I've been waiting for this release for a long time. I lost my first gen Maxes and was expecting for a significant upgrade to get a new pair. This feels like a very minor update to the originals and not really a new product.
Considering the modest update and the fact that they lose many of the quality of life features if outside of the Apple ecosystem, which I am becoming increasingly disenchanted with, I will be looking elsewhere.
I watched the whole video and there is no heartbeat sound, which is what I was expecting as well. I think that they recorded the signal, not the sound that the heart makes when pumping blood.
My off-prem backups are in a Tailscale connected NAS at my parent's house. I'm in the process of talking a friend into having Tailscale configured to host more off-prem backups at his place as well. I'm moving out of iCloud for photo library management and into Immich. I really don't want to lose my photos and videos hence the off-prem backups. Tailscale has been a blessing for this kind of use case
I'm in the process of moving all my backups to Immich - honestly it's best in class software.
I'm able to set it up so that my SO and I can view all the pictures taken by the other (mostly cute photos of our dog and kid, but makes it easier to share them with others when we don't have to worry about what device they're on), have it set to auto-backup, and routed through my VPS so it's available effectively worldwide.
The only issue that I run into is a recent one, which is hard drive space - I've got it on a NAS/RAID setup with backups sent to another NAS at my parents' place, but it's an expensive drive replacement in current market conditions.
I can also recommend Ente. It is pretty polished. Go-based backend using Postgres DB, Flutter-based android version, React-based web frontend (electron for desktop).
This. I have been a big (and loud) fan of M-series hardware from the beginning, but if Apple is going to keep making their software worse, I will find myself lingering on older generations that run Asahi Linux or going back to a traditional x86_64 laptop instead of buying into new generations.
I don't trust Asahi after the whole Asahi Lina thing. Lina being an alt in denial of her other identity is a big red flag. If Hector was honest about it I would feel differently. The deception behind the Lina identity is very weird to me.
I'm not sure what Hector's personal choices have to do with not "trusting" a piece of software? It's open source, so if you don't trust the quality of the software, then just inspect it yourself?
Also, FWIW: Hector/Lina is no longer associated with Asahi anymore.
Same here. I know some people are unhappy with some of the UX tweaks but honestly I don't notice much of it. The whole liquid glass thing is a bit gimmicky. Other than that, I don't see much difference. The rounded corners on windows are a bit silly. But I don't spend a lot of time fiddling with windows. Most of my windows are maximized (not full screen). I'm sure there are other issues people dislike that I just haven't noticed.
I use my laptop for development. I don't actually use most of the built in applications. My browser is Firefox, I use codex, vs code, intellij, iterm2, etc. Most of that works just fine just as it did on previous versions of the OS. I actually on purpose keep my tool chains portable as I like to have the option to switch back to Linux when I want to. I've done that a few times. I come back for the hardware, not the OS.
In my experience, if you don't like Apple's OS changes that is unfortunate but they don't seem to generally respond to a lot of the criticism. Your choices are to get further and further out of date, switch to something else, or just swallow your pride. Been there done that. Windows is a "Hell No" for me at this point. I'll take the UX, with all the pastel colors that came and went and all the other crap that got unleashed on macs over the last ten years. Definitely a case of the grass not being greener on Windows. Even with the tele tubby default desktop in XP back in the day.
I can deal with Linux (and use that on and off on one of my laptops). However, that just doesn't run that well on mac hardware. And any other hardware seems like a big downgrade to me. Both Windows and Linux are arguably a lot worse in terms of UX (or lack thereof). Linux you can tweak. And you kind of have to. But it just never adds up to consistent and delightful. Windows, well, at this point liking that is probably a form of Stockholm Syndrome. If that doesn't bother you, good for you.
So, Mac OS it is for me as everything else is worse. I've in the past deferred updates to new versions of Mac OS as well. Generally you can do that for a while but eventually it becomes annoying when things like homebrew and other development toys start assuming you run something more recent. And of course for security reasons you might just not drag your feet too long. Just my personal, pragmatic take.
Is your Spotlight usable? Mine literally will not find an app
Searching for Chat yields "Ask ChatGPT", "ChatGPT Atlas", "ChatGPT Atlas" the website, and chatgpt.com. Does not yield the actual ChatGPT.app which I have currently open lol.
Closing Tabs in Safari till takes more than a second though. And if you hold Cmd-W to close all of them it just completely locks up and crashes. Still not fixed since the release of Safari 26.
I'm on an M4 Pro MacBook-- basically the fastest computer you could buy from Apple before today-- and opening/closing the tab sidebar in Safari on Tahoe takes multiple seconds, even if I have only 4-6 tabs open, and seems to drop to 5 FPS. It's comically bad.
It's so bad I switched back to Chrome. I had thought Chrome had a major battery life penalty compared to Safari on Macs, but I checked more up-to-date info and apparently that's outdated.
