 20 years. Linux desktop is garbage no matter the tangent you want to explore. I have 3 developers using windows so know all about developing ai with wsl and the fun problems that come along with that.
>The standard argument of "here is a particular bug that doesn't exist on Macs, therefore Macs are better" lol.
Yeah, this article is literally about an annoying MacOS bug. I use a Mac 8 hours a day for work; it's a great machine, but I bet I'd have 20 glitches and annoyances that I work around, by reflex, all the time.
MacOS is good, but it's certainly not flawless. And if it wasn't for Apple's magnificent hardware, I'm not even sure it's the best.
> And if it wasn't for Apple's magnificent hardware,
I would agree with this sentiment if people said something like "Apple has gotten the hardware right with the current gen, but the intel macs were colossal pieces of shit in both hardware and software".
The reason you have to tinker with MacOS and not Linux is because you're fine with how MaxOS is set up. So you waste your time in Linux getting it to behave like MacOS.
Obviously if you go into it with the assumption MacOS is correct and the more like MacOS you are, the better, then Linux distros will fail horribly.
People do this with Windows, too. If you go into it expecting Windows-isms you're gonna be very disappointed. And such "isms" aren't actually good at all - usually they suck. But because you already know them, they aren't "isms" anymore, they're now expectations.
If you go back to the very first few times you used MacOS (or OSX at the time), you'll realize there was a lot of shit that surprised you. You adapted, and in some cases have actually come to PREFER functionality that sucks. And now you expect it, and that's the problem.
I had macos forced on me when I joined a company writing forex software. You’re right, it sucked learning all the different keyboard shortcuts, learning to use an extra modifier key (now one of my favorite things) and just little things like double clicking a file renames it :/
I thought it was crazy using the butter knife (from the meme) to write serious software. Previously I was a windows admin at a 500 computer site and dealt with Microsoft, debugging issues in their kernel. Throughout this time I’ve also use Linux extensively from Ubuntu when it came with pc mags to raspberry pi home security projects to servers and boxes. I even compiled gentoo one time for fun.
I have enough experience to know the differences between all of the operating systems from ‘95 through to 22.04LTS. No, macOS can’t be beaten for desktop experience, except for gaming which is now starting to come around also.
The modifier key choice is (among popular solutions) simply correct. I had twoish decades of Windows/Linux shortcuts in my head so it took a few months to get comfortable with a Mac keyboard, but it’s simply better. The cmd key location is excellent, you can feel how much less strain there is in your hand hitting cmd+c vs ctrl-c, and your fingers aren’t pulled away from the home row. Between that and not conflicting with terminal signal shortcuts, it’s the right way to do it (among common choices, anyway—I’m sure someone out there has some custom solution that’s better).
It’s weirdly hard to get Linux to use that keyboard layout and shortcut set, which is a shame. There’s demand for it, and some attempts to make it happen, but it must be really tough to achieve.
Their default English layout is also easily the best of the major options I’ve seen, as far as simply typing English-language text goes. I don’t get why other platforms don’t clone it and use it for their default. No way it can be covered by patents, I think it’s been mostly the same since before OSX. Linux has one alternative layout that’s close to as good, but never seems to be the default English keyboard, for some reason—you have to know you want it.
I always have at least one Linux machine around that I use primarily, but it's never been reliable. Either Debian or Ubuntu, I always, without fail, have issue with sleep/wake/hibernate and will never bet it'll wake properly when they sleep.
My current Ubuntu desktop with AMD cpu doesn't sleep and has to be manually hibernated.
My HP Dev One laptop with PopOS will fail to wake roughly 1/10 times, requiring a hard reset. Other times it'll fail to sleep and overheat in my backpack. Occasionally, it'll stop recognizing USB peripherals, or the trackpad/keyboard will stop responding to inputs.
I prefer Linux on nearly every front, but having a totally unreliable computing environment makes it a deal-breaker for me.
> "Have you tried $THING"
No I really have grown tired of waking a machine to a blank screen and having to ssh into it to kill gnome or any of the other crap.
My Macs very occasionally freeze on wake too--but that's exceedingly rare compared to the myriad issues with Linux usability.
XFCE was my favorite back in my Gentoo days, after I started using laptop hardware fast enough that it wasn’t noticeably slower than my prior favorite, WindowMaker :-)
When I used early Ubuntus on desktop machines (back when Ubuntu wasn’t terrible—before the PulseAudio fiasco and the following series of bad decisions and failed maneuvers against Red Hat) I usually just stuck with the default of Gnome2. That era’s by far the closest I’ve seen Linux get to Just Working.
[edit] FWIW I do find Void with a very-light window manager pleasant to use, but I don’t want to have to self-serve every little feature these days, so it’s pleasant but impractical for my actual life. Nothing short of a full DE, so just KDE or Gnome, with a batteries-included distro, stands a chance of matching what I’m used to just being there and happening for me without my having to ask for it. Unfortunately, I strongly dislike both of those DEs for different reasons. :-/
Hard disagree. Every Linux-running personal computer that I use or have used is a terrible experience. Something is always broken, the whole system needs to be hard rebooted at least a few times a week, parts of the OS will randomly stop working each day, the list goes on and on. macOS is not perfect by any means, but at least I can actually get work done on it.
As a counter anecdote, I run Arch on everything except the MacBook I was issued for work. They've all been running perfectly for years, I can't remember the last time I had an issue that wasn't ZFS failing to compile for a new kernel, and I opted into that problem.
Meanwhile my work Mac every so often decides my external monitor just doesn't exist anymore and I have to reboot with it unplugged, then again with it plugged in to get it back.
> Something is always broken, the whole system needs to be hard rebooted at least a few times a week
I remember this sort of thing about 15 years ago, but in the last 8 years of nixos, I've maybe hard rebooted twice. I've also only ever rebooted after an upgrade. otherwise I go months with just sleep/wake. I wonder if you have some interesting hardware...
In modern days, you can daily drive linux without issues. If you were having issues, it was most likely you were doing something wrong, or you were using a company configured laptop that the IT department didn't set up right.
This is still the case. KDE is full of bugs, bluetooth does not work properly (it fails to swap between hidef to a microphone/speaker setup automatically), 4K monitors have all kinds of problems (though KDE 6 fixes quite a few), hardware decoding in firefox/chromium for videos is a horror, the stupid fan starts all the time out of nowhere (by far the most annoying intel machine behaviour, thermals in windows are much better), and battery is dead after a three-four hours max (and usually much worse than windows on the same horrible x86 hardware).
A macbook air is miles ahead, unless you confine yourself to old hardware. I moved from thinkpads + arch to mac + brew. The experience is insanely better.
It's great that they translated the UI in that language!
Jokes aside, I use a mix of Windows 10, Windows 11, Linux Mint (have had a few DEB and RPM distros on the desktop too) and macOS. I have to say, that all of them are serviceable.
Windows is sometimes quite annoying to deal with, but has a lot of software for it (the likes of PowerToys, MobaXTerm, WinSCP, System Informer, Handbrake, 7-Zip, HWiNFO64, MiniTool Partition Wizard, MPC-HC, Rufus, ShareX, XSplit VCam, VSeeFace and others). You can do most of the same things in alternative software in other OSes, but there's a huge variety to be found, same as with running most of the games out there natively. The UI feels hit or miss and worse in Windows 11 than in 10 in some regards (no vertical taskbar, for example, need fixes for the context menu etc.), but the OS feels usable.
Linux Mint and other Linux distros are pretty much ideal for software development, hands down. Most tools work, the resource usage is great, there's a huge knowledgebase on how to do things out there, it's quite customizable and can be used on servers, desktop computers or even an old low spec laptop alike. I personally settled on Cinnamon, but XFCE was very usable and someone might prefer GNOME or KDE (there were even attempts at reviving the old Unity desktop from Ubuntu, that one might have gotten hate when it was the main option, but actually had its nice bits too). Gaming is hit or miss with Proton (many games will run but definitely not all, also forget about playing anything with invasive anti-cheat solutions), sometimes you also won't be able to get some productivity software running, if it's developed only with Windows in mind, Wine isn't a silver bullet but it's nice that it exists.
My M1 MacBook as an overall computer feels like it has great build quality despite the overpriced hardware. I'm mentioning that, because it's very well integrated with the hardware and I haven't had any weirdness due to that yet, like the touchpad on a laptop stopping working after a fresh Fedora install, or needing to compile Wi-Fi drivers from a GitHub repo for it to work at all, or Windows looking at the RAM available in a laptop and deciding that it wants most of it for itself and to slow everything down to a crawl. In macOS, the desktop also feels polished, is reasonably customizable, though sometimes is a bit jarring compared to both Windows and Linux distros, as are the things surrounding it (everything from the keyboard layout, to how managing open programs works, also connecting to an external 1080p monitor is a miserable experience because it doesn't fit within their own hardware ecosystem either). Development is doable, unless you go for the 8 GB version because you need the OS for a project and can't afford anything more, gaming feels way more limited than on Linux distros, but nothing feels particularly broken either.
Neither is ideal, neither is horrible. They're all somewhere in the middle, doing more or less well when it comes to particular aspects.
> It's great that they translated the UI in that language!
Bit offtopic but since you nudged it:
The oldest Polish localization of MacOS was done by a private company that insisted on using more "appropriate linguistically" terms that have roots in the 70s Polish IT. Tho, some people claimed it was just an attempt to separate Apple's system from Microsoft's even more dramatically. And for example instead of "icon" - "ikona" that translation introduced "stamp - "znaczek"; "edit" menu item - "edycja" (sometimes "edytuj", depending on program) was "change" - "zmiana", "folder" that stayed as it is become "teczka", "briefcase". The most prominent example is the "cancel" translation, which elsewhere become "anuluj" but the team opted for "abandon", "cease" - "poniechaj", tho some argue it should be "desist" - "zaniechaj".
The first official Leopard translation followed let's say, the 'industry standard', tho "desktop" still is being called there "biurko" while Linux and Windows uses term "pulpit" which is more close to "dashboard".
The discourse that happen around "cancel" translation is still bring up on few occasions, as an example of trying to preserve origins of that old IT glossary and also of being nonconformistic to the ridiculous levels for some weird personal reasons.
Echoes of that translation can be seen in the Polish KDE localization - there's one contributor who insists for using these rather obscure and weird terms: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404286 and since there's no official community nor team (to my knowledge), that translation gets approved and makes KDE looking weird for someone coming from Windows
I very much doubt that. I tried installing Fedora on my new laptop, and the defaults are horrible. It doesn't even support two-finger gestures on the login screen, so you have to right click in a different way before logging in.
At least it's not as bad as Ubuntu, which allowed me with a simple warning to install Nvidia drivers without a full system update, which broke the system so badly it couldn't even boot anymore, o an otherwise newly installed setup.
And Debian is horrible too, it doesn't even have a task bar of any kind (you are forced to Alt tab to switch apps, or even see which other apps are running), unless you go hunting for some extensions someone made.
All of these can be made to work decently, but calling it a good out of the box experience is laughable.
>It doesn't even support two-finger gestures on the login screen, so you have to right click in a different way before logging in.
A default setting you don't like and have to adjust? How horrible.
>At least it's not as bad as Ubuntu, which allowed me with a simple warning to install Nvidia drivers without a full system update
So...user error?
>And Debian is horrible too, it doesn't even have a task bar of any kind (you are forced to Alt tab to switch apps, or even see which other apps are running)
Now I get it, this is satire for someone complaining about the Linux experience. Good one!
> A default setting you don't like and have to adjust? How horrible.
No, even after adjusting the settings, they only apply after you log in. So every time you hit the login screen, you get the default settings again until you log in.
> So...user error?
Yes, of course. And it's well known that the penalty for user error is supposed to be complete failure to boot, especially for people new to a system.
> Now I get it, this is satire for someone complaining about the Linux experience. Good one!
Maybe throw in some constructive ideas rather than empty grandstanding? Is it supposed to be a good thing to not have a list of running apps? Is it normal to have to install extensions to your desktop environment to make it work for common worlflows?
I am not complaining about defaults here, there is just no option in Gnome to get a basic bit of UI working like all other desktop environments have worked for 30 years, including Mac, Windows, KDE, XFCE, and past Gnomes. You have to discover and install 3rd party software to get basic UI. This would be like someone launching a new browser that doesn't support tabs out of the box, and people saying "oh, don't complain, there's an extension someone else made that adds tab support".
And note that I'm specifically criticizing the out of the box experience, not the state you can get your system to: I was specifically responding to a claim that the out of the box experience is "great".
I have an M2 Macbook Pro mostly gathering dust and waiting until Debian supports it rather than dip so much as a toe into Apple's crass software ecosystem. For now it is a file server, albeit I had to purchase an dongle just to make it run with the lid closed because Apple deemed that an unlikely use case.
Windows is still bad at this, too, incredibly. Was initially issued a Lenovo Win10 machine at my current job, decided to give it a shot because I hadn’t used Windows for work in a long time, might have gotten better.
It was using 40% of its battery while “sleeping” over night, and even at full charge wouldn’t get me through a light work day on battery—not even close. Straight back to the battery-anxiety I hadn’t felt since back when I used Windows and Linux on laptops years and years ago. Plus the touchpad is still ass (sorry, never got any good at aiming with the track point, even though I used an IBM Thinkpad for years and years)
Luckily this place will issue a MacBook if you ask nicely. My god, that was a rough few weeks.
The only time I’ve ever seen Linux disk hibernation actually work about 100% of the time was on an IBM Thinkpad I used to have, and only if I did some arcane magic with a specially-sized-and-designated partition in just the right partition order, because that triggered something in the hardware that let it handle things directly.
Have you ever tried to compare something like Ubuntu or RHEL on a per feature per function basis with Mac OS?
There are literally thousands of possible combinations of accessibility features alone, that are vastly more difficult to impossible to access. Or simply don’t exist in any form. Once you add in all the default apps and functions of Mac OS, there’s likely millions of possible combinations that would take a fortune in time and effort and knowledge to replicate maybe a quarter of, on a hypothetical laptop installed with Linux.
Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years.
Edit: Of course 99% of these combinations are irrelevant to any particular individual, but they are all relevant to at least a few small groups.
Linux promoters don’t seem to understand that alienating a few thousand users each time is a big deal if that alienation process happens thousands of times…
> Have you ever tried to compare something like Ubuntu or RHEL on a per feature per function basis with Mac OS?
Yes? Why would people recommend it as an alternative otherwise?
I used MacOS for 5 years, left after Mojave and came back when an employer made me support MacOS. The current software experience on Mac is genuinely insufferable. Advertisements in your news, notifications begging you to try Safari, zero support for common and Open Source filesystems, constantly broken software packaging, zero useful APIs (what am I supposed to do with Metal???) and a $99/year tax to compensate for the displeasure of supporting developers. You really want to argue Apple cares about you?
As a software developer, what pushed me over the edge was Docker. It runs absolutely terrible on MacOS, consumes resources/battery and makes your CPU hot as satan's taint. Native development is a nightmare on MacOS and you just have to settle with that if you want to defend it as your home. Don't even get me started on how bad Brew is.
> Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years.
If your peripheral manufacturer can't support USB class compliance, they do not deserve money in the first place. I produce music on Linux and haven't ever had a MIDI device or DAC fail to register. It's a standard that even Apple isn't "courageous" enough to reject.
Many developers do encounter similar problems when using macOS, especially when developing and running tools like Docker. macOS's resource management and performance issues are often frustrating, especially when you need to do a lot of development work.
In fact, you can use other tools instead of Docker instead of Linux. As far as I know, [Servbay](https://servbay.com) does a much better job than Docker on Mac.
> As a software developer, what pushed me over the edge was Docker. It runs absolutely terrible on MacOS, consumes resources/battery and makes your CPU hot as satan's taint.
