And you, what's your operating system to code ? Me, I use Arch btw
All three main desktop operating systems suck for very different reasons
So many praises for Windows and Mac about 'premium features', 'corporate environment' and 'device support'. But not enough talk about how they treat customers like crap and cash cows. Windows is replete with spyware and ads. It doesn't respect the user's choices, like when not to do an update or opening the links with a browser of user's choice. Heck! Some versions don't even allow you to register users without a cloud account. And now they are taking definite steps towards ensuring that you can't do anything they don't approve - with TPM and pluton non-sense. Praising windows is like being in an abusive relationship and finding justifications for it.
Mac is on the other extreme. They lock down their platform more and more in every revision in the name of security. It's getting harder to side-load apps. Why? For security, of course! No mention of how security comes primarily from platform design. Then there is the hardware, where everything is glued, soldered, riveted, digitally locked, etc, etc. Any small issue, and it's garbage. Not even parts from another genuine Mac can be used. Macs also have the strange distinction of needing calibration and signing of any part that can be replaced at all. It's deliberately designed to extract more money from you and create a tonne load of e-waste (iWaste?). Mac fanbois have a habit of justifying it in the name of 'miniaturization' and progress. Honestly, that's just hand-wavy and completely wrong technical argument. And Apple says it is all for 'privacy' and 'security' while their actual reason is the pursuit of double-digit growth (not just profits). So, in effect, Apple is saying to their customers "Oh honey! You're are just too stupid to take care of it. So let me just decide for you" - all the while squeezing you for money. Does it end there? Oh no! They need developers to pay a yearly fee and want to take a huge cut from their profits. All that for "providing the engineering, platform and services". As if the exorbitant price they extract from their customers isn't enough.
The hardware situation on Linux distros and frankly even BSDs isn't as bad as it is projected by some. Most devices just work even on a live installation medium. Even Nvidia works. (Have you considered the possibility that if any device doesn't work, it's the manufacturer's fault and not the OS's? There are plenty of devices for which the community maintains the drivers, just because the device manufacturer isn't an utter trashbag). There are tonnes of games too - thanks to Valve and Proton. And as for the 'corporate env', you are probably just locked in or too used to them. There are users who have been on these platforms for decades now without complaints. And there are companies built entirely on them. Can you say the same about any of the company that makes your OS/devices? Is there one among them that doesn't use Linux or BSDs?
Look! I'm not claiming that everything is rosy on the Linux and BSD side of things. Sometimes you have to find an alternative way of doing things (there are plenty of options). Sometimes, you have to configure a lot. Sometimes, you have to carefully choose your hardware so that your life is easier with Linux and BSDs. But there is one thing they don't ask you to do- and that is to surrender your self-respect. You don't get treated like cash cow. You don't get spied on as if you are a thief. You don't get restricted like a school kid. You're not told that your choices are wrong. Your choices are not disrespected. You don't get treated like you owe them after you paid your hard earned money on the devices they make. Ultimately, it's up to you to decide if the little conveniences are bigger than your self-respect.
You can literally install Linux on a Mac. Even on MacOS you can run whatever app you want, there's no need for sideloading.
Macs are actually secure. Not as much as ios, but compared to the general linux userspace, it is like a military establishment vs a homeless tent.
Did you miss the part where I said they use the security argument to lock down the device and restrict the user? In addition, Linux distros in their default configuration may not be secure - but there are plenty of packages that can secure it down to a deep level. It just depends on the user's threat level assessment. That military establishment vs homeless tent analogy is just pure hyperbole and FUD.
Security doesn’t work like that and I find it important to share the insecure nature of most linux distros with many people, hopefully to make it improve one day.
Currently a
make installcan do literally anything to your computer besides installing a video card driver (as per the old xkcd comic) and sure there is firejail.. but let’s be honest, how often do you use it? Defaults matter, and thus linux is insecure.Also, again, how is osx locked down? What’s a concrete thing you can’t do on it?
macOS all the way.
All the comfort of a UNIX FOSS env, all the premium features of a corpo env.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=E_C3pgc1Iho&t=83s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Why bother with a front-end? This vlogger's on peertube, as @ozoned mentioned: https://tilvids.com/w/995NqXZXXshptUnwZNcbKi
Nah these days with wsl, I prefer windows over Mac. At least you get packages that have been updated in the past decade.
