Children use smartphones way more than “PC” computers today.
Bigger distinction: Kids with computers vs. kids with “smart” devices.
I feel that is the difference we’re seeing though. Younger kids who generally live on smart devices have lower tech literacy.
And apple phones are “smart devices”
Why insert the qualifier there?
Because my phone isnt a smart device. Its a dumb device that does nothing by itself and everything i tell it to do. It allows me to remove things i dont like without self destructing and locking me out. It works offline without complaining. It doesnt spy on me.
That doesn’t really answer my question. I’m going to conclude that you just have some personal issue with Apple.
I wouldn’t blame them. It’s really difficult to do anything Apple hasen’t planned for on their tablets.
She must have had a Mac. Only Windows teaches both the knowledge and the fury to convince children to switch to Linux.
Switching from apple is like breaking out of prison.
Coming from windows it’s a breath of fresh air
With iPhones yeah, but MacOS is not very locked down at all. You can run all the unsigned code you want.
Although you could argue the new Apple Silicon Macs are kind of locked down, since Apple only allows kernel extensions on the older Intel Macs
god, running unsigned apps was a pain though.
it’s always puzzled me why Apple themselves call installing non approved software “jailbreaking”, they’re straight up stating that their os is a jail
They weren’t the ones to come up with the name, so they have to follow what everyone else calls it.
apple usually renames existing concepts to make them sound better though
I don’t know. I think Mac gets a lot of hate simply because it’s a Unix that was sold to the devil and comes with a satanic concierge service.
Like, I’m not saying that selling your soul to the devil is possible but if I had to pick a handful of people that on the whole I would say probably did I would pick Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Elon musk, Jeffrey bezos, Larry Page, Vladimir Putin, and probably every Hollywood social elite and musician that sells a platinum record, every Republican senator, congress person, and every president after Jimmy Carter, and every CEO whose company is worth more than 10 million dollars who didn’t inherit the company from their parents.
Don’t forget Robert Jordan
The ambassador or the guy that wrote The wheel of Time series?
My mistake, Robert Johnson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Johnson
growing up my family had a mac desktop that i had access to while really young. eventually realized mac is a little terrible, so i tried bootcamp to get some proper use out of the computer. i successfully installed windows, but somehow fucked up and formatted the mac partition. all for windows to also suck
What did your parents do?
my parents were understandably pissed because i had deleted at least a few hundred gigabytes of photos and videos from the last decade. iirc i was banned from touching the computer for at least a year, which was funny because i was literally the only one who used it
Even as an adult I don’t trust myself not to fuck up so whenever I do installing or partitionning, I always disconnect my drive that contains the personal files.
Eh, I grew up with Macs, but I couldn’t afford a Mac for my first computer, or even a windows license. I got a computer from a family friend that was broken which I fixed up and installed Linux on.
This isn’t right at all… Mac’s are awful if you want to do things like play most video games. Linux is much the same.
That’s right. I said it. Come downvote me, fanboys, I don’t mind. I’ve seen what makes you cheer.
Proton is way better than whatever thing Apple has going on (didn’t they say they were working on their own proton-like thing? did they just forget about it? I remember seeing a video with some sort of dev preview a while ago…)
Most video games work perfectly in Linux now…
I am probably the only person ever to grow up with a UNIX terminal server as my home computer. any crazy IT thing i do now pales in comparison to my dad, running ethernet cables through our heating ducts in a probable building code violation
**As someone who has ran fiber and ethernet to companies post a category 5 hurricane to get network connections back online for paychecks across 7 states including the virgin Islands… I have never seen that. And we used satellite radio dishes to send signals across areas when we rewired the emergency center (police, fire, etc) under marshall law. It’s fucking humbling to have all bridges shut down in the area to try to cut down on people pillaging and have them give you a badge to cross under any conditions no matter the danger because you are considered “needed.”. Some other poor souls could have stood on the beach watching it come in piling shit up and running home to drag my chicken coop into the garage throw 2 dogs in the car and “evacuate” only to where the hurricane actually ended up hitting harder. I was an idiot, but the office building i was working from was on the front of the Los Angeles times or w.e the next day to show the destruction. We dug crabs and sucked water for days out of pipes to get Ethernet run in moves for months… But yet I have never seen someone run them though heating ducts haha. (True story)
Edit: circa Hurricane Michael, Panama City 2018
…you dad did very well; give him a hug this december…
When I was 12 I installed Linux… and now I have autism. And I’m gay!
