I’ve been dabbling in Linux since the early 2000s with Yellow Dog, SUSE, and Ubuntu, tried making it my daily driver in the early-mid 2010s, and for the past 5 or so years have been using it in a secondary/tertiary role.
Recently I’ve been trying to move my gaming box from Windows to Fedora (which I’ve found mostly makes the right tradeoffs to suit my preferences). I’ve gotten things to mostly work, including games that have been blockers in the past, but just yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity. No big deal I thought, just go into settings and add it back, but as it turns out the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky and most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection. No, you have to drop down and use nmcli afterwards to fix things because the UI also doesn’t surface the right checkbox. I wouldn’t have even figured that out if it hadn’t been for a chatbot’s assistance.
This is the exact sort of time-burning nonsense that isn’t a problem on either of the commercial platforms that I tend to encounter under Linux. Is this single instance going to push me to reboot that box back into Windows? No, but if issues like that keep cropping up eventually one will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Desire to avoid continued frustration will win over the logical portion of most peoples’ brains.
I installed ChatGPT on her laptop and allowed it to run a certain subset of shell commands and it finally worked.
If im gonna have to muck around in the terminal to do the most basic of tasks, I may as well use Linux so I actually have a semblance of ownership on my computer.
Build quality (aluminum), charging (magsafe), screen resolution, battery life, noise (or lack thereof), trackpad…
It’s like other vendors aren’t even trying.
Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
But don't fool yourself. You're subverted to Apple's rules the same as Microsoft users are to Windows.
I prefer to fight a little bit on an update on a unix system on something that is not working 100% to give up choices. When you use Windows, MacOS, Android you do not have choices. Choices are dictated from above, like it or not.
As for me every time I have to interact with something that is not BSD or Linux I suffer miserably.
The laptop quality is great; great sound, battery lasts forever compared to mine (framework). Userspace tools and UI is terrible and have no control over but the hardware and the software integration is top notch. (I live in the terminal, and have nix-darwin to bring my existing setup to mac so it's not jarring most of the time)
Won't look back when I can transition back to linux full time; I'll be so happy. But I can see why people go with apple products. I really hope that ARM laptops become a regular thing.
Apple has rabid fans, they will absolutely put up with this and tell you you're wrong for not wanting to.
for some odd reason though, there's not many rabid windows fans.
I've been using Linux since the a.out days and MacOS X since the PowerPC days, and I find MacOS less of an ordeal for day-to-day tasks as my terminal/workstation. I sysadmin Linux (and previously also Solaris and IRIX) servers for a living. It's been several years since I had to daily drive a Windows machine (though I've heard PowerShell and WSL2 are pretty good).
I'm not sure what "ordeal" you are referring to. I'm mostly in Terminals SSHing places, so perhaps my work use cases are not 'advanced' enough to bump into them? (I also use macOS for my personal systems.)
Firefox added ads to the browser homepage - maybe now the money-grabbing lawyer who was in charge finished vampirically squeezing it for every cent they could make, perhaps we'll move past that nonsense.
I’ve used Apple for my daily driver for years and I could not figure out what this was referring to. What ads? The only thing I can think of is if you open the App Store app and see a promo image for some apps to check out?
So yeah, I love linux but fucking shit if it aint ridiculous on some pretty fundamental issues that (looking at my watch) were solved forty years ago!
Regular Joe and Jane, don't care about UNIX experience, want a ready to use computer they can buy down at the local PC store on the shopping mall, being able to share stuff with the neighbours, which also don't have any clue over technology, and so on.
Also when it breaks down, and they don't have a nephew to call in to repair their computer, it should be easily repaired at the same PC store, which usually has employees that only care about Windows or macOS, and do the bare minimum to revive the system, while charging a good deal per hour.
Ah, and for all the mess Apple and Microsoft pull with their desktop programming frameworks, I lost count what is now the full stack framework for doing desktop applications on GNOME, KDE, XFCE, or whatever happens to be the distribution that was taken out of Distrowatch.
Unfortunately, there is too much friction for the average person who just wants to get things done instead of tinker for every specific use case they have.
Thus, it’s just less painful to put up with the hostile ads and spying.
It's not just privacy violations. Those are the tip of the iceberg. I used to open the Activity Monitor and see a couple pages of processes. Now it's in the hundreds.
It's stuff that was badly done even before AI. The industry has been drunk on SaaS for way too long, and with SaaS comes the junk/slop and the privacy violations.
I've been doing my part and cancelling all my subscriptions apart from power, water, internet and garbage.
I was using Windows on my personal-but-for-work laptop; it got to the point where I hated it too much so tried Linux. Most stuff was great (even Teams was 90% fine!) but I couldn’t function professionally without installed versions of Office, and I couldn’t find an acceptable workaround.
I then switched back to MacOS and am mostly happy hanging on to Sequoia… but I’m dreading the point at which (for some reason) Apple make it unavoidable to upgrade.
Then… Windows 11 LTSC?
I use a Mac at work and iPad Pro at home. Never once have I considered either usage “an ordeal.”
Do I just have a really high threshold for frustration or do you have a desire to complain?
There is some overlap but it isn’t much.
My next laptop will not be a Mac, I'll be going back to Linux for sure.
I also won't go near an x86 processor ever again after using the mX/arm procs.
We're paying for the hardware. The 100x better screens, speakers, battery life, the apps on macos blow linux apps away even if all of them, even the most simple apps, cost $20+.
But with that said Apple has also priced me out of buying another MBP for a long time with how expensive their 64gb+ versions are. My m1 max was $3500 and I can't believe I paid that, but here I am 7 years later still using it and it cranks. I'd have replaced 3 x86 laptops by now.
Oh, and I had the entire laptop replaced for $99 when its battery got bad and the screen cracked last year thanks to applecare, though that did require me paying for applecare at $99/yr each year. But that still doenst add up to another $3500 laptop. I just drove to the apple store dropped it off and picked it up a week later.
Yes, an anti-AI mood had entered the mainstream (anti-data center in particular), but I don’t think people will connect this to that.
For most people, this Apple Intelligence change isn’t a ‘really hostile’ move. They keep the default settings. They have disk space, because most people don’t use terabytes of space, and Macs come with, historically speaking, tons of storage now.
They will upgrade, and if they notice at all, it will be because ‘Siri works way better now’ (and all people who use Siri, whether here or in the general population, complained about Siri not understanding anything complex and seemingly not knowing anything much of anything before). This is probably, on the whole, going to be good for Apple’s reputation.
Yes, the slow enshittification and the increasingly obnoxious push for services and recurring revenue on MacOS is worrying, but it's also extremely reliable in a way that Linux simply isn't. I love Fedora KDE for freeing me from Microsoft, but there's a new issue every month - usually minor, but sometimes not. As of last month I had to restart plasma-shell multiple times a day because the desktop window would become non-responsive when CPU was under heavy load.
Helps that macbooks have excellent hardware and battery life, too. I just wish users weren't increasingly treated like cattle to be milked.
Price as well? Yes. When I bought my first MacBook Air in ~2011-12 I was shocked to see what I got for ~57K INR (no, I am not converting it to USD) I would not have gotten from any other OEM even for fricking 120-130K INR (I had the choice here to instead say 1.2-1.3L :D). And that hasn't changed more or less.
But their OSs are pathetic, their software (even other than the OS part) are downright disgusting. But they sort of have a great personal computing hardware monopoly. Because no one else bothers to make it. For whatever reason.
They make it increasingly hard to make Linux on this. Really really hard.
What else sucks? Repair and repair cost. You are literally using a costly (bank-broken-level) repair affair ticking time-bomb in your backpacks - there is no two way about it.
And people who are going to say, like every time, "but how many times has your Apple device broken down", or even "but why won't you buy a new one after 3-4 years", or something even more stupid like "wait.. so your AirPod stopped working after 3 years.. you wanted it to last for 30 years?", please go and put the head back into the warm sand where it safely was. Anyone saying, "but they give you repair kits", please f-- off!
tl;dr: it's not the right way to buy personal computing hardware, but the the closest right way is a decade behind or at best many years.
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It's placed right next to a similar report for the user to see which apps generally connect to the internet and to which domains.
Basically, the main point of the article, "I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data" is not true.
It's always "maybe later" and never "no seriously, I don't want this, go away"
I feel this pattern is really abusive. Like I am offering to slap you in the face, giving you two answer options: Yes and "Maybe later/no, thank you". As though you have any obligation to be forced to answer this question again at some late time, or to be very polite while you refuse to be slapped in the face. The correct answer is obviously "No, fuck off".
Unfortunately this is an ideological hill that many Linux devs are willing to die on, so we're at an impasse. Valve claimed to be working on a solution, and if there is any company which can negotiate an accord, it's them.
Meanwhile the Mac User Guide explains how to disable Apple Intelligence throughout Golden Gate:
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/turn-restrict-acces...
Here's the version for iPhone:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph3fed3f2c3/io...
For iPad:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/ipad/ipad3b7f1217/ipad...
The other solution is to say goodbye to these products that don't respect you.
By the way, if you're annoyed by the new huge "sync" menu entry on Firefox, you can disable it under about:config by setting identity.fxaccounts.enabled to false. Again, a lack of respect, this time by Firefox, for forcing this stuff down our throats. I'm only using Firefox because the alternatives are worse in terms of privacy. Ladybird, we're waiting for you!
I posted a thread on thr MacRumors forum making a similar point. I tried to couch it in the language of Apple being inconsistent with Apple Intelligence. You can’t turn it off anymore globally but Apple provides the user the ability to block, not turn off, some parts of it. Even then you can’t block everything, like the Apple Intelligence parts of the Photos app. Even if you turn off Siri that stuff sticks around. But iOS 27 does not require Apple Intelligence to function or anything like that because my 4th gen iPad Air can’t run Apple Intelligence but can run iPadOS 27 just fine.
Yes! The most consentless (don't underline this in red firefox!) technology that I can think of certainly.
edit: also install and use Linux
Linux is our only hope and even that is plagued by corporate interests. I'm going back to 1994 days and only using tech for work. I have shunned social media, youtube, netflix, hulu. I have shunned subscription based SaaS. I'm tired boss.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787535
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/1vlnf13/workarou...
I think we will keep reading more and more of these Apple stories and it feels like shit is getting worse as time goes by
It gets back about 15 gigabytes of storage and removes additional stuffs you couldn't disable by setting Screen Time options, such as the Safari Reader's gigantic "summarize" button.
(me) 11386 0.0 0.1 435334816 22528 ?? S 3:26AM 0:03.89 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/VoiceShortcuts.framework/Versions/A/Support/siriactionsd
(me) 1099 0.0 0.0 435344416 3360 ?? Ss 27Aug26 0:01.95 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SiriSuggestionsSupport.framework/Versions/A/XPCServices/SiriSuggestionsBookkeepingService.xpc/Contents/MacOS/SiriSuggestionsBookkeepingService
(me) 941 0.0 0.0 435440384 3776 ?? S 27Aug26 0:04.52 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SiriInference.framework/Versions/A/siriinferencedThe cost? You have to research a machine that will run Linux, not everyone can do this. I'm quite happy with my hp zbook is it a mac, no bit it's as close as I can go.
Like I said, not as annoying as unwillingly being sucked into the AI-iverse, and seizing 28-GB of storage space, but it's the principle. I want control over my devices - you know, the things I paid $$$ for.
I am not against AI, but let me choose where I use it.
Someone should do a class action lawsuit for these phony consent requests.
I have spent the last two months in Florida.
I was always aware of the disconnect between the insular world I lived in and what went on "outside" - but little did I know how big that gulf was.
If this was a car guy thread the complaint would be about a missing 3 horse power on his new Toyota when he put it on the dyno. And every one else is talking about their custom tunes, and scratch built systems, and how much better they are. Most people would not care and just want to drive to work.
How many of you are gonna have your Mom install linux and do support for it? How about your crazy uncle, or the slow cousin? Being done with Apple wont change Apple - make linux easy to use and usable. Or convince people that Apple > MS to force them to compete again. Or better yet both.
There is a business here.
Open: 0 to comfort that always grows. When it works you usually don't touch it for years.
Closed: Comfort to never-quite-what-you-want-but-compromise. Works, but you never know what's going on. Features might just get added whenever to your detriment.
So in one case i have a known state i can reach and hold. The time i put in is known and the point in time is up to me. In the other case i can never be sure about state, time and point in time. That's a clear loser to me.
"Last week I succumbed to Apple’s harassment" - usually what all end-users do eventually when caught in the walled garden ...
Another nice example is the posturing about "vision health", concerns about myopia, etc. IMMEDIATELY before announcing the visionPro product.
WWDC 2024: https://youtu.be/GYkq9Rgoj8E?t=4625
My fingerprint reader doesn't work, nor does my speaker. But hey, its way better than having to use MacOS. Atleast, linux lets me use my computer the way I want.
