I said no and Apple said yes

I think people are generally more willing to put up with the former.

Should AI features be easier to switch off? Sure, no argument there, but a problem like a network interface vanishing, breaking internet connectivity, and re-adding not working as expected is much more serious, even if it’s an issue that impacts fewer people. At least the system with unwanted features is still usable for work.

Yes, don't try to actually get any work done, install anything you care about, or use it in a way that improves your life at all. Just reorient your life around learning this clunky system and don't expect to get any actual benefit from it until you've spent years learning it.

This is the standard Linux pitch, followed by "why doesn't anyone use it!?"

I spend a disproportionate amount of time tinkering with Linux desktops trying to make them act the way I like anyway, but the amount of tinkering is exponentially higher with a minimal WM setup. I can’t get any work done under them.

I also don’t really care to administer everything via the CLI and don’t find it a good use of my time to write Bash scripts for everything. If I’m going to do that I’d rather just write my own DE, because even if that’s a wildly larger task than writing a few scripts I’m going to get vastly more satisfaction out of it since I can make everything work exactly as I think it should.

I've been using it on my tablet, as I do find it to be a nice UI for the touchscreen, but I may switch to KDE because Gnome's onscreen keyboard is horrid, and difficult to replace.

That applies just as much to Windows and MacOS as it does to Linux.

They’re also a crutch that shouldn’t be necessary for tasks so commonplace and simple as adding a network interface.

However, those only exist because real people talk about problems on forums. If we fully integrate an LLM into the desktop and nobody discusses the issues they run into anymore, will LLMs continue to be able to solve the problems?

IE, the ethernet port shouldn't just disappear from the OS; it doesn't matter that now it's a little easier to fix the problem.

I tried putting the driver files on a USB stick but the Windows installer refused to recognize those.

Specifically, on my machine interfaces created in KDE settings have a flag to prevent automatic DNS resolution toggled on, and this is not represented by a corresponding checkbox in the wizard or when editing the interface. As a result I could ping other devices on the network and external IPs like 8.8.8.8, but not browse the web or do anything else that requires DNS resolution. One has to use nmcli to toggle that flag off.

Yes, there is a whole moral discussion to be had, but as much as you win points for doing the better thing, the better things don't really pay bills.

The good news though is that we definitely won the server war. We can spin up VMs and install Linux without licences. We have access to software that works well, security updates, frequent releases, a massive ecosystem of free software, no advertising, very little to no licensing for software, and it works incredibly well. So much so, that we can't even imagine a world in which servers require licence keys or subscriptions or a marketplace account.

Imagine now, if laptops & workstations were as solved as servers are.

That's why we aren't there yet, because they're not.

Probably 99% of Apple / Windows users aren't very tech literate so if they have to fight an update they'll just think it's broken.

It's just basic business practice, cater to the 99%, don't worry about the 1%

Happened to me years ago. No biggie, installed a backup and noticed I had somehow removed the most important directory with all my work files from the the time machine back up. Hardly Apple’s fault, though, but I got complacent with ”it just works”.

Since then I come to conclusion that the saying should go: ”It works - until it doesn’t”. If it os not the OS, it is myself who messes something up.

These days I almost solely use Linux. I have M1 Mini as a media centre connected to TV and I have to use Windows crap at work. Opening my Linux seems like a hig from an old friend in comparison. I might need to read docs and fight with drivers every now and then, but fuck it, I don’t care. Because this one is mine.

This happened to me once with a Mac upgrade!

And it’s still fewer times than something has happened to one of my Linux machines, by an order of magnitude.

There are little annoyances with Macs and occasional frustrating problems, but after using them side by side with other operating systems for years it’s what I choose for the daily driver.

Most complaints come from people who have become familiar with one OS for a decade and then get angry when they use something else and it’s not the same as their familiar thing. There isn’t much value in those comparisons.

one was a permissions/capability issue, but the other was straight up performance. As someone said above, an AI agent drilled down on both workstreams immediately, so the pivot wasnt too rough

I've spent the last 2 weeks trying to get Windows to work (hard crash at random times) when it ran flawlessly on Ubuntu.

The issue appears to have arisen because Windows decided to update my graphics drivers, so making them (for reasons AMD perhaps need to sort out) incompatible with Adrenaline. A million reboots later, using arcane programs to clear out hidden installs, hidden config, and trying to get details from a system that will readily tell you it recovered but gets shy about what caused it to crash .. eesh.