I have this issue as well on multiple Tahoe Macs. Opening a new Safari window is 500ms to 1000ms. Adding a tab is faster most of the times. But Safari frequently loses tabs turning them into a blank page without a URL. Searching in the passwords app talkes multiple seconds. This is on multiple macs with different icloud accounts even.
I don't have that problem (new Safari window in < 100ms) but I believe you, LOL.
Because I have the problem on 7+ Macs (as in all mine, my kids', my sister's and my dad's (all of which I am primary tech support on)) where if I press ⌘+ to increase the font size on a website, it increases — and then immediately reverts back to the previous size.
Every single time. But only the first time. I just did it on this site to be sure it still happens.
Do it again, and it works.
It's been happening for at least one or two years, across more than one major OS upgrade. ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
I will say that 26.4 beta 2 was the first time I've regretting using betas since Sonoma beta 2. The Sonoma beta ruined the firmware on my machine and Apple had to replace the logic board; the latest Tahoe beta broke all networking on my machine and I had to erase the installation to fix everything. I've since dropped off the beta train for the time being.
I already left the beta train on my iPhone because I had too many issues getting my grocery apps to allow me to place orders without going to my laptop and doing it in a web browser.
I moved away from mac because of the OS and couldn't be happier. The hardware may be great but non-Apple hardware is fine too, and Linux is significantly better experience than MacOS these days.
The next macOS will be touch screen centric with elements getting bigger when you're close to touching them, rumors say. That being said, I run Tahoe and it works perfectly fine to me, I am not sure what issues people have with it. Sure, some corner radii aren't exactly the same but I honestly couldn't give less of a shit as long as it runs the programs I need.
Safari routinely using 20+ Gb of memory with a handful of tabs open. Safari tabs refusing to close. Unresponsive System Settings window. Random application freezes and crashes, Apple Music not playing music. This is on a 32Gb M1 Max. My M1 Air on Sequoia doesn't experience any of these issues, even if it has half the unified memory.
Not necessarily, because I never used Apple apps, it's not like I'm avoiding them now because they're ostensibly buggy (as others don't seem to have the same issues in this thread).
Unfortunately it won’t be long til we’re all forced up to Tahoe anyway. Well, ee iOS developers will be anyway once they make the latest Xcode only work with it…
I’m right where you are. Very happy Apple customer since my first PowerBook G4. Currently have an M1 Max, an iPhone 17 Pro, the iPad Pro, HomePod, Apple TV, and Watch Ultra.
All the _just works_ feeling and reliability seem to be gone. Tahoe is so unstable that I now restart the Mac every day, when in the past it happened on software updates only. Apple Music is another huge mess, I can’t comprehend how can it be so unreliable.
Looking for exits as well and kind of looking forward to migrating to Graphene OS, self-hosted Immich, and Navidrome
I can't quite believe how bad Apple Music is. I will say this for Apple, when I tried out Music on a brand new Mac and it didn't work properly, I got to chat to a real support person who walked me through fixing it.
It shouldn't have been broken though. It shouldn't be a native app written by Apple that feels worse to use than both Spotify and YouTube music. I mean, I open it now just to see if there's anything janky and yeah. "Get 3 months for $5.99" and then below that "Get 3 months for $8.99" and you'd have to scroll and read much smaller text to see that the second one is for family - I mean that's reasonably obvious but it's weirdly unpolished. And then the play bar, which is floating around, looks unintegrated with the app, obscures the content area, and provides enabled controls that do nothing because there is no song to play. Not broken, but UX stuff that shows a lack of care.
And yet Apple engineers are going through numerous forums and Reddit posts to gaslight people by commenting “well, it doesn’t happen to me, mine works perfectly”.
They managed to mess up an entire ecosystem and they’re acting so stupid about it that I cannot believe all this software was made by Apple.
There’s no elegance, no thought out user experience, no good design, it’s all stupid glass design with comical amount of padding. It all looks like it was designed and implemented by a team five over a half assed pool party.
What the hell is Apple doing with its tens of thousands of engineers, if they cannot make a freaking window manager.
I'm convinced that this is the fate of all successful software companies. It's not a result of arrogance or hubris or anything else like that. It's the result of turnover.
Take your favourite rock band and turn over all the musicians until no one is left from the original band. Should we expect the band to continue cranking out chart-topping hits?
There's one further factor that makes the situation even worse than the "Rock Band of Theseus." That's the fact that young software engineers are not interested in stewardship. They want to build their own projects, not fix bugs in someone else's. Across the software industry we see this lead to a continual churn, rewrites and redesigns no one wants, and a huge amount of wasted effort reinventing the wheel (and often making a worse wheel).
There should be leadership at the top focussing the efforts of developers though. Developers wanting to make new stuff doesn't only happen because of turnover.
It often feels like Apple hires the best hardware and marketing people in the world and holds them to the highest standards, but the software design and engineering people are left to just kind of screw around, redesign stuff for shits and giggles, and laugh as people fill their forums with bug reports and (very obvious) feature requests.
