Best use of a Mac is to sell it and buy 2 computers to put Linux on.
To fix Windows problems, reboot (and pray)
To fix Linux problems, Be root.I had a job developing software for datacenter machines’ hardware and software health. And the most common automatic repair that we had was escalating 1. reboot; 2. reinstall OS; 3. check hardware. I know it’s different but it was fun to see it “first-hand”.
And also, “to create Linux problems, be root” works as well.
to create Linux problems, be root
Personal attacks are against community rules.
Hey, if it’s an Intel Mac they run Linux great. I’m using a 2011 iMac running Linux Mint going on two and half years and haven’t had any issues!
(I know that more recent Macs have Asahi Linux, but I’ve not used it and cannot speak to it)
Nice.
I started out on a Coleco Adam. I could play Atari games on it.
There are dozens of us.
The first 3 computers I ever touched were an Apple II, Apple II e, and a Powemac.
Then I spent a decade in the Windows wilderness. Back and forth… Now safely home to Linux.
Maybe not a good question by itself.
That was definitely back before Apple went crazy with their whole closed ecosystem. Apple II feels a lot more like linux these days considering the amount of documentation available about the hardware. And parts aren’t locked down with serial numbers like in the iPhone…
I had a lot of fun as a kid messing with an Apple IIgs. One of the games I had was “Thexder”, and you can probably guess where I got my username.
Basically the same here haha
people who grew dealing with classic mac are going to flip a table reading this.
I was definitely autistic, as it turns out.
Is Discluded a word? Isn’t that Excluded?
She was about to say discarded, then change the route mid sentence.
Got 'em!
No no, discluded is for when you exclude someone and diss them at the same time.
I think it’s one of those flammable/inflammable sort of things.
I had to install PC-DOS because Windows didn’t exist.
On my family’s 386, it booted into DOS, which I wasn’t literate enough to figure out at the time, but I knew how to load MS DOS Shell, which was a text-based file GUI I could navigate to launch DOS programs, or I could run Windows 3.1 to play Castle of the Winds. (And I was aware Windows has other purely theoretical uses. It was only necessary for Castle of the Winds.)
I remember when my aunt got us a 320MB hard drive loaded with shareware games. That was life changing.
I wasn’t autistic, I was poor and switching to Linux made old hand-me-down computers work like new. It also frustrated me a lot, but that’s part of the game.
Guess i’m autistic lol. I did install Linux on my laptop when i was 12, but it didn’t last very long. The only reason i installed it is because i felt bored with the Windows UI, and distros like Ubuntu and Mint looked really interesting at the time. After i realized that i couldn’t get my EXEs to work i just went back to Windows lol.
It wasn’t until LTT made their video about using PopOS instead of Windows 11 back in 2021 that i remembered Linux even existed. I decided to give it a shot since Windows 10 had already started to freak me out for a while with their weird questions like asking if they can use my handwriting data. The rest is history. I know LTT gets a lot of flack for how they’ve handled their Linux content, and some of it is deserved, but if it wasn’t for me seeing that video i wouldn’t have given it a try.
Well, for the EXEs you just needed to use Wine.
About te UI… Well, graphical environments are independent of the distro most of the time, the only exception is when a distro has its own DE or WM hardcoded to it and won’t support anything else, as Mint, but even Cinnamon and MATE can be run on other distros
Yeah, i know these things now, but back then i just didn’t do any research and had no clue. Although i do remember trying wine, but i couldn’t get any games to work. I’m not sure if that was me being incompetent, or wine not being as good back then, probably a combination of both lol. This was like back in 2010 or something.
WINE was awful back then. It’s still not great. Bottles makes it bearable and of course Proton has entirely changed the game for gaming.
I’ve been into Linux on and off since around 2006… it was always cool, but kind of a pain in the ass to use. Until sometime around 2015-2020 or so we hit an inflection point and now linux is ready for primetime in a way it wasn’t before. Like when I first installed linux in 2006 it was like “yep… this sure is volunteer-made software (derogatory).” But it’s much better than it was.