My experience is you need far more expertise to run Windows. Maybe if MS tested they're releases so it didn't break itself all the time ...

I wonder why? If nobody can help them, they are fucked on any OS.

Which is the whole point, no? There would be more Linux everywhere if it didn’t occasionally break in ways that require special expertise to fix.

I find the Apple offering's keyboard worse to type on, its enormous touchpad is a chore to engage with compared to the venerable Trackpoint, and the operating system feels contrived to make simple things difficult.

The x220 thinkpad is 14 years old now. And has a 500 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM. Perhaps in another 14 years Apple will be able to match it feature for feature.

One might well ask why I own Apple hardware at all. The answer is to buy entry into their walled garden as a developer.

> but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues

These are defining qualities of something that does not "just work"

> and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up

A Linux sysadmin teammate of mine has >10 years of running Linux servers, and chose to install Ubuntu on his work Dell laptop, and in the ~2 years he's been running that thing he's had regular (2-3/month) issues with audio during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meetings sessions. Both Bluetooth and wired headset connections.

At my last job (pre-COVID) I had a Linux workstation at my desk and a Windows laptop. At where I'm currently at we're hybrid and so we get laptops and I chose a MacBook because I knew I could both do my daily sysadmin chores through Terminal and also have access to 'business apps'.

If you look at MacOS with a critical eye, it's nearly impossible to say it has good UX. It's outdated and everything requires more clicks. Finder stuck 20 years ago. Hard to find settings. Poor screen real estate. Hard to read text with transparent everything.

Let's kill this myth that "Macs are more intuitive to use".

I have to agree on the hardware quality though but that doesn't do everything as I still have to use the OS

https://9to5google.com/2026/09/21/googlebook-launch/

Xiaomi certainly does: they have billboards touting it: along the bottom they show phones, dishwashers, cars, laptops, and everything in between.

> and durable keyboards

It wasn't that long ago they had terrible keyboard lifespans which could be a death knell for the laptop, and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec. They've come far in recent years, and I certainly wouldn't be sad if it was my main machine yet I don't expect them to be an outlier forever.

In some dimension Apple (and any serious manufacturer) is always going to be ahead - and they certainly are in non-gaming portable CPU/GPU combos right now. Alas, they aren't ahead in many other dimensions; my Fedora X1 Carbon is my strong preference over my M4 macbook pro and a large part of that is the basic usability of the system and window manager (sway), which is something Apple will never match until we meaningfully switch interaction paradigms.

Running an AMD card on my Dekstop system. It's invisible as an Intel on-board graphics card, and this is a great thing.

Much greater than rebooting to a black screen because NVIDIA decided to not support your GPU anymore because it finished its economic life for the company, not you.

If thats all you do you might as well just use macos. Something comes up you can just send your parents to the apple store. Probably one of the last places on earth you can get a real life human in a real life building from a real life major company to sit down with you and walk you through your issue. They will do this for free, you only pay for an actual repair job, which you can also of course do there for a relatively fair price all things considered for oem quality work. Not sure where I would take any other laptop for repair. Do people even repair laptops as a business?

My guess? Most people don't care, but the discussions are driven by the few who do, because for them, it's a really big deal, and they'll pay accordingly. Similarly for "My code is unreadable unless it's on a 4k display at 220+ PPI" -- I'm sure it's true for them, but for me, a crappy FHD display I can get for $100 is great for coding.

I'm like this with Linux...I pay System76 a premium because I care about how they go about building their systems, both hardware and software. To normal folks, it seems like a crazy thing to pay a premium for, but for me, it's a great deal.

Anyway, I was sure something was up, checked settings, and found a new feature akin to 'more accurate mouse'. I disabled it and my trackpad started working again. Everytime I have to use that PC I get angry about something unbearable windows thought was a good idea. Tbh my Linux has been driving me up the walls recently. I think I just don't like computers at all.

The old Mac trackpads were great. The new Mac trackpads where they increased the size, and made it solid-state feel terrible to use. Make it make sense.

The peak was my high school Gateway laptop.

Yes, but the point of the linked article is that this preference inevitably results in your device spying on you. To each their own indeed.