When even my "boomer" aged and non-tech savvy dad who has always used an iPhone notices the update is bad, I think you are in at least a little bit of trouble if you don't quickly course correct.
I'm sorry but if your out is linux and windows because you're not happy how stuff doesn't "just work" in the Apple ecosystem boy are you in for a bad surprise.
However bad you think Apple is getting with MacOS - windows is getting worse. And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having". Meanwhile I can't use bluetooth on my desktop (works perfectly fine on windows), and I was watching laptop reviews from justjosh recently where he's adding a segment where he is trying out linux on the device - and his experience on the two videos I've seen "sound does't work, wifi doesn't work, BT doesn't work ..."
All that said I am looking into leaving the Apple ecosystem as well because I just don't like how locked down and the devices are, but I'm fully aware that it's going to take significant effort for stuff that I'd get out of the box from Apple.
The problem isn't that MacOS doesn't work, it's that MacOS doesn't work _and_ you can't fix the things that don't work.
You can anticipate "the linux brigade" because it works well for many of us.
This isn't to say there _aren't_ problems. Bluetooth, audio, etc. working all depend on having the luck that someone wrote good drivers for the device you want to install Linux on. When you do have a problem, you don't have the benefit of having many people on your same configuration like you do with Apple. You might find yourself troubleshooting as the only person with your specific combo of dongle, mobo, cpu, distro, and kernel.
I've been on Linux since 2009 and MacOS since 2021. I've never had a bluetooth problem with Linux but I've had a ton on MacOS (but that might just be airpods).
The nice thing about Linux is that you have control over all your problems. On MacOS, if you have a solvable problem, the solution is often either "Pray that Apple fixes it in the next release" or "The fix for that costs $10 per month and it'll clog up your app switcher". On Linux, if you have a solvable problem, the solution is often "go into the settings for your distribution" or "install this tweak tool" or "find someone who had it before on a support forum and follow their steps".
It's not unreasonable that someone who is fed up with unsolvable problems on MacOS would find Linux more appealing. It's not a naive mindset, it's just how things are.
Thanks for this very important point. It often gets lost in the discussion.
The big idea with Linux/BSD/fully-open-source is that you can fix whatever you don't like.
That was the breaking point for me with Tahoe. I never loved MacOS before that, but it never got in the way. Then with Tahoe, it got in the way, so I went to fix it, and found out that fixing it is actually impossible! That was the breakup moment.
Sophisticated LLMs make it even easier to fix or tweak any Linux/BSD/fully-open-source software to our liking.
> The big idea with Linux/BSD/fully-open-source is that you can fix whatever you don't like.
That's a great theory, and sometimes it's actually true, but in reality for most users most of the time, Linux is as "fixable" as Windows or macOS, because most people, even the technically savvy ones aren't driver developers. Heck most software developers probably aren't even C programmers anymore. And even if someone had the competency in the language and low level system programming, do they have the time and the inclination to re-write the audio stack so that it finally works correctly? Or to fix the fact that even in 2026, sleep and hibernate are hit and miss? And then to maintain their patch against future system updates or go through the process of getting it upstreamed?
Most Linux users, and especially most Linux users switching from something like macOS or Windows would be waiting and hoping that someone else decided to fix the thing for them because they either lack the skills, time or inclination to do it themselves. And we know this is true because if it weren't true, all the various "wars" over the years like systemd and pulse audio and wayland wouldn't have been a war at all because everyone who didn't like it would have easily patched it out and moved on. But a modern full fledged OS experience is a mess of intertwined and complex dependencies. So when a distro decides to switch a big chunk of the underlying stack like that, most people either have to go along with it, or hope that enough people feel strongly enough about it to fork everything and make their own distro, and then they have to hope the forkers have the passion and drive to maintain that for them.
Yes, you "can" fix whatever you don't like in linux. Just like you "can" find all the information you need to diagnose and treat whatever medical condition you might have online and at your local libraries. But most people are still going to pay a doctor, because most people don't have the time or skills to actually do it.
> but in reality for most users most of the time, Linux is as "fixable" as Windows or macOS,
I disagree with this. For most users, most of the time, Linux is significantly more fixable than Windows or MacOS.
In nearly 20 years, I've never had to write a line of C or touch the Linux kernel to fix issues I've had on Linux.
For example, one of my big peeves I've had lately on both PopOS and MacOS are the looooong animations to switch desktops.
On PopOS, I had two paths to fix this: Tweak the COSMIC desktop to fix the behavior, or the simple thing of simply installing GNOME (or KDE or any other DE of choice).
On MacOS, I'm SOL. There's no way to fix that on my Macbook (short of installing Asahi Linux, of course).
> Just like you "can" find all the information you need to diagnose and treat whatever medical condition you might have online and at your local libraries. But most people are still going to pay a doctor, because most people don't have the time or skills to actually do it.