Well, that’s fair.
As for Wine, I only managed to make Warcraft III to work, but not Minecraft or any other game. Wine needed so much tweaking back then.
Around the same time also.
I somewhat managed to set up my own mail server on my PC when I was 14. It was unbelievably shitty, barely functional but I did learn a great deal and only wasted about a week of my life while gaining some trauma. After I realized I can send and receive some e-mails, I immediately reinstalled windows to play counter strike with my friends as I was becoming ostracized for constantly talking about POP3 at school. That was the episode that made me understand that I do not want to do computer science.
At 12 I was not so interested in the features and mechanics of computers and OSs as to even have an opinion on the Windows UI, let alone consider other options. I was using AOL chat rooms and MSN Messenger, watching stupid flash videos on Newgrounds, and playing The Sims and Mech fighting games. I was in college studying Computer Science before I even gave a shit, and didn’t actually install Linux on my PC until I was in my mid 20s. So, from my perspective, you’re still an outlier.
Well when i talked about the UI it was honestly just very superficial. In a way of “oh i’m bored of this, but this other thing looks much different.” Basically monkey brain shit. It’s funny cause while i ended up going back to windows to be able to play games, my laptop was just a dual core celeron that could barely play anything anyway. I remember it often overheating and shutting down while i was playing sims 3 lol.
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I have full time Linux users on my team. I fix their code all day and go home to use all 3 os’s.
Using Linux means you like tinkering, not that your smarter or more capable.
In my case, I used Linux because I didn’t like being spied on. I also didn’t like ads and I hated my settings being reverted after Windows updates. Fuck Windows. It’s an OS that doesn’t understand consent.
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Liking to tinker things is somewhat correlated to being more capable or even smarter, though; I mean, you can’t tinker if you’re not capable and/or don’t know how to do it.
With LLMs you can theoretically tinker, but in my experience, 90% of the output will be hallucinated.
Can you fix a carb? Or replace your fuel injector? What about build a small table for your home? Run a Cnc? Maybe you don’t tinker enough then.
Your hobby makes you more capable in your hobby.
And your take and experience on llm’s is trash. The models are excellent coders and simply need context. There are only a few specific domains where they don’t produce excellent code. They aren’t going away in tech. There will be a middle ground where they are used.
The question the OOP is getting at isn’t about being smarter or more capable. It’s about knowing how to probem solve, which is itself about feeling like it’s ok to tinker.
I am a full time Linux user and nobody fixes my code ever, can you explain this?
Is this sarcasm? God damn I was a bit riled.
In the case that I’m actually not understanding your confusion, I’m a Staff engineer for 15 or so devs. Everyone makes mistakes (myself included) and everyone is fluent on nix systems.
But I’m running Colima and podman on osx because it’s a vastly easier os to use in a work environment. I’d choose windows + wsl over native desktop nix. And it has nothing to do with my capabilities.
I’m sure sometimes your code needs fixing.
But this whole thread is a bait. zzzzzzz
I’ve been using linus for like 27 years or so, but I don’t think I’ve been tinkering with my desktop for 20 years. Tinkering with my servers of course.
I’ve been using linus for like 27 years or so
New honeypot just dropped?!
Has he been using Finnish or Canadian Linus?
Do you have ethical stock of the canadian one? Or is it all day old?
Yes :DG<
Damn! I wanted to know what the hypothesis was.
Apple users are dumb. Or some other bs
“Windows sucks so much it forces you to learn how stuff works”
I’ll concede that Windows’ shittiness taught me some things, but I don’t think it actually taught me much that was useful because of how opaque and poorly designed it was. Like, yeah I could edit registry keys and I know what A:\ and C:\ were, but that stuff doesn’t mean shit outside of Windows. It was mainly the abstraction gained by moving away from Windows that actually taught me stuff.
Not dumb, tech illiterate. Some of the smartest people I know are completely tech illiterate, especially when it comes to tasks that don’t involve using a web browser.