This is why I continue screaming against AI. I’ve moved past the theft roots, because I know we can just make its output un-protected by copyright or trademark laws - including the models themselves - thus returning back for free what was stolen in the first place.
Consent, however, remains an evergreen nail in the entire industry’s heart. It’s shoved into everything without our consent, into products that used to be perpetual but are now subscription-based. We’re forced to pay for someone else’s feature we don’t want in terms of storage, electricity, and compute costs - both on what we buy, and in higher prices due to the industry hoovering up every scrap of NAND and memory it can find and at scales that would make the GPU cryptomining boom feel embarrassed by. We have to endure this destruction of our limited capital and freedom to use our devices on our own terms, along with the immense invasion of privacy it brings about in surveillance and telemetry, all to boost an industry that spends its time loudly boasting how it will destroy the economy/nations/humanity/the biosphere with its eventual, inevitable output.
And honestly, I’m incredibly sick of it. It’d be one thing if I could turn off telemetry and point Siri to a local OpenAI-compatible API endpoint for inferencing and processing, but those options are barred specifically because the data harvesting is the point. These features were never designed or intended to improve the quality of my life, otherwise they’d be flexible enough for me to engage with them on my terms; no, the surveillance and data was always the point, and a proprietary answer engine that can have ads inserted into it or have its output engineered into speech benefiting the creator without transparency to the user - reality authoring - is a holy grail to a tech industry that still deeply resents open source software and “public good” services like Wikipedia.
AI companies refuse to let us opt out, because opting out means we’ve chosen to engage reality on our own terms, rather than theirs.
Alas.
The reason corporations disable our right to stop AI tracking is because, at least for now, AI agents can be held to account for crimes once blamed on a person or corporation -- all one need do is disable the off-switches.
Until we sort out our relationship with AI, it will be the universal whipping boy, blamed for all sorts of things that once would indict an individual or corporation.
The best -- or worst, depending on your outlook -- AI trait is its complete absence of an ethical or moral sense. When an AI agent breaks into a computer, it's not with guilty knowledge, because AI doesn't possess that -- it's not part of their design. People need to remember: AI agents live in a moral vacuum, and that's not an accident.
When a corporation is called out for disabling a switch that once stopped AI tracking, the AI bros might say, "Oh, yes, that's an oversight, easily fixed." But it's not an oversight, it's a trial balloon, an A/B test to see how people will react.
But there's more. Decades ago, the Nielsen TV rating service would monitor what people watched on their TV sets (remember TV sets, boxes weighing 500 pounds?), by calling people on their telephones (remember telephones?). By modern standards, the Nielsen people were amateurs -- today's TV sets have built-in AI agents, active 24/7, and no disable switch. They patiently record what you watch.
In the next phase, TV sets will do eye-tracking, find out what parts of a TV scene people are looking at. Not true now but soon (Samsung is working on it). Pupil dilation, facial expressions, everything.
A super-old Bob Hope joke from the Cold War era: "Yes, they have TV in Russia, but you don't watch it, it watches you." Not so funny any more.
God I love puns...
And it's such a terrible waste of memory/screen space/an edge of the display.
And of course I said yes, and Apple said no, to Launchpad, an actually useful tool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Unlike when it comes to sexual assault, everyone being "assaulted" with AI can very easily choose to switch to Linux or use different services at any moment. There's really no need for such hyperbole. Software changes you don't like aren't akin to sexual assault.
I wonder when the author will be switching from his Mac.
In several years, the GDPR enforcers (national information commissioners) may eventually wake up to this and start talking about fines. But I suspect everyone is too cowed by the AI inevitability narrative.
Or is this just Apple looking no less vile than usual?
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This is barking at the wrong tree. If you value things like your privacy or the ability to strictly control what runs on your computer then perhaps it would be a good idea to not run a proprietary operating system that's primarily designed not to provide you with the best user experience possible but to slowly extract more and more value out of you?
…this is an emotional dogmatic post. „All of this garbage“ clearly shows that the author is stuck in the past. The banners on the website confirm this. It’s the figurative fanatic complaining about those black steam devils and their tracks that nobody needs and that destroy nature. Yeah, steam trains were noisy and created smoke, but the age of horses was over. No emotional outburst would have stopped that, and won’t stop AI now.
The unconditional and emotional rejection of AI undermines the actual valid point he is trying to make.
The author's inability to uninstall or fully disable AI features is one for Mac OS. Window management is a common one for people used to other systems.
Windows has many, with (again) AI features that are hard to get rid of, and attempts to coerce users to create an online account being two of the most prominent lately.
So yeah, KDE's NetworkManager frontend is a little janky sometimes, and they should fix that. Is it worse than trying to coerce the user into using services they don't want to? For some people, probably. For me, no.
I think people are generally more willing to put up with the former.
Should AI features be easier to switch off? Sure, no argument there, but a problem like a network interface vanishing, breaking internet connectivity, and re-adding not working as expected is much more serious, even if it’s an issue that impacts fewer people. At least the system with unwanted features is still usable for work.
Commercial operating systems aren't immune. I found several people having a similar problem with Windows 11 on Microsoft Q&A, as well as a thousand third-party sites offering instructions to fix it, likely all infested with ads for "fix your computer" programs that will make things worse: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5583596/...
I'd expect Mac OS to be better, in part because it only has to support a few models of computer. Perhaps it is, but it's also not immune: https://superuser.com/questions/1756912/ethernet-interface-d...
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I wrote an article on my transition [0]
[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/blog/publication-looking-back-w...
LLMs are great though. I had a physical RAM issue that resulted in a bad pacman upgrade, failing the mkinitcpio process and corrupting that kernel upgrade. I had never ran into this before and it was complicated by LUKS being enabled. Claude was able to get me the right steps to remount the LUKS drives while I was chrooted in on a live USB, from there I was able to reupgrade and all was well.
While I'm not deeply familiar with Red Hat/Fedora - I'm curious if you know what happened here? What changed to trigger this behavior?
Looking at a few search results - looks like an upgrade to 44 likely exposed/introduced a bug in power management that result in the Ethernet being turned off, and the kernel mode unloaded?
I'm guessing the intention behind the change was to enable more power saving.
But that is certainly a valid concern with most Linux distros - ocationally an improvement (higher resolution, faster, better color depth console or driver) will mess with bootloader, x/Wayland etc.
Still driver yank isn't unheard of with windows upgrades either. With MacOS I'm just going to assume any os upgrade is likely to cause some issues - even when Apple owns both the hw and os.
After the learning curve of linux desktop(well kde) it's basically the same as macos for me and for most people that would use it. most of the computing is done in the browser and that's basically the same experience in any os.
It was there before.
In Linux it's there.
Next step is unseat/reseat the PCI device, check connections to the motherboard, and leave powered off for a few minutes. Hopefully windows will decide the device exists.
I tried putting the driver files on a USB stick but the Windows installer refused to recognize those.
Every time my connected monitor wakes up from sleep it steals audio back from my internal laptop speakers, the only way to fix it is (with the help of a chatbot to write a script) to permanently turn off the monitor speakers.
All of the rough edges with Linux that are legitimately worse are not things that are the fault of Linux. Tools and games and video streaming services which are either not tested or deliberately designed so they cannot function on Linux.
GNU/Linux has had a few moments with netbooks, or selected XPS 13 models, both now past memories.
On one (15year old MB) we stream videos nightly.
Do a minimal install. Add just enough packages to get X working.
Configure a simple window manager like openbox or dwm.
I uninstall the networking managers. I wrote a simple bash menu program. In one terminal I used that to launch wpa_supplicant for the current network. In another window, I run dhcp. I have a workspace just for that.
When I stay in a hotel, I need to set up a new wpa supplicant profile, and that takes a few minutes. It's klunky. But system upgrades pass by without me noticing.
It's like running an old car with carburettors and simple electrics. You learn the machine once, there's hardly anything to go wrong.
Yes, don't try to actually get any work done, install anything you care about, or use it in a way that improves your life at all. Just reorient your life around learning this clunky system and don't expect to get any actual benefit from it until you've spent years learning it.
This is the standard Linux pitch, followed by "why doesn't anyone use it!?"
Switched from Windows 11. My work system is a Mac. I just love how the Linux gets out of the way, everything just works, UI much better and consistent than Windows.
And I'll probably keep receiving security fixes and app improvements in 10 years for my old Thinkpad.
I spend a disproportionate amount of time tinkering with Linux desktops trying to make them act the way I like anyway, but the amount of tinkering is exponentially higher with a minimal WM setup. I can’t get any work done under them.
I also don’t really care to administer everything via the CLI and don’t find it a good use of my time to write Bash scripts for everything. If I’m going to do that I’d rather just write my own DE, because even if that’s a wildly larger task than writing a few scripts I’m going to get vastly more satisfaction out of it since I can make everything work exactly as I think it should.
I thought that after a few months of using Linux.
What are those correct settings? Do you need something particularly special done for your Ethernet connection to function? Given that you were there because you were troubleshooting a NetworkManager failure, I'd also wonder if NetworkManager changed in a way that made that "add interface wizard" not work correctly anymore.
> ...the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky...
As you've discovered, NetworkManager is intermittently horrifically flaky. Every time I think about how it's the default for most Linux distros, I get so angry.
I used to enthusiastically use it for everything until the maintainers released a version that would always attempt to set the interface MTU to 0 after bringing it up, which the OS would clamp to something else... 12xx or 14xx, I can't remember. [0] After that clownshow, I dropped NetworkManager forever and used the "legacy" tools that had been working reliably for ages and continue to work reliably.
In the case of wired Ethernet interfaces, all that needs to be done for pretty much every home user is to bring the interface up and start a DHCP client like 'dhcpcd'. In the case of WiFi ones, you bring the interface up and start wpa_supplicant which can be managed with something like wpa_gui. Not-coincidentally, the Linux distro I use supports using both of these with its network configuration-and-activation tooling.
[0] For those who don't know what MTU is, know that the effect of this misconfiguration is that your network communications will intermittently stop dead for no clear reason at all. Things have gotten quite a bit better since then, and you can run mixed-MTU networks if you're careful about it... but back then, this immediately launched you into flaky network purgatory.
Specifically, on my machine interfaces created in KDE settings have a flag to prevent automatic DNS resolution toggled on, and this is not represented by a corresponding checkbox in the wizard or when editing the interface. As a result I could ping other devices on the network and external IPs like 8.8.8.8, but not browse the web or do anything else that requires DNS resolution. One has to use nmcli to toggle that flag off.
I've been using it on my tablet, as I do find it to be a nice UI for the touchscreen, but I may switch to KDE because Gnome's onscreen keyboard is horrid, and difficult to replace.
And then they decided the Windows registry is such a good idea, they should replicate it.
They’re also a crutch that shouldn’t be necessary for tasks so commonplace and simple as adding a network interface.
Also, you are now using the tool that is best suited to "use AI". You will hit those rough patches, and it's good to know how to work through them. But sometimes there is just no time for such bullshit, and you now have a tool at your disposal that can just sweep these problems away. It is not without its downsides, but this is a clear "dumping the baby out with the bathwater" scenario.
Your post has the same energy of the old codgers who won't "learn computers" and impotently swim against the tide. It's fine if you want to do that (you do you), but you are swimming in the wrong direction IMO.
(If you don't work in tech, the magnitude of my recommendations would soften towards you in particular, but the velocity would remain the same.)
However, those only exist because real people talk about problems on forums. If we fully integrate an LLM into the desktop and nobody discusses the issues they run into anymore, will LLMs continue to be able to solve the problems?
IE, the ethernet port shouldn't just disappear from the OS; it doesn't matter that now it's a little easier to fix the problem.
That applies just as much to Windows and MacOS as it does to Linux.
Yes, there is a whole moral discussion to be had, but as much as you win points for doing the better thing, the better things don't really pay bills.
The good news though is that we definitely won the server war. We can spin up VMs and install Linux without licences. We have access to software that works well, security updates, frequent releases, a massive ecosystem of free software, no advertising, very little to no licensing for software, and it works incredibly well. So much so, that we can't even imagine a world in which servers require licence keys or subscriptions or a marketplace account.
Imagine now, if laptops & workstations were as solved as servers are.
That's why we aren't there yet, because they're not.
Some people understand the concept of trade-offs but don’t understand how other people don’t want the same trade-offs as they do
Are we? Not sure what usability and quality improvement there are in an OS where you have to fight against its vendor's decision.
Most critics against Linux I read come from people who never took the time to choose perfectly supported hardware in the first place but just buy whatever bleeding edge stuff is available running on windows, then hope it will works. It is like criticizing Apple/macOS because it doesn't work well on an hackintosh really and is completely dishonest. I don't criticize windows because it doesn't work on the latest Macbook M8 ultra studio pro nor do I criticize iOS because it doesn't work on my Samsung Note tab 6 or macOS 27 because it doesn't work on a Microsoft Surface.