Edit: and of course I see your P.S. note. But that isn't really responsive. Most Linux users would point out (P.S.) that they'd like their hardware to be faster and lower power or their OS to be a little cleaner. But alas, you can't have everything.

we should strive and push to keep having these a alternatives. Which the industry is trying to remove.

When I first tried macOS I hated it and had a long list of issues I could give. They are all still valid but it turns out they don’t actually stop you getting work done.

A lot of other crafts and jobs need way more expensive hardware. Software engineers "only" need a $1,000 - $3,000 laptop every 5 or so years. That's typically less than 0.5% of that 5 year's salary.

I've probably heard "this time is different" on the topic of PC laptops catching up to Macs a hundred times over the last decade, but it never is...

It's hard to rebuild trust after selling a computer (without a CD drive) without networking drivers and no indication of which wireless chipset it has, but including a CD with said drivers.

I'm not exaggerating, I had so many horrible experiences.

I haven't abused this m series mac as much. But my old original aluminum unibody from 2012, that thing lasted about 12 years until water damage took it out. It fell to the floor on every corner multiple times. None are perfectly round anymore due to the force of the impacts. Never shattered the screen or affected anything with the computer.

I have a friend who ran over his with his f150. That did end up putting some cracks into the screen, but it still worked and he still used it in that state for a couple years at least.

Windows users are the ones who don't want to think about the OS at all. They want to get something else done and have the OS get in their way as little as possible. Linux fans want to dig deep into their OS and play with its internals; Mac fans want the OS to be an experience: trendy, sleek, reassuring. The kind of people who like it when the AI tells them "you're absolutely right!". Windows users generally understand that Windows is awful; the worst operating system, in fact, except for all the other ones.

Apple users to Windows users: I feel bad for you

Windows users to Apple users: I don't think about you at all

Windows has always been weird like that. Relevant HN post from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599481

This is the billion dollar question for corps though. Windows and MacOS are first class citizens of the corporate IT universe and all the weirdness of corporate IT works. MDM, identity/auth, Office, LOB apps, video, document signing, data labeling, everything.

Linux has taken huge, heroic strides, and has caught up to about 2005. Corporate IT simply will not sanction Linux desktops unless they are provably as well versed in the entire ecosystem as Win/Mac, barring a "political" decision made at the top to make it happen.

To change this would require a profoundly deep, expensive, and continuing investment in all aspects of the 'Modern Work' experience, plus genuine commitment from Microsoft to make it happen (which would likely require lawsuits and enforcement).

The situation today is that a few orgs are playing catchup on some features, but that will never be enough to match a platform that has been dedicated to corporate life for 40+ years, and from a company infamous for extending their advantages to extinguish the competition.

We've finally achieved AI Inception here. And I'm sadly sure we're going to go deeper.

How far we’ve fallen from the “it just works” era of Apple.

They can’t even make a JSON reader, and require their users to understand the jargon generated by third-parties training on your personal Apple data.

> not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive

In their refusal, while (accidental) acceptance is always definitive...

EDIT: In another thread this is called the ratchet of consent. Apt.

Yes, more text can be another way to provide the message, but if you've ever done any user testing, you'll know that people at best scan through your UI. I know I wouldn't read that, or at least would prefer not to have to read that.

I guess I don't see why "No" combined with "You can change this later in settings" is so much less offensive than "Not now".

I think equating having the option of KLAC with Windows is totally disingenuous. There are countless other differentiators. You would be free to just not use KLAC if you so desired.

Ideally you would be free to not play KLAC games, and I would be free to play KLAC games. I just hope for the option one day, as I would very much like to make the move to Linux.

Play single player games, then you can complain about cheating AI opponents.

True story: I know a woman who built a relationship with her tween nephew on the other side of the world mainly by playing Fortnite with him ever week for two years - all for free because she never bought a skin.

> I want to clarify to anyone reading this that this only effects high-competitive games, like LoL, Valorant, PUBG, R6S; and not all of them (e.g. Counter Strike).

It affected a game I really care about: Arc Raiders. That's not a "high-competitive" game. It's PvPvE, shooting at funny robots and scavenging rubber duckies. Cheating killed the game. [It's down to 6% of its peak.](https://steamcharts.com/app/1808500#All) Just because this hasn't affected the games you love doesn't mean it's not affecting many games. See Titanfall, H1Z1, and The Cycle: Frontier, among many more.

> It does not affect "multiplayer" in general, to the contrary, most multiplayer games are not affected (coop games, MMOs, RTS).

