Comment by macintux
4 months ago
> Building your first machine is fun, building your 10th is less so.
Building a Linux box led me back to Apple.
I had been using UNIX at home, school and work for several years, and decided it was time to build my 3rd Linux box. Went to CompUSA out of idle curiosity to see what equipment they had, and the only computer in the store with Internet access was a Mac.
I hadn't used a Mac since the SE/30 days, and I suddenly realized that the NeXT acquisition which I'd mostly ignored had changed everything. Why build a Linux box and be locked out of tools like Photoshop when I could have UNIX workstation that ran commercial software (for, admittedly, significantly more money).
Never looked back.
> Why build a Linux box and be locked out of tools like Photoshop
That's what VMs are for. You're never really locked out. It may not make sense to go that way if Photoshop is THE thing you work with of course.
> when I could have UNIX workstation that ran commercial software
Because for lots of software MacOS is a second class system. Partially because there's just no way to test things on it without investing lots of money in hardware, so many people don't.
If you're doing lots of sysadmin / software maintenance style work, MacOS just provides unnecessary pain.
> That's what VMs are for.
For me, the psychic angst of using Windows is much, much worse than any Mac-related inconvenience.
> If you're doing lots of sysadmin / software maintenance style work, MacOS just provides unnecessary pain.
Amazingly a significant amount of the software that you use on a daily basis, perhaps unwittingly, is developed and maintained with macOS and Windows!
I'm working on packaging things for Darwin platform. And helping people deal with homebrew/compilation issues. I'm painfully aware how much is developed by people with no access to or interest in MacOS. And unless something targets windows explicitly (not wsl), you can basically expect issues going in. In a twisted way, I'm one of the enablers of the current situation where things are usable on a mac.
Sometimes you can tell by the simple fact that the git repo contains files in one directory that conflict in naming. Linux has no issues with "Foo" and "foo" coexisting.
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Indeed, why get a lesser experience with Linux laptops, when I can use Apple and Microsoft platforms, and use Linux in a VM when I really need to.
The Year of Linux Desktop is delivered on a desktop VM.
If that works for you, great. My default works better with Linux with only occasional other system. Makes me least angry. (Also because Linux is the only system that handles sleep/hibernation for me without issues, ironically...)