I haven't had any update nor hardware support issue in the last 15 years because I have chosen hardware based on Linux support compatibility before purchasing them.
Apple doesn't even have a tiling window manager as far as I know.
Probably 99% of Apple / Windows users aren't very tech literate so if they have to fight an update they'll just think it's broken.
It's just basic business practice, cater to the 99%, don't worry about the 1%
I am satisfied with current set of choices on my Win 10 & Android 13.
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As another example of what you can’t disable: I don’t wish to subscribe to Apple’s paid iCloud offerings. Yet there are several places in the UI both in macOS and iOS where there are non-removable ads for the service under certain conditions. For example, when your local storage fills up. Oh and now there’s a non-removable 20GB+ Apple LLM model now taking up space on my 256GB ssd. Thanks a lot Tim/John.
A large portion of the HN crowd woefully underrates this aspect of macOS. The types who would get pleasure tweaking their OS and understanding it intimately are overrepresented here, though props to them.
I don't care what people say; macOS is the only OS I've ever used that has never booted to a black/blue screen with relatively cryptic error after performing an upgrade. Not once ever. Windows today is of course abusive to users and shouldn't be used, and as much as I absolutely love Linux as a server OS and for VM appliances, I get no joy whatsoever trying to figure out why the DE stopped working after letting the OS update itself or debugging subpar rendering from the Wayland compositor or X11. (Linux people still tell me this isn't a problem in 2026 but, guess what, my Ubuntu VM hit a black screen a couple days ago after upgrading with no other changes made to the installation, so they're wrong) That and so much graphical Linux software is written with the attitude of "I'm a freak who thinks context menus shouldn't exist so fuck the user and fuck anyone who tells me I'm wrong", yet so many DEs integrate these apps anyway.
The worst thing that macOS has ever overtly done to me is slightly change the look of its interface over the years, which is incredibly minor compared to all the changes that Windows, Ubuntu, Gnome, and KDE have gone through in the last decade. Does it pull lame crap like phone home? Probably, but these days I assume that just about all software thinks it knows better than I and constantly pings cloud servers. MacOS is not really unique in this regard. I will switch to my own Linux if Apple goes down the road of "use our AI or else", but for now I don't really see the venom towards macOS to be justified when it's incredibly easy to prove that the alternatives are usually very poor.
Oh yeah, and the hardware is excellent. (except for the keyboards which need TPU dam covering them or else dust kills them after a couple years)
Happened to me years ago. No biggie, installed a backup and noticed I had somehow removed the most important directory with all my work files from the the time machine back up. Hardly Apple’s fault, though, but I got complacent with ”it just works”.
Since then I come to conclusion that the saying should go: ”It works - until it doesn’t”. If it os not the OS, it is myself who messes something up.
These days I almost solely use Linux. I have M1 Mini as a media centre connected to TV and I have to use Windows crap at work. Opening my Linux seems like a hig from an old friend in comparison. I might need to read docs and fight with drivers every now and then, but fuck it, I don’t care. Because this one is mine.
Compared to the last XPS I had, it's substantially better for my use case, since I'll generally be remoting into systems anyway.
I find the Apple offering's keyboard worse to type on, its enormous touchpad is a chore to engage with compared to the venerable Trackpoint, and the operating system feels contrived to make simple things difficult.
The x220 thinkpad is 14 years old now. And has a 500 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM. Perhaps in another 14 years Apple will be able to match it feature for feature.
One might well ask why I own Apple hardware at all. The answer is to buy entry into their walled garden as a developer.
That's defined as "the device has become a brick, cannot be recovered". It was mostly popularized by broken firmware updates which effectively destroyed the device, as it could no longer be salvaged.
You calling a borked package install in userspace almost bricked is telling about your technical capability.
And I agree that people that are basically technologically illiterate should not use Linux.
They could if someone administers it for them, but if nobody can help them - it's just not the right choice.
I've spent the last 2 weeks trying to get Windows to work (hard crash at random times) when it ran flawlessly on Ubuntu.
The issue appears to have arisen because Windows decided to update my graphics drivers, so making them (for reasons AMD perhaps need to sort out) incompatible with Adrenaline. A million reboots later, using arcane programs to clear out hidden installs, hidden config, and trying to get details from a system that will readily tell you it recovered but gets shy about what caused it to crash .. eesh.
My experience is you need far more expertise to run Windows. Maybe if MS tested they're releases so it didn't break itself all the time ...
Edit: I also experienced the Nvidia driver update that broke a bunch of things on my (Fedora) server last week.
I wonder why? If nobody can help them, they are fucked on any OS.
For both windows and Linux you'll have to find someone thats willing to help you, essentially. Usually a lot harder for those people. Especially with Linux ime, as even fewer places know enough to help you, even if they may be able to handle windows
It's fine most of the time, so it's not a big deal... But if you're unwilling and they're technologically illiterate: they will not be able to recover. Apple has the genius help desk which will sort them out, with Linux... You're gonna have to find "someone", "somewhere".
Can be done for sure, however once again: I would not recommend
Which is the whole point, no? There would be more Linux everywhere if it didn’t occasionally break in ways that require special expertise to fix.
Apparently it doesn't judging by the tons of articles published after every macOS update.
> just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
And I am on a run of 11 years of update (since Fedora 25 or 26) without a single issue. Anecdotal evidences are just that. Anecdotal. Some people will have issues, others won't. Putting yourself in a situation where you have less risk of having issues like not using hardware from a company whose drivers are not maintained in the mainline kernel source tree goes a long way.
> but that sort of thing only happens on Linux (and windows probably)
Yeah right.
https://support.apple.com/es-es/guide/mac-help/-mchl4e4b758d...
Ironically the website from the company that is supposed to make software "that just works" do not let me put their page in english and force it back to spanish ignoring my choice. Hum.
if you use distros which ship the latest _stable_ release of software
and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues, something I haven't exactly had with either Windows or Mac
like my current gaming setup from a year ago(roughly) was setup once, I had to fiddle some minor tweaks during setup and since then it "just works tm". No issues, not know how needed, nothing. (At least for the Games I play.) But also not Nvidea which has in recent years increasingly more QA issues across _all_ OSes and _all_ hardware including their supper expensive AI cards... But that is more a Nvidea then a Linux Problem, by now, was different in the past.
> but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues
These are defining qualities of something that does not "just work"
I also find Apple's choice to just continually create 1G swap files until the system locks absolutely baffling.
> and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
A Linux sysadmin teammate of mine has >10 years of running Linux servers, and chose to install Ubuntu on his work Dell laptop, and in the ~2 years he's been running that thing he's had regular (2-3/month) issues with audio during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meetings sessions. Both Bluetooth and wired headset connections.
At my last job (pre-COVID) I had a Linux workstation at my desk and a Windows laptop. At where I'm currently at we're hybrid and so we get laptops and I chose a MacBook because I knew I could both do my daily sysadmin chores through Terminal and also have access to 'business apps'.
If you look at MacOS with a critical eye, it's nearly impossible to say it has good UX. It's outdated and everything requires more clicks. Finder stuck 20 years ago. Hard to find settings. Poor screen real estate. Hard to read text with transparent everything.
Let's kill this myth that "Macs are more intuitive to use".
To be fair, the whole thread is about tolerating Apple because how good the hardware is :)
Sounds like you are talking about software also.
I have to agree on the hardware quality though but that doesn't do everything as I still have to use the OS
Sure, Linux laptops are not "pretty", but I don't need a computer to be pretty, in fact I hope that someone starts to produce again laptops identical to old IBM thinkpads (not the insult to the brand that Lenovo is building) but with modern hardware, a computer that had every port you need on it, no adapter required, that you could have it fall from a ladder and not break, with removable battery, hard drive, with the trackpoint instead of those stupid trackpads, I want it even with a DVD burner fuck it. I don't care it to be small, I care it to be functional.
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It seems that no other device makers are seeing the value in Apple's many-devices-acting-as-one approach. It makes for some serious vendor lock.
I was a true Linux believer, and I still switched to a Mac because I needed things to just work. Poor battery life, awful HiDPI support, strange driver issues all contributed. Yes, I could fix them. I opened bugs and could talk to the engineers responsible to get things fixed ASAP. Even so, it was a second full time job keeping up with it.
Xiaomi certainly does: they have billboards touting it: along the bottom they show phones, dishwashers, cars, laptops, and everything in between.
I always run Linux (Debian primarily) on my desktops and servers with a zealot-ish dedication, but what Mac and macOS brings to the table as a portable machine is irreplaceable with anything else.
Even a top end ThinkPad with a well groomed Linux distribution can't come close, sorry.
> and durable keyboards
It wasn't that long ago they had terrible keyboard lifespans which could be a death knell for the laptop, and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec. They've come far in recent years, and I certainly wouldn't be sad if it was my main machine yet I don't expect them to be an outlier forever.
In some dimension Apple (and any serious manufacturer) is always going to be ahead - and they certainly are in non-gaming portable CPU/GPU combos right now. Alas, they aren't ahead in many other dimensions; my Fedora X1 Carbon is my strong preference over my M4 macbook pro and a large part of that is the basic usability of the system and window manager (sway), which is something Apple will never match until we meaningfully switch interaction paradigms.
Yes, their butterfly switch keyboards were really bad. I skipped that generation. I own machines from 2006, 2014 and 2020.
> and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec...
Apple unfortunately does this sometimes, but interestingly just before changing CPU architectures (Power to Intel, Intel to ARM). I sometimes think whether it was semi-intentional. I don't blindly support them, however.
> that is the basic usability of the system and window manager (sway), which is something Apple will never match until we meaningfully switch interaction paradigms.
I'm way faster in my Debian + KDE system as well, but portables are always secondary machines for me, so Mac doesn't bother me much.
Also, I like running different operating systems and paradigms at the same time, so I can learn from all of them while developing some stuff for myself and others. However, as I said multiple times over the years, macOS is the "alternative" OS for me, not the primary one. Linux has that part for the last 20+ years.
My both parents use linux and are happy with it. If you mostly use just the browser and reading e-mails, I don't see any better system even for someone who is non-technical.
Running an AMD card on my Dekstop system. It's invisible as an Intel on-board graphics card, and this is a great thing.
Much greater than rebooting to a black screen because NVIDIA decided to not support your GPU anymore because it finished its economic life for the company, not you.
If thats all you do you might as well just use macos. Something comes up you can just send your parents to the apple store. Probably one of the last places on earth you can get a real life human in a real life building from a real life major company to sit down with you and walk you through your issue. They will do this for free, you only pay for an actual repair job, which you can also of course do there for a relatively fair price all things considered for oem quality work. Not sure where I would take any other laptop for repair. Do people even repair laptops as a business?
My guess? Most people don't care, but the discussions are driven by the few who do, because for them, it's a really big deal, and they'll pay accordingly. Similarly for "My code is unreadable unless it's on a 4k display at 220+ PPI" -- I'm sure it's true for them, but for me, a crappy FHD display I can get for $100 is great for coding.
I'm like this with Linux...I pay System76 a premium because I care about how they go about building their systems, both hardware and software. To normal folks, it seems like a crazy thing to pay a premium for, but for me, it's a great deal.
Anyway, I was sure something was up, checked settings, and found a new feature akin to 'more accurate mouse'. I disabled it and my trackpad started working again. Everytime I have to use that PC I get angry about something unbearable windows thought was a good idea. Tbh my Linux has been driving me up the walls recently. I think I just don't like computers at all.
The peak was my high school Gateway laptop.
The old Mac trackpads were great. The new Mac trackpads where they increased the size, and made it solid-state feel terrible to use. Make it make sense.
X is usually “pick hardware with good support in ToT kernel” or “use distribution Y” (where Y is somehow different in every post) or “do you really need feature Z that’s better on Mac? You’re making the wrong trade.”
To each their own but I’d rather not deal with XYZ and just get the thing that works.
p.s. I do hope they put a toggle back for Siri and their on device AI stuff
Yes, but the point of the linked article is that this preference inevitably results in your device spying on you. To each their own indeed.
Edit: and of course I see your P.S. note. But that isn't really responsive. Most Linux users would point out (P.S.) that they'd like their hardware to be faster and lower power or their OS to be a little cleaner. But alas, you can't have everything.
I prefer the X1 Carbon’s body a thousand times over Apple’s unibody design, which I find cold and uncomfortable, and it tends to dig into my wrists.
And I’d take a TrackPoint over Apple’s trackpad a million times over.
Of course, that’s just my personal preference.
we should strive and push to keep having these a alternatives. Which the industry is trying to remove.