This isn't a great analogy, but it's worth noting: Many conditions are expected to be self-diagnosed and self-treated. I don't go to the doctor for scrapes, bruises, colds, dry eyes, a stubbed toe, etc. By this analogy, Linux users are buying their own aspirin and applying their own band-aids, while MacOS users are waiting in line, dependent on someone else to fix these things.
I say this as someone who uses both MacOS and Linux daily.
> On PopOS, I had two paths to fix this: Tweak the COSMIC desktop to fix the behavior, or the simple thing of simply installing GNOME (or KDE or any other DE of choice).
So what did you do? Did you fix the DE? Again, this is effectively outside the skill of the sorts of people who would be "switching" to linux due to the issues with macOS or Windows.
And while installing a new DE is certainly easier than re-programming one, it's still dependent on someone else having written a DE that not only solves your problem, but doesn't introduce entirely new ones and isn't so fundamentally different to the user that they might as well have switched OSes in the first place. And if the user's primary issue was being forced into a major interface re-design like liquid glass, having to switch to a completely new DE is more of a lateral move than actually fixing the problem.
And to be clear, the fact that it's POSSIBLE for someone to fix a problem for you even if you can't, and it doesn't have to be the primary OS vendor is a benefit of using an open source OS. So I'm not saying it's not possible to benefit from this. I'm just saying that for most users, most of the time, the ability to "fix it themselves" is effectively as out of reach for them as it is using macOS or Windows because having access to the source code is only the tiniest part of actually fixing a problem for themselves.
Since my doctor analogy fell flat, let me try again with a traditional car analogy. A kit car is infinitely more open, customizable and user controllable than any car bought from an auto manufacturer. And yet, for the vast majority of drivers, buying a kit car, even if it was turn key and pre-built would do absolutely nothing to make it more likely that they will do their own repairs or modifications to the car. They will continue taking it to the same mechanics they always took their traditional cars to, they will continue to buy off the shelf parts if possible and do without if not.
Nope, I swapped to GNOME. Forking the DE was something I was considering doing just to contribute back. It's not something I'd recommend someone to do. (That said, it's Rust and not C, so the barrier for entry is much lower.)
If someone can install Linux, they can install a new DE. It's easy peasy.
> if the user's primary issue was being forced into a major interface re-design like liquid glass, having to switch to a completely new DE is more of a lateral move than actually fixing the problem.
No, switching DEs fixes the problem. If MacOS were open source, then you'd have a community-run fork from before Liquid Glass. (If MacOS were open source, you'd also probably have an LTS branch anyways, and no dark patterns forcing you to update.)
Ubuntu users dismayed by Unity were able to stay on GNOME by installing GNOME. Ubuntu users dismayed when Unity went away were able to stay on Unity because someone forked it. GNOME users dismayed by GNOME 3 are able to stay on forks of GNOME 2.
And it's worth stressing that _none_ of these were so bad as Liquid Glass.
>for most users, most of the time, the ability to "fix it themselves" is effectively as out of reach for them
This is the thing I take contention with. This seems hard to square with the experience of someone using Linux. Is this an assertion you're making as someone who doesn't use it?
I think the most common experience on Linux is that people are able to fix the things that annoy them. It's a tangible and normal thing, not a hypothetical.
> No, switching DEs fixes the problem. If MacOS were open source, then you'd
>have a community-run fork from before Liquid Glass. (If MacOS were open
>source, you'd also probably have an LTS branch anyways, and no dark patterns
>forcing you to update.)
>Ubuntu users dismayed by Unity were able to stay on GNOME by installing GNOME.
>Ubuntu users dismayed when Unity went away were able to stay on Unity because
>someone forked it. GNOME users dismayed by GNOME 3 are able to stay on forks >of GNOME 2.
And again, all of these solutions are the user being dependent on someone else doing the work they want for them, and are very much not "fixing it themselves" any more than installing Asahi linux on their macbook would be "fixing it themselves"
> Is this an assertion you're making as someone who doesn't use it?
No it's an assertion I'm making knowing that the vast majority of computer users barely understand what it is their computer is doing at any given time or why. And of the subset of users that do have an understanding, an even smaller subset of those users have the necessary skills, time and inclination to fix something wrong with the system. I worked computer retail for years. The vast majority of people I interacted with had no interest in knowing what their computer was doing under the hood or how they could solve their own problems. For every one customer that I had the chance to show how they could do something for themselves, I had 10-15 other customers tell me they didn't want to know, they just wanted it fixed.
I have plenty of experience using Linux. I spent 7 years working at a job where I was thankfully allowed to use a Linux box as my primary development machine. My home network runs stacks of Debian boxes, my 3d printers are running klipper, my home media systems Ubuntu or Debian. I built an arcade system than runs off of a Debian box. I've built remote scanning and printing workstations out of some Raspberry Pis for a company I worked for, and built custom touch screen inventory workstations prototyping them out on "Puppy Linux" installations (some weirdness around needing to work forward from a very old x11 config that didn't work with modern ubuntu at the time). I've been installing and using Linux in some form or another since I first spent 3 days twice in a row downloading the set of 600MB install CDs for "mkLinux" over a 33.6 dialup connection (twice because the first time I pulled the files down in "text mode" which broke the images).
