After a few years of fiddling with Windows and Linux on a custom-built PC, I'm looking to get a computer that "just works", as this is a time in my life when I really can't afford to deal with any hassles (not that there was anything particularly bad with my setup; it's just the little things that add up). I had my eye on a Mac (mainly for OS X), but it's increasingly looking like a bad time to get one. Is it really, or are these complaints overblown? I'm having some trouble sifting through these conflicting experiences on my own.
Depends on your definition of a hassle. I am a happy user of Apple software, I love iTunes. I do experience occasional issues — AirDrop not finding peers, iOS asking for a password when it's not supposed to, iMessage failing to sync SMS read states between the Mac and the phone. If you're okay with occasional problems like that, go ahead and try it.
I suppose every operating system is going to have little problems like that, and if that's all there is, I can manage. It's just that I really liked OS X back in the Leopard and Snow Leopard days. I could almost describe it as a "magical" experience using them, but I'm worried that that magic's gone in these latest versions, as all this recent complaining seems to indicate.
Can you perhaps tell me how newer versions of OS X fare as a UNIX-based operating system for development, compared to Linux? I've heard that it's become more locked down. How about its app "ecosystem"? I remember that a lot of apps, by developers small and large, were of really high quality.
A short list of the 'little things that add up' (your post up the tree) with your current set up may be of interest as well as people could then comment on the likelihood of those or similar.
Oh, nothing in particular, I guess. I dabble a lot--in C++, Haskell, Ruby, Java, etc. I really liked using package managers on Linux. I remember using Homebrew on OS X. Is that still around?
As for the little things that add up, let's see:
- Much of it's hardware-related, and it might just be due to my poor PC-building skills. For example, my case has a fan that buzzes intermittently, and the ports in back aren't perfectly aligned.
- Windows isn't UNIX-based. I'm aware of things like Cygwin that emulate a UNIX environment, but it feels tacked on. Also, Windows 10 is nice, but it's kind of ugly, among other things.
- On Linux, X has given me a lot of trouble, and though Wayland looks nice, it seems like it'll be a while before it's widely adopted and fully supported. I had a problem with GNOME 3 where it took about a minute before it showed the desktop after logging in, for example. Audio was a pain to deal with, it had Wi-fi connection issues, etc. Also, Linux lacks support for a lot of big applications that I use or intend to use (Photoshop, DAWs, etc.).
- Non-English language input is poor in both operating systems (could just be the language I used though). If I recall correctly, OS X had pretty nice language input support, and the option-characters (e.g. Option + E for an acute accent) were really nice and intuitive.