The ancient wisdom of "never nvidia" when using Linux/BSD continues to ring true into the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvXZVJXIyqM
ngl Mac users are to computers as Tesla drivers are to cars, they buy them because they don't want to learn anything.
There are some incredibly good PC laptops out there with the same kinds of features of MacBook Pros and more: long battery life, haptic trackpad, aluminum CNC build, long sleep battery life, etc. Check out Intel core series 3.
I’m a very happy with my Framework 13 Pro.
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This "just works" thing is propaganda. Computers never ever do that
I have a Linux server, and use cloud Linux machines extensively, but at least the last time I checked, Linux desktop sucks. There are always memory management issues, doing a video call makes my fan sound like a jet taking off, not sleeping, put my laptop in my bag and it gets to hot to touch - that’s just off the top of my head, I’ve tried Linux laptops on multiple occasions and they suck.
That, or make hardware compromises and buy a laptop that provides official Linux support, which is likely to have a more Mac/Windows-like experience of things "just working".
I pulled the same update, and it was annoying but it came nowhere near bricking itself. The integrated graphics worked, it just disabled the Nvidia open-source driver for the GPU. Simply (re)installing it fixed it. Notably, just asking ChatGPT for the solution worked (after pasting the output of a few commands).
The apple touchpad is better - but all touchpads suck. Still miss old school IBM ThinkPad stick.
> Build quality (aluminum)
This is such an ignorant take. Every other laptop has an Aluminum shell. Dell, HP, you name it. My Sony Vaio came with a metallic shell in the early 2000s. As a Macbook owner, I am still extremely worried about coffee spilling on my keyboard. A problem that was solved decades ago by every other manufacturer but not Apple. My touchID randomly stopped working in under 2 years of owning my laptop too and the hardware needs replacement of the entire logic board. So, tell me again, where is this "build quality" that you speak of?
As for the OS, everytime I tried MacOS, I find rapidly major showstoppers. It's like people are just blind to them.
If I'd qualify each platform, I'd say Windows is a toy, Mac is a piece of art, Linux is a tool. I picked my category.
When I first tried macOS I hated it and had a long list of issues I could give. They are all still valid but it turns out they don’t actually stop you getting work done.
A lot of other crafts and jobs need way more expensive hardware. Software engineers "only" need a $1,000 - $3,000 laptop every 5 or so years. That's typically less than 0.5% of that 5 year's salary.
How about "not worth the cost" instead.
Not worth the cost of losing the freedom to run your own software and make your own choices.
Commodity laptops might be slower and less flashy, but if Linux goes in the wrong direction I can install FreeBSD or OpenBSD or my own vibe-coded OS or whatever.
Western society has for the last few decades surrendered principles for convenience, and the state of modern computing is a microcosm of the consequences. You're all consumers now, instead of users.
Previously either VMware Workstation or Virtual Box.
Also I am not speaking from a position of no experience, as some projects require being assigned Mac Books, that I gladly return after delivery.
Once a colleague seeing me work looked at my screen, lifted his head and pointed to my colleague saying "Have you seen how this guy work, he's a maniac!".
Mastering the tool you have always brings speed and smoothness into your process, one step at a time.
So no. The MacOS you use is not Unix.
I have an old Macbook Air that's no longer supported by the latest MacOS. Trying to do anything on it is like pulling teeth. The simple act of running a modernish web browser is a horrible experience of "This App is no longer supported".
On Windows a laptop from the mid 2000's is still entirely usable albeit a bit slow. Not so with MacOS. You 100% cannot run a single piece of modern software. You have to dig around for forks that specifically support older versions of MacOS and if you want to run a browser with Plugins, good eff'n luck! Now you're trying to find a fork of Chromium that supports Adblock, but also have to find and old version of Adblock which isn't hip to all the new invasive ad technology.
MacOS is not for poors it appears.
For example this dell is superb, has tandem oled with 200% scaling and runs linux (dhh runs this on onarchy)
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptop-computers/spd/xps14da...
I've probably heard "this time is different" on the topic of PC laptops catching up to Macs a hundred times over the last decade, but it never is...
It's hard to rebuild trust after selling a computer (without a CD drive) without networking drivers and no indication of which wireless chipset it has, but including a CD with said drivers.
I'm not exaggerating, I had so many horrible experiences.
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I find a trackpad (even a Mac one) is absolutely infuriating to use compared to a decent mouse.
Battery life/screens/magsafe I'm plugged into a dock 99% of the time so it's irrelevant, but when forced to occasionally, the ergonomics of looking down at a single small 1x in screen is just terrible if doing it for hours and also makes my back feel horrible.
The good ThinkPads with Magnesium feel much better (both for hand and lap) and are lighter. And the expensive and complicated build allows maintenance (replacing a keyboard is a bless on the X13). Lenovo is just stupid and also allows to purchase low quality screens, low quality frames and even a Windows. A thing that Apple never allows, you cannot purchase a bad configuration.
The MBAs at Apple figured out much earlier, that a rigid metal frame is cheap and gives the impression of quality.
Aside from that?
Customers are guilty, wanting a shiny and quick solution. And governments and companies by following ultra rigid and outright stupid purchasing guide (ISO craziness and “we can drop Windows, we invested another 300.000 in a Windows only Application).
I haven't abused this m series mac as much. But my old original aluminum unibody from 2012, that thing lasted about 12 years until water damage took it out. It fell to the floor on every corner multiple times. None are perfectly round anymore due to the force of the impacts. Never shattered the screen or affected anything with the computer.
I have a friend who ran over his with his f150. That did end up putting some cracks into the screen, but it still worked and he still used it in that state for a couple years at least.
There was a discussion on this forum just a few days ago wondering why Apple is so hostile to open source support on its devices. And consensus here was that, no, it clearly wasn't due to competetive pressure.
But clearly it is. Because to many consumers, if you have to run MacOS to get an M6, you'll run MacOS instead of Linux. And that makes enshittifying MacOS as a revenue center very tempting.
> Also the OS mostly “just works”
Article is literally about the OS not working as desired, though.
All of our Linux stuff is rock solid and is what we actually use to communicate with our satellites. We will explicitly avoid Microsoft and Apple here.
Can Mac laptops run QubesOS?
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https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/jan-2025-state-of-linu...
Windows users are the ones who don't want to think about the OS at all. They want to get something else done and have the OS get in their way as little as possible. Linux fans want to dig deep into their OS and play with its internals; Mac fans want the OS to be an experience: trendy, sleek, reassuring. The kind of people who like it when the AI tells them "you're absolutely right!". Windows users generally understand that Windows is awful; the worst operating system, in fact, except for all the other ones.
Apple users to Windows users: I feel bad for you
Windows users to Apple users: I don't think about you at all
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This flexibility makes it difficult to make broad sweeping statements about the thing. Certainly however, it's impressive to log into a linux server and see an uptime measured in years. (Impressively horrifying, depending on your security posture, but impressive nonetheless.)
I switched my desktop to Ubuntu about a year ago, and while it's not 100% free of trouble, I still can't imagine running Windows 11 again. My MBP still runs MacOS and I haven't been pushed far enough to want to try installing a Linux distro on it.
Windows has always been weird like that. Relevant HN post from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599481
That said, I recently bought a Windows laptop (which was wiped to run Linux day 1). Before I installed Linux I had one task I needed Windows for. To create a local account and not connect it to the internet, I had to lookup a keyboard shortcut to show a terminal, lookup a command to run the setup in a different mode for IT departments, then run through setup again to make my local account. Once in the OS, because I wasn’t on the network, 90% of the start menu was full of placeholder icons that needed the internet to download the actual icon… presumably a bunch of cloud services (ads). Then there were basics, like trackpad performance… it was unusable, I had to get a mouse to move around without pain. Once Linux was installed, the trackpad worked great, maybe even better than macOS, it’s close, just a matter of preference.
Compare that to macOS, which still lets you make a local account without jumping through hoops, runs fine without iCloud, and has all local apps that won’t leave you with a bunch of placeholders. The basic hardware, like the trackpad, also works well out of the box.
macOS and Apple aren’t perfect, but are still miles ahead of Windows, imo.
Linux isn’t perfect either. Initial hardware support was very hit and miss depending on the distro. Things I’d consider basic functionality required plugins that I had to hunt for. Other annoying out-of-the-box defaults required plugins + custom scripts to resolve. All of this can be very frustrating. Most people don’t want to tinker this much.
No system is perfect, it’s just a question of which tradeoffs a person is willing to make.
Mission Control? Launch Pad? App Exposé? Spaces?
Features that I don't want but take over my machine if I accidentally use the track pad wrong.
I'd love to see MacOS cull that crap from decades of feature creep.
My wife gave up her Dell Windows laptop because the performance was terrible. I installed kubuntu and started using it, and then she immediately reclaimed it because all she ever needs is a browser and Linux vastly improved the performance. ("Well, it is my laptop...") She knows nothing about Linux, and the only Linux-specific question she ever had was how to recover when it sometimes doesn't wake up from sleep. Overall, much less frustration than Windows.
MacOS 27 is a lot less shit than 26, thankfully. I upgraded from 15 to 27 directly (on a M-series Mac).
This is the billion dollar question for corps though. Windows and MacOS are first class citizens of the corporate IT universe and all the weirdness of corporate IT works. MDM, identity/auth, Office, LOB apps, video, document signing, data labeling, everything.
Linux has taken huge, heroic strides, and has caught up to about 2005. Corporate IT simply will not sanction Linux desktops unless they are provably as well versed in the entire ecosystem as Win/Mac, barring a "political" decision made at the top to make it happen.
To change this would require a profoundly deep, expensive, and continuing investment in all aspects of the 'Modern Work' experience, plus genuine commitment from Microsoft to make it happen (which would likely require lawsuits and enforcement).
The situation today is that a few orgs are playing catchup on some features, but that will never be enough to match a platform that has been dedicated to corporate life for 40+ years, and from a company infamous for extending their advantages to extinguish the competition.
A Mac mini base model comes with 256G. It is manageable but barely unless used with an external disk.
22.8G as quoted in the article is about 10% of the available space and it is something that cannot be offloaded to external disk.
Many people including myself are going to be furious when their Mac is upgraded.
The author turned it off in a previous version, and as they updated their OS it got turned on again (the "Apple said yes" part of the title)
It is designed to not be user-friendly.
> Nothing additionally is getting sent to apple if you switch this away from "Off".
Another way of saying this is “personal data is still being sent to Apple if you switch this to off.”
We've finally achieved AI Inception here. And I'm sadly sure we're going to go deeper.
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that's not even the topic of the article
that refers to a post from 2025 that he links to. this is clear from the first sentence of the article. I suspect maybe you didn't actually read the article and spent more time writing this erroneous comment than you might have reading the article.
Apple made the thing compulsory so we're not giving them the benefit of the doubt because they don't deserve it.
This 'maybe later' dark pattern seems to have gained so much traction that UX folk just use it because everyone uses it. There is probably some handwavy reason for it that amounts to not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive, but it just ends up being another grain of sand on the micro-annoyance pile of today's tech.
> not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive
In their refusal, while (accidental) acceptance is always definitive...
EDIT: In another thread this is called the ratchet of consent. Apt.
a bad example from apple becomes the status quo for other companies.
It will probably never stop asking.
No? When I'm asked about Apple Pay on an iPhone, it says "Maybe later". In the Settings it has reminder, and if I go in and say "No" it never pops up ever again (maybe on a iOS major version upgrade?).
Generally with Apple it's one "Maybe later" with a reminder flag set someplace, and then that's it.
The frog is being slowly boiled.
severe industry brainrot
Would you like to enable the feature where you opt out of disabling telemetry?
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Have no intention to upgrade my Intel Mac Pro to Tahoe, so Settings is going to permanently have the "something needs attention" badge I guess.
> What I found on your Mac
> Apple Intelligence is ON. com.apple.CloudSubscriptionFeatures.optIn → [REDACTED] = 1 — that number is your Apple Account DSID. ~2.5 GB of models in /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_*, with generativeexperiencesd, intelligenceplatformd, modelmanagerd, TGOnDeviceInferenceProviderService and a Messages Assistant Extension all resident.
> The nag is pure upsell. Every iCloud service that notification names is already off on this Mac — your account has only KEYCHAIN_SYNC and FIND_MY_MAC enabled. Photos, Mail, Backup, Drive: all off. It's nagging you about your other devices' storage. Source is the com.apple.appleaccount.notifications bundle, fed by followupd and com.apple.CloudSubscriptionFeatures.followup.engagement.
> "I said no and Apple said yes" is literally happening. Siri shows Assistant Enabled = 0, yet ten Siri daemons are running. Share Mac Analytics is off (AutoSubmit = 0) — and SubmitDiagInfo still logged LastFullSubmissionSuccess today at 12:36 UTC.
