Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

In many cases the things he claims are past linux behavior remains the same today. Perhaps he hasn't used Linux in recent years?

> External Monitors

Plugging in monitors in linux today frequently does not behave as you expect. The chances of errant behavior is significantly higher on linux than any other operating system. I can't speak to apple computers not working with projectors, but it seems like he's comparing apples to oranges here.

> Software Installation

The "One True Way" of installing software is still the case in linux. Installing outside of the native package manager's repositories is discouraged. Installing of any software on mac is 'discouraged' in that you need to authorize just about every installation you do on the app store. Homebrew does not require sudo to install applications, though GUI applications will generally still need an okay from the user to open and use. The outlier in software installation is Windows, where it is still encouraged to install executables downloaded on the internet.

> Hardware comaptibility

Linux and MacOS both bake hardware compatibility into the kernel. You will still run into weird cases where a display port out on your graphics card won't work with linux for some indiscernible reason. This is admittedly significantly better than it was in 2000, however.

> Laptop features

Linux didn't have dedicated laptops in 2000. The fact that they lacked USB ports has nothing to do with Linux.

Current macbook pros have 4 usb ports (other than entry level mbp 13). Retina macbook pros had 2. I'm certain he's talking about usb-a ports, however. This isn't unique to Apple laptops, however. Most PC laptops manufactured today lack more than 2 usb type a ports. It's very difficult to find.

> Advocate behavior

It's pretty remarkable how someone can be so condemning of condescending elitist behavior while simultaneously being a condescending elitist jerk.

No, it's not. Most prominently Apple costs thousands, Linux is a community driven kernel and software distributions on top of it, which commonly are free of charge. From that perspective his comparisons are nil. Linux doesn't make computers that have problems. Apple has its own closed ecosystem of hardware and software, Linux is Open Source Software. To say that modern Apple systems are just as bad as Linux systems 20 years ago is making Linux look bad, it's an unfair comparison. Remember Apple 20 years ago? It was even worse than today!

I have run into the storage problem a number of times, yeah. Once there was a `.Trash` file in some hard-to-access place that needed deleting. And if your Time Machine backups are failing, they can create a big cache somewhere mysterious in the file system. I have told Time Machine to ignore docker files as well, not sure if it helped in every case. In one case I deleted all my node_modules folders, and Time Machine backup succeeded and macOS deleted it's prepared backup files, freeing up tonnes of space.

We'll see if it occurs again with Catalina.

All the other stuff is almost entirely wrong, in my experience.

> This isn't true. People have been running `./configure && make && make install` since long before 2000 and long after 2000 as well.

And you can still do this on macOS too!

> It was also more normal to spend days or weeks on a problem and not expect everything to be handed to you on a silver platter via Google or StackOverflow.

Excuse me but that is definitely not what someone should be doing unless they don't have any actual work to do and instead can use all their time to play with Linux distro configurations. It is unacceptable to have to resort to spending days or weeks on a problem. That is an absolute show stopper for almost everyone.

You can "defend" Linux with the fact that it is a open source project that is maintained and improved by people in their free time, and that is absolutely okay and acceptable. But you can't then complain why hasn't Linux taken over the desktop. Why? Because, unlike on servers where the only person responsible for it is a "guru", everyone uses a PC and expects it to work and let them use it to accomplish work or entertain themselves. If Linux cannot do that, people won't use it, no matter the [whether subjective or objective] freedom-restrictions, dark patterns, privacy violations and outright illegal activity of Microsoft, or the [subjectively?] overpriced Apple ecosystem.

edit: Also, I'd like to add that I use Ubuntu exclusively at home and have a super-paranoid-level network firewall setup that blocks and monitors all traffic, and use AOSP on my phone with only blobs for GPU, SoC initialization and the magic black box that is the baseband processor. I use Ubuntu because it works for me better and more often than Windows, but I am a geek and I know things that my parents don't.

Okay bad example they also use Linux that I forced on them to be able to remotely administer it. But in any case people use what works for them best. I cannot afford an update that gets stuck on Getting things ready... and risk shutting down the PC and having it do a mandatory recovery or rollback procedure. Linux breaks less often for me because I pick my hardware and software and set it up. But nobody can expect that of people and they shouldn't have to. Death by a thousand paper cuts and rough edges and all.