Welcome (back) to Macintosh • Hacker News Board

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#131

Post by hedora » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 1:02 AM UTC

ElijahLynn wrote: post #66

mrbuttons454 wrote: post #59

I have been a Mac user since the classic mac days. I waited in line for the first iPhone. macOS/iOS 26 are bad enough that I've begun switching to Linux. I preordered a Clicks Communicator and Pebble Round 2. Switching from a Macbook Pro M4 to an Asus ROG Flow Z13 with Debian. macOS 26.3 updated clang and broke my emscripten workflow. I tried to unrar a file but the version of unrar provided in homebrew is deprecated…

Gonna say that the switch from X11 to Wayland that was pretty much forced this year across many distributions, broke a ton of things too (screenshot programs, keyboard shortcuts), however, all the code is open source, and there are workarounds and source code available but it still sucks. Basic keyboard shortcuts are still broke with the Wayland migration. e.g. Copyq has this janky workaround for a shortcut to regist…

I do all my gaming and LLM inference on devuan. (That laptop should chew through 30-120B parameter LLMs, depending on how much RAM it has.)

I don't have any of the problems mentioned by you or sibling comments, full stop.

Up until about a year ago, audio was janky as hell, but then as part of the great de-Poettering, they switched from PulseAudio to PipeWire. I've had zero issues since then.

Copy paste works. Login works. X11 runs at native panel speed (144Hz) with bug-for-bug parity with windows 3d acceleration, but open source (AMD drivers). XScreenSaver works (and can lock the screen). I can't comment on any of the stuff you mention in the second paragraph. I assume it's a bunch of broken Wayland workarounds?

Anyway, instead of switching to Mac, just switch to a stable distribution. Devuan is Debian minus systemd, so essentially everything works out of the box. Even crap that requires systemd usually works, since they install stubs. LLMs like Claude will happily admin it once you tell it that which init system to target.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#132

Post by marcus_holmes » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 1:02 AM UTC

rafaelmn wrote: post #65

nsbk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m right where you are. Very happy Apple customer since my first PowerBook G4. Currently have an M1 Max, an iPhone 17 Pro, the iPad Pro, HomePod, Apple TV, and Watch Ultra. All the _just works_ feeling and reliability seem to be gone. Tahoe is so unstable that I now restart the Mac every day, when in the past it happened on software updates only. Apple Music is another huge mess, I can’t comprehend how can it be so…

I'm sorry but if your out is linux and windows because you're not happy how stuff doesn't "just work" in the Apple ecosystem boy are you in for a bad surprise. However bad you think Apple is getting with MacOS - windows is getting worse. And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having"…

> And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues.

I think that's probably a few years out of date. Certainly, it used to be completely true and was a major problem.

I'm just not finding that now. Drivers are better, and more widespread, and there are less odd hardware innovations in standard PC components that screw it up.

And, if you want a laptop that runs Linux perfectly, there are more than a few options out there that ship with Linux installed and supported now.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#133

Post by lynndotpy » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 1:03 AM UTC

stockresearcher wrote: post #73

mrbuttons454 wrote: post #59

I have been a Mac user since the classic mac days. I waited in line for the first iPhone. macOS/iOS 26 are bad enough that I've begun switching to Linux. I preordered a Clicks Communicator and Pebble Round 2. Switching from a Macbook Pro M4 to an Asus ROG Flow Z13 with Debian. macOS 26.3 updated clang and broke my emscripten workflow. I tried to unrar a file but the version of unrar provided in homebrew is deprecated…

From an outsider just going by what you wrote: you are trading a $2000+ year-old computer for a new $2000+ computer because you are annoyed about some temporary problems (yes, they are temporary). Apple marketers are just going to think that in another year you’re going to get annoyed by some Linux thing (yes, there will be something annoying) and buy a brand new $2000+ Mac. These kind of posts get a lot of upvotes,…

First, I have no reason to believe these problems are temporary. There are problems MacOS has had for years that have never been addressed, before they added the new problems when forcing Liquid Glass on people.