Thanks for saying this. I own an M2 Max Macbook, which is my very first Macbook, and I tried Docker the other day only to find it was literally unplayable.
I then recalled running Docker forever ago on a much shittier Windows laptop and it was sort of a breeze? I was confused as to why I couldn't have the same experience now.
Thanks to you, at least I know this is unlikely to be a case of PEBKAC
Yeah Docker’s non-native and runs under a virtualized Linux everywhere but… on Linux, so that’s a little rough. I’ve found some of the alternative VM hosts for that to be a ton faster and more power efficient, as they make better use of MacOS’ built-in virtualization system, but YMMV. I’ve also found that Apple’s lead on power management is so great that I can be using a power-sucking thing like Docker and still come out ahead, which is really lame :-/
I hear that “Docker Desktop” is especially bad on MacOS, but I’ve used docker almost as long as it’s existed and still haven’t used that (I don’t really even know what the point of it is?) so dunno about that part.
IME macOS is easily the most broken and user hostile from a professional developer perspective. Maybe I haven't been using it enough, only 2 years.
The hardware is amazing though and no other OS can predictably wake the laptop when opening the lid and not wake it when it's closed, which is kinda a deal breaker for a laptop, so I still use it. Not particularly excited about it, would prefer a Linux laptop if it could sleep reliably. (Seen pictures of a framework laptop with a kernel panic after wake, and I was seriously considering getting one.)
it’s very cohesive and stable by comparison to Windows. It’s beautifully designed compared to KDE. It’s most similar to gnome.
if you’re the kinda guy who sees it as user hostile, I’d wager it’s because you refuse to learn the macOS/gnome paradigm and demand things to be how they were on your windows pc 30 years ago.
I'm not talking about how it looks - I don't care. I can find settings I need when the system implements them no problem.
I'm talking about the gimped OS underneath the eye candy:
- docker sucks compared to native Linux (obviously) and WSL2 (less obvious)
- I have to install BetterDisplay (props to the dev btw, great tool) just to make my perfectly good 25x16 144Hz monitor not look like shit
- I have to install a tool to invert my mouse scroll wheel
- I have to install a tool to manage windows in a sane way (sequoia only just started to know how to do that but it's a looong way ahead)
- I have to install a tool to have multiple things in the clipboard
- Sequoia broke the system firewall and it's still not fixed in 15.0.1 (my mac is enterprise issued and it has all the fancy security apps you've all heard about)
I ran out of time to keep going, these are what I'm running into daily. Fortunately there are tools, but every major macOS release breaks some of them.
And im talking about the fact that there are people who are perfectly comfortable using tmux and vim, + browser window for most of their work, or something similar like i3wm. They can say that its the best possible UI layout, and their argument is just as valid as yours.
Its not about pushing anything alternative as "the best". Its about saying that you prefer Mac OS based on your personal preferences and not trying to make up bullshit objective reasons for it like they are fact of the world, which Apple users tend to do A LOT, and I don't really understand why.
Like I use Windows solely, because I need to run CAD programs, I like to Game, and I use WSL2 for development purposes, and I prefer having everything in one place. But Im not going to make up reasons why its the "best" because it does all of that.
> it’s very cohesive and stable by comparison to Windows
That's an incredibly low bar. Windows 95 is cohesive and stable as compared to Windows.
> It’s beautifully designed compared to KDE
It's beautiful. Designed? I don't know about that. In my experience, it takes significantly less clicks, swipes, or keypresses to perform action in KDE as opposed to pretty much everything.
I consider that good desktop design, because these are tools. Less work = better tool.
> It’s most similar to gnome
Yeah, and Gnome is awful IMO. Some things just can't be done without installing extensions. The workflow is very "my way or the highway". Seemingly simple actions require submenus of submenus. The UI design isn't dense enough, so a bunch of info is just missing.
> refuse to learn the macOS/gnome paradigm
The difference here is I can easily replicate what macOS and gnome have going in KDE. Because KDE is flexible, and those aren't. Why would I though, when I can instead abuse KDE for efficiency gains in workflows? I'd much rather do that.
I personally think that the development experience on Mac is better. I have complained about the poor development environment you mentioned before, but I successfully solved it with some new tools. On Mac, you can use Servbay or mamp to solve this problem.
Servbay:https://servbay.com
>and no other OS can predictably wake the laptop when opening the lid and not wake it when it's closed
You can do it in Linux with scripts. I had it on my old laptop when I had Manjaro on it. Basically disable any action on script close, then write a custom service that listens for an event and puts the computer to sleep. Only thing is you have to press the power button to wake it, but it worked well.
In general, I have been using work issues Macs, and I tend to agree - they are pure shit. I wouldn't even call them good hardware. People seem to forget how mac thought it was a good idea to make the esc button a virtual one on the touchbar. I had 3 work replacements, first one fried chip due to an "incompatible" usbc hub, the other 2 started swelling batteries. In every single case, I ended up losing a small amount of work I haven't backed up (like a shell script), since you can't replace the hard drives.
Currently on the latest iteration of MBP 14 inch, the hardware seems good so far. Battery life claims are overrated - with slack, bunch of browser tabs and VSCode I get max 4 hours, but to be fair, this is the lightest laptop that Ive had that can do that (I used to have a much larger Thinkpad that could do CAD for 4 hours on battery)
This is code words for "Im emotionally invested into my choice for non logical reasons and its very hard for me to admit I have made the wrong choice".
My choice is also bad. Zero of them are good. All constantly have stupid quality problems or fail to operate as well as they should.
It’s a choice between hamburgers that are 30-50% shit, and one that’s 10% shit. Every single one has way too much shit in it. All of them deserve loud, angry complaints about the amount of shit they contain. But if I must eat a hamburger…
>All constantly have stupid quality problems or fail to operate as well as they should.
And my guess is that your "operate as the should" is probably some very personal opinions about how an OS should function based on your personal workflow, that you assume should be the defacto standard.
But for the sake of the argument, lets just assume that your standard is actually optimal from an efficiency standpoint. In that case, the argument to make in case of Mac would be this: Out of the box, Macs are closer to optimal, but technically Linux is is better because you can customize it to be exactly optimal.
> Out of the box, Macs are closer to optimal, but technically Linux is is better because you can customize it to be exactly optimal.
If you’ve got a clean solution for getting cmd-style shortcuts so you don’t have to deal with the how-is-this-still-a-thing-in-2024 problem of conflicting shortcuts in terminals, on Linux, I’d love to know what it is. And that’s just the start of it.
>getting cmd-style shortcuts so you don’t have to deal with the how-is-this-still-a-thing-in-2024 problem of conflicting shortcuts in terminals
I can play that game.
Let me know when Mac gets rid of their stupid useless apple and function keys that is somehow still a thing in 2024, to where you have to bend your pinky unnaturally to get to the apple key, and even more so to the control key instead of just combining them in a single key like the rest of the modern world.
And your response is code for "I'm unfamiliar with the concept of oligopolies, and believe that every consumption choice should be based on logic alone." Come on.
One cause of the problem is that ~99% of the user-facing OS market is steered by three total companies, for sure.
One difficult bit, though, is interoperability. Even absent monopolist BS (and there’s plenty of that) it makes the OS market tend toward winner-take-all.
Nope. Standard human behavior. Plenty of studies done that shows that when you attack peoples opinions, it feels like personal attacks. Peoples opinions are a fundamental part of their ego, and we all have a fundamental drive to self actualize, which translates the active process in ensuring that we are what we believe we are.
Others in the family still use iDevices. Can't avoid Windows or macOS due to work. Prefer FreeBSD and use that mostly. It's an old mac and will be dumping it after another year or two. Do not plan to buy an Apple computer ever again as soldered RAM / HDD and iShittification of macOS is the future.
It may not be worth it: the ridiculous upfront prices to get enough RAM and SSD space, and the lack of upgradeability of those two components, significantly undermine the value proposition of the Mac platform.
But the laptops at least are definitely better quality. The touchpad, charger, screen, keyboard, case, speakers, etc. are all well above the Windows competition in terms of both build quality and durability. The commoditization of every component in a PC laptop has really sapped the life of that platform. No, actually, I don't want another shitty Synaptics touchpad with ancient features and buggy drivers. I really would like every key on my keyboard to still work consistently 2 years after I bought the computer. And no 1080p is not good enough (but hey at least we finally got away from 1366x768!).
Some of the PC makers do seem to have caught on and you can get something comparably specced and competitively priced if you look hard and carefully. But it will still have some deficiencies compared to the MacBook that you can't shop your way around.
> Some of the PC makers do seem to have caught on and you can get something comparably specced and competitively priced if you look hard and carefully. But it will still have some deficiencies compared to the MacBook that you can't shop your way around.
This has kept me on Mac laptops as well. There's always some compromise made elsewhere, even on high end laptops. Usually it's the trackpad, or poor thermals making it unusable as a laptop or just super loud (comparing to the Apple Silicon line here, my intel MBPs were furnaces). Plus, if you want anything other than a 1080p screen you are pushing close to MBP prices anyway.
>I really would like every key on my keyboard to still work consistently 2 years after I bought the computer.
You say this as if Apple didn't spend 5 years selling keyboards that were nearly guaranteed to die after a years worth of usage in a slightly dusty environment.
People love Apple hardware because they have a terrible memory for all the flawed hardware Apple always releases and pretends isn't flawed. There are significant design flaws that affect a significant portion of their customers that they just never acknowledge. For example, I only recently learned that my previous work macbook failed in the way it did because a specific short ribbon cable was made shorter for no discernible reason and so some revisions of the 2015 macbook pro just have indescribable screen corruption as a failure mode. Apple doesn't tell you that though, just send it in, let us charge you $1500, and replace half of the computer.
"Better" is a relative term. Better in what, for which purpose?
There is currently no fanless laptop that can run linux (at least macos is not windows, so good enough for me, I do have some standards) that can even remotely be compared to a macbook air. Or in general to meet the quitness of higher end macbooks except under heavy load, or the performance you get on the go. I am just tired of having a "jet engine" making constant noise in my room. We have been waiting for qualcomm snapdragons to catch up, maybe after a few more iterations they will stop being a disappointment, and then I may switch to a snapdragon (or amd or intel or whoever manages to get there) laptop with linux.
This does not even include other aspects that macbooks are superior to whatever I have used in the past, eg their touchpads or speakers, which I discovered just when I switched.
I still use a MacBook from 2015. That's hella longevity compared to other laptops I've owned. And the only thing better than Apple trackpads is the Thinkpad "nub".
Too bad about the craptastic keyboards from 2016-2020 though.
I love Linux. I've just been burned too many times to trust it on my primary laptop. This is a machine with a high availability requirement -- if I have a job interview, the camera had better work right now.
Never updating within several days of anything important works well in my experience.
Although the specific hardware matters as well—an Intel Macbook’s Facetime HD abomination with its out-of-tree drivers was a source of constant frustration; by contrast, the Framework’s camera (the old one, not the one released recently) has been solid enough that I don’t actually know what it is.
I agree about the issues that Linux sometimes has....
However, how is this different from current Windows? I have had a machine decide that it needed to update while I was in the middle of a teams call. "Luckily" I was able to switch over to phone while it did what it wanted to do and then switch back but still....
It's funny how Apple went from leading in UX/UI and being average/below average on hardware, to the opposite. iOS/macOS truly is a cluster-fuck when it comes to UX that makes sense. Luckily we can run other OSes on Apple computer hardware, but not as lucky with Apple phone hardware...
Or KDE Plasma… they’ve been making amazing things with look and feel in the last couple of releases. Either way, that much customisation and user control on an iPad… practically unheard of.
How can you even install the update without access to the Internet?
For years, I can not do the automatic updates, because it always fails with an error message along the lines of "Failed to personalise software, check your internet!", even though I have a perfectly working Internet connection. The only way to update is with a live USB and an ethernet connection. Everything else fails.
You can manually download the updates from here - https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs for the older versions of mac (or check and download it manually through Software Update). Once the installation starts, the installer does some verification and / or data collection for which it requires the internet, and then starts the installation - at this point, just switch off the router.
every time I update macOS, some of the system settings are changed to default including some in the firewall
Windows has also been doing that for some time now. Only Linux is relatively "clean" from that perspective, but even now some distros are beginning to sneak in spyware. The enshittification of OSes continues...
> but even now some distros are beginning to sneak in spyware.
Citation needed. I remember Ubuntu sneaking in some stuff a couple of years ago[0], but most of the mainstream distros have a clean track record. What are you referring to exactly?
I've been in-place upgrading my Fedora install for about 7 years. Or is it 10? IDR. As far as I remember the upgrade has always succeeded. Sometimes things are broken afterwards because software I liked got removed or something, but I never got locked out or the operating system unusable.
What problems have you encountered on Fedora that were caused by a distro upgrade? Asking this because I've been using Fedora for years across different machines and can't recall any breakages that were direct consequences of an upgrade, though I usually apply it a month or two after the release date, so maybe there are early kinks that get resolved by that time.
If you want leak-proof VPN, you need to implement it outside of your device, at the router level. This is true for any device but Apple devices in particular.
I highly recommended sniffing the traffic on the wire and piping it through wireshark. You can do this with a router, or a passive Ethernet tap. You’ll see a bunch of packets going to places other than your VPN entrypoint. If you use a router, you can check your mobile for leaks too. (Did you know if you have WiFi calling enabled, then your phone makes a TCP connection to a sensor server controlled by your ISP every 30 seconds? So if you’ve got T-Mobile and you’re abroad, not even using it as your default SIM, they’ll get a nice log of every exit IP you use.)
Apple’s seeming embrace of support for VPN and network filtering extensions is a red herring, because they’ll happily disable it for their own traffic.
On iOS, the App Store will skip any VPN, and similarly Apple will even block you from downloading updates if you’re on a VPN. I only realized this when I used my wireless router with VPN on it and updates failed to download.
On Mac, there are a bunch of issues, especially on first boot. It seems like the Mac will refuse to establish the VPN until it can make one connection outside of it. I encounter this when my computer wakes from sleep and the on-demand wireguard tunnel (using Cloudflare Warp) fails to send packets. I unplug my Ethernet, disable always-on, wait 30 seconds (for some timeout?), re-enable always-on, and then plug in the Ethernet and in connects. But I’m not actually sure this isn’t leaking, I need to investigate more.
it also leaks the audio of tabs before logging in.
Even though I had disabled all 'restore' applications features, macos sometimes decides to 'start' browsers BEFORE logging in after a restart AND those start auto-playing audio from whatever was paused before the reboot (or many days before).
Since then I went rather deep disabling that feature, but I never trusted it.
They want their TCP/IP stack and safari browser hot and ready for their demanders of instant gratification.
In the long run, they barter this goodwill for "Safari is shit" credit until they and Google force the internet until a browser-turned App-Play-Store war.
Both companies win, and can blame the other company - all while incentivising anti-competition behavior and benefiting from their own organizational, yet altruistic, self-interests happening to coincidentally collude in similar, yet distinctly more complicated cases of creating monopolies spanning multiple domains.
The internet was captured, gamified, commoditized, and vertically integrated into a handful of giga-Corps.
your mobile devices are essentially tracking devices you are addicted to, and the government is too interested in these shiny grandiose things and their use in facilitating government functions without any real consequence, they fail to see the systematic risks that they themselves have allowed to proliferate by not enforcing stricter laws for systematically - exploitable intersections of law, technology, and business.
The differences between governments and megacorps are dwindling and the two are becoming much more alike one another. We already live in global technofeudalism.
Alas, no. By and large, governments are still vastly less competent than multinational corporations. MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes or buy their products.
> MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes or buy their products.