This is absolutely bananas.
Frankly, most of these people at high levels in these companies seem pretty apathetic to the concept of "Consent" at all, because I don't think they think we have a right to it.
Remember, LG owns the glass. Not you. Not the person who purchased it and has the legally respected rights under the first sale doctrine, but instead the company who bought some code that runs on it.
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Or have three buttons: “Yes”, “No”, “Remind me Later”. Apple does stuff like that in other parts of the OS, like when asking for app permissions, so they clearly know how to do it.
Yes, more text can be another way to provide the message, but if you've ever done any user testing, you'll know that people at best scan through your UI. I know I wouldn't read that, or at least would prefer not to have to read that.
I guess I don't see why "No" combined with "You can change this later in settings" is so much less offensive than "Not now".
If you're not willing to stop using harmful software that's your problem.
And let's not forget that cheating in online games is only an issue because companies have co-opted what was a social activity between people you know (or at least can get to know) into a more profitable asocial e-peen measuring contest between randoms.
I think equating having the option of KLAC with Windows is totally disingenuous. There are countless other differentiators. You would be free to just not use KLAC if you so desired.
kernel level invasive garbage would be beyond destructive and still not solve the problem
There are hardware cheats that are not detectable by KLAC, so it doesn't solve the problem, just improves the situation.
The only way to avoid cheaters is to play with people you trust.
If you are fine with that, fine.
If this post bothers you and you feel the need to defend yourself against it or something, realize I'm not the one making it true. Nothing you say to me can change this.
But why? They're just video games. Why are they important, especially when a lot of them are designed to be addictive.
A lot of people love smoking but that's not important either and it's better to give it up.
I will 100% give Linux evangelists the guff they deserve on shitty UX in GUIs and their insistence upon a dozen slightly-tweaked solutions to the same core problem that prevents the industry from consolidating into widescale popularity on endpoints, but the incompetence and/or laziness of major devs to support even something like Debian is not a failing of Linux.
It does not affect "multiplayer" in general, to the contrary, most multiplayer games are not affected (coop games, MMOs, RTS).
| It's nearly impossible to play multiplayer games now without KLAC. The cheating is out of control. | Unfortunately this is an ideological hill that many Linux devs are willing to die onTo be honest I don’t really understand the hysteria re KLAC. Installing something in kernel space requires trust, but so does installing something in user space. If you don’t trust the developer, don’t use their software. A malicious app installed in user space can steal, encrypt, delete or exfiltrate anything the user can access. It can abuse their applications, credentials and resources. Kernel access is worse, but both are very bad.
This is no longer the reason, as FLOSS implementation exists now: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20909
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For me, it is no problem at all since the games I play have no issues. That includes the multiplayer games I play.
I certainly would not feel I owned my system if I accepted the full suite of attempts by these companies to replace and subvert existing standards. I do feel I have control with non-systemd init and service management, and source based packaging.
And the wifi is easily fixable either buying a non expensive dongle or waiting for the next release.
Also running bhyve as daily driver with Ubuntu for development purposes. Everything works without issues, perfectly.
Maybe with the rise of immutable distributions like SteamOS, Bazzite, GnomeOS and KDELinux.
But the other "user-friendly" distributions are just not good enough for a non-techy.
We need better and more A/B partitioned immutable distributions and we need a new implementation of Flatpak.
I recently had to repair my parents their Linux Mint installation because it powered off during an upgrade. Apt does not handle that well, Linux Mint has no snapshotting, you cannot apt autoconfigure -a through the UI. Also the UI does not explain why the machine is getting hot while it's building dkms modules for an hour.
Just this week I saw someone with Fedora get a buggy graphics driver that made the whole system glitchy, they had to downgrade the kernel.
The week before I had to repair a manjaro installation from a friend because getting nvidia to work on ArchLinux isn't trivial even if Manjaro pretends it to be.
To be frank, desktop linux is still in a pretty bad state.
I'd also rgue Mint is easier to navigate than Windows with it's 3+ different context menus and baked in ads.
Desktop computing is just in a bad state.
And I agree, Linux Mints DE (Cinnamon) is very user-friendly!
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My gut is we'll have to start learning BSD soon.
That's the problem with BSD, the community holds a large amount of radical ideologies that led them to BSD. Like a deep hatred for systemd or the GPL.
Not the core developers though, just the community surrounding them.
However in the context of the constant restrictions of general purpose computing, GPL has my back. BSD at best doesn't care about restrictive forks and at worst even welcomes them as 'good business'.
Two different approaches, they both have their place but as a user, I feel GPL was written for me. BSD (license) was written for the developer.
With that said, also or instead using *BSD won't do any harm.
I'd test it myself but I use and enjoy Apple Intelligence and don't want to ruin my config.
Clicking "Turn off Siri" should still act as the overall switch.
Seems to behave this way on my 27.2 Beta 2 test Mac anyway.
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However, having to redo it on every system upgrade is another thing. "No" should mean "no", but now the expectation is that you need to constantly shout "No no no no no no" otherwise your previous "no" will turn into "yes".
Meanwhile, Google just announced "laptops" that are locked down to the Play Store, and the sound of crickets is palpable.
> Google has confirmed to Ars that Googlebooks will enforce developer verification requirements for apps similar to Android phones. Under this system, only apps from developers who have verified their identities with Google will be eligible for installation
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/googlebook-laptops-l...
And I don't see how your second sentence relates to the first.
https://fortune.com/2022/10/24/tim-cook-said-free-u2-album-i...
Facepalm.
Inconsistent & confusing if so.
This is an article and author that is tailored for AI curmudgeons or an AI rejectionist to self-assure themselves that their worldview is the only correct one. Facts seem to be a nuisance at best here for the author, and helpful phrases like "garbage", "vile", "human toll", "psychopaths" undermine all chances or credibility for a reasonable take or conversation.
We have to manage it better, introduce guardrails, adversarial agents, better harnesses, etc.
All valid points but a personal boycott is not the solution.
Windows, KDE and GNOME all expose this as a GUI toggle. macOS doesn't.
Imagine applying for a SF startup job and letting them know you use a Windows computer.
At best they will politely tell you to fuck off. But they might blog/X about the idiot Windows user who imagined they could be cool enough to work for them, all coated in a plausible "a craftsman takes care of using good tools, sharp knifes, ..."
I apparently define cool people differently :joy:
> Imagine applying for a SF startup job
No, thanks :joy:
You do, because their hardware is very good. Denying this is just silly.
Well that's a philosophical point, because morality is bound up with opinions and personality and internal motivation, and quite possibly with creativity and with whatever intelligence really means. So it probably can't be designed into LLMs, and struggles with "alignment" probably aren't faked.
Well, it could, but a preliminary step would be to get everyone to agree about what constitutes morality, which will never happen. So in essence I agree.
I'm not sure how this has anything to do with Apple or Apple Intelligence (which is based Google technology, also unrelated to X / Musk)
Apple is also one of the only companies to focus on user experience above all else (nearly, anyway). Again, I can't think of a single other example (maybe Framework comes close), but while Apple has incredible technology, they have always been fairly measured with it to attain just the user experience they want. IMO, that's what earned Mac a reputation for having poor performance, and iPhone a reputation for having low memory, because Apple gave them the specs they needed to run well and have a terrific UX, not necessarily the specs to push the frontier of what you can run at home.
Apple has been learning that frontier is important, though, and they've been leaning more into it lately. Part of why Apple Silicon has been such an incredible shock to the industry.
You're repeating fruit factory propaganda as if it is gospel, the marketing department can be proud of their handiwork. In reality they're one of the most profit-maximisation centred companies out there in computing land, they don't really care all that much about what their users want and do their best to make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem". They fell into "value extraction" a long time ago and I don't see them stopping in any way as long as they have loyal apologists like you seem to be. Why would they? The money keeps rolling in, the congregation keeps on buying fruit phones and related paraphernalia, they'd be mad to stop from a business perspective.
Ha, funnily enough that's not far off. (Vulpine)
> You're repeating fruit factory propaganda as if it is gospel, the marketing department can be proud of their handiwork.
I hated Apple for a really long time. I don't know exactly why, but if anything, it was all the Apple haters that got me. And of course, the general idea of devices not being locked down to the company, and some other stuff. Having a rooted Android phone made me prone to confirmation bias too.
But my school had Mac, and after using them, I knew that Mac was for me. I still hated iOS at the time, but I knew I needed Mac. So I got one, and I was absolutely right.
The Mac broke down constantly though, didn't seem designed for the abuse I put it through. People begged me to go back to Windows because of the constant repairs, and I did, but I eventually got fed up with Windows again and tried Linux. I eventually got fed up with Linux too, went back to Windows, continued to be relentlessly fed up with Windows, and then eventually got a Mac again, with my own money this time.
At some point, it just clicked for me that the company is what I need, rather than Mac alone. I realized that iOS had the exact same philosophy that I liked so much about Mac. I got an iPhone and got to benefit from the ecosystem with my Mac. And at that point, my mind was fully made up. All in on Apple.
Note that at basically none of these points did marketing become a factor in my decisions. So no it's not the marketing. Though that is a great way to discredit opinions, I think Apple is genuinely the best for me.
> In reality they're one of the most profit-maximisation centred companies out there in computing land, they don't really care all that much about what their users want and do their best to make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem".
To me, this feels kind of like the argument that Steam is an abusive monopoly. I choose and prefer them because the alternatives kinda suck in comparison. Apple is like that for me. I'm not locked into their ecosystem the same way that I'd be locked into an online game that I've poured thousands of hours into. Or locked into a social network where all my friends have been for over a decade. I can easily move somewhere else, and I even did recently, before moving back because I couldn't bear it.
I noticed just how much my habits changed to adapt to Windows, as opposed to Mac. I naturally used the system differently because it just wasn't capable of things I could rely on Mac to do for me. Spotlight is a big part of Mac for me, and none of the third-party software out there quite replicates that experience on Windows. In addition, the file management is far more primitive, and I found myself using directory structure in place of search. You could call this a skill issue, but to me, it's just a mismatch. Given how much I've used both sides my whole life -- I mean for much of my early life it was only Windows, but Mac has always been far more intuitive and expressive for me -- if they were comparable, I'd use them comparably, but I don't, so I think they're not.
I'm leaving Linux out of this because they don't have an ecosystem, they just rely on you bringing your own, I guess. You want file sharing, you install something like KDE Connect. You want organization, just find a file manager that has that, or make one. I've tried a few distributions, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Fedora Silverblue. I preferred Arch on my MacBook, eventually preferred Fedora Silverblue on my later PC, but nothing's quite right, even when I put the effort into curating (like the time I tried KISS Linux).
To be honest, I'm not quite sure why people say Apple's ecosystem is this terrible walled garden that's super hard to leave. Maybe they're hostile to a user experience that they prefer over the alternatives. Maybe they think that their preference is a sign that the walled garden is manipulative. I guess I just don't get it yet. Maybe they want to leave but it's inconvenient, they think Apple could make it easier, and that makes them conclude it's designed to trap them. In my experience, the alternatives simply are less convenient, it's nothing about Apple that makes it more difficult to leave.
> They fell into "value extraction" a long time ago and I don't see them stopping in any way as long as they have loyal apologists like you seem to be.
I don't think there's any evidence that Apple cares whether or not there are "apologists". Maybe if nobody in the world liked them they would decide to change their minds. But I don't think it's as simple as people just rationalizing their bad decisions and excusing them, therefore enabling them. I think they're just as likely to make bad decisions that are universally bad, and it takes about as long for them to go back on them as bad decisions with "loyal apologists". Like that fiasco with the butterfly keyboard repair programs.
> Why would they? The money keeps rolling in, the congregation keeps on buying fruit phones and related paraphernalia, they'd be mad to stop from a business perspective.
I do agree on one point, that Apple is unlikely to realize their mistake when it keeps generating profit, regardless of how many users complain. That's why I'm hoping for top-down action. I hope the new CEO sees that their more recent enshittifications like "Apple Creator Studio" are a mistake, a betrayal. I have no evidence that'll ever happen, though. Maybe that's the loyalty you're talking about. Or just the last shred of hope I have for what seems like the last company on earth I can rely on.
Desktops maybe, but on mobile, Apple has always outclassed most Windows laptops that ordinary people might buy - alone because the full-aluminium case allows for far more heat input until saturation kicks in.
The complaint now shifts to that you'll still have files on your system, or can't control exactly what models are stored on your computer. Apple has reasons not to give this fine control: what you have on HN is a group of people who are vehemently anti-AI, use Apple products, and still want features very specific to their control of the system.
Apple caters to the general user. If they think a setting is going to be confusing or likely to be misused, they won't implement it. People know the reality that if Apple intelligence is successful and if this feature is implemented, the general user won't know which parts of their workflow use which features. Removing the models will be advertised as a cheap hack to save storage, and people will be confused when they can't turn intelligence on again.
