Yeah I got one from work. I was quite excited to get one as macos is supposed to be a paragon of design but after using it I'm so glad I didn't spend my own money on it as it's been a total disappointment. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't want to launch it off the roof.
It's amazing how often people who post on here about hating macOS have only just got a Mac for the first time and simply can't be bothered to learn, or hate that the keyboard shortcuts are different, or desperately want their OS level adverts back or something. It's lazy.
What 3rd party tools would those be? I've been using Macs since ~1994 and my 3rd party tool use has fluctuated wildly over that time. I have a lot of 3rd party software installed but I can't think of anything that I'd call a "requirement" to "fix" the OS.
The most obvious one is that there's no native way to handle having too many icons in the top bar. If you have too many, they just start disappearing, instead of being hidden in an expansion like on Windows. This _literally_ makes them unusable without a third party program.
And if you have the notch this is very far from a theoretical problem.
The native solution to this is to hold the command key and drag unneeded icons out of the bar to remove them. If the programs you’re using refuse to let you remove those icons (or they keep re-adding them against your wishes) then those programs are bad citizens and you should probably stop using them!
That's not really a solution. I don't want the icons permanently gone, I want them accessible because they are there to provide essential functionality.
If I delete my Dropbox icon out of the menu bar how am I supposed to know that it's running, click on it to see its status, quit the program, etc.
I use the password manager built into the OS (iCloud Keychain) which doesn’t put an icon into that bar.
We’re talking about a limited resource (a few inches of screen real estate at the top of the screen) that tons of app developers feel entitled to occupy. Now we could have some kind of system whereby excess icons get dumped into a … menu, but that defeats the entire purpose since they’re no longer on the screen all the time!
There are plenty of apps out there which do not feel entitled to a slice of this precious screen real estate. I think it’s worth supporting them!
> Now we could have some kind of system whereby excess icons get dumped into a … menu, but that defeats the entire purpose since they’re no longer on the screen all the time!
This is just not true. The purpose is not necessarily to have the icon on the screen all the time. If the menu doesn't exist, the buttons don't exist either, and plenty of applications are built assuming that you have access to their bar icons while they're running.
If the icon is missing there is _literally_ no other way to use the relevant functionality. If the icon is hidden in a menu, you can use the functionality, it's just an extra click.
Yeah but all OSes have UX problems that require third party tools to fix. Hell, you could argue that FDO/GNOMEs "no use an extension" attitude is exactly the same thing.
'Plenty' vs an atrocious amount that constantly nags.
MacOS's ads whilst I still detest, is a one-off prompt.
Window's ads can sometimes only be removed with registry key configs OR deployment of management policies...
Nagging for OneDrive?
Nagging for sign in?
Nagging for edge-as-default?
Nagging for copilot with edge?
Nagging for sync your bookmarks and let copilot handle it?
I’m a local account user. I don’t use any of the above.
As a lifetime Mac user, I will say that the last few updates to MacOS have made me start looking towards linux. Ignoring the many sins of liquid glass, Disk utility is almost nonfunctional, as are many of the built-in utilities. Sure I can use the command line tools but to me it's a concerning trend that highlights poor attention to detail that the Mac was always known for.
As someone who has done this very thing, and is a lifelong Linux fanboy (I run Linux on literally everything else), I would strongly suggest you don't do this if you're using a Macbook. The losses on battery life are far too high to accept, and if you have lower specs on the Mac laptop, you will really feel them on most Linux flavours.
> The losses on battery life are far too high to accept,
Why do people keep saying this? I have been on M1 Air on Asahi for the last 4 weeks, getting 8-10 hours daily. I see my wattage consumption on screen at all times, it varies between 2.5-3W when scrolling web and around 5W when actively working with apps. I see no difference between macOS and Linux! The only difference is the s2idle consumption but personally I don't care, besides all other modern Linux laptops have same exact issue, often worse.
On my Intel T14s 4th Gen I was getting maybe 5 hours, and that's already with heavily optimized setup!
Impressive, that must be a recent fix then, and it's good to hear. I tried Asahi some time ago and it was about 3-4 hours on average. I am still running Linux Mint on an old 2015 Macbook Pro and had to make some major power management tweaks (preventing it from _ever_ boosting up from base CPU and GPU frequency) to get close to the battery life I had before.