MNCs are like local governments levying property taxes.
e.g. you need a phone much like you have to live somewhere. Your "Tech Government" is determined by a highly constrained choice like your local civil government is determined by your zip code. Maybe you can move at great disruption and cost but it's only to the jurisdiction of another government and some variation of autocratic laws and taxes.
However, you have no vote and there is no pretence at serving your interests. You are not a citizen but cattle to be farmed... just maximal exploitation to please the mighty Mammon.
this. also any profit margins sure are a "tax" in that comparison. Only you don't even get a public service for it, however bad it might be. For taxes, at least some of them are used for public services.
The less local the government, the less likely I am to see any material benifit from the taxes I pay. Local and state taxes fund roads and other infrastructure, public schools, social programs, etc. Federal taxes fund military adventurism, pure corrupt waste like SLS and worst of all ""aid"" for shitty foreign countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel so they can wage wars on their neighbors, for which America's international reputation suffers greatly.
But you are right that more local government has advantages over more centralised government. For example, it's easier to change your local government, if you don't like it: just move to the next town over.
You elk of America's international reputation and foreign fiscal affairs is ironic as you are only inconvenienced a fraction that the hundreds of third world humans endure daily to prop up our unsustainable standard of living.
You have definitely maimed and killed a non-zero amount of humans indirectly by the stochastic math that tallies the bodies on your Luxury products.
We are bias. Your gas wouldn't be less than $10 a gallon if we didn't drop $10b a year policing the Canals, Gulfs, and ports.
The higher your standard of living, the more dependencies, the more complexities, the more abstractions, and more susceptible to changes/perturbations until the "millionaire if not for taxes" thinks he can go without the "taxation without representation" route.
> also any profit margins sure are a "tax" in that comparison.
No? If your local government runs a surplus, that's sort-of equivalent to a profit (but not quite). Profits aren't equivalent to taxes. That's just silly.
So wrong. Every dollar that $FOO_COMPANY shovels to Google and Apple to spend on advertising is a dollar that you, the consumer, end up footing the bill for; a dollar that does not go towards improving the product you receive in any way whatsoever.
The advertising industry itself is a tax on the price of everything.
That's not a tax. That's just a payment they make for goods and services (in this case, ad services).
> [...] the consumer, end up footing the bill for; a dollar that does not go towards improving the product you receive in any way whatsoever.
Huh? You could make the same argument against providing free coffee for employees. Every dollar the company spends on coffee is one that they didn't spend on anything else..
And, obviously, ads go towards improving the improving the product I receive: without ads, I might have bought a different product or none at all.
Not all ad spend improves my experience, obviously, but neither does all spend on everything else. And I don't have to buy a product, if I don't like the ads.
> Megacorps are adopting the level of competence of governments.
Any sources for that? From all the studies (and anecdotes) I've seen, MNCs are vastly more competent that most local companies, and the latter are also _usually_ still more competent than government.
You are "forced to pay taxes" to have schools and roads and rescue services and law and everything else that makes the United States still a mostly habitable place to live.
Corporations do not force you to pay taxes YET. When the corporations get in total control and you cannot even vote just wait to see what a slave you are.
> You are "forced to pay taxes" to have schools and roads and rescue services and law and everything else that makes the United States still a mostly habitable place to live.
In any case, I grew up in Germany and have adopted Singapore as my home. And in comparison I am very happy that my overall tax rates here are perhaps a third of what they would be in Germany, while the services provided here are at least three times as good. (But the latter is subjective.)
Not incidentally, Singapore is perhaps the most well run city on the globe, and the place most run like an MNC.
> Corporations do not force you to pay taxes YET. When the corporations get in total control and you cannot even vote just wait to see what a slave you are.
Huh? That seems about as relevant as making an analogous argument against current real world governments by pointing out that someone might clone Stalin.
Yes, theoretically possible, but rather far-fetched.
"Some of the biggest sectors domestically — shipbuilding, electronics, banking, and now they're very involved in private banking — got their start because Lee Kuan Yew and the government specially directed state funds into those areas," Kurlantzick says.
The government also provided social services like housing and health care, in a way liberal economists applauded."
"He understood the politics of this very diverse place, and put together the laws, including the labor laws, that created a stable, peaceful place that multinationals were looking for," Lim says.
And it is good for you, but what about people who are not you?
"People live well, but the per capita GDP conceals a high level of inequality, so that is definitely a major issue in Singapore today and one of the things that the current prime minister has focused on," he says.
MNCs get governments to force you to buy their products. I've dealt with governments where the only way to send or receive docs was MS Word. Sometimes saving in MS Word format works (LibreOffice), sometimes not.
> By and large, governments are still vastly less competent than multinational corporations
Is this something you know firsthand or something you think you know because a huge amount of money has gone into spreading that message for political purposes? Anyone who’s worked for or with a multi-national knows that they’re hardly as efficient as the marketing would have you believe, and anyone who’s looked at libertarian media knows that it’s almost entirely funded by rich people seeking tax & regulatory reductions, banking on you confusing their interests with your own.
Roads should be privately provided: they aren't even a public good.
How they are financed is up to the operators. Perhaps they want tolls, perhaps local stores want to chip in to improve their business? Perhaps something else that would take someone more than 30 seconds to imagine?
(In any case, roads being provided by local government isn't all that bad. It's relatively easy to change your local government by moving from one town to the next. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity)
> governments are still vastly less competent than multinational corporations.
Speaking of competence devoid of context misses the point. They are resembling each other greatly in the sense of misaligned incentives with their "users", which supersedes run-of-the-mill competence in terms of importance in this context. I'm not going to give points to some moron who is swimming competently in the wrong direction.
> MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes or buy their products.
An oddly naive comment given all that has been written about how Amazon operates, to give one example.
I never got this sentiment. Corporations as viewed from the inside are wildly incompetent—and that's before you consider profit inefficiency. I suspect this would be a lot more obvious if it weren't for the last seventy years of intentionally hampering government from competing with the market players directly. Once a product hits enshittification it benefits everyone (but shareholders, who contribute nothing to society) to nationalize the production and provide it at zero margin.
> Corporations as viewed from the inside are wildly incompetent [...]
Corporations have varying levels of efficiency. MNCs are by and large _fairly_ competent.
Of course, if you see them from the inside, there's still enough weird and incompetent stuff going on.
Compare to how western militaries have their fair share of screw ups, but they still wipe the floor with non-western militaries, whenever there's any conflict.
>MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes or buy their products.
yeah, because the only kid bigger, told them to knock it off, as to not hamper their own racket.
If you think a mega-corp won't go AWOL and attempt a Banana Republic/Dutch East India Company again, but with more proxies, lawyers, SAM's, and corrupt officials to "YAS" them into integration, then you really haven't been paying attention to what globalization is really about.
The US had to ask for money back from the oil barons.
Bezos/Musk/Zuck/{untold billionaires} will have much better bargaining chips when they possess the monopoly on surveillance, money, and influence, and have proxy chairs at the U.N.
And I bet those countries would be better run in every way.
>"they fail to see the systematic risks"
Or they also fail at providing a solution.
Apple has no incentive to improve Safari. "It just works" is what their cultists paid to have the honor to parrot, and they enjoy the majority of web market share of people with actual wages and disposable income. That's why the sell culture, not their people's data (directly, yet).
Since it's not "Safari" that's broken (since iPhones cost a lot of money, they cant break), the users will lie blame at the fault of the web developers, since they had gotten cozy within the comfortable, flexible, expected behaviors of Chrome, having enjoyed a hiatus from IE11 EOL pollyfills and jquery.
Apple then made it easier to roll out an app than to grapple with the pitfalls, nuances, foot-guns, and gabbling documentation that Safari has carefully mal-compiled to shepherd both developers and their users into the Walled Garden.
It's just the browser wars, but with higher stakes. And Microsoft already won.
If you’re referring to people as “cultists”, consider that your point might not be as strong as you think. If you have a non-emotional argument about a browser, try making it with logic and data rather than emotion. For example, demonstrate awareness of where the browsers rank on the features which web developers really need (Google’s devrel team likes to highlight PWA features almost nobody uses even on Chrome) and show why the “walled garden” metaphor applies more to a niche browser than the dominant one by a large margin.
> Would you prefer diletantic government intervention in this area instead
what kind of answer is that exactly?
I would much prefer they fix the issue, yes, the stuff I'm using is provided by Apple and it's been paid off in full, I don't know what made people believe that it's ok if software sucks...
If a train company causes an accident they are considered liable if a software company leaks my data they should be considered liable, it's as simple as that, no need for this anti government stands that frankly make adults look like angry teenagers with a bad bladder
The complaint was the governemnt does nothing, because they lack a clear solution, to the non trivial problem of todays megacorps and their Power since they control our gadgets. Do you happen to have a concrete solution?
>They want their TCP/IP stack and safari browser hot and ready for their demanders of instant gratification.
Having short startup times is bad now? ...because of "instant gratification"? The rest of your rant might make sense in the broader context of what big tech is doing, but bringing it up in this thread and implying that it's part of a conspiracy where "The internet was captured, gamified, commoditized, and vertically integrated into a handful of giga-Corps" is unhinged.
Yet they still make a sound when powered on or resuming sleep (and curiously, when plugged into my usb-c monitor, keeps going to sleep and turning back on (with a nice sound) forever. No other laptop win or Linux does that)
I actually tested my laptop before writing that comment. My laptop(s) make no sound even if I close the lid with playing audio (sans Firefox, as I said).
I didn't test sleep/wake consciously while I docked my laptops, but I don't remember they start making sounds when they should be silent. Maybe you're seeing PowerNap cycles, but mine is not doing any noise in PowerNap, either.
Need to test with leaving Firefox playing something and see what it does.
...all in all, interesting sentiments. I'm using these things for ~15 years at this point, and while they did funny things in the past, this was not one of them.
macOS sends a "pause" signal to all players when it sleeps, and any application which can handle that won't be playing any audio when the system wakes up. So if your audio continues the moment you open the lid, please file a bug report for that application.
That's PowerNap. Depending on your settings, your Mac wakes up briefly to check e-mails, updates and sleeps again. Normally it happens only during charging, but you can enable on battery power or disable it completely.
Bluetooth and wireless radios stay on for a longer while because to keep everything connected if you are moving from room to room at home or at work, also it's made possible because all radios are higher end models with their independent processors.
so basically you're retracting your previous statement that the notebook sleeps as soon as you close the lid? Because doing all that shit isn't sleeping, even if their marketing calls it a 'nap'
When you close the lid, macOS directly sleeps, shutting down fans in ~10 seconds if you have them, reaching S3 (Suspend to RAM) state. Radios stay alive a little longer to keep any BT/Wireless connections to speed things up if you're just moving places, then they go dark as well.
If you enabled PowerNap on charging, your laptop will wake up briefly after some time (Every hour or so) after you plug it in, check mails if Apple Mail is open, check for any system updates, and sleep if there's none after fetching the mails (It'll download the updates if there are any, IIRC). If you have setup Time Machine, and the drive is available (locally or via network), PowerNap will wake the system and take a backup every 24 hours, making sure that your backups are always up to date.
Per factory settings, PowerNap on battery is off, so it'll sleep without any disturbance up to a month or so, and will hibernate when the battery is low.
So, yes, the laptop sleeps as soon as you close the lid. But wakes up periodically to make sure that everything is fetched and ready (if it's connected to power, by default).
BTW, There's an actual method called Power Nap involving short naps to recharge. It's not an Apple naming gimmick [0].
That’s an unfair characterisation. It’s just restoring windows, some of which happen to be browser windows, which then load a website with auto-playing video or audio that (unsurprisingly) starts playing. No one is selling it as a feature to “play sound when waking up from sleep”. I bet that if you configured the browser to never auto-play, this wouldn’t happen.
To clarify, because commenters seem to be misunderstanding my point: I’m not defending the functionality, I think it’s wrong. My sole quarrel is with the characterisation that Apple is selling it as a feature, when they’re not. Let’s not ascribe wrong (or at best unknown) motivations to behaviours, as that makes is less likely they will be fixed.
No one is selling it as a feature, no, but I would still consider it an OS level bug, and a security one at that. Focusing on the browser is a step away from the point: if I'm not signed in, I don't want sound playing from any app⁰.
I've had Windows do something similar, a media player deciding to unpause when coming up from hibernate (this was before Windows seemingly broke hibernate) and for some reason being at full volume, and it was a fair few seconds before I was able to login, get to that app, and hit pause again. It didn't leak anything sensitive (Hey everyone, this guy watches Stargate!) but it made me “that guy we all hate” on the train… Again it is the app that is responsible for making the sound, but I think at that point the OS shouldn't let it.
<glasses tint="rose">I miss the times when laptops had physical volume sliders…</galsses>
To me this has the feeling of making a mountain out of a molehill, but I don't think there is any denying that the molehill itself exists and to others it might be more than the very minor irritation it could be to me.
> I bet that if you configured the browser to never auto-play, this wouldn’t happen.
I bet that no matter how tightly you try to control that, some advertiser will find a way to override it to make sound play, and sods law says that will happen when you most want your waking laptop to be quiet. Blocking audio while not signed in at the OS level is a safer gate.
----
[0] Actually, there is an exception there: if the machine has locked due to input inactivity, I want audio I'm listening to continue and notification pips to come through. There is a distinction between OS restarting (from [re]boot, wake, etc.) and local console not logged in due to input timeout, in how I'd prefer things to behave.
Yes, I understand, I have encountered that as well and I agree it shouldn’t happen.
My only quarrel is with the other user implying Apple is selling this as a feature. I have my fair share of criticism of Apple and other tech companies, but let’s please not let blind hate take over and dilute arguments.
The characterisation matters, yes. Because when you ascribe wrong motivations out of perceived spite, it makes it less likely the people who can fix it want to do so.
I’m not defending the bug, I’m replying to the post below it.
I do not think the user particularly cares whether it was an intentional feature or an unfortunate byproduct of features and bugs when they open a laptop in a classroom or a meeting and it starts blaring the music they listened to before closing it.
Some areas of expertise require so much work, it nearly prevents the student from learning to appreciate the intent, the craft, itself.
It's like being literally unable to dog
Opening a laptop, even if the last activity was blaring obnoxious carnival music, should _allow_, not _demand_ the user to resume their last function - which was explicitly to _pause_ the laptop, by closing the lid.
If I close the lid, I am done with the computer and video; it is obvious that I am done right now - the OS/browser would be alerted of LidDown, and I would expect the OS to tell the browser to Pause (via some new javascript media API that I am sure exists), pagefile ram if possible/needed, and dump all console.logs to a temp directory, in case restarting from hibernation goes awry.
If I open the lid, I am attempting to use the computer. The previous quest can be pertinent or moot; but it would be oddly assumptive (against the ethos of general computing) to _automagically_ resume (especially a paused) playback just from first button press - at least give me the option to explore, format, or rename the thing.
The thread shouldn't pause with AudioContext frozen in an "active" status. The thread unpauses, the AudioContext resumes before the next frame (whever thatll be) comes to remember to pause it.
Windows 7 with Youtube can figure out - even with hibernation breaking audio/bluetooth on windows - then surely the most expensive company and OS 15 years later has made an inkling of progress (if that was ever their intention)
How is this possible? I wouldn’t have thought that it could open your applications without you logging in? How does it know who you are? How does it know which applications to open? If you’re not logged in yet, is is just logging in for you automatically but not showing you?
Seems like a huge security bug. This isn’t being exploited? Wild stuff.
Reminds me of when you could hear a FaceTime call coming through but if you chose not to answer it, no worries! Your iPhone will turn on your camera anyway! And send your video to the calling party!