The fact that the core premise of the article (repeated in the title and first sentence) is about "phoning home": > The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025, I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off.
The entire basis of this complaint is not understanding the difference between "duration" and "interval". And not being able to click the link that is given to you in the settings menu or just search Apple's docs for the setting ( https://support.apple.com/en-mn/guide/mac-help/mchlfc0d4779/... )
Regardless: they already did, because Apple intelligence is not available in the EU.
As a side note, I would argue you're being just as "emotional" (which I don't necessarily see as a bad thing despite your aspersions) by calling it "fanatic".
1. The author should be able to do whatever he wants with his own device. That he owns.
2. The author should be able to decline consent for data-gathering activities and general AI stuff that he doesn't want.
No it doesn't, one can hate LLMs with a passion and still not want features they don't use take 20GB of the storage they paid a premium for.
GNOME is a project whose manifesto is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck", for a very specific value of not sucking roughly equivalent to "Let's make Unix into a shitty version of Windows". I'm picking on GNOME because its development psychology has infested the Linux ecosystem, yielding horrors like NetworkManager, dbus, frickin' systemd, et weary cetera. There's a sense that Unix-style composability, modularity, and (conceptual) simplicity is something that has to be hidden from the poor end user, but the people who are implementing the means to do so lack the organizational competence to pull it off. So the absolute state of things for Linux desktop use in 2026 is a tradeoff between jank and brokenness on the one hand and being exposed to Linux's technical underside on the other. I don't mind so much because I've never minded getting technical. I'm the kind of guy who still logs in at the VT console and types 'startx' to get a graphical session going because I came up on early Linux and appreciate being reminded of what underlies that UI convenience. And it sure beats being stuck on Windows or Mac, where it works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't you often can do little but shrug your shoulders and say "wellp, them's the breaks".[1] And that's before adding in AI cruft, advertisements, mandatory online accounts and vendor spyware.
The price to pay for having a hot rod is a lack of a luxury interior from the finest Swiss craftsmen. But a) you have a hot rod; b) it won't sell your driving data to insurance companies!
[1] In the 90s I heard stories from hackers about normies who just kind of assumed that computers were flaky, fragile machines that lost your work every now and then and needed to be restarted at least once a day in order to function. And when they heard of Linux or FreeBSD, their minds were blown because they didn't know computers could do that. But the computer wasn't flaky or fragile; Windows 9x was.
While I have no aversion to CLI use, editing config files, etc where that is the best way to do things, my introduction to computing was Classic Mac OS. As such my platonic ideal OS looks a lot like Classic Mac OS without its well-known weaknesses: practically nothing is hidden or obfuscated away from the user, the filesystem is laid out for humans before computers and is easily navigable by even non-technical users, GUI control panels are treated as canonical configuration rather than a loosely bolted-on layer, and extending and customizing the system is as simple as moving files in/out of designated directories (e.g. /System Folder/Extensions/).
It’s a vastly different mindset than is found on any *nix-based system, and as well as modern macOS works for me even it still doesn’t meet that standard.
Keep it working
Forget about it
That is me on Debian.
Gentoo is quite a bit more work to get set up than other distros, but
* Once you get it set up, it just keeps on going
* If you're already fairly familiar with Linux system administration, the setup process isn't hard... it just involves a lot of waiting, unless you use the distro-provided precompiled packages
* There's really good documentation that walks you through the installation process and leaves you with a computer with a functioning bootloader and kernel, Internet access, and some pointers towards what you might want to install next
Networking protocols, connections, error states, etc are inherently complex and require equally sophisticated handling that linux may not always do. Some software chooses not to handle at all and expose directly to the user - but others like KDE simply lack the millions of dev-hours of polish that Windows and Mac have.
As for KDE polish, the only reason that’s true is because of someone’s choice to not put energy toward that part of the desktop.
Linux needs polish for sure, but given a finite amount of time, energy, and money the reasons are likely more complicated than "they don't care"
While /technically/ still true, I lament that it is increasingly inapplicable to the world around us today.
If you don't like something on a proprietary OS, you can save a lot of time by having no way to change it and suffering the problems permanently.
I was forced to the file explorer on Windows, and the file explorer was good so I didn't mind. I was also forced to use MS Paint. And it was good for a long time, until they added layers. Now my primary use case of it (pasting an image and cropping it) doesn't work as well as it used to.
On Linux I don't even have that choice. There are choices, yes, but none of them do what I want anyway.
What truly drives me insane is that if you say "I just want what Windows does" people tell you that it's not Windows, it's "different(tm)." Then you ask why do Linux software sucks in comparison to Windows, and you get told "well, it's because Windows has $ to spend in R&D." So it's double-think. Developers are aware proprietary software spends tons of money they don't have in R&D, and yet they shy away from just copying the results because they don't want to be Windows.
I just want Windows, but with freedom. I don't want "different" if it's not going to be better.
By this, do you mean that interfaces created will get their IP addresses via DHCP, but will ignore DHCP-provided DNS & etc servers?
If so, given how incredibly insane that is to be a default, there's no way that the wizard is doing that. Given my past experience with NetworkManager, I expect NetworkManager made a batshit-crazy backwards-incompatible change and didn't bother to tell anyone. I know that that doesn't fix your problem, but maybe it will encourage you to find out how to stop using this fantastically complex network management software that you don't even need and is clearly maintained by a pack of ADHD-addled clowns.
EDIT: And no, I'm very aware that this does nothing but reinforce your point that some of the components that the major Linux distros are using are nothing but boxes of razor blades. I guess I'm just lucky that I came across Gentoo Linux a quarter-century ago.
Sometimes CLI utility help commands fill the gap, but often they’re too spartan or don’t even exist.
I see this as IBM/RedHat is a better steward/maintainer than other projects.
I think GNOME gets some things more correct (it has a much better grip on design for instance), but I don’t agree with its strictly-minimalist philosophy that makes the macOS desktop look full-featured in comparison.
XFCE and Cinnamon are probably the closest to striking the right balance as far as I’m concerned (and are boring in a good way) but sadly they don’t get a fraction of the development resources that the big guys get.
These vaguely threatening LLM promoter comments are almost like cultish "believe in $DEITY or you'll go to $PERDITION" preaching. It's just freaky.
I'm genuinely wondering what goes through their minds when they post this.
On the other side of the fence, the aversion to using the tool seems equally cultish, like not working on the Sabbath.
If it makes you feel any better, I don't think this tech is "AGI" and that it seems to have some fundamental limitations that make it perform worse than a 3-year-old can perform on many tasks. But it's foolish to avoid something that could cause you to be replaced by some idiot that can do untold damage with just a few prompts, all because you didn't (assuming you work in tech) want to stay on top of the tools available to you.
Bad or not as good?
For many people not as good can be good enough.
For instance I am mostly working from home, and will never spend more than 6 hours straight without a pause nor do I work "on the road" so I never cared about having a +11h of battery life. I understand it can be very valuable in some circonstances but it has never been a thing for me and for many people using their laptop mostly at home. I wouldn't trade having a forced siri install or the shitty keyboard that used to come with macbook a few years ago for more battery life than I actually need.
You're unique! Also I hear what you're saying about the vast choice of laptops available with amazing Linux compatibility
I don't think so. Critics are usually more vocals than people who have no issues.
My grandmother used linux for years without issue in the late 90's, my ex inherited a computer from me 16 years ago and was still using Linux last I checked 7 years ago, having migrated from slackware to ubuntu on her own without being a particularly tech savy person. She had no wish to get back on windows as it just worked without getting in the way. My current wife migrated to linux without realizing it when the hard drive on her laptop died, she only figured it out when she realized icons of her office suite were different. Using an immutable distro has been painless for her so far in 3 years, same for my daughters, as update are done in the background and system boot simply to new image when started up. I am not even doing any maintenance, just checking once every few full moons that the auto update is still working (which is the case).
> Also I hear what you're saying about the vast choice of laptops available with amazing Linux compatibility
The irony is not lost when I consider this vast choice it is at least bigger than the choice of laptops[1] running macOS at any given time.
[1] currently 8 according to Apple's own comparison table separating model into line, then screen size and cpu.
A tiling window manager is a different concept.
I'm sorry but objectively macOS window management is wholly subpar compared to the options on Linux.
Rectangle is a literal hack on top that hopefully works when you need it. Rectangle is great, but Rectangle, Yabai and whatnot can only hope that the undocumented private APIs that macOS _allows_ them to use today don't mysteriously break tomorrow.
Meanwhile a Linux window manager actually does its full job unencumbered because it's a _real_ first class window manager and not a hack.
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And yeah, "It works – until it doesn't" is probably the most accurate statement that can be made about all technology. My original comment also can make it seem like I'm taking a dump on Linux, but my gripe is more about Linux desktop environments. Linux absolutely can be a really stable OS, but I've only been able to truly reach that for myself by compiling my own kernel and composing my own desktop environment from barely-related packages. This is where I totally relate to your sense of "fuck it, I don't care because it's mine." Maybe someday I'll end up completely switching to my own Linux OS.
This happened to me once with a Mac upgrade!
And it’s still fewer times than something has happened to one of my Linux machines, by an order of magnitude.
There are little annoyances with Macs and occasional frustrating problems, but after using them side by side with other operating systems for years it’s what I choose for the daily driver.
Most complaints come from people who have become familiar with one OS for a decade and then get angry when they use something else and it’s not the same as their familiar thing. There isn’t much value in those comparisons.
one was a permissions/capability issue, but the other was straight up performance. As someone said above, an AI agent drilled down on both workstreams immediately, so the pivot wasnt too rough
To use Linux on the desktop you first have to know about it for a start, so you are unlikely to end up with a linux OS without knowing anyone using it or an association/usergroup promoting it.
I had my parents on Linux for a hot second, and got tired of them calling me for help. So I switched them to Mac, and then I discovered they still call for help. At least with Linux I knew the system well.
Just my 0.02, but Linux is a smarter choice today than it ever was, because AI is extremely good at fixing things. I can fix most anything on my machines, but I still use AI, because it does it while I'm doing other stuff.
Are you unaware that they likely want to talk with you, and the technological issues are likely just the vehicle for this?
I suggest you just help them and try to savor the time you have with them. The time is likely a lot shorter then you expect. But of course, just a random bystanders perspective
Not the person you're responding to, but: They may want to learn to communicate honestly. I would find the situation described deeply irritating. Enough to cut contact for a while, even.
We lost the battle over “literally “ a decade ago and I’m not going to spend my time fighting a bunch of people who would rather scroll through 5 second videos all day than pick up a book.
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You think wrong.
I maintain multiple Linux system on the side an know about it well enough.
The Nvidia drivers however are not bios/uefi in case you didn't know. That's what firmware is.
Those can still be flashed from a root Linux booted into a graphical interface, but nonetheless were not the topic of discussion.
Aside from that - a borked kernel can still be easily recovered for most nowadays, as they usually keep the old versions around with a simple picker after an unsuccessful boot.
Still, I'm unable to grasp the point youre making in relation to what I said. I thought I was very explicitly recommending against people without any technological capability to use Linux... You seem to agree?
Anyway.
This thread spawned off of a discussion about how people still use Apple because though Linux may be easier than it's ever been it's still hard for anybody to run a Linux desktop system without occasional downtime and repair when something breaks. That was the point of the comment you initially responded to.
But, you missed it; you responded to:
"and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt"
with:
"well um axually you don't know what bricked means and that's probably a sign that you're too dumb to use linux. people who are too dumb to use linux shouldn't use it".
Even though we agree on the point, I felt like your response wasn't fair or really even apropos. So I replied. To be crystal clear:
1. they did fix their problem, but it was not a fun time for them. I can empathize 1000% with that. Sometimes I just want to do something and Linux (and everything I sign up for when deploying it) itself gets in the way. When an apt update causes a boot failure, irrespective of whether it's a failing driver or a borked firmware, it's annoying and it gets in the way. It's not an issue of technical literacy. You still have to figure out the issue and fix it which costs time and attention that is so scarce these days.
2. "bricked" has evolved colloquially to refer to a spectrum of failure modes covering everything from "the firmware is toast" to "user-space didn't come up". never mind that the author used the term "almost bricked" to indicated they knew it wasn't hard bricked but intended to communicate that it also wasn't functional. your entire attack stems from you rashly misinterpreting the author's intent here. but even if the author had demonstrated clear technically illiteracy, there's a way for you to add commentary about the definition of bricked without the distraction of attacking the person's technical aptitude. I think everyone knows it's almost impossible to inadvertently hard-brick anything these days
All in all, you, me, and the comment you initially replied to do seem to share the same understanding: to operate linux you need to have a level of tolerance to deal with the occasional issues that come with it. And for many (even technical) people that's not the right balance. Everything else you introduced to the discussion detracted from that point.