But it's also these experiences that inform my opinion that Linux presents plenty of its own pain points and that plenty of those pain points are simply unfixable by the vast majority of their users. Every other year or so, some updates to Ubuntu would inevitably break multi-display handling or the network or something else on my dev machine at work. I would easily lose a day or two to hunting down esoteric configuration options and work arounds and digging into things that most computer users will never want to touch. My arcade system worked fine for months until an update to something in the Debian/Ubuntu audio stack broke audio on boot. It's been over a year now and it's still broken. You have to manually go into alsamixer, swap which audio "card" the system thinks its talking to (the onboard audio presents as two different cards, one for the normal audio jacks and one for HDMI out) and then toggle the muting on the various outputs until you find the one that was enumerated to be your current output on this boot. As near as I can figure out, it has something to do with a change in the order that the audio system is brought up on boot. It's now loaded much earlier in the boot process and apparently this particular chip and board combination doesn't initialize the second card until after some later step in the boot process pokes it. So when the audio system first comes up, it only sees the one card, can't apply the saved configurations and drops into a default. I've built some work around scripts that try to re-apply the audio settings again later in the process, but so far they're only about 60% effective. In the mean time, it's just broken for me and plenty of other people like me with the same AMD on board audio setup. And I'm someone comfortable digging into debugging hardware boot-up issues and the rats nest that is the linux audio stack.
But this same box also saw me need to switch from XFCE to KDE because some bug with the "notifications" system in XFCE hard hangs any user input for 5 minutes or so if you try to pop up a notification before the first time a user logs into the DE, something that I was doing because the arcade doesn't have a mouse plugged in, but you can hit a hotkey combo to switch to a keyboard mouse control scheme and I wanted a notification to display when you switched control schemes.
I have a raspberry pi running home-assistant that refused to boot if one of the zwave radio devices is plugged in to USB on boot. No idea why and it's been working fine ever since I switched to a different zwave radio, but was certainly a pain if the power ever flickered.
And lets not get into the nightmare that getting each individual linux system to play nicely with DHCPv6 was. Apparently every linux distro does IPv6 DHCP things just a little differently and even across versions of the same distro it can vary wildly.
Are all of these things fixable by AN end user? Yes, probably they are. Are all of them fixable by me? Probably with enough free time and a little luck, yes they probably are. Are they fixable by most people who use a computer day to day and especially the sort of people who aren't already interested in Linux? No almost certainly not. Those users would rely on people like me (or more likely the people I'm relying on) to figure it out and drop a solution in the up stream or provide some package you can install to replace the broken component. And again, I'm not denying that this possibility is a benefit. It's just not the same as "fixing it yourself".
Does it matter? Generally Linux desktop distributions are made for the people who use them, who would tend towards people who will fix things. You mention distros but there obviously are a lot of passionate distro makers because right now it seems like there are more distros than ever.
There are often comments on threads like this that go along the lines of "If only the people making Linux desktop did X then they'd get more people". But there there isn't really anyone making Linux on the desktop. It's not a product. Even the products within it are built on the work of people with very disparate interests. It's kind of amazing that we get a cobbled together working experience at all.
Apple and Microsoft can focus on particular things, like getting more users, or supporting hardware they want to sell, or trying to get you to sign up to Office 365. No Linux desktop environment can have that kind of focus. So when you say it's not fixable to most users I think: well it's not supposed to be. It's not supposed to be anything, it just kind of is. Like coming across a mountain instead of a theme park - it's not a curated experience, it's not going to be for everyone, you might get hurt, but it's far far more beautiful.
It does matter if you're selling someone on the idea of switching away from their mac or windows machine that they're complaining about something the OS vendor has done by highlighting that with Linux they could "fix it themselves". It misses the point that most people don't want to "fix it themselves" and even if they had the inclination to that, for many problems they don't have the time or the skills. If someone is upset that Apple forced a move to Liquid Glass with Tahoe and all the bad UX that comes along with it, it's possible that they could also have the skills to fix their OS if they were equally upset that their chosen linux distro switched to Wayland. But it's more likely than not that they don't have those skills and so for that user, Linux is theoretically an OS they can fix, and practically just as likely to force them to accept the march of technology as any other OS they use.
I personally wouldn't try to sell Linux to anyone and get them to switch. It is a futile game and I see no real reason for it. People will move if they have reason to (in any direction) and the best one can do is show and tell. I will tell people what I like using if they ask. I'm more likely to tell folks not to switch because I don't want to be technical support for anyone outside my household.
I don't think anyone will switch from MacOS to Linux because of rounded corners. If they're really into theming it would make sense.