But how? - surely they don't store the passwords in plain text locally? Does the OS have a function to log in a user while bypassing their credentials? I would have assumed that it is impossible for the OS to preloadapps() when it doesn't have access to the user's apps in the first place.
But apparently it does! shrug
So why tell the user that they need to log in first? If they are the only user account on the system and the OS can access the user's files and apps without logging in, why have the user event set a password in the first place? It seems like a fake login, a false sense of security. And a massive security issue. If the user can just open the lid and that means that code is now running under their own account but they have not authorized a log in, that's just dangerous.
The OS at its core doesn't care about credentials. As long as there is a root process, which there is for init. It can simply execute a process as another user id.
With how modern macbooks and many other laptops work nowadays, you are rarely fully turning off the device and simply hibernating it constantly which keeps everything loaded in memory.
I don't deny there are security implications. But it's an Apple design choice. lol
Damn, how is that possible? I imagine you have FileVault enabled, and if so this sounds like some security bypass?
I was under the impression that until you provide the password after a reboot, the system should know nothing about you as all user data should be encrypted, so it should not know what apps you had open before reboot let alone start playing sound.
After you type your FileVault password you are 'logged in'
This is really about the checkbox on the reboot modal that says "reopen windows when logging back in." An OS update defaults to yes, for whatever reason.
>Damn, how is that possible? I imagine you have FileVault enabled, and if so this sounds like some security bypass?
If you're choosing "reboot" rather than "shut down", presumably you intend to continue using the machine, so it's reasonably safe to keep credentials around. AFAIK windows has the same feature.
> If you're choosing "reboot" rather than "shut down", presumably you intend to continue using the machine, so it's reasonably safe to keep credentials around.
This is the last thing I would expect. Quite the contrary, when I reboot (rather than log out or sleep), I expect the machine to clear it's memory completely.
Somewhat loosely related, but I have something similar with the iPhone browser. Where opening the browser will shortly show the last page I had open (even I carefully closed it before closing the browser). Even if it never got me into trouble, I found that annoying as s. And could potentially make problems.
Yes, but still if you have somebody looking over your shoulder, it can leak whatever you've been looking at.
There's a way to block that entirely for "secure' apps, but iOS could be smarter about this, and cache some stripped down view or expire that cache quicker.
This is also the case for FaceTime; The last image the camera captured will stay visible in the app switcher like forever... so other people who use your iPad / iPhone can see it.
The only explanation is that you restarted whilst having the "Open All Previous Application" checkbox enabled. And yes it will launch processes after you have logged in but before the Desktop is shown.
Either that you or you have some launch daemon that is opening a browser.
> Maybe you should use your imagination and read the second part of what I wrote.
The comment only advances two causes.
> Which is that it could be a launch daemon. It's very common for third party apps to use their imagination and do dumb things on startup.
Yes, that's possible, but unlikely to be an exhaustive list of reasons. Especially since in this case it's about browser tabs playing stuff before logging in, not about any weird third part apps.
I've had similar experiences with MacOS. I uncheck that goddamn box all the time and still it relaunches previously opened applications half the time. If my application or computer crashes, I don't want the crashy application to open up at startup again. MacOS isn't perfect.
OSX is particularly lousy with remembering user preferences and configuration. I quit using it after I grew sick of raging at it forgetting what applications want different files to open with. I've never had this sort of problem on Linux.
I’m very confident that it’s either this or the restore-after-crash feature that OP is seeing. I don’t think it’s anything specific to Safari, because I have never seen Safari opened before login when it’s not my default browser.
That said, there should probably be a checkbox in system settings to disable login “prewarming”.
I actually used Chrome and Edge. Both show that problem. But the main issue is not those browser autoplaying audio and video on "restore", even though it is an issue, its the OS thinking its OK to load apps before a user authenticated itself after boot
> During the macOS 14 Sonoma beta period Apple introduced a bug in the macOS firewall, packet filter (PF). This bug prevents our app from working, and can result in leaks when some settings (e.g. local network sharing) are enabled. We cannot guarantee functionality or security for users on macOS 14, we have investigated this issue after the 6th beta was released and reported the bug to Apple. Unfortunately the bug is still present in later macOS 14 betas and the release candidate.
I've heard NixOS is good, but I guess I still need a GUI os because of browser and some apps I use regularly. I would love to get out of the macOS world, its going to a bad place. Seems like I've configured my whole digital life around apple.
The first boot after a macOS system update has long been bugged out. It launches a bunch of apps you didn’t even have open before updating, seems to be the 5-10 most recent apps you quit. Yes they were fully quit, yes I have the “resume” setting off. It also doesn’t do a resume, it launches them, i.e. tells them to create new windows, and it launches them before it finishes mounting disks, resulting in every update being followed by all my most used apps appearing out of nowhere and telling me all my config and data is gone. It doesn’t really matter, you just reboot again and you’re good, it’s just careless and makes the OS feel unstable. Maybe the firewall thing is unrelated, maybe it finally forces Apple to fix the bug, we’ll see.
I'm not sure what this setting does. The amount of times mac will jsut reopen everything anyway is frustration. I go look up how to stop it and the answer is always "Turn off this setting you already have off".
> In this scenario the macOS firewall does not seem to function correctly and is disregarding firewall rules ... Some examples of apps that do this are Apple’s own apps and services since macOS 14.6, up until a recent 15.1 beta.
This is not new - every time I update macOS, some of the system settings are changed to default including some in the firewall. And I have to painstakingly go through all of it and change it. Also, the few times I've reinstalled or updated macOS, I've always noticed that it takes longer for the installation if your system has access to the internet - so now I've made it a practice to switch of the router while installing or updating macOS or ios. (With all the AI bullshit being integrated everywhere in Windows, macOS and Android etc., I expect this kind of "offloading" of personal data, and downloading of data, to / from AI servers to keep increasing, especially during updates, to "prepare" for the new AI features in the newer OS updates. No internet means the installer is forced to skip it for later, saving you some valuable time, and hopefully you get to change the default setting before it starts up again. Whatever the claims of AI processing done on the Mac or iDevices itself, some "offloading" to their servers, will still happen, especially if the default settings - which you can change only after the OS is installed - also enables analytics and data collection.)
(More here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26418809 and on this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26303946 ).
> I've made it a practice to switch of the router while installing or updating macOS or ios.
Why are you still using those OSes? That seems like a lot of work for something you paid for.
Because all operating systems are terrible but the rest are so incredibly bad that Apple’s are still by far the best, once you add up time saved by features and capabilities and subtract time lost to pain-in-the-ass brokenness.
(Two decades on DOS/Windows home series and NT, at least for gaming and sometimes work, twelve years with Linux as my main desktop OS, started on Android for smartphones, before finally giving Apple a fair chance around 2011 or 2012… because I was issued a MacBook at work and was doing dual-platform mobile dev—FWIW I was rooting for BeOS back when it was still a thing, it was great)
>Apple’s are still by far the best
MacOS may not even be the best (that's subjective), let alone "by far" the best. How can you make this claim when you haven't used Linux in a decade?
I have used it in the last decade, quite a bit. I try it on the desktop every couple of years. My home server is Debian (too lazy to switch it to FreeBSD when it’s working Ok, I rarely modify it, and the way I use it I never have to mess with Systemd anyway), and nearly all the software I write at work targets Linux one way or another.
Also it’s on my Steamdeck, so I get a good dose of the usual jank any time I have to use the desktop mode for anything.
If you've been on a MacBook since 2011 or 2012, it's definitely time to give modern Linux a try. It has come in enormously long way since then. I am not exaggerating when I say, I have a better out of the box experience with Fedora. Then I do with Mac OS. Mac OS certainly has a lot of features, and visually has a great deal of Polish, but it also increasingly has a lot of bugs.
I try every couple years. I tried KDE on Fedora last time (I hate gnome since 3) and could still crash various KDE apps with drag-n-drop operations—I’d trained myself never to use those outside narrow situations on Windows and Linux years ago because they usually broke things or did something stupid, but am now accustomed to them both working and doing something reasonable, so I spot those issues in a hurry when I use other environments now, and no longer accept that as just the way things are. Among other jank and poor stability, that’s just an example.
IIRC making caps another control anywhere I was logged in—not just in KDE—was weirdly hard, too.
Five or six years ago my Ubuntu tv-attached old desktop forgot how to decrypt the root disk its own installer had encrypted, after an OS upgrade.
My Debian server required manual intervention (busting out my rusty Gentoo chroot grub-installing skills) to install its bootloader. The manual version went the same aa usual and had no problems so no clue WTF the installer was trying to do, but it consistently failed, and this was boring, old business-class Lenovo workstation hardware. That was four or five years ago.
Basically when I try to go back I’m missing lots of features and it’s less stable than what I’m now accustomed to, so end up wasting a bunch of time and regretting it.
Hard in this camp too. The OS tinkering that is as requirement of Linux racks up a massive time investment. When you use your computer for work, that bill gets big quick and sometimes it's an inconvenience you just can't afford.
MacOS, for all it's faults, can be tamed with little snitch and a slower update cycle, and then you have a relatively solid system. There's still some things to hate, like when I take my airpods out if I accidentally click one of the buttons Apple Music opens (no one wants to use Apple Music, ever). But, that little frustraition pales in comparison to the build your own experience a poweruser in Linux faces on a weekly basis.
This randomly came front of mind last night when I thought, I can't remember the last time something broke on my laptop. It's been literal months since I've had anything weird or unwanted that I've _had_ to deal with. Contrast that to the last time I tried to daily Linux, about 2 years ago when I bought a framework and couldn't even log in due to trackpad issues, sleep / hibernate issues, screen resizing issues, issues issues issues.
I have plenty of complaints about Apple’s stuff, but my consistent experience when I try to use something else, for the last decade+, is that I’m jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Even goes for things like Shield vs Apple TV.
I very much wish they had one or more peers putting them under pressure to do better, but the (tiny—which is likely part of the problem) set of competitors seem to have other priorities than chasing the particular market that Apple does.
>The OS tinkering that is as requirement of Linux racks up a massive time investment.
Huh, strange.
I install Ubuntu as a daily driver on every system in my house and don't have to do any tinkering outside of customizations I want (which I have more freedom to do).
I mean, I understand there are certain proprietary devices or software that are going to require Windows or MacOS, and that's unfortunate. But the idea that everything is breaking all the time? I just don't see it.
I don't get why people still spread the lie that you have to tinker with Linux. Like right now, I can give you a laptop with a clean Linux Mint install, and you never have to touch the terminal for anything system config to do work.
Seriously, its not that hard to say that you prefer MacOS because you like the feel of it. It does a lot of handholding for you, unlike Linux, which makes it way less likely for you to mess something up. You don't have to go the extra lengths to justify it lol.
> I don't get why people still spread the lie that you have to tinker with Linux.
It doesn't feel charitable to call people sharing their experience "spreading the lie". You're all over this thread talking to people that way. If you're trying to make the case that desktop Linux no longer has this characteristic, this isn't the way to go about it.
That really depends on what type of work you are doing and your specific combo of hardware. And yes you can do work, but when sleep and power management doesn't work it's a significant QoL downgrade.
If you want to use CUDA as a simple example, you'll have to go through the process of using nvidia proprietary drivers and I'm far from well versed on it but that gives me random warnings and I don't quite get the compatibility between it and Xorg/Wayland or which combo to use and I have on more than one laptop ended up with a system that works but that the desktop randomly freezes requiring a hard reboot.
I still do use Linux Desktop and try various different Debian based or Fedora distros out but you definitely do end up tinkering. I don't use MacOS fwiw.
The only issue that I have ever had with drivers is when the ubuntu automatic install defaulted to the latest open source ones which weren't being recognized.
For a whole bunch of other installations, following official linux instructions on Nvidia works incredibly well. Im probably up to like 30 installs of linux mint on laptops and desktops, without issues. I had a personal laptop with manjaro that suppored nvidia prime, I didn't even have to do anything special, just installed nvidia-smi, and prime-run worked out of the box.
And generally, for equal comparison, I wouldn't consider laptops with discrete graphics to be in the same family as more business oriented Macs, the more apt comparison would be those with AMD chips with integrated video drivers, for which you don't need to fuck with any drivers.
I don't know maybe I've just been unlucky, but at least for me on a couple of different laptops I regularly get full desktop freezes on Debian & Fedora from using things like VMs / GPU accelerated browser (Chrome) / Other things (I don't actually use CUDA/AI much at all but I suspect the issues come from sharing of GPU resources across apps, could be wrong)
This doesn't happen on Windows nearly as much on the same laptops, I don't use Macs that much. And yes I agree it does seem more of an issue with laptops with discrete graphics.
I do still use Linux desktop a lot, I'm happy to take the trade-off but my point was just that depending on the work you do, or the features of the laptop you want to use, like power mgmt or bluetooth, there will be tinkering. (and yes this is entirely manufacturers fault)
> a couple of different laptops
Just like with Mac and Windows, you should buy a laptop with preinstalled Linux to avoid hardware problems. Even suspend is flawless on my Librem 14.
If your "CUDA" needs are pytorch, tensorflow, whatever, pip install (or uv pip install) and you're good to go.
When was the last time you even needed to? If you need to do actual kernel writing and thus actually need CUDA (this is pretty uncommon and I think most people that do that wouldn't be asking this question), then most of the issues are not actually issues.
I'll give an example of my latest CUDA error. I run EndeavourOS (Arch based) and so yes, using bleeding edge drivers. Did an update, reboot, oh no... I get to lock screen, login and black screen (but cursor).[0] What's the solution? Roll back cuda. Didn't work? Roll back kernel. Now it works. The problem? nvidia-560-35.03-9 was incompatible with kernel 6.11. I even was able to find in the forums (quickly) the exact issue[1].
But why am I saying this is no biggie? Well... I'm fucking running 560 drivers, which are beta. If you worry about these issues, don't. If you don't want that power, don't run Arch, Gentoo, or other bleeding edges. You know the most confusing part of this all? Was people posting their driver versions with `inxi -G` and so you only see `560.35.03` but I had to roll back `560.35.03-9` to `560.35.03-6`. But also, Nvidia could be better about their namings.
I will also concede that there is a lot of shit information out there and actually parsing what the real answers are takes experience. So here's my advice when you run into your next issue:
But honestly, you'll need to do none of this stuff if you're on a "baby" distro. I very much welcome people to become more experienced at linux but not everyone needs to be and there's no issue with using a distro that holds your hand (OSX and Windows do). But I would strongly encourage any programmer (not just linux users) to become more familiar with the cli. There's an investment cost, but you'll reap >10x rewards from these efforts, even in general programming situations.[0] For the fun of it, I asked GPT and gave it logs from journal and dmesg, it did not get the answer, and listening to it would have sent me down a rabbit hole where I'd be messing with the kernel (I use systemd and dracut, these were communicated to GPT and it was asking me to run mkinitcpio and mess with grub lol)
[1] https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/only-black-screen-after-logi...
And hey look, an update: https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/attention-nvidia-gpu-driver-...
[2] For me `/etc/kernel/cmdline` looks pretty much like `nvme_load=YES nowatchdog rw root=UUID=<that> resume=UUID=<blahh> nvidia_drm.modeset=1 nvidia_drm.fbdev=1` It should be short
[3] Here's a free one for you. Got a python project and you forgot to place `__init__.py` in the folders? `find src -type d -exec touch "{}/__init__.py" \;` (replace `src` with your root source directory)
Sorry what??
Are you trying to refute my point that you end up tinkering if you are using Linux as a desktop?
I don't want to run bleeding edge, I don't want to compile my OS from source, I did with slackware as a teenager, I just want to play around with SD and other AI models without it causing me to end up with my laptop randomly freezing to a hard reboot until I go down a rabbit hole of driver/kernel/window manger combos.
