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foxandmouseyesterday at 9:49 PM9 repliesview on HN

> Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.

Yes, but Linux is finally in that position, not to mention we're seeing silicon from intel and amd that can compete with the M series on mobile devices.


Replies

Saline9515yesterday at 10:15 PM

Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).

Let's not even talk about the case when you have monitors that have different DPI, something that is handled seamlessly by MacOS, unlike Linux where it feels like a d20 roll depending on your distro.

I expect most desktop MacOS users to have a HiDPI screen in 2026 (it's just...better), so going to Linux may feel like a serious downgrade, or at least a waste of time if you want to get every config "right". I wish it was differently, honestly - the rest of the OS is great, and the diversity between distros is refreshing.

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jdejeanyesterday at 10:21 PM

Tahoe is uniquely bad in so many ways, so I tried the Asahi Fedora Remix with Gnome on my M2 Mac Mini. Aesthetically I was more attracted to Gnome, it feels like what we lost with Tahoe. Tahoe to me feels like a really chopped Android skin or something. I made it a few weeks on the Fedora Remix but ended up having to switch back to Mac over missing webcam drivers and other random hardware issues. Plus there’s little OS things that Mac does that make it really hard to go elsewhere.

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bsimpsonyesterday at 10:13 PM

I fell down the Nix hole this weekend, getting my corp Mac and my SteamOS Legion Go sharing a config. My corp device is a 5k iMac Pro that is going to be kicked off of the network when ARM-only Tahoe becomes mandatory later this year.

I work at Google, which issued a Gubuntu workstation by default when I joined. I exchanged it for a Mac, which I've spent a literal lifetime using, because I didn't wanna fall down a Linux tinkering hole trying to make Gubuntu feel like home. Every corp device I've had has been a Mac.

I'm reading this from a coffee shop. On my walk here, I was idly wondering if I should give Glinux (as its now called) a try when I'm forced to replace the iMac. SteamOS is making Linux my default environment in the same way Mac was for decades prior.

akagusuyesterday at 11:38 PM

No, it is not. Apple went down to the same level of Linux, not Linux that became as good as Apple.

Unfortunately today it is a race to the bottom.

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CSSeryesterday at 10:23 PM

Yeah, and gaming aside from anti-cheat isn't a broken mess anymore either. Valve has made sure of that.

carlosjobimyesterday at 11:20 PM

Linux doesn't have much in the way of quality apps for people who aren't programmers, server administrators, or gamers.

Most people want to get productive work done with their computer, and OS X has top tier apps for every need possible.

No good e-mail app, no good office apps, no good calendar app, no good invoicing app, no good photo editing app, no good designer app, etc

zapzupnztoday at 12:50 AM

In the Hacker News bubble, maybe. In the real world, not even close. The reasons why many a person chooses to use macOS, outside of the "YoU bUy It FoR ThE lOgO" that many hard-core technologists seem to believe, don't exist in any desktop environment.

Sometimes, people think "it can be made to look similar, therefore it's the same" (especially with regard to KDE), and no, just no.

dmitrygryesterday at 10:14 PM

> not to mention we're seeing silicon from intel and amd that can compete with the M series on mobile devices.

[[citation needed]], benchmarks please, incl battery life, not promises. "We are seeing" implies reality