Just to put cards on the table, the problem Apple has is disillusionment. They've managed to disabuse people of the notion that Apple designs quality software that is useful in their lives.

People who have lost faith in Apple won't regain their faith even if Apple fixes all the Liquid Glass problems in six months. And that is not something that will happen. On top of that, people are anticipating AI features and a touch-optimized interface.

It's why Google Trends shows larger-than-ever numbers of people having iPhone battery issues, performance issues, and searching for how to switch to Android. "Macos to Linux" peaked after Tahoe, at 3x higher than its pre-LG peak, for example.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#134

Post by fragmede » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 1:07 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #132

rafaelmn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but if your out is linux and windows because you're not happy how stuff doesn't "just work" in the Apple ecosystem boy are you in for a bad surprise. However bad you think Apple is getting with MacOS - windows is getting worse. And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having"…

> And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. I think that's probably a few years out of date. Certainly, it used to be completely true and was a major problem. I'm just not finding that now. Drivers are better, and more widespread, and there are less odd hardware innovations in standard PC components that screw it up. And, if you want a laptop that runs Linu…

Get serious, none of them have a working fingerprint reader.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#135

Post by giobox » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 1:08 AM UTC

trimethylpurine wrote: post #105

I've run IT at two different multi-hundred million dollar companies (IT director 15+ years and help desk before that). I want Mac users to know that using a Mac, if you aren't very tech savvy, can have a dramatically negative impact on your career. When yours is the only computer in the meeting that can't load the graphics network share, and you're the graphics expert, your boss will be calling IT and sternly asking…

This would ring slightly true to me if it was say 20-30 years ago, but Apple are in many ways the IBM of end user business machines now and vast numbers of corporate drones have MacBooks - the rough edges are long ago sanded off.

An IT team that treats Mac users this way today is just a bad IT team.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#136

Post by itopaloglu83 » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 1:09 AM UTC

nsbk wrote: post #35

ordinaryradical wrote: post #6

This is going to be remembered as a comical fumble, in my view. I was fully locked-in to the ecosystem, the phone, the services, the TV, and I am looking for the exits. I’m starting to parallelize to software which will play well on Linux, and when I’m feeling ready (or miserable enough) I will not be looking back. The macOS exodus will be like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy: very slowly and then all at once.

I’m right where you are. Very happy Apple customer since my first PowerBook G4. Currently have an M1 Max, an iPhone 17 Pro, the iPad Pro, HomePod, Apple TV, and Watch Ultra. All the _just works_ feeling and reliability seem to be gone. Tahoe is so unstable that I now restart the Mac every day, when in the past it happened on software updates only. Apple Music is another huge mess, I can’t comprehend how can it be so…

And yet Apple engineers are going through numerous forums and Reddit posts to gaslight people by commenting “well, it doesn’t happen to me, mine works perfectly”.

They managed to mess up an entire ecosystem and they’re acting so stupid about it that I cannot believe all this software was made by Apple.

There’s no elegance, no thought out user experience, no good design, it’s all stupid glass design with comical amount of padding. It all looks like it was designed and implemented by a team five over a half assed pool party.

What the hell is Apple doing with its tens of thousands of engineers, if they cannot make a freaking window manager.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#137

Post by hedora » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 1:12 AM UTC

mceachen wrote: post #112

runjake wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because you are annoyed about some temporary problems (yes, they are temporary) What leads you to believe that anything he mentioned is temporary?

Before anyone downvotes this guy, spend some time on the official Apple support forum. I can't point at a bug that I've seen addressed in subsequent OS releases. Seizure-inducing HDMI flickering from Night Shift. Finder Trash not supporting put-back _sometimes_. Printers becoming permanently "paused" sporadically, or worse, very consistently. Mouse lag/stuttering because you used "the wrong USB port." Apple photos li…

I hit issues in MacOS on a monthly basis, and have been for years.