If I want to do it on Windows it works and I don't get random hard freezes. Trust me I'd prefer to use Linux and do quite a lot but I really don't think you are refuting the point of 'you need to tinker a lot on Linux' with your post.
I'm not sure how old you are, but if "teenager" is 19 and you're even just 25, the landscape is completely different. Honestly, I think that's probably a true statement if we're talking about even a 3 year difference.
I’ll put this out there, currently there’s no better platform than macOS on apple silicon for developing ai systems.
I’m not a stranger to Linux or the command line. I own, use, configure servers as part of my business, including the dreaded on metal cuda install. In fact, the terminal integration in macOS is one of the biggest things over windows for me.
But, every time I try linux desktop, for the past 20 years, it’s been a horrible time sink and has driven home the point that building a competent and most importantly consistent gui based os is harder than everyone gives it credit for.
I stopped using Linux mint after installing it on my desktop and having the screen saver require a hard reboot -sometimes- when trying to wake.
>there’s no better platform than macOS on apple silicon for developing ai systems.
Lmao WHAT?
The ANE system isn't even remotely useful, since is primarily designed for running Apple AI stuff. This is why its integration is so spotty. IIRC, Tinygrad is faster on apple silicon than pytorch at this moment, solely because they did a whole bunch of reverse engineering.
Laptops for ML is just a lost cause as far as matrix multiply is concerned. Nobody is actually doing any serious work on ML stuff on laptops.
>In fact, the terminal integration in macOS is one of the biggest things over windows for me.
Which is funny, because Windows has WSL2 which works incredibly well, has native CUDA integration for ML tasks thats quite good, has an X server that lets you run GUI apps, and is actually linux (not BSD), without anything to get in your way, and its better because its an isolated system that you don't have to worry about bricking and not having a usable computer.
> stopped using Linux mint after installing it on my desktop and having the screen saver require a hard reboot -sometimes- when trying to wake.
The standard argument of "here is a particular bug that doesn't exist on Macs, therefore Macs are better" lol.
Like I said, its not really that difficult to say that you just prefer the Mac OS experience and end it there. You don't have to go on these weird tangents.
>Nobody is actually doing any serious work on ML stuff on laptops.
Was just training a 52gb radiology model. Please point me in the direction of any other platform that can do that for 5k.
>Windows has WSL2
Macos can run VMs too.
>here is a particular bug that doesn't exist on Macs
Yes, my laptop doesn't require a hard reboot after closing the lid. Linux fans won't understand this. If you want more particular bugs, network drivers, amd video cards, trackpad not clicking on the login screen, screen resizing, external monitors via usbc, TweaksUI as a concept. There's no point pretending this isn't a thing, everyone has a story.
As I said, I'm not new here. I've been using linux for 20 years. Linux desktop is garbage no matter the tangent you want to explore. I have 3 developers using windows so know all about developing ai with wsl and the fun problems that come along with that.
>The standard argument of "here is a particular bug that doesn't exist on Macs, therefore Macs are better" lol.
Yeah, this article is literally about an annoying MacOS bug. I use a Mac 8 hours a day for work; it's a great machine, but I bet I'd have 20 glitches and annoyances that I work around, by reflex, all the time.
MacOS is good, but it's certainly not flawless. And if it wasn't for Apple's magnificent hardware, I'm not even sure it's the best.
> And if it wasn't for Apple's magnificent hardware,
I would agree with this sentiment if people said something like "Apple has gotten the hardware right with the current gen, but the intel macs were colossal pieces of shit in both hardware and software".
Linux on laptops is lots of fun, last one was getting UEFI to even acknowledge there was anything Linux related on a SSD.
The reason you have to tinker with MacOS and not Linux is because you're fine with how MaxOS is set up. So you waste your time in Linux getting it to behave like MacOS.
Obviously if you go into it with the assumption MacOS is correct and the more like MacOS you are, the better, then Linux distros will fail horribly.
People do this with Windows, too. If you go into it expecting Windows-isms you're gonna be very disappointed. And such "isms" aren't actually good at all - usually they suck. But because you already know them, they aren't "isms" anymore, they're now expectations.
If you go back to the very first few times you used MacOS (or OSX at the time), you'll realize there was a lot of shit that surprised you. You adapted, and in some cases have actually come to PREFER functionality that sucks. And now you expect it, and that's the problem.
I had macos forced on me when I joined a company writing forex software. You’re right, it sucked learning all the different keyboard shortcuts, learning to use an extra modifier key (now one of my favorite things) and just little things like double clicking a file renames it :/
I thought it was crazy using the butter knife (from the meme) to write serious software. Previously I was a windows admin at a 500 computer site and dealt with Microsoft, debugging issues in their kernel. Throughout this time I’ve also use Linux extensively from Ubuntu when it came with pc mags to raspberry pi home security projects to servers and boxes. I even compiled gentoo one time for fun.
I have enough experience to know the differences between all of the operating systems from ‘95 through to 22.04LTS. No, macOS can’t be beaten for desktop experience, except for gaming which is now starting to come around also.
Happy to die on this hill.
The modifier key choice is (among popular solutions) simply correct. I had twoish decades of Windows/Linux shortcuts in my head so it took a few months to get comfortable with a Mac keyboard, but it’s simply better. The cmd key location is excellent, you can feel how much less strain there is in your hand hitting cmd+c vs ctrl-c, and your fingers aren’t pulled away from the home row. Between that and not conflicting with terminal signal shortcuts, it’s the right way to do it (among common choices, anyway—I’m sure someone out there has some custom solution that’s better).
It’s weirdly hard to get Linux to use that keyboard layout and shortcut set, which is a shame. There’s demand for it, and some attempts to make it happen, but it must be really tough to achieve.
Their default English layout is also easily the best of the major options I’ve seen, as far as simply typing English-language text goes. I don’t get why other platforms don’t clone it and use it for their default. No way it can be covered by patents, I think it’s been mostly the same since before OSX. Linux has one alternative layout that’s close to as good, but never seems to be the default English keyboard, for some reason—you have to know you want it.
This ^
I always have at least one Linux machine around that I use primarily, but it's never been reliable. Either Debian or Ubuntu, I always, without fail, have issue with sleep/wake/hibernate and will never bet it'll wake properly when they sleep.
My current Ubuntu desktop with AMD cpu doesn't sleep and has to be manually hibernated.
My HP Dev One laptop with PopOS will fail to wake roughly 1/10 times, requiring a hard reset. Other times it'll fail to sleep and overheat in my backpack. Occasionally, it'll stop recognizing USB peripherals, or the trackpad/keyboard will stop responding to inputs.
I prefer Linux on nearly every front, but having a totally unreliable computing environment makes it a deal-breaker for me.
> "Have you tried $THING"
No I really have grown tired of waking a machine to a blank screen and having to ssh into it to kill gnome or any of the other crap.
My Macs very occasionally freeze on wake too--but that's exceedingly rare compared to the myriad issues with Linux usability.
Give XFCE a chance.
> That was four or five years ago.
Linux moves way faster than commercial OS IMO.
Reconsider linux. Commercial OS isn't going to 'get better' for IT literate users. :/
XFCE was my favorite back in my Gentoo days, after I started using laptop hardware fast enough that it wasn’t noticeably slower than my prior favorite, WindowMaker :-)
When I used early Ubuntus on desktop machines (back when Ubuntu wasn’t terrible—before the PulseAudio fiasco and the following series of bad decisions and failed maneuvers against Red Hat) I usually just stuck with the default of Gnome2. That era’s by far the closest I’ve seen Linux get to Just Working.
[edit] FWIW I do find Void with a very-light window manager pleasant to use, but I don’t want to have to self-serve every little feature these days, so it’s pleasant but impractical for my actual life. Nothing short of a full DE, so just KDE or Gnome, with a batteries-included distro, stands a chance of matching what I’m used to just being there and happening for me without my having to ask for it. Unfortunately, I strongly dislike both of those DEs for different reasons. :-/
Hard disagree. Every Linux-running personal computer that I use or have used is a terrible experience. Something is always broken, the whole system needs to be hard rebooted at least a few times a week, parts of the OS will randomly stop working each day, the list goes on and on. macOS is not perfect by any means, but at least I can actually get work done on it.
As a counter anecdote, I run Arch on everything except the MacBook I was issued for work. They've all been running perfectly for years, I can't remember the last time I had an issue that wasn't ZFS failing to compile for a new kernel, and I opted into that problem.
Meanwhile my work Mac every so often decides my external monitor just doesn't exist anymore and I have to reboot with it unplugged, then again with it plugged in to get it back.
Funny, I have the exact opposite experience. My Linux laptops just work. My last three Mac laptops were a pain to use.
Some of the most productive developers that I've known have been on Linux since the 90's.
> Something is always broken, the whole system needs to be hard rebooted at least a few times a week
I remember this sort of thing about 15 years ago, but in the last 8 years of nixos, I've maybe hard rebooted twice. I've also only ever rebooted after an upgrade. otherwise I go months with just sleep/wake. I wonder if you have some interesting hardware...
In early 2010s this was sometimes the case.
In modern days, you can daily drive linux without issues. If you were having issues, it was most likely you were doing something wrong, or you were using a company configured laptop that the IT department didn't set up right.
This is still the case. KDE is full of bugs, bluetooth does not work properly (it fails to swap between hidef to a microphone/speaker setup automatically), 4K monitors have all kinds of problems (though KDE 6 fixes quite a few), hardware decoding in firefox/chromium for videos is a horror, the stupid fan starts all the time out of nowhere (by far the most annoying intel machine behaviour, thermals in windows are much better), and battery is dead after a three-four hours max (and usually much worse than windows on the same horrible x86 hardware).
A macbook air is miles ahead, unless you confine yourself to old hardware. I moved from thinkpads + arch to mac + brew. The experience is insanely better.
> and visually has a great deal of Polish
It's great that they translated the UI in that language!
Jokes aside, I use a mix of Windows 10, Windows 11, Linux Mint (have had a few DEB and RPM distros on the desktop too) and macOS. I have to say, that all of them are serviceable.
Windows is sometimes quite annoying to deal with, but has a lot of software for it (the likes of PowerToys, MobaXTerm, WinSCP, System Informer, Handbrake, 7-Zip, HWiNFO64, MiniTool Partition Wizard, MPC-HC, Rufus, ShareX, XSplit VCam, VSeeFace and others). You can do most of the same things in alternative software in other OSes, but there's a huge variety to be found, same as with running most of the games out there natively. The UI feels hit or miss and worse in Windows 11 than in 10 in some regards (no vertical taskbar, for example, need fixes for the context menu etc.), but the OS feels usable.
Linux Mint and other Linux distros are pretty much ideal for software development, hands down. Most tools work, the resource usage is great, there's a huge knowledgebase on how to do things out there, it's quite customizable and can be used on servers, desktop computers or even an old low spec laptop alike. I personally settled on Cinnamon, but XFCE was very usable and someone might prefer GNOME or KDE (there were even attempts at reviving the old Unity desktop from Ubuntu, that one might have gotten hate when it was the main option, but actually had its nice bits too). Gaming is hit or miss with Proton (many games will run but definitely not all, also forget about playing anything with invasive anti-cheat solutions), sometimes you also won't be able to get some productivity software running, if it's developed only with Windows in mind, Wine isn't a silver bullet but it's nice that it exists.
My M1 MacBook as an overall computer feels like it has great build quality despite the overpriced hardware. I'm mentioning that, because it's very well integrated with the hardware and I haven't had any weirdness due to that yet, like the touchpad on a laptop stopping working after a fresh Fedora install, or needing to compile Wi-Fi drivers from a GitHub repo for it to work at all, or Windows looking at the RAM available in a laptop and deciding that it wants most of it for itself and to slow everything down to a crawl. In macOS, the desktop also feels polished, is reasonably customizable, though sometimes is a bit jarring compared to both Windows and Linux distros, as are the things surrounding it (everything from the keyboard layout, to how managing open programs works, also connecting to an external 1080p monitor is a miserable experience because it doesn't fit within their own hardware ecosystem either). Development is doable, unless you go for the 8 GB version because you need the OS for a project and can't afford anything more, gaming feels way more limited than on Linux distros, but nothing feels particularly broken either.
Neither is ideal, neither is horrible. They're all somewhere in the middle, doing more or less well when it comes to particular aspects.
> It's great that they translated the UI in that language!
Bit offtopic but since you nudged it:
The oldest Polish localization of MacOS was done by a private company that insisted on using more "appropriate linguistically" terms that have roots in the 70s Polish IT. Tho, some people claimed it was just an attempt to separate Apple's system from Microsoft's even more dramatically. And for example instead of "icon" - "ikona" that translation introduced "stamp - "znaczek"; "edit" menu item - "edycja" (sometimes "edytuj", depending on program) was "change" - "zmiana", "folder" that stayed as it is become "teczka", "briefcase". The most prominent example is the "cancel" translation, which elsewhere become "anuluj" but the team opted for "abandon", "cease" - "poniechaj", tho some argue it should be "desist" - "zaniechaj".
The first official Leopard translation followed let's say, the 'industry standard', tho "desktop" still is being called there "biurko" while Linux and Windows uses term "pulpit" which is more close to "dashboard".
The discourse that happen around "cancel" translation is still bring up on few occasions, as an example of trying to preserve origins of that old IT glossary and also of being nonconformistic to the ridiculous levels for some weird personal reasons.
Echoes of that translation can be seen in the Polish KDE localization - there's one contributor who insists for using these rather obscure and weird terms: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404286 and since there's no official community nor team (to my knowledge), that translation gets approved and makes KDE looking weird for someone coming from Windows
oh my god, that person arguing for zaniechaj seems like the most obnoxious person ever.
I very much doubt that. I tried installing Fedora on my new laptop, and the defaults are horrible. It doesn't even support two-finger gestures on the login screen, so you have to right click in a different way before logging in.
At least it's not as bad as Ubuntu, which allowed me with a simple warning to install Nvidia drivers without a full system update, which broke the system so badly it couldn't even boot anymore, o an otherwise newly installed setup.
And Debian is horrible too, it doesn't even have a task bar of any kind (you are forced to Alt tab to switch apps, or even see which other apps are running), unless you go hunting for some extensions someone made.
All of these can be made to work decently, but calling it a good out of the box experience is laughable.
>It doesn't even support two-finger gestures on the login screen, so you have to right click in a different way before logging in.
A default setting you don't like and have to adjust? How horrible.
>At least it's not as bad as Ubuntu, which allowed me with a simple warning to install Nvidia drivers without a full system update
So...user error?
>And Debian is horrible too, it doesn't even have a task bar of any kind (you are forced to Alt tab to switch apps, or even see which other apps are running)
Now I get it, this is satire for someone complaining about the Linux experience. Good one!
> A default setting you don't like and have to adjust? How horrible.
No, even after adjusting the settings, they only apply after you log in. So every time you hit the login screen, you get the default settings again until you log in.
> So...user error?
Yes, of course. And it's well known that the penalty for user error is supposed to be complete failure to boot, especially for people new to a system.
> Now I get it, this is satire for someone complaining about the Linux experience. Good one!
Maybe throw in some constructive ideas rather than empty grandstanding? Is it supposed to be a good thing to not have a list of running apps? Is it normal to have to install extensions to your desktop environment to make it work for common worlflows?
I am not complaining about defaults here, there is just no option in Gnome to get a basic bit of UI working like all other desktop environments have worked for 30 years, including Mac, Windows, KDE, XFCE, and past Gnomes. You have to discover and install 3rd party software to get basic UI. This would be like someone launching a new browser that doesn't support tabs out of the box, and people saying "oh, don't complain, there's an extension someone else made that adds tab support".