That’s like half the fediverse here
We get it, you use Arch.
Gaytism
There’s truly not individual unique experiences.
Well there’s a simple explanation right? When you’re growing up grappling with issues like homosexuality, disability or just feeling like an outsider - spending more time at a computer provided an escape from a judgemental and unwelcoming world. This is the same reason so many of us are night owls well into adulthood, cause we grew up feeling safer when the adults were asleep and we could maintain our personal boundaries.
I’m autistic and gay but I also have a secret third thing that stopped me from figuring out linux. The “AD” in ADHD (there needs to be a better way to distinguish between having attention deficit, hyperactivity, or hybrid). I have tried like four times now to figure out linux and my brain just doesn’t get the dopamine it needs from that activity and I just can’t focus 🫠
There is a shoet way to say it: Inattentive type (type I), Hyperactive type (type H), and Combination type (type C)
I routinely describe myself as ADHD type C
C
There is a way to distinguish them ! There is Innatentive type, Hyperactive-impulsive type and Combined type
Weird flex, but ogay.
“Autistic children will be discluded from the study for skewing results”
“Autism involves a significant deviation from expected behaviour”
They have played us for absolute fools.
(I know autism describes a real cluster of traits, but it is only socially constructed norms that define those traits as aberrant, I am not saying it isn’t real)
Yeah, we create the rules that decide whether or not someone is autistic, and we decide what is viewed as “weird” (honestly, everyone is weird, if you were perfectly average in every way, you would actually, in a way, be weird)
So here’s a teacher’s insight:
Mac:PC:Chromebook Rich—Poor
There is a very strong correlation between the wealth of the kids on my module, and the device they have.
Mac users really struggle to understand the concept of local files without being shown. PC users, alas, snort too much SharePoint these days to be considered healthy - trying to save a word document locally these days is like climbing a mountain blindfolded. As for the Chromebook kids, they do their best with what they have, and given how little compatibility those devices have with the software I teach, I’m proud of them.
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Most of the time it’s realising the difference between local and cloud storage. A lot of students get confused when trying to upload their first coursework - usually it’s solved by just showing them the difference between local files (this is stored in a permanent local place) and cloud storage (this is stored permanently somewhere else).
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Maybe it’s to do with the number of mouse buttons.
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Mac users really struggle to understand the concept of
For me, it was trying to explain to a Mac user that she should have a separate profile on her Mac for work vs. personal
She’d convinced her employer that she could work from home using her own Mac (the office was all Macs except for the video production suite), and he said OK. Didn’t ask me, of course. Despite me saying a long time ago when someone else floated the idea, that it was poor practice from a security viewpoint.
Then three days later the call came - “I can’t access work files”. So I remote in, she’s got links to her personal iCloud Drive directories somehow mixed up with the work Google Drive.
I started to explain about using a different profile for work and just got a blank stare.
“You log off your personal profile and log into the work profile”
“How do I do that?”
Personally, I guess that you learn more the more issues you have. MacOS is a more closed down ecosystem compared to Windows, malware is less popular and as hardware comes usually bundled with the OS, you shouldn’t encounter as many driver or hardware issues in general.
As a kid I had so much trouble with incompatible software, viruses, adware, drivers, broken hardware etc. And as I had noone to ask, it tought me a lot about the fundamentals of IT and how to research such issues myself.