Being able to fix things is also a bit of a vague statement. You can fix things in many different ways, and you can fix some things in every OS. Fixing might be writing your own code, or switching a theme, or an application, or a distro, or the whole OS. The level of lockdown then matters. MacOS has the greatest lockdown because you can't just get a new Macbook and fix it by installing something other than MacOS.
Your comments really sound like you don't have experience with Linux. This sounds like you're repeating things others have heard.
> it's more likely than not that they don't have those skills
No, they absolutely do.
Even at the most basic level of interacting with the OS, Linux desktops usually offer more options in its Settings application than you'd get with MacOS.
If something annoys you on Linux, it probably annoyed someone else, and there's probably a toggle or switch for it.
If not, the barrier to fixing it is usually "sudo apt install cool_thing". Higher than "open the settings app", but it doesn't require compiling or coding. It only requires literacy (and, granted, not everyone is literate).
> Linux is ... practically just as likely to force them to accept the march of technology
For starters, let's not characterize Liquid Glass as "the march of technology". It's a symptom of dysfunction within Apple.
Second, no, this is just simply wrong. Many Linux distros offer LTS versions. Ubuntu 16.04 was released in 2016 and its support is ending this year, after a decade. (That's not counting the five more years of security maintenance.) Very importantly, these also don't have dark patterns to tick you to update like Apple did with Tahoe.
> Your comments really sound like you don't have experience with Linux. This sounds like you're repeating things others have heard.
It's really disappointing to me that so many people assume that just because you're not convinced that linux is the right solution for every computer user that you don't have experience with the system. As I mentioned in my other reply to you, I have plenty of experience with Linux, and those experiences are why I say that Linux is just as "unfixable" to your average computer user as MacOS or Windows is.
> > The big idea with Linux/BSD/fully-open-source is that you can fix whatever you don't like.
> That's a great theory, and sometimes it's actually true, but in reality for most users most of the time, Linux is as "fixable" as Windows or macOS, because most people, even the technically savvy ones aren't driver developers.
But there a whole lot more people who are happy to pay Claude $200/month now than there used to be. Claude isn’t a driver developer, but it’s taken a bunch of different open projects and modified for them for me in such a way that it’s made my life meaningfully better.
Things I couldn’t do for years, that I’ve wanted for years, got accomplished in 2 evenings: one to implement and deploy, one to optimise because the original deployment was a good POC but not good enough to keep running (e.g. doubling or tripling of CPU usage or RAM from prior to modification).
Sure, you could argue I’m paying a doctor, but there isn’t a doctor for the apple ecosystem. There’s just “suck it up, sunshine.”
(Written from my iPad, where I continue to suck it up)
You fix something then the next system update breaks everything. Depending on the machine mood and what I'm currently running slack/chrome will crash while attempting to screen share. Audio routing will get messed up randomly every time I need to use a DAW.
Sorry but the level of stuff that Apple users complain about when they say "not working" is not comparable to the level of unreliability of linux for me - it's not even in the same class of reliability - Apple users are just spoiled and rightfully mad about the platform quality deteriorating.
I'm not a Linux noob, I've been running linux desktop on and off for a long time (I remember ordering the free Ubuntu CD's and having to go to customs with my father at 14-15 so over 20 year probably - holly shit time flies). The last attempt was like a year ago for two months. Linux is still very much a hobby you pick up to run your computer for me and every colleague I see using it just confirms this even if they won't admit it (issues connecting to calls, unmuting, turning on camera, etc.). Like I'm annoyed that I can't use HDMI 2.1 via my USB 4 dock on Mac because it doesn't support some protocol, on Linux HDMI 2.1 on my AMD card is a no go from the start (unless I want to go with some random dude unofficial kernel driver patches).
I still use my desktop as SSH workstation and run arch on it, but my client is MacOS - I just need something that works reliably for everyday productivity tasks.
We seem to have a world where neither Linux, nor MacOS, nor Windows "just work". None of them have meaningful support channels for individuals. All of them have issues. They're very similar in these ways.
The first of these systems is actionable: When it doesn't work, it can generally be made to work. The whole journey may be an awful affair for the entire duration, but a person can usually (not always!) get there.
The other two systems are inactionable: When it doesn't work, there is no fixing it. There is no pathway, nor any journey. One can only accept that it is broken, that they are powerless to change it, and that this is the end of the road for that problem.
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There are probably healthier ways to learn acceptance than this.
> The first of these systems is actionable: When it doesn't work, it can generally be made to work. The whole journey may be an awful affair for the entire duration, but a person can usually
It's also important to mention that it is more likely a person would get help along the way.
And - it should also be said that there are non-Linux free operating systems, like the BSD's, for which it can also "generally be made to work". And there's the more niche HaikuOS (where I don't know if what doesn't work can be made to work, but people do use it).
The category of things that don't "just work" on a Mac for me compared to Linux and even Windows is just a class apart. You can't compare shared buffers between phones being flaky or using face time on PC to answer calls from iphone being glitchy to my browser crashing when I try to screenshare, repeatedly, on linux.
