alt Hacker NewsJust my opinion here, after ~4 years of using it at work and daily driving Linux for personal use, including development, for a decade:
- The user interface and UX is pretty and all[1], but doesn't quite work as I'd like and I can't really do much beyond a few limited "hacks". Switching workspaces has a horrible and annoying animation I can't turn off. All applications windows are grouped together and for example some actions cause all of them to jump to the top. Top-level shortcuts are limited and I can't do the same things I can on Linux - eg, I bind Super+Enter to open a new terminal window, on MacOS I can kind get a janky version of that, but due to how the window manager works, it not as streamlined as Linux
- The whole notarization stuff and signing - I mean okay, security, great. But it's annoying and you have to pay Apple like $100(?) a year just for the privilege of developing software for their platform. When I did desktop app dev on MacOS, I had to do `xattr com.apple.quarantine` commands to turn off the security nonsense that prevented me from running our own app I or my coworkers wanted to test locally.
- I have a list of utilities/apps I need to install on a new MacOS machine just to get it to partially behave the way I want. Ideally MacOS should let me customize it directly with the necessary options so these extra apps aren't necessary. Nothing I'm asking is all that complicated - Linux environments provide it more or less by default with a few setting tweaks, even Windows behaves closer to what I want and I'm no fan of Windows.
- Recently I noticed MacOS was using bunch of CPU while idling - I traced it down to some background indexing scanning that was running constantly. I had to look up esoteric command line commands to stop it - which didn't work. I ended up disabling Spotlight almost completely to make it stop using my CPU every time I stepped away for a few mins.
Annoying stuff like this really puts me off of MacOS. Like I'm being forced to conform to their way of thinking and using a device. I'm an adult, let me decide for myself.
tldr; I just like Linux, it works, it's slick, I can turn-on/off, add/remove whatever I want. I'm not restricted to what some company thinks my workflow should look like.
[1]: I'm leaving out their "glass UI" blunder... what a horribly silly thing that is. Plenty to be said about that and others already have, so I won't repeat it here.
OK, so this seems like a list of gripes about MacOS.
It's absolutely fine to have personal preferences on UX, customisability etc. This is why I swore off GNOME at the Gnome 3 transition and have never looked back, for example. If it doesn't work for you it doesn't work for you.
But it doesn't really support the assertion that you can't use the power of an M1 because of "how locked down everything is and most of that power is pretty useless".
Again, not trying to say "Thou shalt love MacOS!" just that I don't think your points there really reflect something so locked down as to be useless. Just something with a UI you don't get along with.