Counterpoint, I grew up at a time when Mac’s still couldn’t do much outside of what apple specifically developed for them, so I learned a ton about emulation and virtual machines and such to play games or use Photoshop. I guess that supports your hypothesis, I can rock Unix command line stuff and containers like a pro, but hate figuring out drivers
Yes, I completely see that. This is not a black or white question. You can use Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS… and learn close to nothing or you can geek around hour after hour to expand the boundaries of your device.
I would just assume, that you learn less if everything you want to do, works out of the box. And ‘working out of the box’ a typical selling point of the Apple ecosystem. Which of course doesn’t mean that you can’t have a steep learning curve. Your use cases obviously weren’t delivered out of the box, so you had to get creative as well.
I had a jailbroken iPod Touch with a shell on it and spend hours and days overcoming system boundaries just out of spite. I also remember vividly trying to bring mobile games to a Symbian phone, tweaking around with a HP iPAQ on Windows Mobile, manually typing Midi ringtones with a text editor on a Nokia. :D
And then there’s 90s Linux because your parents got a used computer with a friend that came with only that and they didn’t want to spend money buying windows 😢 it’s like learning to swim by being yeeted into the ocean, with a couple sharks hanging around.
At least 80s kids got assembly.
Linux had always been good - put together a new computer, move the OS from the old one, put Linux on the old one…
Find Linux is so much fun, dual boot the new machine on Linux, only keep windows for games
My audio collection from then is all .ogg files
Debian didn’t have a stable release until 1996… Even Slackware didn’t shape up nicely until around 98 from what I remember. SLS gave it a GUI but wasn’t well maintained. Linux wasn’t really “good” until early 2000s at the very least.
I just wanted to play Space Cadet Pinball or Commander Keen as a kid, not compile my programs.
You’re clearly talking about modern Linux.
I don’t think I had budget to buy my own computers until '99, and that’s when I first played with Linux
The weird thing is that the UNIX core of MacOS would lend itself really well to tinkering. It’s a shame that Apple lobotomizes all the hardware they sell with locked down firmware…
It’s why I much prefer MacOS over Windows. The command line makes sense. The file and folder structure makes sense. The defaults can be a little bit weird but a little configuration can help me feel right at home.
Ironically, I found macOS to be a lot more technical than Windows. It’s how I got my start with Linux. At least changing the default browser changes the default browser. I’ll be using macOS and Linux side by side.
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Hey! 🙋 I’m an autistic person (diagnosed at age 3). I grew up using Mac computers mostly, because my father preferred them for his work. Although I would encounter Windows a lot when I was at school as well. However, I didn’t really know how to use Windows until I started seeing videos on YouTube about it (such as this one). This was when I was around 10. So I started experimenting with different editions of it (Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows XP, etc.) via a pirated copy of Parallels Desktop. I also found out about Linux, and toyed with Ubuntu with a bit via Parallels. I found it fun, and thus considered the idea of installing Linux properly onto my Macbook. Unfortunately, the trackpad support wasn’t there. So for my 11th birthday, I asked for a “Windows laptop”, and immediately after getting it, I set up some dual-boot with Windows 10 and some fork of Ubuntu called “Pinguy OS”. (I spent way too much time looking at DistroWatch.) Then, I distro-hopped for a bit until I finally settled on Void Linux when I was 13. I’m now 18 and am running Void full-time on my current laptop, it doesn’t even have a Windows partition. :)
Yooo, another autistic geek 2006er!
I was diagnosed at age 4 and i started with Flash games on a Windows 7 family desktop. The first PC i could keep in my bedroom was an old netbook with XP and Lubuntu gifted to me by my mom(i only used the linux part tho). Then, later, another XP-era laptop with Linux Mint, before the current win10 laptop i have today(used it with Windows so far cuz i’m lazy and i used to need windows software but i plan to Linuxize this as soon as win10 is discontinued)
When i take the jump i’m prolly gonna settle for KDE Neon or any other Debian-based that can run KDE and then try to theme it to get something as close to Frutiger Aero as possible.