And note that I'm specifically criticizing the out of the box experience, not the state you can get your system to: I was specifically responding to a claim that the out of the box experience is "great".
can it send txt messages to a phone ?
Probably; look at https://kdeconnect.kde.org/ (note that in spite of the branding, you can run it on a non-KDE desktop if desired)
I have an M2 Macbook Pro mostly gathering dust and waiting until Debian supports it rather than dip so much as a toe into Apple's crass software ecosystem. For now it is a file server, albeit I had to purchase an dongle just to make it run with the lid closed because Apple deemed that an unlikely use case.
The real question is why is every other company with a consumer OS even more incompetent and/or malicious?
“ Every other company “
What's incompetent about Linux? Have you tried to buy preinstalled?
Power management.
Windows is still bad at this, too, incredibly. Was initially issued a Lenovo Win10 machine at my current job, decided to give it a shot because I hadn’t used Windows for work in a long time, might have gotten better.
It was using 40% of its battery while “sleeping” over night, and even at full charge wouldn’t get me through a light work day on battery—not even close. Straight back to the battery-anxiety I hadn’t felt since back when I used Windows and Linux on laptops years and years ago. Plus the touchpad is still ass (sorry, never got any good at aiming with the track point, even though I used an IBM Thinkpad for years and years)
Luckily this place will issue a MacBook if you ask nicely. My god, that was a rough few weeks.
> Windows is still bad at this, too, incredibly.
I couldn't agree more. And yet, Linux manages to be worse, since the "at least I can just hibernate" backup plan doesn't even work properly.
The only time I’ve ever seen Linux disk hibernation actually work about 100% of the time was on an IBM Thinkpad I used to have, and only if I did some arcane magic with a specially-sized-and-designated partition in just the right partition order, because that triggered something in the hardware that let it handle things directly.
I saw people being happy with hibernation on Librem 14 (I use Qubes OS, which doesn't support it).
Have you ever tried to compare something like Ubuntu or RHEL on a per feature per function basis with Mac OS?
There are literally thousands of possible combinations of accessibility features alone, that are vastly more difficult to impossible to access. Or simply don’t exist in any form. Once you add in all the default apps and functions of Mac OS, there’s likely millions of possible combinations that would take a fortune in time and effort and knowledge to replicate maybe a quarter of, on a hypothetical laptop installed with Linux.
Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years.
Edit: Of course 99% of these combinations are irrelevant to any particular individual, but they are all relevant to at least a few small groups.
Linux promoters don’t seem to understand that alienating a few thousand users each time is a big deal if that alienation process happens thousands of times…
> Have you ever tried to compare something like Ubuntu or RHEL on a per feature per function basis with Mac OS?
Yes? Why would people recommend it as an alternative otherwise?
I used MacOS for 5 years, left after Mojave and came back when an employer made me support MacOS. The current software experience on Mac is genuinely insufferable. Advertisements in your news, notifications begging you to try Safari, zero support for common and Open Source filesystems, constantly broken software packaging, zero useful APIs (what am I supposed to do with Metal???) and a $99/year tax to compensate for the displeasure of supporting developers. You really want to argue Apple cares about you?
As a software developer, what pushed me over the edge was Docker. It runs absolutely terrible on MacOS, consumes resources/battery and makes your CPU hot as satan's taint. Native development is a nightmare on MacOS and you just have to settle with that if you want to defend it as your home. Don't even get me started on how bad Brew is.
> Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years.
If your peripheral manufacturer can't support USB class compliance, they do not deserve money in the first place. I produce music on Linux and haven't ever had a MIDI device or DAC fail to register. It's a standard that even Apple isn't "courageous" enough to reject.
Many developers do encounter similar problems when using macOS, especially when developing and running tools like Docker. macOS's resource management and performance issues are often frustrating, especially when you need to do a lot of development work. In fact, you can use other tools instead of Docker instead of Linux. As far as I know, [Servbay](https://servbay.com) does a much better job than Docker on Mac.
> As a software developer, what pushed me over the edge was Docker. It runs absolutely terrible on MacOS, consumes resources/battery and makes your CPU hot as satan's taint.
Thanks for saying this. I own an M2 Max Macbook, which is my very first Macbook, and I tried Docker the other day only to find it was literally unplayable.
I then recalled running Docker forever ago on a much shittier Windows laptop and it was sort of a breeze? I was confused as to why I couldn't have the same experience now.
Thanks to you, at least I know this is unlikely to be a case of PEBKAC
Yeah Docker’s non-native and runs under a virtualized Linux everywhere but… on Linux, so that’s a little rough. I’ve found some of the alternative VM hosts for that to be a ton faster and more power efficient, as they make better use of MacOS’ built-in virtualization system, but YMMV. I’ve also found that Apple’s lead on power management is so great that I can be using a power-sucking thing like Docker and still come out ahead, which is really lame :-/
I hear that “Docker Desktop” is especially bad on MacOS, but I’ve used docker almost as long as it’s existed and still haven’t used that (I don’t really even know what the point of it is?) so dunno about that part.
IME macOS is easily the most broken and user hostile from a professional developer perspective. Maybe I haven't been using it enough, only 2 years.
The hardware is amazing though and no other OS can predictably wake the laptop when opening the lid and not wake it when it's closed, which is kinda a deal breaker for a laptop, so I still use it. Not particularly excited about it, would prefer a Linux laptop if it could sleep reliably. (Seen pictures of a framework laptop with a kernel panic after wake, and I was seriously considering getting one.)
it’s very cohesive and stable by comparison to Windows. It’s beautifully designed compared to KDE. It’s most similar to gnome.
if you’re the kinda guy who sees it as user hostile, I’d wager it’s because you refuse to learn the macOS/gnome paradigm and demand things to be how they were on your windows pc 30 years ago.
what os/dwm do u use
I'm not talking about how it looks - I don't care. I can find settings I need when the system implements them no problem.
I'm talking about the gimped OS underneath the eye candy:
- docker sucks compared to native Linux (obviously) and WSL2 (less obvious)
- I have to install BetterDisplay (props to the dev btw, great tool) just to make my perfectly good 25x16 144Hz monitor not look like shit
- I have to install a tool to invert my mouse scroll wheel
- I have to install a tool to manage windows in a sane way (sequoia only just started to know how to do that but it's a looong way ahead)
- I have to install a tool to have multiple things in the clipboard
- Sequoia broke the system firewall and it's still not fixed in 15.0.1 (my mac is enterprise issued and it has all the fancy security apps you've all heard about)
I ran out of time to keep going, these are what I'm running into daily. Fortunately there are tools, but every major macOS release breaks some of them.
>It’s beautifully designed
I hope you understand that when you say this, its pretty easy to see that you are solely in the ideological camp of liking Apple, not a rational one.
i’m talking about consistent HID, proper negative space, consistent padding and margins, copy etc rather than visuals. It’s more science than art.
And im talking about the fact that there are people who are perfectly comfortable using tmux and vim, + browser window for most of their work, or something similar like i3wm. They can say that its the best possible UI layout, and their argument is just as valid as yours.
Except they don't claim it as science.
Pot. Kettle. But just Linux for you, right?
Its not about pushing anything alternative as "the best". Its about saying that you prefer Mac OS based on your personal preferences and not trying to make up bullshit objective reasons for it like they are fact of the world, which Apple users tend to do A LOT, and I don't really understand why.
Like I use Windows solely, because I need to run CAD programs, I like to Game, and I use WSL2 for development purposes, and I prefer having everything in one place. But Im not going to make up reasons why its the "best" because it does all of that.
> it’s very cohesive and stable by comparison to Windows
That's an incredibly low bar. Windows 95 is cohesive and stable as compared to Windows.
> It’s beautifully designed compared to KDE
It's beautiful. Designed? I don't know about that. In my experience, it takes significantly less clicks, swipes, or keypresses to perform action in KDE as opposed to pretty much everything.
I consider that good desktop design, because these are tools. Less work = better tool.
> It’s most similar to gnome
Yeah, and Gnome is awful IMO. Some things just can't be done without installing extensions. The workflow is very "my way or the highway". Seemingly simple actions require submenus of submenus. The UI design isn't dense enough, so a bunch of info is just missing.
> refuse to learn the macOS/gnome paradigm
The difference here is I can easily replicate what macOS and gnome have going in KDE. Because KDE is flexible, and those aren't. Why would I though, when I can instead abuse KDE for efficiency gains in workflows? I'd much rather do that.
I personally think that the development experience on Mac is better. I have complained about the poor development environment you mentioned before, but I successfully solved it with some new tools. On Mac, you can use Servbay or mamp to solve this problem. Servbay:https://servbay.com
>and no other OS can predictably wake the laptop when opening the lid and not wake it when it's closed
You can do it in Linux with scripts. I had it on my old laptop when I had Manjaro on it. Basically disable any action on script close, then write a custom service that listens for an event and puts the computer to sleep. Only thing is you have to press the power button to wake it, but it worked well.
In general, I have been using work issues Macs, and I tend to agree - they are pure shit. I wouldn't even call them good hardware. People seem to forget how mac thought it was a good idea to make the esc button a virtual one on the touchbar. I had 3 work replacements, first one fried chip due to an "incompatible" usbc hub, the other 2 started swelling batteries. In every single case, I ended up losing a small amount of work I haven't backed up (like a shell script), since you can't replace the hard drives.
Currently on the latest iteration of MBP 14 inch, the hardware seems good so far. Battery life claims are overrated - with slack, bunch of browser tabs and VSCode I get max 4 hours, but to be fair, this is the lightest laptop that Ive had that can do that (I used to have a much larger Thinkpad that could do CAD for 4 hours on battery)
>cause all operating systems are terrible
This is code words for "Im emotionally invested into my choice for non logical reasons and its very hard for me to admit I have made the wrong choice".
My choice is also bad. Zero of them are good. All constantly have stupid quality problems or fail to operate as well as they should.
It’s a choice between hamburgers that are 30-50% shit, and one that’s 10% shit. Every single one has way too much shit in it. All of them deserve loud, angry complaints about the amount of shit they contain. But if I must eat a hamburger…
>All constantly have stupid quality problems or fail to operate as well as they should.
And my guess is that your "operate as the should" is probably some very personal opinions about how an OS should function based on your personal workflow, that you assume should be the defacto standard.
But for the sake of the argument, lets just assume that your standard is actually optimal from an efficiency standpoint. In that case, the argument to make in case of Mac would be this: Out of the box, Macs are closer to optimal, but technically Linux is is better because you can customize it to be exactly optimal.
> Out of the box, Macs are closer to optimal, but technically Linux is is better because you can customize it to be exactly optimal.
If you’ve got a clean solution for getting cmd-style shortcuts so you don’t have to deal with the how-is-this-still-a-thing-in-2024 problem of conflicting shortcuts in terminals, on Linux, I’d love to know what it is. And that’s just the start of it.
>getting cmd-style shortcuts so you don’t have to deal with the how-is-this-still-a-thing-in-2024 problem of conflicting shortcuts in terminals
I can play that game.
Let me know when Mac gets rid of their stupid useless apple and function keys that is somehow still a thing in 2024, to where you have to bend your pinky unnaturally to get to the apple key, and even more so to the control key instead of just combining them in a single key like the rest of the modern world.
And that just the start of it.
And your response is code for "I'm unfamiliar with the concept of oligopolies, and believe that every consumption choice should be based on logic alone." Come on.
One cause of the problem is that ~99% of the user-facing OS market is steered by three total companies, for sure.
One difficult bit, though, is interoperability. Even absent monopolist BS (and there’s plenty of that) it makes the OS market tend toward winner-take-all.
There is a difference between saying "less than optimal" and "bad" if you are really trying to convey some technical point.
Sounds like projection to me. lOl
Nope. Standard human behavior. Plenty of studies done that shows that when you attack peoples opinions, it feels like personal attacks. Peoples opinions are a fundamental part of their ego, and we all have a fundamental drive to self actualize, which translates the active process in ensuring that we are what we believe we are.
Others in the family still use iDevices. Can't avoid Windows or macOS due to work. Prefer FreeBSD and use that mostly. It's an old mac and will be dumping it after another year or two. Do not plan to buy an Apple computer ever again as soldered RAM / HDD and iShittification of macOS is the future.
The marginal cost of that work is insignificant compared to the amount of equivalent work you'd have to put in for linux or bsd.
Plus, little snitch is basically state-of-the-art in terms of ease-of-use if you're willing to put the money into it.
For me, because of the hardware.
it’s just not that much better or worth it
It may not be worth it: the ridiculous upfront prices to get enough RAM and SSD space, and the lack of upgradeability of those two components, significantly undermine the value proposition of the Mac platform.
But the laptops at least are definitely better quality. The touchpad, charger, screen, keyboard, case, speakers, etc. are all well above the Windows competition in terms of both build quality and durability. The commoditization of every component in a PC laptop has really sapped the life of that platform. No, actually, I don't want another shitty Synaptics touchpad with ancient features and buggy drivers. I really would like every key on my keyboard to still work consistently 2 years after I bought the computer. And no 1080p is not good enough (but hey at least we finally got away from 1366x768!).
Some of the PC makers do seem to have caught on and you can get something comparably specced and competitively priced if you look hard and carefully. But it will still have some deficiencies compared to the MacBook that you can't shop your way around.
> Some of the PC makers do seem to have caught on and you can get something comparably specced and competitively priced if you look hard and carefully. But it will still have some deficiencies compared to the MacBook that you can't shop your way around.
This has kept me on Mac laptops as well. There's always some compromise made elsewhere, even on high end laptops. Usually it's the trackpad, or poor thermals making it unusable as a laptop or just super loud (comparing to the Apple Silicon line here, my intel MBPs were furnaces). Plus, if you want anything other than a 1080p screen you are pushing close to MBP prices anyway.
>I really would like every key on my keyboard to still work consistently 2 years after I bought the computer.
You say this as if Apple didn't spend 5 years selling keyboards that were nearly guaranteed to die after a years worth of usage in a slightly dusty environment.
People love Apple hardware because they have a terrible memory for all the flawed hardware Apple always releases and pretends isn't flawed. There are significant design flaws that affect a significant portion of their customers that they just never acknowledge. For example, I only recently learned that my previous work macbook failed in the way it did because a specific short ribbon cable was made shorter for no discernible reason and so some revisions of the 2015 macbook pro just have indescribable screen corruption as a failure mode. Apple doesn't tell you that though, just send it in, let us charge you $1500, and replace half of the computer.
I'm not excusing Apple, I'm shaming the competition. There's no justification for the PC laptops to be so bad.
"Better" is a relative term. Better in what, for which purpose?
There is currently no fanless laptop that can run linux (at least macos is not windows, so good enough for me, I do have some standards) that can even remotely be compared to a macbook air. Or in general to meet the quitness of higher end macbooks except under heavy load, or the performance you get on the go. I am just tired of having a "jet engine" making constant noise in my room. We have been waiting for qualcomm snapdragons to catch up, maybe after a few more iterations they will stop being a disappointment, and then I may switch to a snapdragon (or amd or intel or whoever manages to get there) laptop with linux.
This does not even include other aspects that macbooks are superior to whatever I have used in the past, eg their touchpads or speakers, which I discovered just when I switched.
I still use a MacBook from 2015. That's hella longevity compared to other laptops I've owned. And the only thing better than Apple trackpads is the Thinkpad "nub".
Too bad about the craptastic keyboards from 2016-2020 though.
Just use Linux bro (Suspend still doesn’t wake consistently on my thinkpad it’s been 20 years)
Suspend is flawless on my Librem 14.
Thanks let me just go to distrowatch.org and install a new distro
This is more related to hardware than the distro.
Because Linux is soo hard to use. You have to use supported hardware (like with any other OS), and once a year paste a few commands into terminal.