I care about freedom. In that regard, mac is easily the worst of the three. Also, it kinda combines the downsides of both:
- Being proprietary crap that tries to force you into using it a specific way and does shit in the background nobody ever asked for
- Not being compatible with some proprietary soft- or hardware
I hate windows with a passion but would take it anytime if mac would be the only other option.
Every windows machine a job has given me has been a hunk of garbage. At least Mac hardware has a floor of quality. Not perfect by any means, but at least the battery lasts and there's basic horsepower.
Also every windows machine has been with a fossilized company that has tons of IT bloat with tons of spyware authentication shit on it. Hell I had to file (and fight for) wsl privileges on my current windows machine
The Macs I've gotten have been brand new, straight from the manufacturer.
I'm sure that's just luck of the draw but yeah fuck windows shops hah
I'm not talking about companies that use windows vs companies that use mac but about the systems themselves. It's very possible that most companies that use macs are generally better equipped, treat their devices better, upgrade more often, etc.. But that's a correlation, not a causation. You are right about the quality baseline because apple forces them to buy very specific hardware. But if they'd instead spend the same money for a windows machine and set it up decently, I would prefer that by a lot. MacOS is just terrible. It's less keyboard friendly, always messy, forces users into a overpriced and shitty proprietary lock-in ecosystem, etc.
I'm not sure how long I'll say that though since microsoft really manages to make windows so much worse with every version they release, it has also reached a barely usable state to be honest.
In what way does it limit your freedom? When I first tried OSX I was quite surprised at how customizable it actually is, contrary to all the talk I heard about it.
i used to have this opinion, i dont after having to use a mac for a few months. id take windows+wsl any day.
Being built on nix doesn't mean it's similar, just that they have some commands in common.
I miss my Linux dev machine daily.
Completely agree, I didn’t mean to imply that macOS’ BSD foundation is exactly like Linux. It isn’t. I just think it happens to be much more similar to Linux than Windows.
They are both UNIXes, that’s quite a lot of similarity and I wouldn’t write it off that fast.
The windows experience has gotten a lot closer to Ubuntu than you'd expect, what with WSL. A developer can do most of the same things you'd do on Ubuntu on Windows now. The same cannot be said for Mac.
Thankful to communities, building dev env on Linux is easier than that on Windows.
NixOS is the ultimate dev distro... For backend development anyways.
I had quite a few laptops that worked and then along the way, support was dropped so I had to keep an older kernel.
Cries in game dev
No, seriously. I've tried getting Unity to work on Linux once, and gave up after few hours of random crashes, bugs or errors. And I never even got to building the game, which I'm sure would be an entirely different adventure that would still in the end require to reboot to Windows and try the build there.
Also, getting O365 to work on Linux was another reason why I eventually gave up, since our company is simply a Windows-based, and the web apps are just too cubersome to use. And for alternative clients you usually need an app password (disabled in our domain) or another setting that you don't want to enable for 95% of your employees, since it's just a security risk in the wrong hands.
Oh, and then there are VPNs. I never managed to get Checkpoint mobile working on Linux, without it also requiring intervention from IT to enable some obscure configuration or protocol support.
It's a shame, but every attempt I made to switch ended exactly the same - after few days of running into "make sure to enable this config on the server side" or "if you don't see that option in the settings, contact your system administrator" for every tool I need for my job, I just gave up.
But I'm considering it giving it another try, and just go with the Unix + Windows VM for administrative tasks. But knowing myself, just the small hurdle of "having to spin up a VM" would be a reason to postpone and not do it properly, since that's additional effort... And then there's still the gamedev I do part-time, where I simply don't believe it's a good idea - after all, given the states the engines are in, it's a recipe for disaster of "works on my machine but not in build" or "doesn't work on my machine"...
The real reason linux is better for devs is because there are more communities about linux than about windows on programming.dev
Unfortunately I have to use Windows for work, and it hurts my soul.
Once
nixsupports mac and windows equally well, maybe those platforms can be considered equivalent, but until then linux FTW.I moved so Microsoft doesn't spy on literally everything I do. For programming it does seem to be easy to discover new things when you are part of different linux circles.
