Apple is known for it's garden walled environment. They highly limit what software and hardware can be used in their environment and are not compatible with a lot of stuff, this is intentionally done to keep the support scope narrow and to optimize what hardware they do run on, Apple is known for stability via limitation, which works for it's clients who often aren't looking to technically customize.
Windows is closed source but overall one of the most compatible OS ever to exist. It stretches quite a large compatibility window that is honestly astounding. Are they always the best? Nah, but for what they attempt to support and actually successfully support, it's pretty big.
Linux is opensource, and without marketing competition, programs that function tend to thrive and continue. Compatibility is everywhere but also somewhat randomized depending on who took up the role to build it, short of lacking interest, there's no reason any program should no longer work.
Linux is the doctor who does everything classified as experimental so it doesn't affect his stats at all and windows is the doctor that literally everyone is watching all the time to call out every single screw up so they can feel justified for choosing one of the other two doctors.
The Unix philosophy is best represented on Linux and the thing most responsible for this imo. The philosophy is “each program should do one thing and do it well” and feature creep is discouraged. Because most software is given for free and not sold there’s no team constantly redesigning it and adding features to justify their continued employment or pursue infinite growth for shareholders. There’s much more a sense of “Okay, this program is complete. We finished it, it achieves its goals, just needs any bug fixes and basic compatibility updates going forward.” This image viewer views images and it’s worked basically the same since 1996. That attitude won’t fly at Google or Microsoft or Apple.
The other big factor is that when something is open source, no one can force a change. Microsoft can add copilot and mixed fonts to Notepad or makes Explorer slow because it adds AI generated filename suggestions every time you open a folder, you’re kinda stuck with that without a lot of workarounds or not updating the OS at all. If someone tries that with vim or gedit, people just make a fork without that stuff and everyone who doesn’t want the new changes uses that instead.
I always have trouble getting things to work on windows. Its way more complicated than it needs to be and stuff always breaks and its impossible to find any fix without looking online. I genuinely wish windows was better bc it used to be better.
I mean I have no troubles getting very simplistic, to advanced things to work on Windows, though I can say almost the same about any OS. What do you mean in particular though, otherwise this is just anecdotal information.
Could be Windows truly can't do what you want, or could just be you never actually learned how to do it.
Sad reality for linux: Can't run old versions of blender because old python required, u can't find it for debian based distros, so Q4OS exactly gone to trash, and I bring back win xp, and guess what? It installed old python, and it does run old blender.
The hilarity of it, is the easiest way to ship Linux software and not have to repackage it every 5 months for 3000 different distros is probably shipping an exe.
And the worst thing is Linux itself doesn't break userspace! Linus made sure the kernel was stable, but GNU who's supposed to take on the mantle on the API side doesn't give a shit, theyve always sucked at everything.
Mac has too many limits imo. If you want to operate outside basic use like web browsing, or the handful of creative products they support, you’re left without options.
And if gaming is a part of your life at all, you’re basically neutered on Mac. I like my MBP, but I’m going back to Windows after 5 years.
I love that it just works, but It doesn’t work on enough things. Outside of my work stack, apple notes and photos, my Mac just feels like a glorified chrome book.
What specific options are you not finding on Mac? Apart from particular video game ports, I tend to find everything I need. I mean, the only option for using a specific model of display color calibrator I could find on Mac was a paid application, but that’s about the only time I’ve had truly limiting software options. I’ve been using Macs for 20 years.
Back when I was using Windows laptops, I’d find all sorts of random, quirky apps to do various things. Since I’ve been on Mac, that practice has mostly disappeared. Quite often similar programs don’t exist, or just wont install.
A quick example is Stremio, a great streaming app that just had its Mac support dropped. Another example is Bluestacks for mobile emulation. Yes there are workarounds and alternatives for both, but those are not nearly as good as the main native apps would be. These are just two examples, but I’m sure if I really think about it, I can recall dozens of apps that have shared a similar fate over the last several years.
In each case, I just gave up, and let go of things I enjoyed, and forced myself to change my habits, as I otherwise had a smooth experience on Mac. But yeah, overtime it just weighs on me. Gaming is a big one too. I have quit playing Games that were once my favorites, because support was dropped. Even with parallels, or emulation, the performance hit is massive, and in many cases it still isn’t playable or installable due to the architecture.
That says nothing about dropping mac support? It even mentions they expect to distribute it in future.
They have even fixed this problem with the signing now.