I love Linux. I've just been burned too many times to trust it on my primary laptop. This is a machine with a high availability requirement -- if I have a job interview, the camera had better work right now.
Never updating within several days of anything important works well in my experience.
Although the specific hardware matters as well—an Intel Macbook’s Facetime HD abomination with its out-of-tree drivers was a source of constant frustration; by contrast, the Framework’s camera (the old one, not the one released recently) has been solid enough that I don’t actually know what it is.
I agree about the issues that Linux sometimes has....
However, how is this different from current Windows? I have had a machine decide that it needed to update while I was in the middle of a teams call. "Luckily" I was able to switch over to phone while it did what it wanted to do and then switch back but still....
Your Wi-Fi drivers have been removed from the kernel. Please download them on USB stick. You were warned
I've actually had to get Wi-Fi drivers on a USB stick a lot more times for Windows than for Linux.
The beautiful hardware of the Mac is so wasted with recent versions of macOS.
It's funny how Apple went from leading in UX/UI and being average/below average on hardware, to the opposite. iOS/macOS truly is a cluster-fuck when it comes to UX that makes sense. Luckily we can run other OSes on Apple computer hardware, but not as lucky with Apple phone hardware...
My kingdom for an iPad that runs GNOME!
Or KDE Plasma… they’ve been making amazing things with look and feel in the last couple of releases. Either way, that much customisation and user control on an iPad… practically unheard of.
How can you even install the update without access to the Internet?
For years, I can not do the automatic updates, because it always fails with an error message along the lines of "Failed to personalise software, check your internet!", even though I have a perfectly working Internet connection. The only way to update is with a live USB and an ethernet connection. Everything else fails.
You can manually download the updates from here - https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs for the older versions of mac (or check and download it manually through Software Update). Once the installation starts, the installer does some verification and / or data collection for which it requires the internet, and then starts the installation - at this point, just switch off the router.
every time I update macOS, some of the system settings are changed to default including some in the firewall
Windows has also been doing that for some time now. Only Linux is relatively "clean" from that perspective, but even now some distros are beginning to sneak in spyware. The enshittification of OSes continues...
> but even now some distros are beginning to sneak in spyware.
Citation needed. I remember Ubuntu sneaking in some stuff a couple of years ago[0], but most of the mainstream distros have a clean track record. What are you referring to exactly?
0: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/02/ubuntu-data-collection-o...
New installs make lots of unrequested accesses… fwupmgr, unbound-anchor, ocsp, firefox, all generate telemetry.
Companies have tried buying floss software specifically to add spyware, such as audacity.
It’s not a big fraction of what proprietary OS does, but the threat grows steadily each year.
In this case it sounds like a bug--the issue is resolved on reboot.
Please tell me that upgrading fedora versions works every time ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
I've been in-place upgrading my Fedora install for about 7 years. Or is it 10? IDR. As far as I remember the upgrade has always succeeded. Sometimes things are broken afterwards because software I liked got removed or something, but I never got locked out or the operating system unusable.
What problems have you encountered on Fedora that were caused by a distro upgrade? Asking this because I've been using Fedora for years across different machines and can't recall any breakages that were direct consequences of an upgrade, though I usually apply it a month or two after the release date, so maybe there are early kinks that get resolved by that time.
I am completely with you here man.
Everytime I upgrade my iPhone it turns on Bluetooth. Phreaking annoying.
Apple clearly wants their customer base to use certain features so they simply enable them at upgrade. It's gross.
If you want leak-proof VPN, you need to implement it outside of your device, at the router level. This is true for any device but Apple devices in particular.
I highly recommended sniffing the traffic on the wire and piping it through wireshark. You can do this with a router, or a passive Ethernet tap. You’ll see a bunch of packets going to places other than your VPN entrypoint. If you use a router, you can check your mobile for leaks too. (Did you know if you have WiFi calling enabled, then your phone makes a TCP connection to a sensor server controlled by your ISP every 30 seconds? So if you’ve got T-Mobile and you’re abroad, not even using it as your default SIM, they’ll get a nice log of every exit IP you use.)
Apple’s seeming embrace of support for VPN and network filtering extensions is a red herring, because they’ll happily disable it for their own traffic.
On iOS, the App Store will skip any VPN, and similarly Apple will even block you from downloading updates if you’re on a VPN. I only realized this when I used my wireless router with VPN on it and updates failed to download.
On Mac, there are a bunch of issues, especially on first boot. It seems like the Mac will refuse to establish the VPN until it can make one connection outside of it. I encounter this when my computer wakes from sleep and the on-demand wireguard tunnel (using Cloudflare Warp) fails to send packets. I unplug my Ethernet, disable always-on, wait 30 seconds (for some timeout?), re-enable always-on, and then plug in the Ethernet and in connects. But I’m not actually sure this isn’t leaking, I need to investigate more.
it also leaks the audio of tabs before logging in.
Even though I had disabled all 'restore' applications features, macos sometimes decides to 'start' browsers BEFORE logging in after a restart AND those start auto-playing audio from whatever was paused before the reboot (or many days before).
Since then I went rather deep disabling that feature, but I never trusted it.
They want their TCP/IP stack and safari browser hot and ready for their demanders of instant gratification.
In the long run, they barter this goodwill for "Safari is shit" credit until they and Google force the internet until a browser-turned App-Play-Store war.
Both companies win, and can blame the other company - all while incentivising anti-competition behavior and benefiting from their own organizational, yet altruistic, self-interests happening to coincidentally collude in similar, yet distinctly more complicated cases of creating monopolies spanning multiple domains.
The internet was captured, gamified, commoditized, and vertically integrated into a handful of giga-Corps.
your mobile devices are essentially tracking devices you are addicted to, and the government is too interested in these shiny grandiose things and their use in facilitating government functions without any real consequence, they fail to see the systematic risks that they themselves have allowed to proliferate by not enforcing stricter laws for systematically - exploitable intersections of law, technology, and business.
"they fail to see the systematic risks"
Or they also fail at providing a solution. Would you prefer diletantic government intervention in this area instead?
The differences between governments and megacorps are dwindling and the two are becoming much more alike one another. We already live in global technofeudalism.
Alas, no. By and large, governments are still vastly less competent than multinational corporations. MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes or buy their products.
> MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes or buy their products.
MNCs are like local governments levying property taxes.
e.g. you need a phone much like you have to live somewhere. Your "Tech Government" is determined by a highly constrained choice like your local civil government is determined by your zip code. Maybe you can move at great disruption and cost but it's only to the jurisdiction of another government and some variation of autocratic laws and taxes.
However, you have no vote and there is no pretence at serving your interests. You are not a citizen but cattle to be farmed... just maximal exploitation to please the mighty Mammon.
"MNC don't force you to pay taxes", well 30% fee on products bought, sorry "licensed", on their app stores seem like a tax to me
this. also any profit margins sure are a "tax" in that comparison. Only you don't even get a public service for it, however bad it might be. For taxes, at least some of them are used for public services.
The less local the government, the less likely I am to see any material benifit from the taxes I pay. Local and state taxes fund roads and other infrastructure, public schools, social programs, etc. Federal taxes fund military adventurism, pure corrupt waste like SLS and worst of all ""aid"" for shitty foreign countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel so they can wage wars on their neighbors, for which America's international reputation suffers greatly.
Foreign aid is a very small part of the budget.
But you are right that more local government has advantages over more centralised government. For example, it's easier to change your local government, if you don't like it: just move to the next town over.
You elk of America's international reputation and foreign fiscal affairs is ironic as you are only inconvenienced a fraction that the hundreds of third world humans endure daily to prop up our unsustainable standard of living.
You have definitely maimed and killed a non-zero amount of humans indirectly by the stochastic math that tallies the bodies on your Luxury products.
We are bias. Your gas wouldn't be less than $10 a gallon if we didn't drop $10b a year policing the Canals, Gulfs, and ports.
The higher your standard of living, the more dependencies, the more complexities, the more abstractions, and more susceptible to changes/perturbations until the "millionaire if not for taxes" thinks he can go without the "taxation without representation" route.
> also any profit margins sure are a "tax" in that comparison.
No? If your local government runs a surplus, that's sort-of equivalent to a profit (but not quite). Profits aren't equivalent to taxes. That's just silly.
> MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes
So wrong. Every dollar that $FOO_COMPANY shovels to Google and Apple to spend on advertising is a dollar that you, the consumer, end up footing the bill for; a dollar that does not go towards improving the product you receive in any way whatsoever.
The advertising industry itself is a tax on the price of everything.
That's not a tax. That's just a payment they make for goods and services (in this case, ad services).
> [...] the consumer, end up footing the bill for; a dollar that does not go towards improving the product you receive in any way whatsoever.
Huh? You could make the same argument against providing free coffee for employees. Every dollar the company spends on coffee is one that they didn't spend on anything else..
And, obviously, ads go towards improving the improving the product I receive: without ads, I might have bought a different product or none at all.
Not all ad spend improves my experience, obviously, but neither does all spend on everything else. And I don't have to buy a product, if I don't like the ads.
Governments are adopting the international outreach of megacorps.
Megacorps are adopting the level of competence of governments.
I see no contradiction here.
> Megacorps are adopting the level of competence of governments.
Any sources for that? From all the studies (and anecdotes) I've seen, MNCs are vastly more competent that most local companies, and the latter are also _usually_ still more competent than government.
The post I replied to said:
> By and large, governments are still vastly less competent than multinational corporations.
I just agreed with them. Adopring the level of competence of governments, when governments are not competent, doesn't imply an upward movement.
You are "forced to pay taxes" to have schools and roads and rescue services and law and everything else that makes the United States still a mostly habitable place to live.
Corporations do not force you to pay taxes YET. When the corporations get in total control and you cannot even vote just wait to see what a slave you are.
> You are "forced to pay taxes" to have schools and roads and rescue services and law and everything else that makes the United States still a mostly habitable place to live.
I don't live in the US, and don't pay taxes for that. Most of the things you mention aren't even public goods. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics))
In any case, I grew up in Germany and have adopted Singapore as my home. And in comparison I am very happy that my overall tax rates here are perhaps a third of what they would be in Germany, while the services provided here are at least three times as good. (But the latter is subjective.)
Not incidentally, Singapore is perhaps the most well run city on the globe, and the place most run like an MNC.
> Corporations do not force you to pay taxes YET. When the corporations get in total control and you cannot even vote just wait to see what a slave you are.
Huh? That seems about as relevant as making an analogous argument against current real world governments by pointing out that someone might clone Stalin.
Yes, theoretically possible, but rather far-fetched.
Singapore is a success because of the government:
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/29/395811510/how-singapore-becam...
"Some of the biggest sectors domestically — shipbuilding, electronics, banking, and now they're very involved in private banking — got their start because Lee Kuan Yew and the government specially directed state funds into those areas," Kurlantzick says.
The government also provided social services like housing and health care, in a way liberal economists applauded."
"He understood the politics of this very diverse place, and put together the laws, including the labor laws, that created a stable, peaceful place that multinationals were looking for," Lim says.
And it is good for you, but what about people who are not you?
"People live well, but the per capita GDP conceals a high level of inequality, so that is definitely a major issue in Singapore today and one of the things that the current prime minister has focused on," he says.
MNCs get governments to force you to buy their products. I've dealt with governments where the only way to send or receive docs was MS Word. Sometimes saving in MS Word format works (LibreOffice), sometimes not.
> I've dealt with governments where the only way [...]
Aren't you answering your own objection there?
> By and large, governments are still vastly less competent than multinational corporations
Is this something you know firsthand or something you think you know because a huge amount of money has gone into spreading that message for political purposes? Anyone who’s worked for or with a multi-national knows that they’re hardly as efficient as the marketing would have you believe, and anyone who’s looked at libertarian media knows that it’s almost entirely funded by rich people seeking tax & regulatory reductions, banking on you confusing their interests with your own.
Privatize the fire department and you'll soon see just how shrewd they become.
Denmark hasn't burned down yet. And there are plenty of other examples.
As a recovering libertarian, I remember how the idea of making all roads tolled to pay for maintenance was an instant conversation killer.
Roads should be privately provided: they aren't even a public good.
How they are financed is up to the operators. Perhaps they want tolls, perhaps local stores want to chip in to improve their business? Perhaps something else that would take someone more than 30 seconds to imagine?
(In any case, roads being provided by local government isn't all that bad. It's relatively easy to change your local government by moving from one town to the next. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity)
> governments are still vastly less competent than multinational corporations.
Speaking of competence devoid of context misses the point. They are resembling each other greatly in the sense of misaligned incentives with their "users", which supersedes run-of-the-mill competence in terms of importance in this context. I'm not going to give points to some moron who is swimming competently in the wrong direction.
> MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes or buy their products.
An oddly naive comment given all that has been written about how Amazon operates, to give one example.
I never got this sentiment. Corporations as viewed from the inside are wildly incompetent—and that's before you consider profit inefficiency. I suspect this would be a lot more obvious if it weren't for the last seventy years of intentionally hampering government from competing with the market players directly. Once a product hits enshittification it benefits everyone (but shareholders, who contribute nothing to society) to nationalize the production and provide it at zero margin.
What do you mean by 'profit inefficiency'?
> Corporations as viewed from the inside are wildly incompetent [...]
Corporations have varying levels of efficiency. MNCs are by and large _fairly_ competent.
Of course, if you see them from the inside, there's still enough weird and incompetent stuff going on.
Compare to how western militaries have their fair share of screw ups, but they still wipe the floor with non-western militaries, whenever there's any conflict.
There's plenty of studies comparing the quality of management in local companies versus multinational corporations. See eg https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2020008...
>MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes or buy their products.
yeah, because the only kid bigger, told them to knock it off, as to not hamper their own racket.
If you think a mega-corp won't go AWOL and attempt a Banana Republic/Dutch East India Company again, but with more proxies, lawyers, SAM's, and corrupt officials to "YAS" them into integration, then you really haven't been paying attention to what globalization is really about.
The US had to ask for money back from the oil barons.
Bezos/Musk/Zuck/{untold billionaires} will have much better bargaining chips when they possess the monopoly on surveillance, money, and influence, and have proxy chairs at the U.N.
And I bet those countries would be better run in every way.
> Would you prefer diletantic government intervention in this area instead?
No, I would like a competent government intervention. Those happen, even if some would rather believe otherwise.
How would that look like, in this concrete example of add controlled smartphones?
Since it's not "Safari" that's broken (since iPhones cost a lot of money, they cant break), the users will lie blame at the fault of the web developers, since they had gotten cozy within the comfortable, flexible, expected behaviors of Chrome, having enjoyed a hiatus from IE11 EOL pollyfills and jquery.
Apple then made it easier to roll out an app than to grapple with the pitfalls, nuances, foot-guns, and gabbling documentation that Safari has carefully mal-compiled to shepherd both developers and their users into the Walled Garden.
It's just the browser wars, but with higher stakes. And Microsoft already won.
If you’re referring to people as “cultists”, consider that your point might not be as strong as you think. If you have a non-emotional argument about a browser, try making it with logic and data rather than emotion. For example, demonstrate awareness of where the browsers rank on the features which web developers really need (Google’s devrel team likes to highlight PWA features almost nobody uses even on Chrome) and show why the “walled garden” metaphor applies more to a niche browser than the dominant one by a large margin.
> Would you prefer diletantic government intervention in this area instead
what kind of answer is that exactly?
I would much prefer they fix the issue, yes, the stuff I'm using is provided by Apple and it's been paid off in full, I don't know what made people believe that it's ok if software sucks...
If a train company causes an accident they are considered liable if a software company leaks my data they should be considered liable, it's as simple as that, no need for this anti government stands that frankly make adults look like angry teenagers with a bad bladder
The complaint was the governemnt does nothing, because they lack a clear solution, to the non trivial problem of todays megacorps and their Power since they control our gadgets. Do you happen to have a concrete solution?