1. and 2. are never even an options on linux - there's probably some way but the effort/payoff is basically a nogo. On apple I get those by default just by using the same apple id on the devices. It's not a principled comparison but a practical one between using these systems.
Again if you're coming from MacOS and expect Linux to be better at "just works" you're in for a bad surprise.
> On apple I get those by default just by using the same apple id on the devices. It's not a principled comparison but a practical one between using these systems.
Right. That's why you're complaining about how they don't work.
Anyway, I never suggested that Linux is better at "just works."
Instead, I suggested that -all- of them have issues and further posited that, on Linux, those issues are actionable.
I am disinclined to defend a position that I do not hold.
I have come to hate Android, but every time I seriously look at switching to iOS, it seems Apple has chosen that time to make things even worse. Unfortunately, there's no Linux equivalent for phones. (Or at least, nothing that's easier than gentoo was in 2004. That was great for learning, but for daily use of a critical device, not so great.)
they have yet to invent a linux laptop with good battery life, quality keyboard & trackpad, sleep-then-suspend, bluetooth. as long as apple makes computers with those things, i can be content even if it means living inside my full screen linux vm
the macbooks are crazy for battery life compared to anything else.
But you can run Linux on an M2 Macbook.
And there is premium windows hardware on the market, where Linux actually works better than Windows (notably business laptops like the Thinkpad x1 and HP Elitebook).
unfortunately asahi linux bare metal cuts batty life by 40% or so and doesn’t support external displays via USB-C. worse battery seems a very common theme for linux-on-laptop.
Yeah MacOS is better with Battery life compared to Linux.
But, compared to W11?
I guess it depends a lot. My Precision 5520 got an extra hour of battery on the 9cell varient. Thats about a 20% uplift from W11; but thats an old Xeon laptop now.
Luck doesn't play a factor in getting your hardware to work with Linux. It's either supported or it's not, and since the code is Open Source you can Google/ChatGPT the answer in less than 2 minutes.
Your experience isn't uncommon, but it's largely the result of trying to force a square peg into a round hole. There are thousands of different smartphones, game consoles and set-top boxes that rely on Linux for all of their basic functionality. You only get problems trying to smash reverse-engineered drivers and hardware together expecting OEM-level support. If you want good Linux support, pay for good Linux support.
This. If you want Linux to be better, you need to use Linux. It's not any harder for OEMs to support it vs. Windows or MacOS. It's actually easier to support in many cases. There just isn't a business case. Use Linux, create a business case, get better software. Someone has to be the early adopter. Better nerds like us than grandma.
> I'm sorry but if your out is linux and windows because you're not happy how stuff doesn't "just work" in the Apple ecosystem boy are you in for a bad surprise.
I think you and GP agree more than you realise, their point seems to be that Apple was worth all the locked down walled garden stuff because at least it "just worked." Now it's a locked down walled garden which _also doesn't work._ Tahoe and iOS 26 are the worst of both worlds.
> Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having". Meanwhile I can't use bluetooth on my desktop...
Ok, you're having Bluetooth issues. Fair enough. But using Bluetooth (on a desktop no less) is not so overwhelmingly common that one can justify a sweeping statement like yours on that basis. The "Linux brigade" says that stuff works for them because it does. My desktop "just works" for me and it has for like 5 years at this point. That doesn't mean everything is perfect, but neither is Linux the train wreck of incompatibility you describe.
> And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues.
I think that's probably a few years out of date. Certainly, it used to be completely true and was a major problem.
I'm just not finding that now. Drivers are better, and more widespread, and there are less odd hardware innovations in standard PC components that screw it up.
And, if you want a laptop that runs Linux perfectly, there are more than a few options out there that ship with Linux installed and supported now.
I prefer my MacBook, but the Thinkpad whatever I bought to have Windows and Linux available for some software I need occasionally has a fingerprint reader that worked out of the box on Ubuntu.
Since when is using a fingerprint reader on laptops at all common? If that's a requirement for you then fair enough, but not having a fingerprint reader doesn't make a laptop so niche that one would be justified in saying "get serious".
Another alternative (although Mac OS-only) is [0] OrbStack. Some devs in my team are running it as a more performant alternative to Docker Desktop for Mac and they are very happy so far.
If you're a U.S. citizen, tax dollars from you and others will backstop any cancelled subscriptions, I guess good on you for not trying to pay them twice, though you get zero benefit with this approach.
> In your opinion, what is the best approach, if any, to attempt to address it?
There aren't many options for fighting the tax man, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes". You're only option is to leave the US for somewhere better.
Correct, the US is one of the few countries that tries to collect (Federal) income tax from all citizens regardless of the country they are currently living in. To be fair, when you can prove that income is entirely foreign (not a single US company in the chain of ownership) that income becomes almost entirely deductible and the tax reporting essentially just a census on how well US citizens are doing from an income standpoint globally. (For people that want economics analyses of US influence in global politics, that census can be handy to spin.)
