Mac OSX isn’t bad… so long as you sell it your soul, and don’t want freedom in return, it’s great 👍.
I kid… mostly - it’s iOS that is horrifying, but Mac OSX is still Unix (tho not GNU), so not anywhere within leagues of Microdick.
And - possibly dumb question - couldn’t you always just run a Linux VM at near-native speed, and get the benefits of both?
Other than all that, yeah:-)
Still not comparable to Windows though, imho.
Its sins are just of a different sort - e.g. you don’t need to repair or upgrade those machines so often, bc they work so well for so long as it is, plus other than for gaming, who even upgrades machines these days to begin with?
For non-gaming, Macs are great machines. So too are Linux. While Windows sux ass no matter what. Thus that’s the dividing line, imho.
You can use UTM on an M1 or up Macbook and iOS/iPadOS:
https://getutm.app/
It is not VirtualBox yet, but it is moving fast. And thank $deity it’s not Oracle… like VirtualBox
It’s worth noting that Apple has (for example) gone so far as to replace bash with zsh just because the GPL v3 was too copyleft for them to handle. In other words, fuck Apple.
The company that laid me off let me keep my Mac which was a nice parting gift. I don’t think I’d ever buy one myself. They’re just way to expensive.
I hoped for that at my previous job, and they said it could happen… but it was never going to, and it was a false hope offered. Why do that to me man…? 😭
Then I come to my current job, and they have a super old Mac laptop that was barely holding on that nobody else wanted, and I’m like “yes please”!
Bc if its Windows vs. Mac, and especially if “nothing” isn’t even an option, then a million times out of a million I will choose super old, barely holding on Mac that nobody else wants.:-)
It’s a single SSH command away from my work Linux, and it has MacVim, tons of other open source software available, plus a bunch of stuff that only Mac OSX has, like Preview and other fairly nice tools, which have open source equivalents like ImageMagick and gimp, but aren’t nearly as easy to use.
I don’t need a nice car, and I went without one entirely until I moved to the Midwest where it becomes absolutely necessary, but it’s essential to have a good computer for me:-).
Privacy and data collection-wise MacOS is fine. It’s their main selling point. Doesn’t even force updates on you. I know it’s a low bar, but damn Windows bar is at the floor at this point.
MacOS collects a large amount of data compared to Linux (although not even close to windows). Take a look at their tosdr page and this
I had to look it up (e.g. https://www.extremetech.com/internet/317371-evaluating-apples-data-collection-in-macos-big-sur) and damn, I didn’t know that they collected and sent THAT detailed of info!? (and perhaps they didn’t, until Big Sur)
Even so, as the other reply mentioned, it’s still leagues away from Windows at this point. But yeah, fair then that both Windows and Mac OSX are doing it, while Linux is not.
Still, if you had to pick a machine for your grandma to use, or like either Windows or Mac at work (but not Linux, though lets say that there is a terminal SSH option to Linux available from either), I would pick Mac OSX. It’s fine if others would pick Linux for the former, but I don’t think Mac OSX is a bad choice there.
While Windows… urg, is basically synonymous with being a cuss word nowadays. Witch: “a pox be upon thee - nay, moresooth, may you be cursed to only use Windows for the rest of your days!” (Onlookers: “gasp! what could anyone have done to be cursed with that bad of a punishment!? I would not wish that upon even my worst enemy!?”) hehe:-P
“always” in this case is when you have two or more gpus in your system, which limits the ability to “just” run a vm considerably.
Ah, for gaming, yes Macs are not fantastic gaming machines that’s for sure.
Then again, Linux has long been known to have issues with gaming as well, especially with an Nvidia card…
Unless you use Steam, and then both work, kinda?
Still it seems like it’s Linux and Mac OSX on one side, and Microsoft left behind thousands of years in the past, except maybe for gaming where literally an old Windows running on a VM may run the widest selection of games?
But I still don’t see the logic of grouping Macs together with Windows, even for gaming.
For VMs, I expected more someone to bring up the switch to the M1 chipset, a huge setback for VMs definitely even if temporary, though I’m old enough to remember that Linux and Macs both running Intel were often easier to get things running on than Linux on Intel vs. Linux on AMD. But things definitely change over time, as to what is easiest at any given moment.
Microsoft sucks tho - now THAT’S universal. Can’t we all just get together, united in our hate for it?! (/s, or, well, actually… not!)
Edit: hey, anyone want to start like an anti-Windows or I-fucking-hate-fucking-Windows community? I’ll join it today if you do!? :-)
couldn’t you always just run a Linux VM at near-native speed, and get the benefits of both?
The obvious downside is that Linux is no longer the host OS. MacOS or Windows would be closed source code managing your hardware. And any VM could only be as fast as the host OS allows it to be.
The host OS is likewise limited, but more by hardware, so it might be a small performance tradeoff, depending on whether, as you brought up, you need Linux to be ultimately in control rather than to simply run some software.
So that would not always work, ofc… but it sometimes would!:-)