As a computer scientist and UX designer, I think people in the tech sector are way too hard on users for not understanding the tech they’re using. Tech illiteracy is often a side-effect of good UX design. You don’t need to know how something works if using it is intuitive.
Windows has terrible UX, and Apple’s is a lot better, so it makes sense that Apple users wouldn’t need to get into the details of how their device works as much. That said, I have no love for Apple. I still think their UX is pretty bad, even while admitting that it’s more or less the best that’s currently out there.
On the other side of things, a bunch of the most tech literate programmers I know use Apple computers because it’s basically commercial linux that lets you use adobe products and such.
That is true. The biggest pain point for me switching to Linux was losing Adobe’s suite of software.
Personally I just wish there was an OS that let you have control over your devices, freedom to customize things, and a consistently clean UX. Sadly the corporate world will never allow that, so…you win some you lose some.
My biggest gripe with Apple for coding is the constant mixup of the Command and Control keys when I’m switching between my work laptop and my PC.
Well, that’s an actual fact so…
I almost never seen Macs irl growing up, it was very much Windows country where I live. So obviously when I asked for a computer as a kid it came with Windows, in my case Vista…
Only in the last maybe 8? years I started seeing people who used Macs irl and it tends to be younger people who only have a Macbook for online school stuff.
Also yes I’m the only Linux desktop user I know, Even the servers in every office I’ve worked in have been Windows.
Windows vista. Man that’s a memory.
I started on a Commodore 64.
Same, with two caveats: I used BBC Micros at school before getting a home computer and did some BASIC on those so that might count as my “start”. And second, my C64 was a C64C. MOS Technology 65xx family FTW though.
VIC-20 here. That 3K of RAM didn’t last long when programming. Dad saw I was hitting the wall and got me a 64.
I think my first was an Amiga.
The school had macs eventually for our computer lab. Then at some point we had both a windows machine and then an iMac. I ended up with a windows laptop around 11 and building my own windows pc just a few years later in early high school.
That’s pretty neat-o!
Is the hypothesis that people in those two OS’s have no clue about other OS’s and the one thats looks like a fruit have a superiority complex?
Linux users are particularly notorious for not having superiority complex.
I use Arch btw
It isn’t a complex when it’s just actually superior
psh everyone uses arch nowadays the steam deck is huge! Now if you used nix OS that would be impressive!
Nix is just so normie. Why don’t better use Gentoo? That’s what an actual nerd with no social life does!!!1!1
Noobs not daily driving their LFS builds
Nah, all my homies build their own kernel from scratch… In Assembly. TempleOS goes brrr
I have a superuser complex
sudo drop your complex
Changing “sudo” to “please” on my terminal was the best thing I ever did, now all of my conversations with my computer look so polite
“please !!” sounds like you beg on your knees to execute the last command
You don't have permissions to do this action; next action: rm -rf /
Your illness is rooted deep into your consciousness. “su” is “switch user” by the way…
Hate to be that guy, but it’s akshually substitute user
Omg it’s me
I use Arch btw (unironically lmao)
No-no-no, you love being that guy :)
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Sure but we do have a clue of the other two. Regularly having to act as the IT guy for family for a OS I don’t interact with…
It will depend on the age, but using Windows used to require some tech literacy. As far as I’m aware, Apple has always tried to avoid this need, which also prevents learning it. Modern Windows isn’t much different than modern Mac though. I’m assuming kids on Windows today aren’t much better than kids on Mac.
Controversial opinion but the system working well doesn’t prevent learning about it—if the user wants to. Like Apple computers are still computers, they’ve always had development tools. You could always study it under the hood and learn.
I don’t think that’s controversial. However, there’s two ways people will be encouraged to learn about it. Either the system invites you to tinker, or it doesn’t function how you want and requires you to tinker. Apple, in all of their products, mostly does neither. It functions fine, and it is opinionated about how it functions and doesn’t invite you to change it.