Ayy! 🤝
I’m also thinking of trying KDE the next time I install Linux. I’ve been using GNOME for the vast majority of my time on Linux, though I’ve also dabbled with Xfce and Antergos’ built-in OpenBox configuration for a short while.
Awesome! What made you pick void?
Apologies for the late reply, my internet went down for a day. Anyway, before I was using a distro called Antergos (basically Arch with an easy installer and a few custom packages). When it was discontinued, some people waited for what is basically its spiritual successor, EndeavourOS. Others switched to using vanilla Arch. But I decided to use Void after some research, as to me it was Arch but with a few advantages to my favour:
- At the time, Void had an installation wizard while Arch didn’t (you manually installed it by following the wiki, basically). Now,
archinstallexists, I guess. - It’s still rolling-release, so you can update whenever you want easily, but at the same time not bleeding-edge, so packages don’t break as easily.
- Unlike most Linux distros, it uses runit as the init system instead of systemd. I’m no rabid systemd hater, but you gotta admit that runit is just easier to learn how to use.
- And finally, by adopting a non-major distro, I just wanted to promote Linux apps being compatible with as many distros as possible, and not just either Debian, Fedora, or Arch (or whatever derivatives exist thereof).
(Also, happy cake day! I didn’t know Lemmy had cake days until now hehe :)
- At the time, Void had an installation wizard while Arch didn’t (you manually installed it by following the wiki, basically). Now,
At risk of going off topic, I don’t like Twitter posts like this:
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Both users ‘verified,’ essentially paying for more engagement, but with no actual “verification” like community mods tagging users.
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In your face engagement metrics all over the posts, as if that’s all that matters. Not even a user “poll” like Lemmy/Reddit or Mastadon/Facebook.
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Hiding most replies other than the most algorithmically engaging ones.
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Posted as a screenshot, unfortunately necessary as they essentially broke Nitter and it’s nigh unusable unless logged in.
I don’t like that the Twitter format is kinda the center of the social media universe, and seemingly staying that way now that we basically voted to back it with the US govt.
Move back to Tumblr
You joke (maybe), but Tumblr’s sharing mechanics are relatively healthy.
I don’t joke c:
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I’ve been a dev for 7 years. I used a PC for the first 6 years and I switched to a mac the last year.
My experience with mac has been terrible. The file explorer is just horrible to navigate. It took me ages to find the way to go anywhere except the “favorite” folders. Compability with the remote linux-servers has been awful with broken keymappings and shortcuts. Using hardware from any other manifacturer is riddled with bugs. The machine is unable to adjust volume if the audio is passed through usb-c. And I routinely encounter bugs where I’m unable to interact with apps until I restart them. Everything which seemed to work by heuristics on a PC requires a lot of attention on my mac. I don’t care if I get a floaty animation and bouncy icon if I minimize a window. I just want alt + tab to actually bring back the apps I select.
I am not getting a mac the next time.
I feel the same way about any machine that isn’t a Linux laptop with fully implemented hardware support. I can’t stand macos or windows anymore.
In Apple’s defense though, they have better accessibility than anyone else - hands down. That’s about all they do right IMO.
I dunno, I used PCs pretty exclusively until about halfway through college when I switched and every time I try to go back it’s pretty bad. Windows sucks, it just does everything different than *nix systems, and they have like, 5 different ways of doing things? It feels like they’ve had multiple efforts to clean up the tech debt and never completed them.
And Linux is just lacking for day to day use. I still would love to switch at some point, but it just doesn’t have the right tools and polish. Like, I rely on Karabiner for key remapping and layering and the Linux story is pretty lacking there (though I haven’t looked in a while so could have gotten better). Core stuff for my day to day.
