As a long-term Linux user, I have been forced on occasion over the last few years to use MacOS. I am at an almost complete loss as to what anyone sees in it. Standard utilities that work seamlessly on Linux are regularly broken, there's a weird security system that requires me to do all sorts of boot-time nonsense just to have control over my own machine... and now, apparently, they're violating the first rule of kernel development by breaking userspace.

The hardware is nice, but as a platform, I just don't get it.

I've been using Linux regularly for 20+ years at this point, since Debian Slink. I've used it on gigantic servers, workstations, laptops, and embedded devices – it's wonderful.

But my day-to-day development machine is a Mac, and has been for a long time. This was originally because I was both a graphic designer and a developer, and needed access to tools like Photoshop and InDesign while still having a UNIX development environment, and the Mac was great at both of these. This basically still applies – I have access to lots of really well-designed native applications that I use all the time, and a full UNIX development environment that I use every day.

I really haven't encountered the issues you talk about in a serious way – the most frequent thing is forgetting that I don't have the GNU version of some CLI tools and need to use different flags. Certainly no encounters with a "weird security system". I have a working development environment, running on nice hardware, that gives me access to everything I want – it's hard to find a reason to make a change to this.

I do sometimes come back to working with Linux in a desktop capacity – most recently Ubuntu on a NUC when I shipped my MacBook back for repair. It is broadly fine, but it's still just a bit more irritating. Multiple monitor support was buggy, as was high-DPI support and Bluetooth. No doubt a different distribution and/or some tweaking could resolve these issues and leave me with a development environment that was equivalent to what I already have – but I'd still be missing other tools that I like, not to mention all the niceties of the wider ecosystem.

Honestly it's more likely to be the hardware that makes me change. I don't have the same complaints as others do about recent product lines, but I'm definitely one of those people in Apple's market gap in the "high-end-non-workstation-non-integrated-desktop" area. I'd fork quite a lot of money for something like a 16-core desktop machine, but probably not the £8k Apple wants for the Mac Pro. We'll see what happens over the next few years though.

> Certainly no encounters with a "weird security system"

You didn't use mac during the notarization system outage? I coulndn't even use my keyboard and mouse (the one on macbook, NOT bluetooth one) for 2-5 minutes after lid was opened.

Never had such issue with Linux, yeah, bluetooth ones might stop working but wired keyboard (or laptop open) works always.

Yesterday out of the blue my wifes AirPods Pro stopped working with macbook AND iPhone at the same time - they rejected connection (or actually on mac it looked like they are connected but the sound was coming out of speakers not the pods) and the same situation with iPhone. I had to reset AirPods to make it work.

And don't get me started on the completly stupid difference between ctrl+c and cmd+c. One (the standard for everything except macos) is used in terminal and the other in every other app.

For me macbook would be great for one thing: installing Linux on it, if it only had the ctrl key in the correct place (that is at the left corner of the keyboard not next to Fn).

> You didn't use mac during the notarization system outage?

This has happened literally once in the history of macOS.

> And don't get me started on the completly stupid difference between ctrl+c and cmd+c.

Ctrl-C and Cmd-C are completely different actions. What is weird is that some OSes use the same keyboard combination for them.

You know, this is about the one thing I do like about macOS. Cmd+C/V should indeed be the universal sequence for copy/paste.

I particularly hate the way GNOME terminal uses Shift+Ctrl+C/V for this, because if you accidentally hit Shift+Ctrl+C in Chrome then it opens Developer Tools.