by mrbuttons454 10 hours ago
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 because it's no longer signed/blessed. I ended up SFTPing the file to a Linux box, extracting, and bringing it back.
My son wanted to try a Java minecraft app on his iPhone, but it required insane workarounds to enable JIT to get acceptable performance. This isn't a technical limitation, it's put in place specifically to protect Apple's walled garden, and their precious services revenue.
Despite the thousands of dollars spent on these devices, I don't feel like we own them. We can't run code without the platform owner's permission. We are at the mercy of the platform owner, that has been making increasingly worse decisions.
I'm really enjoying trying the available alternatives. My hope is that enough of us get fed up, and develop a thriving ecosystem in the open source world. I'll certainly be contributing back the things I build.
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 register with the xdg-portal (that works until reboot, then stops), Warp terminal claims there is no support, Flameshot was impossible to configure, have to use the built in Gnome shortcut tool now. The whole ecosystem got wrecked. I have been so irritated by this that I've been considering switching TO the mac ecosystem, BUT this thread is good on my eyes and makes me disinterested now.
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.
> the great de-Poettering
Well, systemd, including logind, which was incredibly unstable for me under manjaro (basic session management was flaky).
Devuan uses elogind, which is a fork of logind that doesn't require systemd. I haven't noticed any problems with it.
Systemd is the big one obviously, that's why I mentioned sysv. I'd never heard of logind, so I thought it was sysv.
> ... what other Poettering software is in normal Debian?
A rube-goldberg version of SSH that somehow depends on many things that should be totally unrelated to SSH. Because ofc Poettering needing to mess with everything does need to have systemd notifications available from SSH.
This excuse allows to link many libs and pretend the backdoor attempts are unrelated to systemd, like the liblzma one.
Not of course it's an excuse that doesn't run very far seen the following undisputable fact: the XZ backdoor only affect systemd-enabled SSH. Ouch. Facts do hurt.
I cannot wait for the day a good hypervisor comes out for Linux that runs perfectly on a systemd-less Linux distro, like Devuan (I already used Devuan, but not as an hypervisor).
Basically "Proxmox but systemd-free". I know I've got the FreeBSD+bhyve option too. And at long last I'll be systemd-free again.
Also, a DNS client and NTP reimplementation that have both had security bugs, the broken replacement for syslogd, etc.
After a while, I just lost track. Happily, I don't have to deal with any of that stuff these days.
I'd expect devuan to be a decent hypervisor host, but haven't tried. There's also SmartOS (a few forks away from being Solaris), which looks like it had a release this year. It includes native ZFS.
Honestly, at this point, I'm looking at devuan as the last stop before I jump on the FreeBSD train. It looks like they let you choose between X11 or Wayland, at least for now. I got Steam to work in a FreeBSD VM, but it face-planted because the VM host didn't support any sort of 3d acceleration.
Hopefully enough users will revolt to keep X11, systemd-free Linux viable, but I wonder if that particular niche (which still works great out of the box) is going to end up less popular than the BSDs.
It's the 128gb variant, and I chose it for that reason exactly. I can dedicate up to 96gb to the iGPU
You can probably just dedicate 1GB for the framebuffer, and then let Linux dynamically allocate memory to it at runtime. As far as I can tell this doesn't impact performance, so there's no downside. (Older AMD stacks required a static partitioning under Linux, I think).
I haven’t had much time with it, but I’ve had to set the split in the BIOS. There’s probably a way to do it from within Linux though. Also hoping some progress is made on using the AMD NPU in Linux. I know it only recently got kernel level support.
I thought I had to split it in the BIOS, but then I just didn't (this is on a 2025 machine), and llama ended up with the same available "GPU" ram either way (confirmed by running inference on it).
Oh that's fantastic, I'll give it a try. thank you!
Finally there's good news for Linux users: https://github.com/FastFlowLM/FastFlowLM
Amazing, thank you!
I have been so irritated by this that I've been considering switching TO the mac ecosystem, BUT this thread is good on my eyes and makes me disinterested now.
It really makes me miss Classic Mac OS 9. I used it from 7.5.1 to 9.2.2. I remember being so excited about Mac OS X when the Public Beta came out that I switched immediately. It really sucked and I went back immediately. But eventually Mac OS X got better and I switched to it, and never looked back.