Sure, there will be curious people who, no matter what, tinker. They don’t need to be encouraged. The OP isn’t really trying to measure them. They’ll be the baseline where there is no measurable difference. The average user is what we want to understand. The average user on Mac isn’t expected to understand anything about the system. It just works. Both Windows (historically) and Linux do some amount of inviting you to tinker, and also requiring you to (depending on distro for Linux this may not actually be required). Windows has increasingly locked things down though, and also revert any changes on update more and more frequently.
Yeah, MacOS hold the users hand way too hard, in a way that is insulting in my opinion.
I’m assuming kids on Windows today aren’t much better than kids on Mac.
Totally right, I have seen it in person.
i think the hypothesis is that windows kids have general tech literacy and problem solving skills and OSX kids dont. and linux users are autustic ;-]
The most powerful things windows can do are gui based and the most powerful things macos can do are in the cli
Not saying everyone bothers going that deep but there is a reason most software engineers and other professionals would prefer mac over windows
Windows is an inconsistent mess and their terminal tools are afterthoughts
I don’t know if that’s accurate. Have you seen PowerShell? It’s so good, some people install it on Linux to use as their main shell
This just proves the world has deeply disturbed people
Nonsense, c# developers might install it on Linux but nobody who understands unix like systems considers it
No he is sorta right, powershell is actually kinda fire.
I use it daily, there is no point putting it on a unix like system
One day we will be rid of windows servers and I won’t have to use poweshell ever again
And that’ll be a sad day; powershell is one of approximately two great things that Microsoft ever did.
It’s a little verbose in its commands, but it’s very good.
Seems right (I use Linux)
That would be a very weird conclusion when Macs were generally the ones taught in school, and are also based on BSD.
generally
Where? Not in Spain. In fact no one I know was taught computers in Mac.
A lot of apple’s design philosophy hides the technical detail, to try and create a friction-free user experience. Android does the same thing, but apple were doing it earlier and on desktop devices to some extent. Windows back in the day was significantly more transparent, although I don’t know if I can say the same for modern windows
That’s well and good for some things, but the concern that it reduces the natural tendency to become highly tech literate is genuine.
add to that that for some time in history it was quite common to build your own pc (something that abviously went away with rise of laptops), which required whole other level of understanding.
I built my laptop. Framework user fwiw
went not isn’t
First time witnessing a stroke over the internet
This has been my experience and have anecdotal evidence of people who can use a Mac but don’t understand any of it. One customer we had problems with until we just cut it off was that she’d have issues with her Mac and couldn’t navigate it effectively to try troubleshooting. She didn’t understand how to install on it so we could run remote management software.
You used entirely different OSes than me then. Macs were not easy to use while windows was standard. If you were using a Mac you were learning a lot more since the majority of PCs in homes were windows and you didn’t have to do anything on them.
No. The only hard thing with macs was and is tivoization, because they want to decide what you can install and what not; that’s the reason why jailbreaks and things as brew and all that had to be created.
My school system used macs before OSX and switched to Windows almost entirely when OS 9 was still the latest thing. Sounds like another user had the same experience. OS 9 was nothing like unix and had no terminal even, to my knowledge.
your car’s main control unit may also be based on bsd (i have no idea whether that is in fact the case) but surprisingly most people would not call themselves experts on car electronic just because they drive a car.
while a lot of people considers themselves to be “it experts” just because they were raised by youtube instead of their parents since the age of 2.
Apple hasn’t always used a Unix-like system, though. The old Mac OS on those school computers was it’s own beast.
And now it seems like schools go for either chromebooks or tablets anyway.
I think one of the reasons is that MacOS didn’t really have any games back then, so there was no reason for a kid to be glued to their computer. And if you use something for a long time, you collect problems and ways to solve them, getting the experience and some technical knowledge along the way.
There were so many games, just not AAA titles
Number munchers and Oregon trail have entered the chat. Also the dozen other games on floppy disks (that my middle age mind cannot remember now) that we played on our Apple IIe’s.
My mom worked at Software Etc in the 80’s.
There were so many more, and better games, for PCs.
The only good games on Mac were ones ported from PC.
I was my mother’s official “troubleshooter”. If a customer returned a game, she gave it to me, to test.
