While this is true, when I still used macOS, I simply learnt to use the terminal. It’s unix like so it’s not that hard. Allows you far more freedom. They basically lock away anything remotely difficult behind the terminal so that it scares off casual users. Basic stuff? GUI. Anything more difficult? Terminal.
I think apple’s software is excellent. Certainly better than windows in many ways.
The hardware and how they treat customers when things break due to poor design? That’s another matter.
The default installation brings ages old tools for the terminal, due to the GNU tools updating their licenses to GPLv3. So first thing you do is you install homebrew, which is slow and kind of miserable if you compare it to any other Linux package manager. Of course you can install nix, and have a half-decent experience in the terminal.
Then, of course, a lot of things are just not available or are super weird configured from the terminal. There’s no systemd, docker is running a Linux virtual machine in the background and is slow as hell, try to have a few daemons running as services, configure that from the terminal and use the machine headless. It’s not a great experience for an experienced Linux/BSD hacker, and lot of the stuff is missing man pages, or they are just so old they don’t matter anymore.
And, hey, a new OS update comes and you just have to fix things for hours because the terminal experience is not The removed Way and that compiler toolchain you need every day is now broken…
I stopped using OSX in 2008, when an OS upgrade forced me to give my credit card to their App Store, to load an Xcode component I needed to continue using the free compiler I’ve been using for years before that. Installed Linux after that and never looked back.
While this is true, when I still used macOS, I simply learnt to use the terminal. It’s unix like so it’s not that hard. Allows you far more freedom. They basically lock away anything remotely difficult behind the terminal so that it scares off casual users. Basic stuff? GUI. Anything more difficult? Terminal.
I think apple’s software is excellent. Certainly better than windows in many ways.
The hardware and how they treat customers when things break due to poor design? That’s another matter.
The default installation brings ages old tools for the terminal, due to the GNU tools updating their licenses to GPLv3. So first thing you do is you install homebrew, which is slow and kind of miserable if you compare it to any other Linux package manager. Of course you can install nix, and have a half-decent experience in the terminal.
Then, of course, a lot of things are just not available or are super weird configured from the terminal. There’s no systemd, docker is running a Linux virtual machine in the background and is slow as hell, try to have a few daemons running as services, configure that from the terminal and use the machine headless. It’s not a great experience for an experienced Linux/BSD hacker, and lot of the stuff is missing man pages, or they are just so old they don’t matter anymore.
And, hey, a new OS update comes and you just have to fix things for hours because the terminal experience is not The removed Way and that compiler toolchain you need every day is now broken…
I stopped using OSX in 2008, when an OS upgrade forced me to give my credit card to their App Store, to load an Xcode component I needed to continue using the free compiler I’ve been using for years before that. Installed Linux after that and never looked back.