Now I am looking back and remembering everything I lost. A computer that was so simple and so predictable. It didn't change behind my back all the time. It never shoved upgrades down my throat. It just worked!
"A computer that was so simple and so predictable."
This is what cachyOS + KDE is giving me at the moment. Ok, so it's not totally simple and there are A LOT of updates. But it's by and large predictable. I never had a 1980-90s Mac, but I had an Apple IIe and an Amiga 500. While cachyOS is so much more powerful it doesn't abuse that power like Windows and OSX with so many background processes and telemetry. I have a Mac laptop and I dual boot my PC with Windows + Linux. I don't have hate OSX but CachyOS + KDE is by far my favourite as it's customisable to the extent I want and it just gets out of my way. Highly recommend it if that wasn't obvious!
If you've lived in your house/apartment for a good long while and settled in, you have an idea of what it was like to use Classic Mac OS 9 (and earlier).
It's like flicking a lightswitch or reaching into a drawer and grabbing a spoon without looking. Everything is always right where you left it. Double-click a folder and the window opens in exactly the same state that you left it when it was last closed. All the icons are arranged in the same way, with the same label colours you gave them, and each of the folders inside that folder open the same way as well. One folder might open in list view sorted by Date Modified while another opens in icon view with the exact arrangement you decided on, all according to the way you left them.
All of those folders open their windows in the exact same position, size, and shape they had when you closed them. This lets you quickly drill down through layers of nested folders, moving your mouse to the next one before your eyes can even register it on screen.
The effect of this extreme level of persistence is that you develop muscle memory for the mouse. No other operating system environment I have ever used works like this, or at least this pervasively (modern macOS still has this for the menu bar). Everyone else just gives up and relegates the muscle-memory control to the keyboard only. This is a huge tragedy! A Classic Mac OS power user works with one hand on the mouse, one hand on the keyboard, and uses muscle memory with both to fly around the UI and work very efficiently. This is especially valuable when you're working in software that needs the mouse anyway, such as art or design software.
It's been a very frustrating year, I made the mistake of upgrading Pop OS 22.04 that I'd been using for years that was a rough couple of weeks!
Toshy still works to give me Mac keyboard shortcuts I might never let go of, but I still haven't figured out the keyboard shortcut to switch between open instances of the same program which drives me insane!
Keyboard shortcuts have been a big pain point, but I'm adjusting. I'm using Plasma 6, and trying to use the defaults vs emulating the mac shortcuts. Print screen as a screenshot button makes considerably more sense to me than Command-Shift-4, and Meta+Print Screen captures just a single window.
Logiops + Plasma's multi desktop support has given me something very similar to the multi desktop experience I had before, and the pager in the taskbar is a big improvement.
The tiling in Plasma needs work. I initially loved it until I released that when I arranged the tiles differently on one desktop, it changed them on the others... Hopefully that gets better.
FWIW exactly because it is open source, there isn't anyone actually forcing you to use Wayland (distros changed a default, they didn't remove the ability to install something else - even Fedora that got rid of X11 support for GNOME in their distro still provides other DEs and WMs). As long as there are people who want to keep using X11, there will be an option (be it Xorg or some fork).
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?
I've been exclusively on wayland (xwayland for games and browsers before they support/ed wayland natively) since 2019 (!)
Yes, there were and are problems, but far, far less than before and not much more than on X11, just different ones.
+1 - switched to Sway (and thus Wayland) in 2017 and it was okay then to only improve over time. At some point I switched xwayland off, as there were env vars to make everyhing I needed run natively on Wayland.
These days my setup is less radical/minimalistic, as I went back to GNOME (Wayland) about four years ago.
I delayed upgrade to IPadOS 26.3 til reddit users shared on /r/ipad that its performance was on par with older version now. However, once I upgrade, the performance issues and bugs are noticeable instantly. For example,
1. switching between different browser tabs has a sub-second delay(est 200ms) 2. a tab in system settings menu takes 200ms to load 3. maximizing a video doesn't always work(sometimes it leaves a big white space on top) 4. double tabbing a keyboard key often triggers zooming into the browser page
I couldn't believe these issues haven't been fixed after 3 subversions.
“I don't feel like we own them.” ← Well-put!
I was 100% Apple: Mac Mini on the desktop, Macbook Air laptop, iPhone, and two iPads.