I think a lot of it is muscle memory. Like yeah, it’s hard to relearn a lot of muscle memory type things. But if you open a terminal, it’s just like any *nix based system, same layout. You can navigate anywhere and open the Finder with
open, etc.I respect that muscle memory is a big thing when iit comes to OS preference. I have spent more than a year now to configure to my preferences and build up muscle memory and understanding of my mac. It’s just not happening. Small things which were trivial to me on PC suddenly requires my full attention and I feel like I’m spending a ton of energy doing simple things. And I feel the same way when I look over the shoulder of my collegues who are seasoned mac users. Things which I would do in no time on PC seems to take many additional clicks and more time for them as well.
But my biggest issue is the hardware compability. I like my mechanical logitech keyboard, which features a mac layout (physical stamps on keys). But several buttons are mixed up when connected. And the key mapping seemingly varies depending on whether it’s connected through bluetooth or usb. As mentioned audio passed through usb-c is not possible to adjust thourgh the default system. I had to download a third party app to adjust volume - which also stinks because the volume at the lowest setting is a lot higher than I want for some cases. My stream deck seems to work with the mac by a coinflip: half of the times I start the machine, it won’t connect.
But the thing that really works me up is when I ask people about the hardware issues. The answer is always “you need to buy apple hardware”.
And that’s where I really fall off. I want to use hardware which I find comfortable to me, but it feels like everything about the mac is trying to make me buy more apple stuff.
And I feel the same way when I look over the shoulder of my collegues who are seasoned mac users. Things which I would do in no time on PC seems to take many additional clicks and more time for them as well.
That’s really strange, can you give some examples? Just curious what things are easier to do on Windows (assuming that’s what you mean), I just have never had that be the case. Maybe it’s cause I’m a webdev and most tooling for web stuff is tailored for *nix systems?
But the thing that really works me up is when I ask people about the hardware issues. The answer is always “you need to buy apple hardware”.
Uh whaaaaat that’s crazy. Yeah I’m the same way, I’ve cycled through a lot of different mechanical keyboards and whatnot to find the one I like now (Ultimate Hacking Keyboard, dumb name but nice features lol). But I can’t say I’ve ever had an issue with a keyboard having hardware compatibility like that… I guess I don’t really use function keys. Again I use Karabiner to remap that kinda stuff to a different layer, which works universally so the same layering works on my laptop as my mechanical keyboard and I don’t need to have different muscle memory for different work-zone setups.
This is the article that got me introduced to Karabiner, even if you hate Mac I do recommend giving it a look. One of the best things I ever did was use Karabiner to modify my layout and reduce hand movement/chording. It completely fixed my RSI issues. My current layout treats the JKL; home row keys as arrow keys when I hold down Capslock, and Capslock + CMD turns them into jump-by-word so I can navigate really fast. Rarely use a mouse when writing code these days. Oh, and Capslock + ’ is delete, surprising how often that is a common hand movement. Plus plenty of other small optimizations. Really couldn’t live without it.
So a few examples on the first point:
When connected to a virtual desktop at the project me and my collegues are currently working with, the mac has a weird keybinding issue where keys passed through to the virtual image are mixed up. No windows computer has this issue. At my previous project, the same issue occurred for those who used macs to access virtual desktops. Also, some of the shortcuts are consumed by the OS, making them inaccessible.
Connecting to multiple monitors is weird. The hardware at my office allows for daisy-chaining connected to a laptop through a single USB-C. At least for PC. Both my collegues and I have struggles with connecting to the monitors, and typically, we end up having to rewire the screens to have multiple inputs to the mac.
So the things from the top of my head are probably mostly software related, and it might be environmental issues with lack of support in virtualizations and firmware of the office equipment.
Regarding the keyboard issues, it might be a local problem. I use a Norwegian Logitech keyboard, featuring a layout with ÆØÅ and different locations for several symbols compared to the US-layout. So maybe the compability differs because of that.
I’ll check out Karabiner for sure, thanks! I use a Vim-plugin for developing and have made a bunch of mappings to reach keys which are mixed up in the virtual desktop. It sounds like Karabiner would fit my workflow well!
I’m should bring that Ubuntu CD I had shipped to me as a kid to a therapist.
