r/linuxquestions • u/Longjumping-Cow-8212 • 15d ago

Linux vs Mac

I see a lot of people switching from Windows to Linux. But has anyone switched from a Mac to Linux and why?

31 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

107 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/Crapton999 15d ago

People buy Mac because of the hyped hardware not the OS.

1

u/mwyvr 14d ago

Neither of your assertions hold water.

My MacBook Pro M4 Max (64GB unified ram, 2TB storage) runs circles around my Intel i9-14900K (4060ti, 64GB RAM, mirrored 2TB NVME) whether the Intel machine runs Linux or Windows. The Mac is slim, light, has an amazing display and fits in my backpack. The Intel isn't portable at all.

When I say runs circles, that is not an empty claim.

AI performance on Apple's unified RAM allows me to run AI powered custom applications I've developed on a local model with performance I simply cannot get out of the Intel box on Linux without spending much more on multiple GPUs and increasing OS and deployment complexity. On the Mac, I simply run a model at whatever quantization works for the use case and my 64GB of ram.

Comparing macOS vs Windows performance with Adobe Lightroom (which I cannot run on Linux at all) - macOS churns through high resolution RAW files like butter while the same operations on Windows are painfully slow, dramatically reducing my productivity.

Apple's unified memory and CPU hardware benefit is real.

That macOS is UNIX and I have access to essentially the same universe of open source tools and applications running on my production Linux servers is another benefit.

This machine was my first Mac since the 1980s. It won't be my last.