I think the root problem with how the US currently spends its tax dollars is the above "vote with your wallet" belief in the first place. "Vote with your wallet" implies that the rich deserve more votes. That's not (representative) democracy, that is oligarchy. Right now the US has two political parties that are both "vote with your wallet parties". They both act like they are bake sales that constantly need everyone's $20 bills just to "survive", but as much as anything they are trying to make US citizens complicit in agreeing that the rich deserve more votes and should control more US policy.
I think the only real solution to a lot of US ills is drastic Campaign Finance Reform.
Minor correction, expat income is deductible up to (currently) $130k under the FEIE. After that it's taxes as usual. There's also an array of other mandatory forms like FBAR for foreign accounts, and the nightmare that is form 5471, with absolutely wild allowances for the IRS to impose penalties, often with no statute of limitations and per-violation fines. For example, a US citizen with multiple bank accounts and a mistake in FBAR reporting for multiple years running will be liable for the (iirc) $10,000 fine for each bank account, and each year (e.g. 4 accounts, 8 years, $320,000 fine).
Living and doing business overseas is as a US citizen is a high risk endeavor.
FEIE is only one of the options for avoiding federal income tax. The other is the Foreign Tax Credit, which has no such limit: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1116.pdf. If the place an American lives and works has a higher income tax rate than the US one, in practice he will not face any tax liability, regardless of income level.
Unfortunately, campaign finance reform would possibly require a constitutional amendment, or at the very least a big shift in how the supreme court views things (so, not likely in my lifetime), since the current jurisprudence is that limiting campaign donations is a violation of first amendment rights.
Yes, many countries have significant limits on campaign donations. Even third parties are restricted from advertising on behalf of a party, and so on.
So no company can simply donate large sums of money, nor can any single person.
The goal is that individuals will be the largest donors, not companies, and that as everyone is capped in the same way, advertising will be a more level playing field. We don't want money in politics. At the same time, we want all parties to get their message out there, their message heard.
It's not perfect. There are issues. But this business of democracy should be taken seriously.
The US technically even has laws that that were supposed to do that still on the books. A particular problem was a very broken decision by the US Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [1] that opened too large of a barn door that the US has been reeling from ever since. That trial argued that companies were individuals/people and that money was the "free speech" of companies and shouldn't ever be curtailed. So there are so many things wrong with that court case on so many levels. It led to the rise of Super PACs (Political Action Committees), companies designed to launder money for political gain where the donors are allowed to remain anonymous and the Super PAC "speak" for them, because now it was "free speech" and not bribes and regulatory capture.
I know pessimists that believe the only way the US succeeds in the Campaign Finance Reform it needs now is through a Constitutional Amendment and if we can't count on Congress to be interested in it (due to bribery), and not enough individual States seem to care (some because they want a chunk of that pie), it's going to take a full Constitutional Convention to pass that amendment, something that hasn't successfully been done in the US since 1787 (also, the first attempt).
There have been some fairly longstanding judicial decisions overturned recently, although I know the reasons are not in alignment with the decision you mention, it does mean there is hope for such change.
So maybe it's actually far less work than considered. Maybe, attacking the decision with a modern eye is helpful.
Citizens United was a 2010 decision. Several of the judges on that case are still sitting judges in the Supreme Court. Since then one of the Congressional oversight decisions on vetting replacements for Supreme Court judges has been whether or not they (at least claim to) agree with the Citizens United decision.
The decision was made in the modern eye, in my lifetime. (The country needed modern Campaign Finance Reform before that point as well, but that decision marks an inflection point from Campaign Finance Reform feeling possible through normal means and court decisions to nearly impossible to overturn in our lifetimes.)
For the ultra-wealthy, leaving the United States is rarely the preferred strategy; instead, they use their immense resources to legally reshape the tax code and utilize complex loopholes. Billionaires like the Koch and Scaife families historically avoided massive estate and gift taxes by creating "charitable lead trusts" and private foundations. This allowed them to pass fortunes down to their heirs tax-free, provided they donated the interest to charities (which they often controlled) for a set period. A powerful approach is to fund political movements to slash taxes for the top brackets. For example, a coalition of eighteen of the wealthiest US families spent nearly half a billion dollars collectively to successfully lobby for the reduction and eventual repeal of the "death tax" (estate tax), saving themselves an estimated $71 billion.
And, of course, in the ancient world, free citizens of Greece and Rome considered direct taxes tyrannical and usually avoided them, leaving such burdens to conquered populations.
So I guess taxes are uncertain, but only for the oligarchy.
One of the many use cases, but basically yes. Other use cases: Home automation, remote backups, media servers, photo libraries, AI assistants... you name it!
Considering the modest update and the fact that they lose many of the quality of life features if outside of the Apple ecosystem, which I am becoming increasingly disenchanted with, I will be looking elsewhere.
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