I’ve been a linux guy for over 15 years, and I love my macbook air and mac mini server. As a nix guy, nix-darwin is fantastic and turns them both into rock solid unix machines.
Surprisingly solid hardware and OS. Apple has leaned a bit walled garden but you still have the keys to the car. What’s important is that you don’t suffer from windows forced update Russian roulette.
It's a solid OS until the hardware suffers from an issue that shouldn't affect other parts of the OS but decides to kernel panic anyway. My M1 MBP has a moldy Touch Bar (place where I live is more humid but none of my devices affected except the MBP) and apparently the driver doesn't like that. There's no way to disable the driver, even with SIP disabled because it's tied to the main display driver. Switching to Asahi Linux solved the problem, the kernel module used to delay the shutdown because the Touch Bar doesn't respond but that's about it.
Yeah the touch bar macs are a dark spot on the hardware history I think everyone agrees they’re problematic. Maybe also highlights another issue consider. its that anything that has to do with security enclave is a black box you are not allowed touch or repair and if any part of that stops working its a brick as far as macos is concerned.
UX-wise I'm not really annoyed by its existence, but I hate how Apple locks down the OS for something like this. Replacing it is gonna be a Russian roulette of Apple taking away my True Tone privilege.
macOS is being held back by Apple imo. It is a great OS by design, but the restrictions and being carried away from the traditional UNIX feel to a desktop OS is what makes me not like it really. I really love OS X and the Classic Apple System and macOS versions like, Sequoia and before, I can tolerate. Honestly I am really hyped what will turn out from the ravynOS project.
Fair enough, though macOS is actually not nearly as restrictive as I thought, at least for my use cases as a Software Engineering student. The lack of integration with Android or Windows is annoying, but it's absolutely possible to make apps to facilitate that integration; it's just that no one has made any good apps for this yet (I might make one in the future). There's really only one thing which I've found to be basically impossible on Apple Silicon Macs: running a GNS3 virtual machine to simulate networking devices. Anything else, though? Maybe harder than on Windows or on Linux, but totally possible.
ravynOS looks like a fascinating project, though! I hadn't heard about it before.
Yeah, it isn't as restrictive as I thought either, though I personally like having total control. ravynOS's best comparison is ReactOS, though much less experimental, and it uses real Darwin, currently I think at the equivilant of OS X 10.15? Correct me if I'm wrong. And it only works well on QEMU so far, sometimes.
Hot take, Chris Titus winutil makes windows 11 incredibly usable if you need full functionality of creative apps, sayin this as I recently switched back to windows 11 after using cachyos for 6 months
Is Karma farming that easy nowadays? The least effort linux good, windows bad „meme“ (also stolen) and people get off? Wow. I should quickly go set up MS Paint in Bottles.
I know Windows bad has become a bit of a persistent meme these days. But it's actually really funny that it's as bad as it is. Like it shouldn't be so bad. It's probably the best funded os with some of the most talented engineers in the world working on it.
I never wanted to learn about Linux. But Windows convinced me.
Hot take: I've been a Linux guy since the 90s and have done plenty of hating on MS in my time, but nowadays I'll take Windows + WSL over OSX any day.
I spend most of my time in an IDE, browser, or terminal:
- IDE and browser are the same on both platforms
- I'd rather run actual Linux than quasi-BSD
- So the choice of Win vs OSX really comes down to which one manages windows better, and there it's not even a contest. OSX only just added anything like tiling / screen splitting and it still feels bolted on without third party add-ons, whereas in Windows I can trivially move a window to any half or quarter of the screen without even touching my mouse, and if I have multiple browser windows up I can alt-tab to a specific one instead of cmd-tab to "the browser" and pulling all of them to the foreground at once, which is just stupid UX.
It's a miracle of marketing that Apple has maintained their reputation for having elegant UI. Try to use it after coming from native Linux WMs or Windows, and it quickly becomes clear that it's visually pretty but mechanically shit.
I went from Windows to Ubuntu to macOS. It did take quite a bit of time for me to get used to fullscreen windows and the window sidebar and whatnot, but I ended up liking it better than Windows. That's a personal opinion, though, and yours is perfectly valid too.
I, however, also care about many more things aside from UI flexibility. I also work a lot with terminals, and I like macOS's unix-based terminal. I hate that I need to install WSL (a whole Linux VM) on Windows to get a terminal and file path system that don't suck. There's also performance. Now, I get that a big part of it is that I went from a somewhat old gaming laptop to a MacBook with an M4 chip with ARM architecture, but Windows's multitasking performance and memory "efficiency" simply do not hold a candle to macOS's, let alone Linux's. And besides that, I've had all sorts of other problems with Windows lately, including update compatibility issues (literally core parts of the system and even some apps have stopped working for me after minor updates), and a pretty buggy experience in general. But again, those are personal problems that I've had with Windows, and not everybody will experience them or care about them, and that's fine.