I was going to ask you to back that up, but I realise I made a broad claim and can also not back it up, so we're just giving each other our opinions, I suppose.

> Ofc, cheating is also present with KLAC, its just the next level of the cat and mouse game (Driver exploits, DMA access via PCIe, Network Packet analysis, ...)

Indeed. The goal is to reduce cheating to a manageable level. It is impossible to eliminate.

> Nonsense. 1. Almost no anticheat is implemented on Linux in the first place. Most "working" anti-cheat solutions for Linux are just a #if Linux doNothing(); #else ... 2. KLAC requires SecureBoot/ChainOfTrust + closed source code running with highest privileges. This does not make sense for any PC, but I dont see why it would be harder to do on Linux than on Windows, Linux just has a smaller install base in general and a lower acceptance rate for KLAC, therefore its not worth it to implement.

Linux does not properly support KLAC because its architecture and development philosophy work against it. For example, Valve explicitly recommends user-space anti-cheat for Proton and says kernel-space anti-cheat is “not currently supported and is not recommended”.

The Linux kernel also deliberately does not provide a stable binary kernel-driver interface. Kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has said that Linux has neither a stable in-kernel API nor a stable binary kernel interface, because maintainers want the freedom to change kernel internals rather than permanently support proprietary out-of-tree drivers.

Riot is on the record as explaining that Linux does not give Vanguard sufficient ability to attest boot state and kernel modules. They also claim that distribution differences make enforcement harder, and that cheats can potentially operate outside an emulated environment where the anti-cheat cannot see them. Riot is on the record saying that anti-cheat is “extremely hard on Linux by design”.

So you're technically correct, but I think you misunderstand a lot of the architecture which underpins this issue, and the ideological boundaries which many developers prefer to enforce around security, FOSS, and ownership.

However, KVM does not solve the problem. In fact, Riot explicitly explains why virtualisation can make the problem worse: if Vanguard runs inside a guest, a cheat can run on the host and manipulate the VM in ways the anti-cheat cannot see. Riot says Linux currently does not give it sufficient ability to attest the boot state or kernel modules, with distro differences making the problem harder.

Linux also deliberately does not provide a stable in-kernel ABI for proprietary out-of-tree drivers. The kernel documentation explicitly says there is neither a stable binary kernel interface nor a stable internal kernel interface. The preferred model is for drivers to be upstreamed and maintained with the kernel, which is almost the opposite of how closed-source kernel anti-cheat is normally deployed.

And this isn't just Riot. EA actually supported EAC through Proton for Apex and then removed Linux access because its anti-cheat team said Linux was being used for impactful cheats, that Linux cheats were harder to detect, and that they couldn't reliably distinguish a legitimate Steam Deck from a malicious Linux client pretending to be one.

Valve itself tells developers that Proton's recommended solution is user-space anti-cheat and that kernel-space anti-cheat is “not currently supported and is not recommended”.

So I guess it's technically possible for a game dev to effectively create their own Linux distro, but I hope we agree that's never going to happen. They're game devs, not Linux devs. Anti-cheat needs a trust chain that the hostile user cannot control and not just an API through which it can inspect the system. Linux deliberately gives the machine owner far more control over the kernel and environment, which is exactly what makes strong client-side attestation difficult.

FYI bhyve isn't a Linux hypervisor. It's part of FreeBSD.

To be honest I don’t really understand the hysteria re KLAC. Installing something in kernel space requires trust, but so does installing something in user space. If you don’t trust the developer, don’t use their software. A malicious app installed in user space can steal, encrypt, delete or exfiltrate anything the user can access. It can abuse their applications, credentials and resources. Kernel access is worse, but both are very bad.

And the wifi is easily fixable either buying a non expensive dongle or waiting for the next release.

Also running bhyve as daily driver with Ubuntu for development purposes. Everything works without issues, perfectly.

Desktop computing is just in a bad state.

And I agree, Linux Mints DE (Cinnamon) is very user-friendly!

That's the problem with BSD, the community holds a large amount of radical ideologies that led them to BSD. Like a deep hatred for systemd or the GPL.

Not the core developers though, just the community surrounding them.

Ha, funnily enough that's not far off. (Vulpine)

> You're repeating fruit factory propaganda as if it is gospel, the marketing department can be proud of their handiwork.