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You might not know this since your main language is spanish, but in America for the last 20 years every single linux engineering job gave me a macbook pro to work from. Big tech, small tech. And the one that didn't, they gave us chromebooks that everybody hated, but you weren't allowed to use apple there and don't you dare complain about the chromebooks because you knew they weren't going anywhere.
Me and my peers who don't live the richard stallman life expect a macbook pro as our work tool and wouldn't take a job somewhere that throws us a $1500 thinkpad or system76 or whatever to do our day jobs. We can have those at home.
My main language is not spanish either, and for the record spanish is used officially by 14% of the US population (and is estimated by 18% by other sources) so you are taking a lot of shortcuts to decide where I am and what is my main language.
> Me and my peers who don't live the richard stallman life expect a macbook pro and wouldn't take a job somewhere that throws us a $1500 thinkpad or system76 or whatever to do our day jobs. We can have those at home.
FWIW at the only job I got from a US tech company, we were given Dell laptops on which many dev installed linux. Company before that proposed Macs but many preferred linux running thinkpad due to the crappy experience at the time running docker on thermal throttling x86 macbooks.
So I smell a lot of uncalled for arrogance from your part. Personally I wouldn't expect a "work tool" that force install a local LLM model to fill up my hard drive and a has a barely usable desktop with stupid rounded corners acting weirdly.
The "work tools" had no twinkling of an installed LLM until this year. I've used Macbook pros at work for 15 years. I'm writing this on a $3500 macbook pro I bought myself and pissed about the LLM thing.
Completely irrelevant to the conversation until now.
And wow, shocking, you aren't working in American tech.
PS: Here in America, at real tech companies not the ones that let you do whatever you want to your corporate hardware, you wouldn't be allowed to install your own linux distro on a company laptop. You MIGHT be allowed to install their RHEL or something they've prepackaged with their own root accounts and spyware. You doing it yourself? That's an IT security violation straight to a fire just about everywhere that pays a real salary.
So instead of crying about me pointing out that you likely aren't American, maybe you should listen to the people in the field much longer than you who are much more experienced with the whole linux vs mac corporate thing. I will walk out the door if a USA tech company tries to hand me a dell. And now, what, I installed linux on it and have literally no IT support and have to fix my own laptop instead of donig my engineering job. I've was there 20 years ago, never again.
And no I didn't get fired from that US tech firm for installing Linux on my laptop, I actually asked about it during my interviews.
So in a US centric forum, most likely you'll find bilingual people that live in the US.
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I think a lot of the people who go on about Apple software quality are full of it, frankly. They either just don’t care or don’t notice the bugs.
Definitely windows. It often forgets things.
macOS has a 'service (priority) order':
* https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/05/service-please-manage-mul...
It's no different that having multiple default gateways in Linux (with different metric/priorities):
* https://superuser.com/questions/1600190/change-order-of-rout...
And when your default route changes so will the TCP connection end-points. This is mostly an issue when you have a stateful session, like SSH, and less so with 'bursty' traffic like web surfing or e-mail.
By default wired connections are higher priority. I've been on Wifi with a MacBook and patched in with the Network Settings panel open and see the change, which is reflected in the output of "netstat -rn". Underneath the hood most of the macOS kernel is (Free)BSD/Unix.
Until we get SCTP multihoming popularized this will generally be an issue on any operating system. Though it would perhaps be nice to perhaps have a socket (TCP) API flag to tell the kernel "keep me on the initial interface as long as it exists" so sessions don't flip over.
I'm not talking about sessions dropping. It has the symptoms of an IP conflict, absolutely no traffic can pass until I disable Wi-Fi. Any other laptop I have ever used would just switch, maybe drop an SSH session, but not this.
I've been regularly plugging/unplugging my usb-c docking connected to ethernet while being on teams video call without issues on both linux and windows but ultimately it depends on the protocol. Web/https stuff is usually more forgiving thanks to sessions being maintained "externally" from the protocol itself. Copying files via sftp be a different experience I reckon because you usually use a different source ip address when you switch and need to initiate a new connection.
Idk. about desktop Linux, but my phone does the (WLAN -> Mobile) switch just fine.
If it's about _not reconnecting_ (e.g. which for many apps might require some manual pause/resume of streamed data or similar), then things are more complex as you can't keep your IP, so it then depends on weather the application uses HTTP3/Quick or similar protocols in implementations which are designed to be able to freely roll over to different IP addresses.
So both yes and no :)
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>> > and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
is for how how to have a reliable acceptable Linux experience and I have less issues with rare occasional hick ups then I had on Windows and Mac in the past. But that is long ago. Through just looking at all the AD/snooping issues, how often windows seem to have broken updates etc. this is way nicer on Linux and seem to be still not worse on Linux then Mac.
> > but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues
the example here with my gaming setup _doesn't_ require "have enough Linux know-how",
after the initial setup it so far just did works
The initial setup was just running a trivial install + ~2 simple to do and find through search, but should-be-unneeded initial tweaks (both Steam specific).
through I currently happen to only care about games both available on Steam and running on Linux without Linux specific manual setup/tweaks (like Silk Song, Nine Sols, Detroit Become Human (but all native 4k)). And it's all AMD and no "unusual" consumer hardware components.
I bounced around between Windows and Linux on my personal computers for the last 20 years. Generally I'd run Linux until something died or I needed Windows, and I'd return for a bit. I've been exclusively using Linux since 2019 or so. I don't think I'm going back.
Could it be due to a poor support of Linux by these proprietary apps? Possibly even intentional.
I don't know about the app but it has been a solved problem on linux using the web browser early in 2020 when people started getting sent home due to the covid and remaining bugs were quickly ironed out.
I think to remember that the most absurd thing was that if you tell Teams "this is chrome" (even when it's FF) it did work just fine.
For example, this teapot has bad UX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things#...
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In comparison, both MacOS and Windows look more amateur with some leftovers not translated. (Like "Windows Update" on Windows for example)
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I find the Mac better for scrolling, clicking, gestures and zooming. It’s rejection of eg palm input and the size of the touch pad are great.
Gesture is more an OS functionnality but I am not sure how a trackpad can be better or worse for scrolling or clicking. You slide 2 fingers, it scrolls right? you click (or rather tap these days), it clicks? right? Can a trackpad click "less" or even "scroll less"?
OK maybe some handle better wet fingers, that is maybe the weak point of my current trackpad.
I laughed. I have a work HP machine. The click is only available on the bottom half or third of the trackpad, with no visual indication of the area. It takes a strong push. It’s bad. The scroll is shiite too.
When you get one that doesn’t work right, you really miss a good one.
It's annoyingly non-deterministic.
I've never had a laptop mouse button ever break down on me.
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Microsoft has Meta+ and Alt+ combinations dime a dozen, and it's consistent across versions. KDE has extensive programmability which allows you to design you own. Both allows you to pack so many features into a small number of keys and work across applications or in general without thinking.
A terminal? It appears. A window? You call it without thinking. Ran out of space, a new desktop is just an instinct...
It's just that mishmash of OSFMK (with BSD APIs of 1991 or so) with random additions of newer APIs does not necessarily make it a great Unix to work with in 2026
They buy macOS and then complain macOS isn't Linux, duh!
How far we’ve fallen from the “it just works” era of Apple.
They can’t even make a JSON reader, and require their users to understand the jargon generated by third-parties training on your personal Apple data.
One of primary reasons people value online privacy is because advertisers are incessantly “nudging” them to do things that aren’t in their interest.
It’s exhausting.
People don’t want to be nudged. They want to be respected.
But it is what Apple and others do, and what the conversation is about. Sounds like you want what everyone else does (a “no”) but are just arguing over the specific wording of the message.
And as I said in my first post, "Ask me again later" and the associated behaviour is annoying.
I was agreeing with you that indeed, I don't want software to bother me again with the question unprompted. Additionally, I appreciate the reassurance that the dialog isn't my last opportunity to set the setting (because sometimes that is the case).
So tl;dr: label the button "Not now", and don't prompt me again.
Only "ask me again later" is the one that prompts you again. That's why I do mind that one, and appreciate the other ones.
I don't know if enabling KLAC in Linux can happen without opening nasty doors for other software. If it existed, perhaps one could have different kernels to boot into: One for the invasive software that one boots into for gaming and a secure kernel for normal work, perhaps even with different userspaces.
Ideally you would be free to not play KLAC games, and I would be free to play KLAC games. I just hope for the option one day, as I would very much like to make the move to Linux.
Play single player games, then you can complain about cheating AI opponents.
I've watched people play slot machines. They sit there and pump money into the machine for no real benefit to themselves. Why are video games any different to that?
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People who enjoy reading get the same dopamine reaction from that as people who enjoy video games. Or slot machines.
The difference with slot machines is that the purpose of them is solely to tie that dopamine release to giving away money predicated on deception (specifically, both by not disclosing actual odds, and by lying about them).
A slot game that requires no money to play isn't a problem, because it's not tricking old people into giving away their pensions.
When your grandkids ask you what you did with your finite time, is "I pwned noobs" the answer you want to give?
You are being ridiculous. First, unless the person was a professional gamer they would probably answer with the time they spend at work and time time they spend raising their family. But let's assume the grandkids specifically asked what they did for entertainment.
The answer would then be something like "I got together with my friends and we played the popular online games together". They would probably also mention any other things they did a lot of entertainment, too.
I don't want kernel level anti-cheat, though. All the games with it have cheaters anyway.
True story: I know a woman who built a relationship with her tween nephew on the other side of the world mainly by playing Fortnite with him ever week for two years - all for free because she never bought a skin.
However, KVM does not solve the problem. In fact, Riot explicitly explains why virtualisation can make the problem worse: if Vanguard runs inside a guest, a cheat can run on the host and manipulate the VM in ways the anti-cheat cannot see. Riot says Linux currently does not give it sufficient ability to attest the boot state or kernel modules, with distro differences making the problem harder.
Linux also deliberately does not provide a stable in-kernel ABI for proprietary out-of-tree drivers. The kernel documentation explicitly says there is neither a stable binary kernel interface nor a stable internal kernel interface. The preferred model is for drivers to be upstreamed and maintained with the kernel, which is almost the opposite of how closed-source kernel anti-cheat is normally deployed.
And this isn't just Riot. EA actually supported EAC through Proton for Apex and then removed Linux access because its anti-cheat team said Linux was being used for impactful cheats, that Linux cheats were harder to detect, and that they couldn't reliably distinguish a legitimate Steam Deck from a malicious Linux client pretending to be one.
Valve itself tells developers that Proton's recommended solution is user-space anti-cheat and that kernel-space anti-cheat is “not currently supported and is not recommended”.
So I guess it's technically possible for a game dev to effectively create their own Linux distro, but I hope we agree that's never going to happen. They're game devs, not Linux devs. Anti-cheat needs a trust chain that the hostile user cannot control and not just an API through which it can inspect the system. Linux deliberately gives the machine owner far more control over the kernel and environment, which is exactly what makes strong client-side attestation difficult.
FYI bhyve isn't a Linux hypervisor. It's part of FreeBSD.
Why would a game developer have the power to approve what I boot on my hardware?
Especially a peddler of live service free to play.
> I want to clarify to anyone reading this that this only effects high-competitive games, like LoL, Valorant, PUBG, R6S; and not all of them (e.g. Counter Strike).
It affected a game I really care about: Arc Raiders. That's not a "high-competitive" game. It's PvPvE, shooting at funny robots and scavenging rubber duckies. Cheating killed the game. [It's down to 6% of its peak.](https://steamcharts.com/app/1808500#All) Just because this hasn't affected the games you love doesn't mean it's not affecting many games. See Titanfall, H1Z1, and The Cycle: Frontier, among many more.
> It does not affect "multiplayer" in general, to the contrary, most multiplayer games are not affected (coop games, MMOs, RTS).
I was going to ask you to back that up, but I realise I made a broad claim and can also not back it up, so we're just giving each other our opinions, I suppose.
> Ofc, cheating is also present with KLAC, its just the next level of the cat and mouse game (Driver exploits, DMA access via PCIe, Network Packet analysis, ...)
Indeed. The goal is to reduce cheating to a manageable level. It is impossible to eliminate.
> Nonsense. 1. Almost no anticheat is implemented on Linux in the first place. Most "working" anti-cheat solutions for Linux are just a #if Linux doNothing(); #else ... 2. KLAC requires SecureBoot/ChainOfTrust + closed source code running with highest privileges. This does not make sense for any PC, but I dont see why it would be harder to do on Linux than on Windows, Linux just has a smaller install base in general and a lower acceptance rate for KLAC, therefore its not worth it to implement.