Then came Tahoe.
I hated it so badly and it wouldn't let me change the things I hated.
I noticed a subtle sneer as I worked, having to use this stupid computer that wouldn't let me adjust it to my liking anymore.
Then I noticed I wasn't working as much as I used to because I just viscerally hated having to work in that Tahoe environment.
At first I did the thing of erasing the entire computer and doing a USB install just go back to the previous.
But then like you said: “I don't feel like we own them.” I didn't trust Apple to not keep making it worse.
So I switched. Got a Linux desktop, and a Framework laptop. Sooooo nice!! Snappy-fast Linux just the way I want it.
While I was at it, got my first Android phone and installed GrapheneOS on Google Pixel. Sooooo nice! So quiet, doing only what I want.
Even got my first Android tablet to replace the iPad. (OnePlus Pad 3.) It's great too. I'm loving the whole Android ecosystem, when made nerdy like Linux.
So yeah I'm 100% off Apple now and will never go back.
That's how bad Tahoe is.
I am currently all-in on the Apple ecosystem and have been for almost 13 years now. But quality of life in Apple land has steadily been getting worse, so I have been considering making the sort of change you describe, but not quite ready to make that leap yet. What would you say was the hardest part of the transition for you?
None. Way easier than expected.
Even GrapheneOS on an Android phone, which I’d heard was hard to install, was dead easy and so worth it.
For Mac to Linux, you can just rsync your /Users/{me} to /home/{me} and enjoy updating some old habits.
Mac user since the 90s, 10.14 Mojave seemed like the last release I liked and where the apps I used still worked correctly (or at all). Ironically Apple has already broken most of the apps I cared about, and for the rest LLM tools give enough leverage that I may be able to cobble together replacements for the rest.
> Clicks Communicator
I'm with you here. Mac user since my father brought home a Mac SE, even briefly worked for Apple. Every new version of Mac OS is worse. Basic things like Finder or Disk Utility are barely usable to say nothing of the poor UX decisions.
How did you solve the Minecraft issue?
He found a sideloadable JIT server + VPN setup. It seems super sketchy honestly, and it's a shame that people have to go through this to enable a feature that should just be available. There is no legitimate reason to block access to JIT.
> There is no legitimate reason to block access to JIT.
Source:
Show me the reasons why you can't safely deploy JIT. If it's a security concern, properly sandbox it.
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, but they do nothing to change corporate behavior.
> they do nothing to change corporate behavior.
Well, they should. I've been on Mac since System 6.0.7. I've had a Mac Clone. I've been mocked by more Windows users for "using a toy computer" than I can remember. I remember (and briefly used) BeOS. I remember The Mac Performa-series fiasco. The Copland failure. Steve's return. The launch of OS X.
In all those years, I have NEVER witnessed such widespread dissatisfaction among long-time, loyal users, heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem. Users so frustrated with Apple's moronic decisions and the design of the OS that they are literally paying money to abandon it. I'm one of them. The frustration isn't rooted in nostalgia or resistance to change. It's the accumulation of what feels like contemptuous decision-making.
If that doesn't set off alarm bells in Cupertino, I guess it's just one more proof that parting ways is indeed the right call.
> 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 libraries corrupting themselves with no recovery paths.
It would be strictly better to just not have the forum, then shouting sorrows into the void would feel more solitary.
Countless of issues are not being resolved. I stopped submitting detailed and reproducible bug reports a while ago.
I basically don’t care anymore. Timeline consistently pinkscreens my laptop.
I just don’t give a f anymore. I barely run any Apple software on my Mac.
The only reason I stop use it, is because I have not spent the energy into researching:
- performant + long battery laptop with a good build quality
- disk encryption + while on X attempts
- good trackpad
The rest, the os, the shortcuts, I can change or adapt.
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.
Some people believe the Republican rule is also temporary. It’s a difference in ahem, temperament I suppose.
The fine article made the same comparison.
No, the difference is trajectory and trust.
We all predict the future, consciously or not. We invest our time and effort into a system that we think has a good future.
Tahoe made me lose trust in Apple's software, and see its trajectory as a bad one that I didn't want to invest any more time into.