I hated Apple for a really long time. I don't know exactly why, but if anything, it was all the Apple haters that got me. And of course, the general idea of devices not being locked down to the company, and some other stuff. Having a rooted Android phone made me prone to confirmation bias too.

But my school had Mac, and after using them, I knew that Mac was for me. I still hated iOS at the time, but I knew I needed Mac. So I got one, and I was absolutely right.

The Mac broke down constantly though, didn't seem designed for the abuse I put it through. People begged me to go back to Windows because of the constant repairs, and I did, but I eventually got fed up with Windows again and tried Linux. I eventually got fed up with Linux too, went back to Windows, continued to be relentlessly fed up with Windows, and then eventually got a Mac again, with my own money this time.

At some point, it just clicked for me that the company is what I need, rather than Mac alone. I realized that iOS had the exact same philosophy that I liked so much about Mac. I got an iPhone and got to benefit from the ecosystem with my Mac. And at that point, my mind was fully made up. All in on Apple.

Note that at basically none of these points did marketing become a factor in my decisions. So no it's not the marketing. Though that is a great way to discredit opinions, I think Apple is genuinely the best for me.

> In reality they're one of the most profit-maximisation centred companies out there in computing land, they don't really care all that much about what their users want and do their best to make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem".

To me, this feels kind of like the argument that Steam is an abusive monopoly. I choose and prefer them because the alternatives kinda suck in comparison. Apple is like that for me. I'm not locked into their ecosystem the same way that I'd be locked into an online game that I've poured thousands of hours into. Or locked into a social network where all my friends have been for over a decade. I can easily move somewhere else, and I even did recently, before moving back because I couldn't bear it.

I noticed just how much my habits changed to adapt to Windows, as opposed to Mac. I naturally used the system differently because it just wasn't capable of things I could rely on Mac to do for me. Spotlight is a big part of Mac for me, and none of the third-party software out there quite replicates that experience on Windows. In addition, the file management is far more primitive, and I found myself using directory structure in place of search. You could call this a skill issue, but to me, it's just a mismatch. Given how much I've used both sides my whole life -- I mean for much of my early life it was only Windows, but Mac has always been far more intuitive and expressive for me -- if they were comparable, I'd use them comparably, but I don't, so I think they're not.

I'm leaving Linux out of this because they don't have an ecosystem, they just rely on you bringing your own, I guess. You want file sharing, you install something like KDE Connect. You want organization, just find a file manager that has that, or make one. I've tried a few distributions, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Fedora Silverblue. I preferred Arch on my MacBook, eventually preferred Fedora Silverblue on my later PC, but nothing's quite right, even when I put the effort into curating (like the time I tried KISS Linux).

To be honest, I'm not quite sure why people say Apple's ecosystem is this terrible walled garden that's super hard to leave. Maybe they're hostile to a user experience that they prefer over the alternatives. Maybe they think that their preference is a sign that the walled garden is manipulative. I guess I just don't get it yet. Maybe they want to leave but it's inconvenient, they think Apple could make it easier, and that makes them conclude it's designed to trap them. In my experience, the alternatives simply are less convenient, it's nothing about Apple that makes it more difficult to leave.

> They fell into "value extraction" a long time ago and I don't see them stopping in any way as long as they have loyal apologists like you seem to be.

I don't think there's any evidence that Apple cares whether or not there are "apologists". Maybe if nobody in the world liked them they would decide to change their minds. But I don't think it's as simple as people just rationalizing their bad decisions and excusing them, therefore enabling them. I think they're just as likely to make bad decisions that are universally bad, and it takes about as long for them to go back on them as bad decisions with "loyal apologists". Like that fiasco with the butterfly keyboard repair programs.

> Why would they? The money keeps rolling in, the congregation keeps on buying fruit phones and related paraphernalia, they'd be mad to stop from a business perspective.

I do agree on one point, that Apple is unlikely to realize their mistake when it keeps generating profit, regardless of how many users complain. That's why I'm hoping for top-down action. I hope the new CEO sees that their more recent enshittifications like "Apple Creator Studio" are a mistake, a betrayal. I have no evidence that'll ever happen, though. Maybe that's the loyalty you're talking about. Or just the last shred of hope I have for what seems like the last company on earth I can rely on.

1. The author should be able to do whatever he wants with his own device. That he owns.

2. The author should be able to decline consent for data-gathering activities and general AI stuff that he doesn't want.