Hehe, yeah I see. I can agree to a lot of that. Maybe I should try a Mac for once and for more than 20 minutes. I think I mostly read the iPhone stuff and shake my head. How they force developers to buy a Mac, restrict the whole iPhone ecosystem. I don’t think I’d feel at home on a platform like that
Concerning the Macbooks: I’ve recently learned about their M2 and M3 Macbooks and their outstanding performance at some workloads. For example people doing machine learning (AI) stuff on them. And the numbers of tokens an LLM can process/generate on them is on a whole other level than what my Intel machine does. I think Apple did a good job with that hardware. However they cost so much more… I can get a very decent frame.work laptop with a modern Ryzen for $2.070 or buy a new Macbook for $3.400 with a bit less RAM and the same amount of storage. It’d be faster at a singular workload i’m somewhat interested in. But I’m not sure if it is worth that kind of money.
And I think I’m about to get old. I’m accustomed to how Linux works, I know my way around, have my workflow set up. I’m not sure if I can be bothered to learn something new… Exchange the little annoyances for something that requires me to adapt to an entirely new workflow… Maybe I’ll try it anyways. See if there are cracked versions of MacOS that I can boot in a VM and see if I like it. I have to think about that.
Thank you for the discussion. I really don’t see Flatpak as the pinnacle of software distribution. But Linux is constantly evolving. I’m pretty sure we’ll someday get there for desktop applications. I think all the containerization stuff, CGroups and SystemD stuff is a good approach. It makes many things so much easier than they used to be. And I can spin up light containers, services and have them run with arbitrary permissions and environments on a server and all I need is a few lines of text. Sure, I configure the permissions and what they’re allowed to access myself on the server. That can’t be transferred directly to the desktop. We still need additional interfaces and especially ways to address what you said. Linux is a good desktop operating system, but there are some things that need to be solved better (or at all).
Since you mentioned that GUI application automatization. That is a crazy approach. I saw some CI pipelines using such tools to test GUI applications and web interfaces. Load XY, press TAB 4 times, hit enter, search for an element with Z in the name, press ALT+F, do something else and then do a screenshot… The whole thing looked completely mental (to me.) And I think there is something like that on Windows, too. I can only imagine things like that break easy and you’re never able to change things if people actually rely on it. But I’m really not an expert on this. Might have valid use-cases. Or it’s just a silly way of doing things.
Something I don’t agree with is Windows and MacOS succeeding because of solid and stable APIs. Theoretically this might be the case for developers. For Windows desktop end-users it is certainly not the case. My family threw out several printers because after an Windows Update there were no drivers available any more. Most of my old games don’t work any more, I’ve tried. Installing the old dotnet or c++ runtimes and directx versions is a hassle, sometimes impossible. Some games crap out entirely. I can’t do it the other way around and install an old version of Windows on modern hardware. So while in theory the Windows Kernel API might enjoy a good development model, it has little to zero effect on the end-user and why they buy Windows-Laptops in large quantities. And if success at the market is the measurement, contrary to Windows, Linux is the dominant operating system on servers an very successful there. So I don’t think this is the real reason. But reliable interfaces is certainly something we want. Apple changed the entire kind of processor architecture, and then again. With them things also don’t stay the same. They solve that with other techniques. And a Macbook won’t be thrown to the garbage after a few years because it’s gotten so slow. I see people keeping them for quite some time. But they usually don’t run the latest version of MacOS any more. At least that’s what I’ve seen.
Anyway, it’s getting kind of late here. Thanks for the comment and the additional info you linked. I’m going to read the links tomorrow.