While I understand that, I can't help but compare this to Mac hardware rather than software. There was a years-long stretch when it seemed like they'd really seriously lost the plot: the butterfly keyboard, the Touch Bar, the "trashcan" Mac, heat issues across the line. There was a real case to be made for abandoning Macs based on hardware issues alone (and I'm sure some folks did, and hopefully they're happy for it).
Then came Apple Silicon. And at least in my eyes, Apple hardware is the best it's been in a really long time.
There are some definite trainwrecks in the current state of Liquid Glass (especially on the Mac), and there have been other dubious choices and mounting bugs made over the last few years. But I've used both Windows 11 and a recent Linux distribution (Fedora, via Asahi Linux, running KDE Plasma), and while I like the latter it's just not enough to make me give up what I like on the Mac in terms of Mac-only applications and little life-bettering affordances I've internalized over the years I've been here. Yes, if the trajectory they're on now in software continues, I'll have to re-evaluate that -- but their hardware took a real turn for the better after Jony Ive and some of his deputies left. Alan Dye and some of his deputies left earlier this year, and I'm not going to count the new team out before giving them a chance to prove themselves.
It's a good point. I hated that butterfly keyboard, and the Touch Bar was an utterly useless gimmick for me. And they realised that and rolled it back (and added ports again!).
They do eventually listen to their customers. Let's hope it doesn't take as long for these changes to get rolled back.
I'm kinda stuck with Mac at work. I don't mind it, but I run Linux on all my personal computers and find that is way better.
I wonder how much connect there is between those in charge of hardware and those in charge of working software. It would be one thing if the software had a design direction, we all hated it, but it was implemented to its logical conclusion and pure stupid bugs weren't left to linger for years. That would be a matter of difference in taste and vision.
But I wonder if they have the ability to execute... anything, anymore. It's starting to look a little like Windows, which in a totally shameless and burlesque fashion has 3 or 4 design paradigms at the same time, jumbled together in a big stew.
It does feel like the decision making is internal-politics-driven rather than customer-satisfaction-driven, for both Mac and Windows now. Senseless changes that have little in common with other changes.
We've had this for decades with Windows, and internal leaks confirming that it's all to do with turf wars between departmental heads.
As you say, it's an indication that Apple are going down the same road, and are unable to actually execute a vision anymore.
I've been running Debian on servers for 20+ years now. And in the last few years I've been running it on my desktop, sort of a toe in the water. Debian hasn't let me down, and I'm very familiar with it.
I was on my way out the door before the Apple Silicon launch. They managed to briefly bring me back in, but the software is only getting worse. It's a shame too, because I do believe Apple has the best hardware.
Setting aside whether the problems are temporary: what else is he supposed to do? As a customer, the only power you have in the relationship is "I'm not going to do business with you any more". And you can certainly threaten that, but at some point you have to actually walk away. If all people do is complain but keep buying Apple products, Apple will never have an incentive to improve.
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.
Yeah, I still remember when I flipped from Linux to Mac at home. In my case it was a long time ago when I got a 4k monitor and couldn't scale the display text/icons and so couldn't read shit on it, and setting up a multi-monitor setup with Linux with different display resolutions was completely impossible. It worked in a few buttons with Mac. Digging into the issue on the Linux side there was some developer just yelling into the issue that people couldn't see 4k resolution, so there was no point to buying that hardware and everyone was just making a purchasing mistake with 4k monitors. I'm sure it has been long fixed by now, but that's the social problem which is waiting there. It won't be that issue, but there'll be something else like that...
Who cares what Apple marketers think if you are not using Apple products? The point of switching to Linux is that you no longer have to care whether their corporate behavior ever changes: you just live in the open-source world instead.
I gave up on Apple twelve years ago and I can't imagine ever buying another Mac.
If multiple people stopped buying Macs and complained and that got apple to solve the temporary problems, isn't that hat what people intended to accomplish?
> because you are annoyed about some temporary problems
I mean, all problems are temporary, time is money etc. etc. And there are signs that suggest that some of these problems (namely freedom to run your own software) are not going to get resolved soon. Is there something deeper in your thought that I missed?
> These kind of posts get a lot of upvotes, but they do nothing to change corporate behavior.
I don't understand, we are on a discussion forum. Of course writing comments here does not influence what Apple does, that's not what HN is for, I think (I hope) that everyone already assumes that. Why do you feel the need to point that out?
Apple has been headed down this road for over a decade. Not sure why you would think any of this was temporary.