Definitely not 5h, not anymore. I just got off the train after working on my laptop for 3.5h, connected over wifi to the internet, browsing, searching files, etc., and ended with my battery down to 65%. I have no complaints, this is as good as it gets for Linux users. I think it's worth noting that Linux and its stack is probably most efficient OS nowadays, performance wise, so while not totally optimized for hardware, the software gets extra 10% or so over macOS and it might be showing.
It's also quite amazing how macOS doesn't support containerization which is hugely important for a hefty chunk of all devs out there. So, Docker Desktop, Colima, OrbStack. VMs. Deal with it.
Not to mention the amazing amount of services running in the background, at least 80% of which I haven't needed in the 6.5 years I have my Mac, but can't stop / remove / disable.
My Linux laptop is supposedly 40% weaker than my desktop Mac, so the online sheets say at least. It runs my work's integration test suite 15% faster.
A lot of us have given Macs a very honest chance. It's okay and it's very workable, that much is a fact -- but if one is willing to pimp their machine and OS -- nowadays made even easier by LLMs -- then the experience and everyday ergonomics and actual dev-enhancing abilities quickly outpace a Mac.
And I wish that wasn't true because I wasn't looking forward to changing my main machine. But the annoyances and slowness and closeness just compound until they start literally reducing your everyday productivity.
I’m running Docker Desktop as I write this. What did you mean by “doesn’t support containerization”?
And really, who cares if it had 10,000 background services if 9,999 are idle at any given time? Run `ps auxwww` on a Linux box sometime and it’ll look similar.
Does not support it _natively_ and is measurably slower than a supposedly much weaker Linux machine was my point, which I believe I expressed quite clearly.
> And really, who cares if it had 10,000 background services if 9,999 are idle at any given time?
Normally I don't. I have an okay idea on how modern OS-es work; temporary swaps, compressing RAM for rarely used background processes etc. -- they work amazing, macOS included.
I suppose my problem is more the services that _do_ interfere, like the one that feels it has to scan every CLI command I launch, to the point that it became noticeable, especially side by side with the "weaker" Linux laptop and hell, even with a VM-ed Linux inside my gaming PC as well.
So OK, I accept the correction: does not much matter how many are they in general. Those that interfere though, and I can't stop them -- this is where I drew the line and gradually started my migration away from macOS.
And this:
> Run `ps auxwww` on a Linux box sometime and it’ll look similar
...is objectively false. I just tried it; even my home server that's doing plenty of stuff I get 244 items. On the Mac I am writing this? 840.
Maybe the laptop with KDE will have a touch more than 244, but I doubt they'd be 840.
Call me a purist, I like to know what my background services are doing, though I'll admit I care less and less with age.
I’m not trying to be pedantic here, but I genuinely don’t know what you mean here. Macs have built-in virtualization and containerization. Docker and podman etc are wrappers around it, but the internals are built in.
Did you mean they have to emulate x86 code if you download an x86 image instead of a native one?
I mostly meant they don't support cgroups and other Docker-required machinery and have to emulate them.
OrbStack bridges a good chunk of the Linux performance gap however. I was using Colima before and then the Linux laptop was running the integration test suite ~60% faster. OrbStack reduced that to 15%.
I think the real point is a) change is difficult, and b) we all have different needs.
If you asked me to use a Windows machine I would be frustrated from day one and would want my Mac back, but everyone else where I work (except one) uses Windoes every day, and I don't know how they do it.
As far as needs, I haven't been a serious dev for a long time (ask my employees who won't let me near any code), so containerization is a non issue I could care less about for myself, but (for personal use) there are apps on Mac that work for me that don't run on Windows, and definitely don't run on Linux.
There are probably reasonably "objective" measures that can be used to rank OS's agains each other, like security or bugs, but even some measures that sound objective may be based on data but their value is subjective. The OS wars are old, and maybe I'm old too, but they're getting tired (unless we want to discuss how the AmigaOS was better than any other OS at the time but with one fatal flaw.)
I can't quite work out if this is serious or not, but for anyone who doesn't know, you can set global and app-specific keyboard shortcuts in System Settings->Keyboard->Keyboard Shortcuts. Shortcuts map to menu item titles which means you can set a "Select Next Tab" shortcut and that shortcut will work in every single app that uses "Select Next Tab" in a menu - it's one of the best features on macOS.
