> I can agree with now are 2 and 3, the rest is just invalid.

The parent poster is clear on what they like (or don’t) and even prefaced everything with “and these are super subjective”. Personal preference doesn’t become invalid when another disagrees, nor does parent seem to be fishing for agreement.

Excuse the morning haze clouding my vision, guess I focused on writing without focusing on reading enough. Invalid is not the right word.

I did explicitly state that my points were very subjective - they are personal opinions and I didn't try to hide that. I also did not try to hide that I like macOS - that's why I use it now, after all. As I explicitly said, my attempts with a linux laptop setup have been primarily an insurance policy against Apple continuing to run the Mac into the ground - not out of idealism.

But answers to a few specific points:

- Okular fails to render weird PDFs for me - things like NXP datasheets are notable for this. It is my usual PDF reader on Linux though. Additionally, the few features I called out were not an exhaustive list, just examples. Preview also makes it very easy to do things like combine PDFs or remove pages from existing PDFs, or do things like crop all of the pages in a PDF in one operation - this is surprisingly useful!.

- tearing is something I have never managed to actually completely eliminate. I can get rid of it for the most part on single display setups (although setting TearFree introduces video stuttering on intel), but on multi-display setups I have never managed to lose it - on both intel & amd's OSS stacks, and on nvidia's proprietary driver. I fully admit this is something that disproportionately annoys me and that others may not care about, but it's a solved issue on Windows and macOS and has been for years. Using wayland instead of X11 resulted in a lot of apps getting very poor performance or flat breaking when rendering - but every time I try wayland it has gotten a lot better since the last time. But replacing a 30+ year old windowing system with a new one is a pretty huge undertaking, so I'm not surprised it's taking a while!

- things like kdeconnect/gsconnect etc don't support integration with iOS. It's not their fault - iOS is restrictive and Apple keep it that way very deliberately, but it achieves their aim very well - it keeps people tied in to Apple's ecosystem. Losing all of the niceties at once is pretty jarring - and even if I replace everything at once, eg going macOS -> linux and iOS -> android, etc it still doesn't end up as fully integrated.

1) did you try gscan2pdf, pdf arranger, or libreoffice with the pdf?

2) tearing is typically video driver related. Solution for many is to use intels video drivers

3) if you are tied to the apple ecosystem its always going to be easier to stick with it.

4) Most linux users focus on vim shortcuts or terminal/bash shortcuts. Thus the ecosystem will be behind

I'm not sure that the criticisms for the article and parent comment are quite so easy to dismiss wholesale, but I do concur that many of them are actually criticisms of the GNOME DE and not so much Linux itself. In my experience as a daily Linux user it was somewhere between 2-3 years ago that KDE Plasma surpassed GNOME as the most productive desktop environment for Linux, and the distance between the two only appears to widening still. I would love to see what impact the simple choice to swap plain Ubuntu for Kubuntu would have had on their conclusions.

I actually use KDE generally on Linux, I find GNOME very difficult to get along with :)

edit: and desktop distro of choice is generally Arch for me - it's been a long time since I used ubuntu.

You’re too dismissive, Linux apps are terrible compared to Mac and it’s a big reason preventing me from switching.

That you got used to using crappy software doesn’t mean I want to do the same.

Daily macOS and Linux user here.

Linux does have a lot of crappy and quality software. Using the better ones changes the experience a lot. Not all software on the macOS is top notch either. There are some amazing apps, but most of them can be replicated on Linux or have better equivalents.

I think you're dismissing something here.

> Linux apps are terrible compared to Mac

And it's this sort of absolutism that continues to solidify the "cult" like impression of the Apple consumerism culture.

It is however true that majority of Linux software that is excellent can leak over to Mac since OSS can be ported over, but the other way around doesn't really work.

Having said that, i have all the tools I need on Linux, excepting office, which I run via wine. I wish I didn't have to, but what can you do.

I also find a lot of people complain about to be simple habit; I've been using Linux 25ish years, and was an early (too early) adaptor of GNOME 3, and MacOS just pisses me off. I know that most of my complaints are simply me not being used to it though. I could learn to live with it I'm sure, but I'm not moving to a platform that's as hostile to users as MacOS. I'd rather move to Windows.

