There's no real package manager. You can't rebuild your kernel. You can't upgrade your hardware. Once your HW is unsupported by Apple you're stuck with an old OS that is unsupported by third party software as well.
I don’t... I don’t want to rebuild my kernel? I want my goddamn computer to compute. I want to get my work done, then maybe order Chipotle. At least the Mac sleeps properly when I close the lid, unlike every Linux laptop I’ve ever had.
My Thinkpad T460p on ubuntu sleeps properly when I close the lid, every time, which is better than Windows managed on the same machine. I am running a stock kernel though.
I’m glad it works for you. It doesn’t work for me, on top of the myriad other Linux things that don’t work for me that, although well within my capability to fix, I would rather not have to deal with.
On my Lenovo sleep works as good as on my older Macbooks. Not having a power saving sleep mode as good as the Macs was one of my main complaints when switching away from Apple. The key to success was the systemd's hybrid sleep mode. With it I can use the Lenovo just as the Macs, that is: never switch off, just close the lid and restart work when I open it again. As a bonus it also properly hibernates when it runs out of battery (just as the Macs do).
Well done - a function works well on a restricted set of hardware which the OS has been tested thoroughly against. How do you expect that same thing to be achieved with the hundreds of potential laptops out there which could run Linux?
Who cares? The tribulations of the creator are not the concern of the end user.
If i can expect a macbook to work properly running macos, but can't expect a laptop running Linux to work properly, that's all I need to know. I'm not going to be all "I guess it doesn't matter that my laptop doesn't sleep, they have hundreds of models to account for!" and just deal with it.
“You can’t rebuild your kernel.” Are you kidding me? Apple supports the hardware it ships on day one, then provides free updates until the device is obsolete.
It means "until the third-party developers in the OS's application ecosystem have changed their definition of 'state of the art' to include the use of enough new layers of bloat that old devices can no longer run the newest [versions of] apps."
An obsolete laptop is the same as an obsolete phone: it's one where it chugs when opening Spotify, or Slack, or any other "nobody ever bothered to optimize this" app that everyone uses anyway.
Or, to put that another way: you can certainly retouch photos in GIMP, or even in Paint Shop Pro 7 on Windows XP. But what if you want to use seam-carving in your photo-retouching? PSP7 ain't got that. Once you know that your use-case dictates a modern version of some memory-hogging software, well, that constraint dictates what kind of computer is "obsolete" or not for you.
There's no "real package manager" on any of the BSDs; package managers are a Linux-ism. BSDs (like Darwin) have base-systems, developed and released as a whole; and then, separately, userlands, delivered through some kind of ports system. Critically, nothing in the base system is ever dependent on the userland; the system always works fine with zero userland ports installed.
Under such a paradigm, there's absolutely no difference between a first-party ports ecosystem and a third-party one.
> You can't upgrade your hardware. Once your HW is unsupported by Apple you're stuck with an old OS that is unsupported by third party software as well.
Personally, I like the era of disposable computers. Most computers have got hardly anything in them these days, anyway; just an SoC and a battery. What would you upgrade? It'd be like upgrading the parts in an electric toothbrush. In both cases, there's just a few parts, and they all wear out at about the same rate, such that when the device is worn out, it's all worn out. Just get a new one, and recycle the old one for scrap (i.e. what Apple does when you use their trade-in program.)
> Once your HW is unsupported by Apple you're stuck with an old OS that is unsupported by third party software as well.
The latest version of MacOS supports hardware from 2012. High Sierra (released 2 years ago) supports hardware from 2009 and 2010, and very little if any software released today won't run on it.
speaking as someone with a long history of old macs, I'm very comfortable in saying this is a straw-man argument that doesn't matter BECAUSE every single mac I have ever had that they've dropped support for has been EFFING PAINFUL to use long before they dropped support. I've been using Macs since the Mac SE. Apple maintains support for their devices long after any reasonable person that wasn't dirt poor would have replaced them. Any poor person in the US would probably be better off going to the library and using the crappy free computers there, because macs that old are ridiculously slow.