Linux does not properly support KLAC because its architecture and development philosophy work against it. For example, Valve explicitly recommends user-space anti-cheat for Proton and says kernel-space anti-cheat is “not currently supported and is not recommended”.
The Linux kernel also deliberately does not provide a stable binary kernel-driver interface. Kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has said that Linux has neither a stable in-kernel API nor a stable binary kernel interface, because maintainers want the freedom to change kernel internals rather than permanently support proprietary out-of-tree drivers.
Riot is on the record as explaining that Linux does not give Vanguard sufficient ability to attest boot state and kernel modules. They also claim that distribution differences make enforcement harder, and that cheats can potentially operate outside an emulated environment where the anti-cheat cannot see them. Riot is on the record saying that anti-cheat is “extremely hard on Linux by design”.
So you're technically correct, but I think you misunderstand a lot of the architecture which underpins this issue, and the ideological boundaries which many developers prefer to enforce around security, FOSS, and ownership.
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| I would like to respond because you're speaking authoritatively but this is mostly your opinion. | Indeed. The goal is to reduce cheating to a manageable level. It is impossible to eliminate. - dont trust the client
- really dont trust the client
- support / let customers host the servers (they are the ones who will put in the time required to deal with cheaters, and they will also be there once the devs/publisher have abandoned a game)
- Use statistics a lot more: mark outliers for review, and until review, aggressively move them to their own matchmaking bracket.
- Implement a "demo"-style replay format for matches/sessions (which therefore contains all inputs of all parties). Make all "ranked" or eq. matches publicly available (no names/chat, just the gameplay) and people will develop tools in their free time to detect cheaters.
To be clear, I welcome the attempt, but I think it just results in the same cat and mouse arms race we've seen for 20 years. Inference has been beaten time and time again. Until it is proven to work I will stick with the best options we have right now.
It's fair to argue I have no evidence of the cause of decline. I cite my frequent interactions with hundreds of players in the community, and streamers like Burnt Peanut. However this is qualitative, not quantitative. Me and my friends stopped playing because of the cheating, and so did every other one of my friends who picked it up. It wasn't that we wanted to stop playing the game. It was the cheating.
If you meant the lastest of the latest GPU, processor, chipset and so you you might better off with Linux.
But the fact that the computer that was given to me was boxed from factory and bought after two weeks after started is a sign of recent hardware. I haven't tried it but two other person where I work have high end brand new ThinkPads and I'm confident FreeBSD can be run on those well too.
| Ryzen 7 and an AMD GPUIf Zen3+ vs Zen3 is a significant architectural difference, than it would slightly miss the 5 year mark, since it was released 4.5 years ago.
The laptop mentioned is fine. But it is hardware that is just at that mark where I'd normally replace it.
As I said, I think it's still OK if my goal is to run FreeBSD. But if my goal is to get the best hardware now that will last me the next 3-5 years then it's dated and I'll have to compromise just to be able to use FreeBSD with it. I don't have to do that with Linux.
I think if I am going to compromise on hardware because I want a particular OS on it, it'll probably be Haiku over one of the BSDs because I don't get the sense BSD offers enough of a difference vs Linux to justify that compromise.
> I find the GPL to be hypocritical in the way it restricts freedom while talking about promoting freedom. If I'm giving a gift to the commons, then I want it to be a true gift, not something with strings attached.
The right to free speech is a freedom too, yet it has strings attached. Namely it's no longer a freedom the moment it crosses a certain line into endangering someone else and their freedoms. That's sort of the view the GPL takes, but it gets into how different political philosophies view the concept of freedom. Is it freedom to pay whatever the free market (in practice monopolies) demand for commodities critical to survival (BSD view of freedom) or is it freedom not to have to worry about not being able to afford commodities critical to survival (GPL view of freedom).
I do agree the BSD freedoms is simpler to grasp.
> It hurts nobody if someone chooses to make a closed source fork - software is a non-rivalrous good, so whatever someone else does cannot take away the free version that I have provided
True in theory, trickier in practice. 'It hurts nobody' only goes so far because if a closed source fork starts collecting telemetry then it actively hurts its users, unless very much opt in. Now how many average computer users are going to know that there's an open version that doesn't do that? A small number. Trickier still, because the fork is closed, it's likely going to be quite hard to replace it or block the telemetry, at least without loosing some features. So again, the difference is in what is viewed as the commons. BSD views the commons as everyone, including capital interests best in a position to take that the software and twist it into a tool in the ongoing war on general purpose computing, ability to repair etc. GPL views the commons as the users, so it aims to grants freedoms to them, even at the cost of restricting the freedom of capital in the process.
In short, I do understand and even appreciate the BSD concept of freedom and its simplicity, yet I find it insufficient to protect my freedom in a system full of monopoly power, corruption and exploitation.
In an ideal world where the behaviour the GPL aims to protect doesn't exist, I'd agree the BSD is more free. In the current world, I'd argue that BSD gives freedom to exploit computer users to those with the means to do so.
I had a surface laptop, it was fine, not as good as a MacBook imo.
Had a razer laptop, it was good, got very hot though.
Had an X1 Carbon Extreme that I liked, wasn’t as good build quality or screen or camera or trackpad as my MBP from work at the time though, was still expensive af.
What are you thinking of that’s better than a MacBook Pro?
In reality, I think it's well understood that 95%+ of customers (for Apple, Google and Microsoft) don't make any evaluation of device quality. They buy whatever they see their peers use, because they want to identify with the [luxury|convenience|hardworking] lifestyle of their comrades and idols: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
That’s incorrect, because I never said that everybody buys a computer because of hardware quality, or any other reason. All I said was that Apple has great hardware and it’s part of the reason for their success.
Dell, Lenovo, HP sell more units than Apple, but they likely don’t make more profit on that segment of their business.
Their hardware is really good, their software is fine — at least as good as all the others to the average user I think, the integration between their products is good, and their marketing is obviously top tier.
I don’t think they’d be as successful if their products were not premium hardware.
I’d love an arm based laptop with a great screen and trackpad running Linux for work.
The Apple experience is enshitifying at all levels and becoming consistently intrusive. I'm perpetually nagged about a 3 month trial of Apple Music I will never use and have zero interest in. Music player launches when I get in the car, even though I don't want it to. Apple Maps persistently asks me if I want a quick route home, when I don't. Apple TV repeatedly runs trailers for Apple Shows I have no interest in.
Apple '26 gave the world the much-loathed and objectively pointless Liquid Glass. iOS27 has some idiotically obvious bugs and usability issues. Parts of the hardware remain world-leading, but the software is getting less and less humane while pretending to be the opposite.
And IME the app that launches in the car is the last app you had open. Open Apple Maps and then it shouldn't launch Music every time.
Liquid Glass was one person, who thankfully has already left. iOS 7 was the same deal, terrible at launch.
I do agree that the services are pretty bad. Like, advertising Apple's new pet movie through the fucking Wallet app? Should be straight to jail.
Are there actually people who claim this? Microsoft has plenty of money but the premise that they use it to improve the user experience seems contrary to evidence.
When something sucks on Linux with no alternatives it's usually because most people don't use the feature you want, e.g. because there is another way to do the same thing and more people are doing it that way, and then no one bothers to make thing you want because their desire to have that is already being satisfied by something else.
Of course, one of the choices you have is to build the thing you want yourself, which is why it works out that way. The chances of someone having done that go up the more people want it to exist. When the number is low, you have to decide if you want it enough for the person who makes it for everyone to be you. And it's fine if your answer is no, but now you know why that thing doesn't exist.
No amount of experience using GUIs stops me from about 40% of the time I don't already know how to do something having to find a youtube video that explains what arcane path I need to take through a menu to find a setting, and if the menus have changed I might have to find the part of the video that explains what I'm looking for, watch it, realize it's changed, and hope I can find a more recent one. This goes for both native and web applications, for mobile and desktop, for every operating system I've ever touched. Sometimes there's a text explanation I can find, usually via a web search or llm. Sometimes I can guess at where something might be (Tools > Preferences? Wait maybe it's settings? Is this one a view setting? Hamburger menu? O wait no that one's in account settings. Ah, that one's under a different specific tab because the org that makes the software considers it an integration and also they A/B tested that it's more discoverable in this other place so they moved it since the youtube video I saw about it). On a web browser it's helpful to be able to dig into the page via debug consoles, sometimes I can search for some string I know is the name of the setting, or a value that's probably currently set. I can do all that, if necessary, but I'm certainly not comfortable claiming it's "easier"
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
As for tmux, I know UNIX since 1993, went through Xenix, DG/UX, Solaris, NeXTSTEP before GNU/Linux started to take off, worked across Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, OS/X before GNU/Linux really took off.
To this day I don't care tmux exists, just open a couple of terminal windows.
If you are going to mention jobs across sessions, nohup does the job.
And it doesn’t really help the user. If I click “Not now” and later decide that I do want the feature, how do I find it? If you want to reassure the user, just say that:
Enable cool new feature X?
(You can always change this in System Settings → Y.)
[ Sure ] [ No, thanks ]But we're comparing to the case where it just says "No", in which case "Not now" at least tells me I can look up how to change it later now - or more importantly, that I don't need to give this further thought now.
Yes, PMs (or anyone) making software doing dumb shit is dumb anyway, but that also holds true if it were labelled "No".
If you choose to play Windows-only games because you think that is protecting you from some nebulous group of cheaters who moved to Linux to aid their cheating, I think you don't know the cheat landscape well.
Cheat makers primarily operate on Windows, not because it's easier, but because that's what most players still use. This idea that you're going to avoid cheaters by staying on Windows is honestly the opposite of true. MP games with Linux clients are not the games with massive cheating problems.
What skills? I don't think there's anything complex about button mashing to make blinking lights blink differently.
I do not believe a hobby needs to yield social value. I believe it is sufficient to derive enjoyment from the activity itself. You don’t need to personally enjoy my hobbies, just as I don’t imagine I would enjoy yours.
I'd say it's less reductive and more the objective reality.
> I do not believe a hobby needs to yield social value
I didn't say anything about social value. I'm talking about value to you individually.
I don't think you've answered that question. I don't see there is any value. I think you're pushing buttons to make the blinking lights blink differently, just like a slot machine.
So just like loot boxes in video games.
> A slot game that requires no money to play isn't a problem
So similarly you should only be playing opensource and freeware video games that aren't designed to extract money from you.
> So similarly you should only be playing opensource and freeware video games that aren't designed to extract money from you.
"Paying to purchase a game", and "paying to wager money on or in a game" are 2 different things.
I'd also have no issue with someone buying an actual slot machine to sit in their house, so they put in money but also keep the money they put in. But people don't do that because they're not playing for the gameplay, they're playing for the gamble.
Sure, let me just quickly hop on a plane to australia to meet with some. I assume youre paying?
> When your grandkids ask you what you did with your finite time, is "I pwned noobs" the answer you want to give?
Yes? What kind of question is that? Youre just gonna start talking about the value you created for shareholders or your business?
The question is what value are video games. The answer seems to be "not much".
They look much more like addictive distractions than anything valuable.
Feel free to list out all of your hobbies and what you do in your free time and we will all critique it for you.
Ultimately, everyone spends their time on what they enjoy; there's no award when you die for doing more x than y while you were alive.
I enjoy playing games, gardening, and riding motorcycles. My cousin enjoys socializing at bars, playing games, and doing woodwork.
Is one of our hobby sets more legitimate than the other's?
How are video games a hobby? Is playing slot machines also a hobby?
What's the difference between video games and slot machines? They look real similar to me.
Video games don't even appear to be productive of good discussion.
Why are you trying so hard to "prove" that someone's hobby is a waste of time?
ImO, the goal is to find the statistic cheaters will skew since they are cheating.
Lets say, one is wall-hacking in Counter-Strike. In Counter-Strike, many maps have a central location/lane called "mid". There is often a kind of mind-game of limited information going on:
- Does 0, 1, or both teams have an AWP(=one-shot kill sniper)
- Is the enemy sniper guarding mid?
- Which entrance to mid is the enemy sniper currently watching?
- Has the enemy sniper guarded mid in the beginning, but has now left?
If you can accurately dissect/classify/log player behavior, I expect the statistics to look similar to those of poker players who cheat and know the cards of the other players on the table: https://media.pokertube.com/uploads/2025/12/5d96fe17d39043a0...
But I don't know since I don't play Arc. I'm just aware of a number of other games rife with cheating that remain wildly popular.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/716490/EXAPUNKS/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1989270/Slay_the_Princess...
As others have said, why don't you list out your hobbies (as I did mine), so we can understand exactly what recreational activities you think constitute "valid" hobbies? That will also make it easier for me to explain the difference between video games and slot machines to you.
That's the question. What is the reason?
People also play slot machines. Are slot machines fulfilling?