Not once have I hit an issue that wasn't documented and left unresolved on Apple's for over 3 years.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#138

Post by rounce » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 1:14 AM UTC

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #120

ElijahLynn wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gonna say that the switch from X11 to Wayland that was pretty much forced this year across many distributions, broke a ton of things too (screenshot programs, keyboard shortcuts), however, all the code is open source, and there are workarounds and source code available but it still sucks. Basic keyboard shortcuts are still broke with the Wayland migration. e.g. Copyq has this janky workaround for a shortcut to regist…

Hyprland it's doing a lot of efforts in solving these problems. For now I'm using i3 and will come back one the ecosystem stabilizes more. (More than that I've lazy bc from what I've seen now is ready)

> Hyprland it's doing a lot of efforts in solving these problems

Is it? Do you have any examples?

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#139

Post by lynndotpy » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 1:18 AM UTC

rafaelmn wrote: post #65

nsbk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m right where you are. Very happy Apple customer since my first PowerBook G4. Currently have an M1 Max, an iPhone 17 Pro, the iPad Pro, HomePod, Apple TV, and Watch Ultra. All the _just works_ feeling and reliability seem to be gone. Tahoe is so unstable that I now restart the Mac every day, when in the past it happened on software updates only. Apple Music is another huge mess, I can’t comprehend how can it be so…

I'm sorry but if your out is linux and windows because you're not happy how stuff doesn't "just work" in the Apple ecosystem boy are you in for a bad surprise. However bad you think Apple is getting with MacOS - windows is getting worse. And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having"…

The problem isn't that MacOS doesn't work, it's that MacOS doesn't work _and_ you can't fix the things that don't work.

You can anticipate "the linux brigade" because it works well for many of us.

This isn't to say there _aren't_ problems. Bluetooth, audio, etc. working all depend on having the luck that someone wrote good drivers for the device you want to install Linux on. When you do have a problem, you don't have the benefit of having many people on your same configuration like you do with Apple. You might find yourself troubleshooting as the only person with your specific combo of dongle, mobo, cpu, distro, and kernel.

I've been on Linux since 2009 and MacOS since 2021. I've never had a bluetooth problem with Linux but I've had a ton on MacOS (but that might just be airpods).

The nice thing about Linux is that you have control over all your problems. On MacOS, if you have a solvable problem, the solution is often either "Pray that Apple fixes it in the next release" or "The fix for that costs $10 per month and it'll clog up your app switcher". On Linux, if you have a solvable problem, the solution is often "go into the settings for your distribution" or "install this tweak tool" or "find someone who had it before on a support forum and follow their steps".

It's not unreasonable that someone who is fed up with unsolvable problems on MacOS would find Linux more appealing. It's not a naive mindset, it's just how things are.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#140

Post by itopaloglu83 » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 1:20 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #93

card_zero wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you saying the long list of bugs don't actually happen?

They definitely do. But in my experience they "accumulate". Like, things all work pretty well at first. And then god only knows what happens as config and preference files get into weird states, and temp files accumulate and never get deleted, and cache files get stuck with old info and refuse to update, and god only knows. So people with relatively new installations have a pretty good time, while people who have mig…

Death by a thousand cuts.

Yes, things like small bugs and abnormal user experiences accumulate and over time the OS and other apps become inconsistent.

As heavy users who are generally by profession spend a lot more time with a Mac, they tend to experience more issues, and things that used to work for decades start to crumble. It all works if you’re acting like working on glass pieces, but that’s not what computers are made for.

You’re supposed to use it extensively and get more efficient over time without a glassy UI and other broken systems pulling you down at every turn.

It’s not about using a system for 10 minutes to visit a website with Chrome, but instead spending days programming things, having a normal life, and still having the very simple file discovery features working.

There’s no reason for a computer to be this choppy and slow (in things like context switching etc.) unless something else is going on in the background.