I had one i lost it. i also had a CD of solaris before oracle bought them out a long time ago.
I still have my SuSE 8.2 9.0 and 9.1 discs, and the official books I bought in a book store to get 9.1. I also have my Solaris discs. They are somehow part of the few things I haven’t lost in all of my moving.
my parents kept them then threw them out when i left home.
Imagine paying for a blue tick on Xitter.
could’ve been before elongated muskrat bought it
It’s not unfortunately, there’s a date of 09/12/2024 under the original tweet
oh… oh… oh…
I’m genuinely curious; is her hypothesis that macOS users are less tech literate? Because I definitely know much more computer science people that use macOS than Windows (of course most use Linux, but Windows is on third place).
I don’t understand the correlation with technical people on Mac. Like I DONT GET IT 😭
how can you just be ok with not being able to do stuff you want? I tried to use a cracked iPhone before deciding just to buy a new android because I just bout exploded with the corporate shenanigans apple has.Edit: It would appear that Mac is very different from IOS. Ive never tried it other than 15 minutes of fiddling with a friends once, nice to know it’s not as locked down as IOS is.
Many thanks, but I hardly understand this conversation lolMacs have a decent terminal + CLI interface built in, and decent hardware. Also, for many years apple offered huge discounts for students through their university, so many CS students got a macbook for super cheap and just never stepped out of the ecosystem.
The CLI interface is literally just GNU BASH, people need to understand Apple steals everything slaps a fresh coat of paint on it and boasts how innovative they are.
~full disclosure; I’m super jealous andhave always wanted a Mac Pro or Macbook Pro~
Actually its zsh but yeah nothing special.
Unfun fact: it switched from bash to zsh because Apple was butthurt and paranoid about GPL v3. Fuckin’ cowards.
It’s better than power shell or whatever crap is on windows. Even WSL had issues the last time a used it a few years ago. Mac is Unix which Windows will never be.
PowerShell is like the 1 good product Microsoft has made the las 10 years
That is a dangerous opinion. In my mind, Microsoft has made zero good products.
OS X and iOS are completely different beasts, iOS is a closed off nightmare whereas OSX is basically just stable pretty Linux missing a few packages and costing more
OSX is
basically just stable pretty Linuxliterally BSD, including licensing the UNIX trademark to make it officialFTFY.
The fact I had to use iTunes to put music on my phone and the lack of access to the filesystem were extreme deal breakers for me. There is also the impossible hoops you had to jump through to change ownership of a phone. I gave my mother my old iPhone when I changed to Android and it was impossible to scrub my account from it, even with a factory reset.
The environment felt way too sterile for my liking. It treated me, a legitimate tech savvy user, like a malicious imbecile.
It treated me, a legitimate tech savvy user, like a malicious imbecile.
So it’s doing security correctly.
That’s like saying martial law is doing security correctly.
I hate this take. That is not how security should look on consumer devices at all and it’s one of the ways the security industry is being co-opted to ruin consumer devices. The user is not the attacker on a consumer device. Consumer devices should provide tools to enable strict protections and allow the user to choose. It should be easy to put the device into the fully locked down state at instal/initial provisioning, likely even the default, but it should also be easy to deviate from that during provisioning. After provisioning it should, of course, be incredibly hard or impossible to go from the locked-down state to the nonlocked-down state without wiping data.
I use a Mac precisely because it lets me do what I want. Linux is endless configuration and poorly designed UIs, Windows is an incoherent mess that needs to be wrestled back to a usable state with every major update. Mac does what I need without any fuss.
Truth be told, I have a PC for gaming and a Linux server for Plex, *arr, and home automation. But when I need to get work done, it’s the MacBook. No question.