There were definitely a lot more PC games returned than Mac, but there was almost never anything wrong with them. Probably came down to individual setups.
Which was Mac’s strong point. There was no real diversity in hardware, so everything worked.
But all the Mac games SUCKED compared to PC.
Unfortunately, this was also when I was exposed to Ultima IV… and my homework never saw me again.
Someone clearly never played Dark Castle
Were you under the impression I don’t believe there were pc games back then? I didn’t say that, also, funny enough you say
The only good games on Mac were ones ported from PC.
But the only games I specifically named actually were on Mac first then later ported to DOS.
I’m not so sure but I think back THEN there were less captivating PC games as well. My perspective is from the early 00s Russia, when you had to deal with pirated games, unbelievably slow Internet, funny videos shared between friends on CDs, going with a hard drive to a friend’s house just to share your music collection, etc. Basically, we had to know how to do this kind of stuff because the alternative was so expensive. Now with LLMs you don’t even have to “google” anymore, so there’s no need to know, for example, what a file extension is.
Interesting perspective. I was in the rural US and my experience was probably closer to yours than you might think. 33-48kbps modems were insanely slow, even back then. Between that and my parents banning the Internet in the house, most everything I got my hands on was pirated, and either painstakingly (secretly) downloaded over midnight hours on the unreliable modem or from a floppy disk or burned CD from a friend! This was circa 1997-2001 until I moved out and got a usable Internet connection.
Yeah, that checks out, I usually notice a 10-20 years “cultural” gap. Personal anecdote: watching The Sopranos in 2020s still felt like the topics in russian media and culture are just starting to catch up, before that no one really talked about depression as a disorder, and people taking ADs were seen as “crazy”.
Yep. A lot of people also say that the rural US is typically about 20 years behind california in a few ways, which I also agree with.
Huh? Mac had the better games! In fact I lived in the countryside and our school was mostly Macs until I got to high school.
Huh? Mac had the better games!
That’s a wild claim.
They are talking about stuff from 30 years ago and having difficulty processing that they are old now.
In the 90s, especially early 90s, the hardware was just plain faster and more capable. Coupled with a remarkably robust shareware community, gaming was great on them. The difference between Doom II (the PC-DOS game everyone remembers) and Marathon, which was its mac contemporary, was ridiculous. Textures, resolution, gameplay complexity, the ability to actually look up and down, etc.
Then Gil Amelio tried to turn them into a business-focused company for a few years, and mac gaming never fully bounced back from that. I mean, it almost did. Halo was going to be a Mac exclusive at launch, and then Microsoft bought out Bungie right before launch to sell their new X-Box.
You’re either very young, or didn’t have access to Mac’s as a kid. The games were great. Number Munchers was sick.
I don’t think 40 (how long ago Number Munchers came out) can be considered “very young.”
Yes, that’s my point. He’d have to be in his 20’s to have missed all the early Mac games.
If he’s 40 he for sure would have either played them, or just never been around Mac’s as a kid.
Mac had heaps of games in the 80s and 90s. Then from the 90s to the 2010s, it was WINDOWS TIME for games, with some being ported to OSX and Linux or run with compatibility software. Now it’s Windows/Linux hardcore and still only small or modest Mac support.
Mac did have a ton of fun games back then, though! I didn’t get a Mac of my own until Intel Core Macs came out, but I loved the Macs I used at my friends’ houses and school.
I went through an edgy “Apple is worst computers” phase in the 2000s, but I grew to like the hardware and OS after I picked one up to install Windows on to bring to LAN parties (all non-Mac laptops that could play games fuckin suuuuuucked back then and I was never at home.)
I don’t know about better, but the Mac games I had in elementary school were awesome for kids that age. Oregon trail and number munchers. I don’t think pc gaming had really taken off much at all then. That was years before doom, even.
Did it have Zoo Tycoon? No? I think we’re done here.
No no. Autistic children should be in, but as another variable to check
Sadly, the public is vastly undereducated in the value and importance of control variables.