" beatiful, integrated kmail and their whole PIM suite"

Is that the one that used a MySQL database on the desktop? The disaster known as akonadi? That would frequently lock up requiring restarts? When I used KDE back in the day one thing I'd make sure was to remove PIM/akonadi/kmail completely and use Thunderbird or whatever else instead.

"Is that the one that used a MySQL database on the desktop?"

It's been a few months since I gave up, but IIRC Akonadi has a few storage backends.

I was looking for a GUI mail client to replace using my various webmail based interfaces. As much as I love Plasma, KMail and its ilk were painful. Akonadi still has issues all these years later, and gave me trouble setting it up. The messages produced are less than helpful.

Once KMail was running, it was fine to use, albeit with an occasional crash, just at the wrong times so it got annoying. I stopped using it.

Akonadi was an ambitious idea that was really badly implemented. I've not used KDE for ages so I have no idea what the current state of play is - I think they now disable it by default. Someone should have probably rewritten it with sqlite, back then.

Yeah, Akonadi isn't great right now, but KMail is a very nice client.

Try watching Netflix in Firefox or Chromium. Or enable smooth scrolling in Firefox and hit PageDown a couple times. The issue with scrolling can be resolved by enabling hardware acceleration, but this isn't the default in Firefox and the obscure config breaks from time to time. Until hardware acceleration becomes the default, not an opt-in, I consider this feature broken.

Aside from Netflix, I'll sometimes see tearing even on YouTube, when I put it on fullscreen. Luckily, there is mpv with builtin youtube-dl support, which solves this problem. But I haven't found a solution for Netflix, other than rebooting into Windows, or switching to my Mac.

I wonder if there are significant differences between video hardware or drivers, or perhaps even generations. I've watched Netflix, a local HBO streaming service and YouTube on Linux for years on Intel graphics without noticing tearing, and yes, back when there was tearing when watching video on a previous (pretty old) machine I had, I did notice it.

Really? Last year when we were in the office multiple of my coworkers had awful tearing on their Linux machines of multiple distros. I’m sure it was related to their specific hardware/driver setups but still. These were workstation class machines.

I can’t remember ever seeing tearing on my MacOS machines. And I’m even using a cheapo $15 DisplayPort adapter for my third monitor.

I haven't seen tearing in years either except in somewhat exotic cases [1], so I wouldn't be surprised that there are other people who haven't either. Nor am I really surprised that some people do get tearing.

My recent experiences have been exclusively with Intel integrated GPUs on a laptop, which seem to be a fairly reliable option in terms of desktop compatibility and integration nowadays. I don't know what the current state of e.g. proprietary NVidia drivers is, but I wouldn't be surprised if you ran into more problems in terms of compatibility with the rest of the desktop system (including stuff like tearing) with those than with some of the better open source drivers.

Workstation-class machines might thus actually be more prone to tearing if they require using proprietary drivers.

That doesn't make it any less of a problem if your coworkers' machines did exhibit problems, of course.

[1] I've seen tearing e.g. when playing a web video in the Steam client, but I find that more of a corner case than browsers or general desktop use.

I actually experienced pretty bad tearing running i3 on a new (at the time, last August) Dell XPS 13, but switching to Wayland/sway fixed it and its been running flawlessly on that since.

I tend to like native apps a lot rather than browser equivalents.

I self-host my mail server and use an IMAP+SMTP client to talk to it - I don't use something like gmail. $work uses gmail and the web ui frustrates the hell out of me (and I pity anyone whose only experience with a native email client is being paired with gmail, because their IMAP implementation makes it rather painful!).

For password manager, 1password has a native app and browser extensions that talk to that local native app. There are browser only ones too, but I prefer the native app integration because it shares unlock state between all of the extensions and the full desktop client all in one go.

But you're right, you can't have change without things actually changing. It's a tradeoff between convenience and what you're used to, and the benefits of what you get from changing. For me, for now that ends up sitting on the side of macOS. For others, that might be Linux or even Windows. I don't think any of those positions are wrong, it's all about what works for each person.

It's absolutely subjective / personal. That being said, (non-mobile) OSs are less crucial, provided you have a browser. For a while I was having to move back and forth between Win and Apple. Being more browser-based made that less friction-y. Frankly, I think that's universally a good position to be in. That is, ultimately I don't care what OS. I'll be okay.

Humans adapt. It's what we do. Yet so often we mistake wants for needs.