This is the key difference people miss in this discussion. Being able to do the things you want varies so wildly but the system gets out of the way entirely to let you do things. Not sit and endlessly tweak configurations. While for some that might be what they want to do and believe me macOS also has endless configuration parameters to tweak, the class majority just want to do things with the computer as a tool. It’s a subtle nuance but you said it well, it specifically lets you do whatever you want. Editing configs for hours to customize the desktop environment is not the same as being productive with the system.
have you tried mint
that’s the stereotype a lot of people believe but it’s just false imo
if your hardware is compatible, then it’s as simple as any other os
I’ve been daily driving Debian and arch for over a decade lol.
Mint is very good. Seriously. If I had to daily drive Linux on the desktop, I’d use Mint. But even Mint is a far cry from a Mac in terms of usability and software compatibility.
I’d also have to go back to x86-64 to use Mint, and that’s a big step in the wrong direction. I’m sure that won’t always be the case, but at the moment, the ARM Linux situation is still quite fragmented.
For tech people, OS X is basically a BSD with a pretty UI that comes preinstalled on nice hardware (which is important mainly because corporate IT procurement is only gonna give you a choice between a Mac or a [Dell|HP|Lenovo] business-line machine running Windows (and with corporate policy that prohibits installing Linux). The Mac is a much nicer choice in that situation.
Also remember that, although they’ve backed away from it now, there was a time back in the 2000s when Apple was leaning into the UNIX hackability of the OS – they were coming out with stuff like XServe and Automator and went out of their way to design their machines for toolless upgrades of things like RAM. Some of the popularity of Macs among technical people stems from that era, and memories of it.
iOS, by the way, has always been an entirely different story. Your experience with a cracked iPhone isn’t even slightly representative of the experience using an OS X Mac.
Because it’s Unix, and Windows isn’t, and they refuse to try Linux because it’s
not backed by a corporationtoo much of a headache to use day-to-dayI’m always confused by people who don’t seem to understand that MacBooks and iPhones run different OSs. Why would they run the same OS?
You can install pretty much anything on a MacBook via the open-source package manager brew. I’ve been exclusively using Linux at home for almost 20 years, but on my work computer, which is a MacBook, I really don’t find much is missing. I use the same oh-my-zsh profile on both, brew install the real version of most utilities, and I move on with my life and get work done.
Apple doesn’t lock down the bootloader at all, so it’s trivial to install Asahi Linux now if you want to. I did this on my home computer because I like the screen, battery life, and keyboard layout.
install pretty much anything on a MacBook
It’s kinda simple actually. As much as I love patching the Linux kernel or debugging it, or anything really it takes a lot of the one resource in life I have less of each day, time. Generally on macOS I can just upgrade and not bother worrying about breakage. Not always sure but if you’ve ever had to deal with python libraries or c libraries and updating source you start to go if I’m not getting paid for this crap why bother.
My entire network is almost all Linux but I generally just use macOS mostly cause safari battery life is insane. Plus zsh as my shell I live in the terminal and use emacs I can pretty easy migrate off either but video apps and audio are so much better on macOS it’s not even funny. Maybe now that the realtime kernel patches are in mainstream Linux audio can get closer to macOS audio latency but I won’t hold my breath.
I can’t speak to windows though I don’t really use it outside of work related usage which is minimal as I work for a company that sells a Linux distribution.
how can you just be ok with not being able to do stuff you want?
Huh? What do you mean?
There are a lot of things that Apple just straight up tells you you can’t do – I don’t use a Mac often enough to make a list, but I can tell you that running apps made by people who aren’t giving Apple $99/yr for code signing was recently added to it – and using MacOS means being okay with that.
Could be, could also be she is generally actually curious about it. I would actually think its the opposite since your problem solving skills are exercised more on a windows than a mac. Computer science people will engineer a solution from the ground up while the rest of us will problem solve and be happy with something held together with duct tape.
I think computer science is related to problem solving though. Especially programming is just basically solving one new problem after another and being able to figure out new solutions to errors you don’t know.
I think that’s the gist of it. Apple is so hell bent on proprietary everything and keeping their hardware locked that there isn’t all that much you can tinker with when using a Mac. Aside from the high price of apple products, the customizability of PCs (and the access to games) are what kept me on windows.