> Do you happen to have a concrete solution?
Don't buy Apple products?
at least until they clear their act...
> your mobile devices are essentially tracking devices you are addicted to
Speak for yourself. Sent from my Librem 5.
Sent from my Nokia 3310
Is this some kind of joke?
>They want their TCP/IP stack and safari browser hot and ready for their demanders of instant gratification.
Having short startup times is bad now? ...because of "instant gratification"? The rest of your rant might make sense in the broader context of what big tech is doing, but bringing it up in this thread and implying that it's part of a conspiracy where "The internet was captured, gamified, commoditized, and vertically integrated into a handful of giga-Corps" is unhinged.
I can’t think of anything I want less from a laptop than it playing sound when I open it… and yet apple bring it to me as though it’s a feature.
There are exactly zero situations where I would want my laptop be anything except fully muted when I open it.
Configurability is also out of fashion nowadays, so you'll get that behaviour and enjoy it.
Your applications should catch the signal and pause. Safari, Apple Music and Spotify handle this well. Firefox needs a bugfix.
Yet they still make a sound when powered on or resuming sleep (and curiously, when plugged into my usb-c monitor, keeps going to sleep and turning back on (with a nice sound) forever. No other laptop win or Linux does that)
I actually tested my laptop before writing that comment. My laptop(s) make no sound even if I close the lid with playing audio (sans Firefox, as I said).
I didn't test sleep/wake consciously while I docked my laptops, but I don't remember they start making sounds when they should be silent. Maybe you're seeing PowerNap cycles, but mine is not doing any noise in PowerNap, either.
Need to test with leaving Firefox playing something and see what it does.
...all in all, interesting sentiments. I'm using these things for ~15 years at this point, and while they did funny things in the past, this was not one of them.
you're lucky :-)
macOS sends a "pause" signal to all players when it sleeps, and any application which can handle that won't be playing any audio when the system wakes up. So if your audio continues the moment you open the lid, please file a bug report for that application.
GP wrote nothing about sleep.
macOS sleeps the moment you close the lid, and wakes the moment you raise it a little. It's instantaneous, esp. ARM powered ones.
I've seen many situations where macos laptops with a closed lid continue to perform network tasks
That's PowerNap. Depending on your settings, your Mac wakes up briefly to check e-mails, updates and sleeps again. Normally it happens only during charging, but you can enable on battery power or disable it completely.
Bluetooth and wireless radios stay on for a longer while because to keep everything connected if you are moving from room to room at home or at work, also it's made possible because all radios are higher end models with their independent processors.
so basically you're retracting your previous statement that the notebook sleeps as soon as you close the lid? Because doing all that shit isn't sleeping, even if their marketing calls it a 'nap'
No, PowerNap doesn't work like that.
When you close the lid, macOS directly sleeps, shutting down fans in ~10 seconds if you have them, reaching S3 (Suspend to RAM) state. Radios stay alive a little longer to keep any BT/Wireless connections to speed things up if you're just moving places, then they go dark as well.
If you enabled PowerNap on charging, your laptop will wake up briefly after some time (Every hour or so) after you plug it in, check mails if Apple Mail is open, check for any system updates, and sleep if there's none after fetching the mails (It'll download the updates if there are any, IIRC). If you have setup Time Machine, and the drive is available (locally or via network), PowerNap will wake the system and take a backup every 24 hours, making sure that your backups are always up to date.
Per factory settings, PowerNap on battery is off, so it'll sleep without any disturbance up to a month or so, and will hibernate when the battery is low.
So, yes, the laptop sleeps as soon as you close the lid. But wakes up periodically to make sure that everything is fetched and ready (if it's connected to power, by default).
BTW, There's an actual method called Power Nap involving short naps to recharge. It's not an Apple naming gimmick [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_nap
Sorry, mistook which post you were replying to.
Nah, no problems. Things happen. Have a nice day :)
``` #/bin/sh osascript -e 'set volume 0' ```
and SleepWatcher by bernard-baehr.de
That’s an unfair characterisation. It’s just restoring windows, some of which happen to be browser windows, which then load a website with auto-playing video or audio that (unsurprisingly) starts playing. No one is selling it as a feature to “play sound when waking up from sleep”. I bet that if you configured the browser to never auto-play, this wouldn’t happen.
To clarify, because commenters seem to be misunderstanding my point: I’m not defending the functionality, I think it’s wrong. My sole quarrel is with the characterisation that Apple is selling it as a feature, when they’re not. Let’s not ascribe wrong (or at best unknown) motivations to behaviours, as that makes is less likely they will be fixed.
No one is selling it as a feature, no, but I would still consider it an OS level bug, and a security one at that. Focusing on the browser is a step away from the point: if I'm not signed in, I don't want sound playing from any app⁰.
I've had Windows do something similar, a media player deciding to unpause when coming up from hibernate (this was before Windows seemingly broke hibernate) and for some reason being at full volume, and it was a fair few seconds before I was able to login, get to that app, and hit pause again. It didn't leak anything sensitive (Hey everyone, this guy watches Stargate!) but it made me “that guy we all hate” on the train… Again it is the app that is responsible for making the sound, but I think at that point the OS shouldn't let it.
<glasses tint="rose">I miss the times when laptops had physical volume sliders…</galsses>
To me this has the feeling of making a mountain out of a molehill, but I don't think there is any denying that the molehill itself exists and to others it might be more than the very minor irritation it could be to me.
> I bet that if you configured the browser to never auto-play, this wouldn’t happen.
I bet that no matter how tightly you try to control that, some advertiser will find a way to override it to make sound play, and sods law says that will happen when you most want your waking laptop to be quiet. Blocking audio while not signed in at the OS level is a safer gate.
----
[0] Actually, there is an exception there: if the machine has locked due to input inactivity, I want audio I'm listening to continue and notification pips to come through. There is a distinction between OS restarting (from [re]boot, wake, etc.) and local console not logged in due to input timeout, in how I'd prefer things to behave.
> No one is selling it as a feature, no
That’s all I’m saying.
> but I would still consider it an OS level bug
I agree.
To clarify it restores windows AFTER a reboot, BEFORE i login.
What RIGHT does it have to create processes with a user BEFORE I authenticate to the machine ?
Yes, I understand, I have encountered that as well and I agree it shouldn’t happen.
My only quarrel is with the other user implying Apple is selling this as a feature. I have my fair share of criticism of Apple and other tech companies, but let’s please not let blind hate take over and dilute arguments.
Does it matter if the end result is that the browser plays audio before you've authenticated your user session?
The characterisation matters, yes. Because when you ascribe wrong motivations out of perceived spite, it makes it less likely the people who can fix it want to do so.
I’m not defending the bug, I’m replying to the post below it.
I do not think the user particularly cares whether it was an intentional feature or an unfortunate byproduct of features and bugs when they open a laptop in a classroom or a meeting and it starts blaring the music they listened to before closing it.
Some areas of expertise require so much work, it nearly prevents the student from learning to appreciate the intent, the craft, itself.
It's like being literally unable to dog
Opening a laptop, even if the last activity was blaring obnoxious carnival music, should _allow_, not _demand_ the user to resume their last function - which was explicitly to _pause_ the laptop, by closing the lid.
If I close the lid, I am done with the computer and video; it is obvious that I am done right now - the OS/browser would be alerted of LidDown, and I would expect the OS to tell the browser to Pause (via some new javascript media API that I am sure exists), pagefile ram if possible/needed, and dump all console.logs to a temp directory, in case restarting from hibernation goes awry.
If I open the lid, I am attempting to use the computer. The previous quest can be pertinent or moot; but it would be oddly assumptive (against the ethos of general computing) to _automagically_ resume (especially a paused) playback just from first button press - at least give me the option to explore, format, or rename the thing.
You're asking the OSes to actually implement proper session management and centralized leak controls?
It has never happened before...
The thread shouldn't pause with AudioContext frozen in an "active" status. The thread unpauses, the AudioContext resumes before the next frame (whever thatll be) comes to remember to pause it.
Windows 7 with Youtube can figure out - even with hibernation breaking audio/bluetooth on windows - then surely the most expensive company and OS 15 years later has made an inkling of progress (if that was ever their intention)
How is this possible? I wouldn’t have thought that it could open your applications without you logging in? How does it know who you are? How does it know which applications to open? If you’re not logged in yet, is is just logging in for you automatically but not showing you?
Seems like a huge security bug. This isn’t being exploited? Wild stuff.
Reminds me of when you could hear a FaceTime call coming through but if you chose not to answer it, no worries! Your iPhone will turn on your camera anyway! And send your video to the calling party!
Vast majority of all laptop and even phone usage is single user. They could literally be doing
if macbook_has_only_one_account():
preloadapps()
But how? - surely they don't store the passwords in plain text locally? Does the OS have a function to log in a user while bypassing their credentials? I would have assumed that it is impossible for the OS to preloadapps() when it doesn't have access to the user's apps in the first place.
But apparently it does! shrug
So why tell the user that they need to log in first? If they are the only user account on the system and the OS can access the user's files and apps without logging in, why have the user event set a password in the first place? It seems like a fake login, a false sense of security. And a massive security issue. If the user can just open the lid and that means that code is now running under their own account but they have not authorized a log in, that's just dangerous.
The OS at its core doesn't care about credentials. As long as there is a root process, which there is for init. It can simply execute a process as another user id.
With how modern macbooks and many other laptops work nowadays, you are rarely fully turning off the device and simply hibernating it constantly which keeps everything loaded in memory.
I don't deny there are security implications. But it's an Apple design choice. lol
Damn, how is that possible? I imagine you have FileVault enabled, and if so this sounds like some security bypass?
I was under the impression that until you provide the password after a reboot, the system should know nothing about you as all user data should be encrypted, so it should not know what apps you had open before reboot let alone start playing sound.
After you type your FileVault password you are 'logged in'
This is really about the checkbox on the reboot modal that says "reopen windows when logging back in." An OS update defaults to yes, for whatever reason.
>Damn, how is that possible? I imagine you have FileVault enabled, and if so this sounds like some security bypass?
If you're choosing "reboot" rather than "shut down", presumably you intend to continue using the machine, so it's reasonably safe to keep credentials around. AFAIK windows has the same feature.
> If you're choosing "reboot" rather than "shut down", presumably you intend to continue using the machine, so it's reasonably safe to keep credentials around.
This is the last thing I would expect. Quite the contrary, when I reboot (rather than log out or sleep), I expect the machine to clear it's memory completely.
Somewhat loosely related, but I have something similar with the iPhone browser. Where opening the browser will shortly show the last page I had open (even I carefully closed it before closing the browser). Even if it never got me into trouble, I found that annoying as s. And could potentially make problems.
FWIW, what you’re seeing is likely just the cached thumbnail that iOS creates for the app-switcher UI, not an interactive web session.
Yes, but still if you have somebody looking over your shoulder, it can leak whatever you've been looking at.
There's a way to block that entirely for "secure' apps, but iOS could be smarter about this, and cache some stripped down view or expire that cache quicker.
This is also the case for FaceTime; The last image the camera captured will stay visible in the app switcher like forever... so other people who use your iPad / iPhone can see it.
Yes. Something like that, but can reveal a lot of the site you were in.
What I don't understand is why browsers (in my case Brave) doesn't pause all playback after a restart?
I have never heard of anyone with this issue.
The only explanation is that you restarted whilst having the "Open All Previous Application" checkbox enabled. And yes it will launch processes after you have logged in but before the Desktop is shown.
Either that you or you have some launch daemon that is opening a browser.
I also have this issue from time to time.
> The only explanation is that [...]
Please show some more imagination.
Maybe you should use your imagination and read the second part of what I wrote.
Which is that it could be a launch daemon. It's very common for third party apps to use their imagination and do dumb things on startup.
> Maybe you should use your imagination and read the second part of what I wrote.
The comment only advances two causes.
> Which is that it could be a launch daemon. It's very common for third party apps to use their imagination and do dumb things on startup.
Yes, that's possible, but unlikely to be an exhaustive list of reasons. Especially since in this case it's about browser tabs playing stuff before logging in, not about any weird third part apps.
I've had similar experiences with MacOS. I uncheck that goddamn box all the time and still it relaunches previously opened applications half the time. If my application or computer crashes, I don't want the crashy application to open up at startup again. MacOS isn't perfect.
OSX is particularly lousy with remembering user preferences and configuration. I quit using it after I grew sick of raging at it forgetting what applications want different files to open with. I've never had this sort of problem on Linux.
In my experience, when filetype associations change under macOS it’s because some app I’ve used recently has made those changes without asking me.
I know some people are tired of all the prompts but I don’t think apps should be able to change those associations without first prompting the user.
I’m very confident that it’s either this or the restore-after-crash feature that OP is seeing. I don’t think it’s anything specific to Safari, because I have never seen Safari opened before login when it’s not my default browser.
That said, there should probably be a checkbox in system settings to disable login “prewarming”.
I actually used Chrome and Edge. Both show that problem. But the main issue is not those browser autoplaying audio and video on "restore", even though it is an issue, its the OS thinking its OK to load apps before a user authenticated itself after boot
I had this issue, and something similar in my old iPhone. I'm sure there are other explanations, because yours is not it.
The article has today's date on it, but I could swear I read this exact same article a month ago...
From September 13, 2023:
> During the macOS 14 Sonoma beta period Apple introduced a bug in the macOS firewall, packet filter (PF). This bug prevents our app from working, and can result in leaks when some settings (e.g. local network sharing) are enabled. We cannot guarantee functionality or security for users on macOS 14, we have investigated this issue after the 6th beta was released and reported the bug to Apple. Unfortunately the bug is still present in later macOS 14 betas and the release candidate.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/bug-in-macos-14-sonoma-prevents-...
Was fixed September 22, 2023 it seems (https://mullvad.net/en/blog/macos-14-sonoma-firewall-bug-fix...).
Seems like Apple's product/engineering department doesn't agree with the marketing department about how important their users privacy is.
It’s been reported by Little Snitch as well: https://obdev.at/blog/should-i-upgrade-to-macos-sequoia-part...
I've heard NixOS is good, but I guess I still need a GUI os because of browser and some apps I use regularly. I would love to get out of the macOS world, its going to a bad place. Seems like I've configured my whole digital life around apple.
> I've heard NixOS is good, but I guess I still need a GUI os because of browser and some apps I use regularly.
What? NixOS runs GUIs just fine. (This comment sent from a browser on NixOS)
> Unfortunately apps are not required to respect the routing table
Insane. Why even have one or expose it to the user if it's just suggestive fiction?
Vendors really need to stop privileging themselves on users machines.
The first boot after a macOS system update has long been bugged out. It launches a bunch of apps you didn’t even have open before updating, seems to be the 5-10 most recent apps you quit. Yes they were fully quit, yes I have the “resume” setting off. It also doesn’t do a resume, it launches them, i.e. tells them to create new windows, and it launches them before it finishes mounting disks, resulting in every update being followed by all my most used apps appearing out of nowhere and telling me all my config and data is gone. It doesn’t really matter, you just reboot again and you’re good, it’s just careless and makes the OS feel unstable. Maybe the firewall thing is unrelated, maybe it finally forces Apple to fix the bug, we’ll see.
It seems to launch all the apps you had open when you pressed the "Update" button, even if that was 30 minutes before the installation began.
Ah, that is so annoying. It actually opened stuff from yesterday once.
> yes I have the “resume” setting off
I'm not sure what this setting does. The amount of times mac will jsut reopen everything anyway is frustration. I go look up how to stop it and the answer is always "Turn off this setting you already have off".