I’ve been using Linux for quite a while now. While not everything is perfect,
You don’t have to upsell me Linux, I’m already sold however I do use both Linux, Windows and macOS at work and home and notice the subtle differences when it comes to a polished experience and cohesion - Windows is the worst on cohesion as expected.
And which kind of cohesion on the desktop are you missing and I don’t? I mean sure, Apple has one big ecosystem with everything tied to it. It is convenient and easy as long as you’re within that one ecosystem. And Linux for example doesn’t sell an operating system and online services and software
I’m not talking about ecosystems, I’m talking about the small annoyances from icons that don’t have a consistent looking across apps on Linux to for instance whenever I want to add a VLAN instead of doing it on GNOME Settings (gnome-control-center) I’m forced to use nm-connection-editor that is a different application. Settings are kind of scattered around. The same happened with Wireguard VPNs for a while…
Flatpak isn’t something tightly integrated into the system and it isn’t Linux’s default choice
It does use a lot of the same containerization technologies that Docker, LXC etc. use such as cgroups, namespaces and bind mounts. To me it seems more like the higher levels are missing pieces to facilitate communication between applications (be it protocols, code or documentation) and sometimes it is as simple as configuration.
Additionally I have the command line where everything ties into another superbly. It follows the unix philosophy. That means I have tools that are supposed to do one task, but do that task well. And then I have a simple means of connecting them, concatenating them and it makes things really easy. I don’t know how Apple does stuff.
Apple also has it, macOS is a UNIX system for what’s worth and that’s the reason why a large number of developers use it instead of Windows. The cli tools you use under Linux are most likely available for macOS as well via brew.sh.
To be fair Apple actually does a decent job when it comes to connect things as they even created a programming language called Apple Script that as made specifically so you can automated macOS GUI applications easily. On Linux this can be done with strongwind (deprecated?), dogtail (dead?), xdotool but those tools are sloppy and hard to use.
In AppleScript you can access the native APIs of macOS GUIs and simulate a user clicking on buttons and menus, you can also tell it to record some action on the GUI and it will translate it to code.
Recently Apple even made their macOS GUIs automations available from JavaScript and you can do the exact same things you used to be able to do from AppleScript in JavaScript. They actually invested so much into that you can even build entire macOS desktop apps using the typical UI components and frameworks Apple provides with JavaScript.
a game that isn’t available for Mac or you’re forced to use Microsoft Access or other specific software for work? Or you want to watch Virtual Reality pornography and that happens to be something the app store cuts down on?
There’s a difference between macOS and iOS. What your described is what happens in iOS - you’re required to use the store and whatnot, but under macOS you can get applications from anywhere you want like you do on Window and Linux.
You just can’t compare specifically Flatpak to the way Apple does it. It is something that is focused on decoupling things from the system, not integrate them
Apple does enforce a LOT of separation. they call it sandboxed apps and it is all based on capabilities, you may enjoy reading this. Applications get their isolated space at ~/Library/Containers and are not allowed to just write to any file system path they want.
A sandboxed app may even think it is writing into a system folder for preference storage for example - but the system rewrites the path so that it ends up in the Container folder instead. For example under macOS apps typically write their data to ~/Library/Application Support. A sandboxed app cannot do that - and the data is instead written beneath the ~/Library/Containers/app-id path for that app.
And here’s how good Apple is, any application, including 3rd party tools running inside your Terminal will be restricted:
I bet you weren’t expecting that a simple ls would trigger the sandbox restrictions applied to the Terminal application. The best part is that instead of doing what Flatpak does (just blocking things and leaving the user unable to to anything) the system will prompt you for a decision.
I would really like Linux to step up their game regarding a few things. Desktop application sandboxing and distribution is one thing. If you use Flatpak for this, the blame is on you. It is not the solution I’d like to see. And it is not the intended way of using Linux, so you can’t really complain. We need a proper solution instead.
But okay I see your point. Still believe that Flatpak could’ve done a few things better just by looking at what Apple does.
Half of the success of Windows and macOS is the fact that they provide solid and stable APIs and development tools that “makes it easy” to develop to those platforms. Linux is very bad at that. If major pieces of an OS are constantly changing and it requires large re-works of the applications then developers are less likely to support it. To be fair the Linux situation might be even harder than that - there are no distribution “sponsored” IDE (like Visual Studio or Xcode) and userland API documentation, frameworks etc.
If Linux is able to provide those things we may even get proprietary software like Adobe on Linux because let’s face it the lack of Adobe and others is also Linux’s fault, not only on those companies. It is really fucking hard to develop and support software for Linux when you’ve to deal with at least two major half-assed desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) and one of them decides to reinvent the wheel every now breaking APIs with little to no regard for software. To make things worse you’ll end up finding out that most of the time people are running KDE + a bunch of GNOME/GTK/libadwaita components creating a Frankenstein of a system because some specific App depends on said components.