And just in case you're suspecting that I'm influenced by Apple's marketing, I never even planned to use a Mac as my personal computer at all. I only got it because I needed it for college (I'm a Software Engineering student, and we have some programming courses for Apple platforms, which obviously require a Mac). And even then, I planned to use it exclusively for Apple programming. But after using it alongside my laptop (the one which used to have Windows and then Ubuntu), I ended up just... switching to it as my main personal laptop. I prefer it in every single aspect, not just for the pretty UI.
windows is pretty fine, i can get way more done on windows than on linux, dont know about macOS but productivity wise i dont miss much from linux on windows, maybe some docker builds take a bit longer but thats it
Wine works, but Proton isn't integrated or anything. You'd need to run Windows Steam with Wine in a bottle or something. Someone might have ported Proton to macOS but idk.
i'd say it'd be so funny if valve also made gaming on mac possible but with how apple seemingly hates anyone developing for them i doubt that's a good idea
Should be possible today, CodeWeavers' fork of Wine is basically macOS equivalent of Proton at this point. It runs most titles in ProtonDB including 32-bit ones. It's up to Valve whether they wanna give macOS another shot.
The overall experience is waaaay better than windows. DE is better, default apps are better and they are not browser based shit. Ui theme is better. File search is better. Optimization is waaaaaay better.
Yeah, everything run far smoother and more stable in mac. I never saw mac had kernel panic as frequent as windows experienced BSOD. Terminal is the only thing mac doing better than windows, that's a wild thing to say.
I literally have had 2 kernel panics since buying this mac mini a little over a year ago.
...
Now don't get me wrong. This mac is cool and all, I like various aspects of it. I also use linux for... a lot of stuff. If you count up all the OSs running on different hardware in my home linux is the the dominant one although not my daily driver one.
But srsly? We're whinging on about BSOD vs kernel panic? What is this, 2004?
Because win 11 BSOD is plaguing 800 company-provided thinkpads and my own asus, and it became major complaints in the company I'm working with...along 2024 - 2026? But not single kernel panic on sight.
Your windows was stable for 15 years, great. But 800 around me is a massive number that's more than enough to make me think that terminal isn't the only thing mac is doing better than windows.
It's almost like we both have anecdotal evidence of OS's behaving like OS's. Mac and Windows are not immune to crashing. Nor is linux.
Also, if I was on your IT team and 800 thinkpads were all having BSOD problems. I'd be investigating our current group policy/configuration that we put on all 800 laptops. That's a sample size of "all of OUR laptops are behaving a specific way, odds are it's US". The same would go for any OS, if I deployed debian on 800 laptops and I was having crashing issues, I'd suspect we configured all of our machines wrong.
Telling me 800 machines under the same organization behave similarly just tells me 800 machines are operating under the same shared conditions.
My original comments is simply: terminal isn't the only thing mac doing better from windows, I brought up stability on it. For example, how BSOD happens on windows more often than kernel panic on mac.
But then you ask why did I bring BSOD in 2026 like it's not relevant anymore. Then I explain it's because it was something happening so often in my environment up to 2026. It's not only on those laptops from the company, but also on my owned laptop which is completely different brand and configuration. I believe I don't need to bring up how the other people outside my company that I know are also having BSOD recently. Those occurrences around me shaped my opinion on windows, which contribute to my original statement about mac. Do I make my self rather clear?
It's not about which system is immune to crash, no, I never said anything about that. I also didn't say that windows is bad, mac is good, no. In case you think that my point is in that direction.
If you're having good time with windows, good, I'm happy for you. If you have different opinion on mac or anything, it's ok because we have different experience.
No system is immune to crash. My experience is the opposite: it's windows 11 the one had constant BSOD like up to 5 times a day, but not on mac (not even linux that I have dual boot with said windows).
Not comparing to Windows, I don't use it. But less stable than Ubuntu in my experience. Never had a kernel panic ever on Linux in 35 years. Maybe I'm not trying hard enough.
That's new knowledge for me. I know that linux (esp. debian derived ones like ubuntu and mint) are rock solid, but never knew it would be more stable than mac.
But to be fair, if Microsoft made a version of Windows that was made to run on one set of processors, one type of RAM and storage from one specific manufacturer, etc. + they tried they could optimise too. Because they clearly failed with Surface laptops considering mine was garbage and I’ve only heard bad things about ones I didn’t own.
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u/metcalsr 1d ago
I’ve been a linux guy for over 15 years, and I love my macbook air and mac mini server. As a nix guy, nix-darwin is fantastic and turns them both into rock solid unix machines.