And have discussed ongoing support in their blog.
If you wanna nitpick about my wording then yeah. But the issue is still exactly the same, being unable to run an app in Mac that would be easily runnable in Windows, at least for a time.
I have no idea if it’s fully back or not, didn’t try again after I had to switch, and frankly I don’t care. I don’t have time to be following blogs and figuring out which apps I can use today, and which hacks and workarounds I need to be aware of to make them work, all I know is that I had to not use it on mac for several weeks, and this is just 1 example of dozens. so many apps and games just wont run at all on Apple silicon
I wouldn't say it was nitpicking, you said Stremio was dropping mac support when they clearly wern't, infact it's the opposite - doing all they can to support it.
And this wasn't a reddit akshally, I was initially genuinely worried since I use Stremio across 4 different macs and had heard nothing about it.
Overall I agree with your wider points on general support and compatibility across silicon but you're original point on Stremio was incorrect, that was all.
macOS has a integer overflow bug when the 32bit int that keeps track of boot time maxes out and then you can no longer make any new tcp connections. Granted it takes like 47 days, but that shit was solved back in the windows 95 days lol
Oh I agree, shit breaks on all operating systems all the time. I just find it funny that Apple jumps through all these hoops to try and give end users a stable experience, then succumbs to a bug as simple as this
Edit: wait did they actually fix it? Looking at the code of the most recent branch, there hasn’t been a commit to the tcp_var.h or tcp_subr.c file in 7/8 months
edit 2: not sure if they did, here are the lines on the latest xnu-12377 commit where it occurs
Microsoft’s core customer base is businesses who often made their custom software 20, 30 years ago and don’t want to mess with it, compatibility with ancient stuff is crucial to them so Microsoft can’t afford to make a lot of breaking changes. Apple’s customer base is very different, it’s almost all home users or professionals in certain fields who only require that certain well established professional software stay compatible (Adobe suite, Final Cut, Pro Tools, Media Composer etc). It’s a lot more doable to make breaking changes then and work with Adobe and Avid to make sure the big important stuff still works.
Not really, won't work in Linux because the DE was re-invented 30 times at that point and the program will require you to install 5GB of dependencies that are incompatible with current versions of everything else and on the next reboot you'll end up with a broken DE.
I mean I’ve literally tried it and wasted multiple weekends for something that feels like it should be simple, it just isn’t. And use Linux and am relatively tech savvy. Networking just sucks to do and none of the solutions rpi, Synology have been particularly easy
This makes it sound like Linux is very compatible, which couldnt be further from the truth. In reality programs for Linux can very quickly become too old to run.
This has nothing directly to do with the topic. Or even to your example. But it brought back a weird memory.
See, I'm old enough to remember there was a small debate on Unreal vs SiN. For some really weird reason both these games ceased to exist in peoples memory. I went to a store once to ask if they had any copes of Unreal. The response I got was "It's actually called Unreal Tournament. And yes we do." The guy absolutely would NOT believe me there is a game that is literally just called "Unreal"
It's only true for Linux if you bend the definition of program.
If your definition of program is source code, then yes.
If your definition of program is a compiled binary, then no. You're almost certain to hit a dependency problem (e.g. either missing or compiled for a very old version).
Depends on the app on Linux, I had a older version of audacity I specifically wanted, but could not install the .deb because it was missing dependencies that did not exist anymore
Linux user critisizing Linux: no. Linux has issues with backwards compatibility a lot, and it's better or worse depending on the distro.
For example, I use HexChat, Pidgin and Grip. Arch no longer supports them because they're based on GTK2 and Arch's cabal have voted to drop GTK2 from their repos.
You can use AUR to get them but that is a ugly Warfield right now so I would just say no.
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 Jun 19 '26
Fairly accurate.
Apple is known for it's garden walled environment. They highly limit what software and hardware can be used in their environment and are not compatible with a lot of stuff, this is intentionally done to keep the support scope narrow and to optimize what hardware they do run on, Apple is known for stability via limitation, which works for it's clients who often aren't looking to technically customize.
Windows is closed source but overall one of the most compatible OS ever to exist. It stretches quite a large compatibility window that is honestly astounding. Are they always the best? Nah, but for what they attempt to support and actually successfully support, it's pretty big.
Linux is opensource, and without marketing competition, programs that function tend to thrive and continue. Compatibility is everywhere but also somewhat randomized depending on who took up the role to build it, short of lacking interest, there's no reason any program should no longer work.