Switching from macOS: The Basics
My own burning hatred towards Apple runs a little hotter than most, and I have been seriously googling (and trying) alternatives since 2012.<p>That was when my $9000 Mac Pro — which had been a great machine, and still was, except for the little detail about not having been updated since 2009 and thus being stuck with USB 2 (!!!) to say nothing of Thunderbolt and any kind of modern accoutrements — started to feel like a personal affront, a sneering <i>fuck you</i> directed at not just me, but everybody remotely like me. (Wow!!! <i>Déjà vu</i> bro!!)<p>Nevertheless, I didn't switch then, and all of us complainers won't switch now either.<p>Because <i>the fucking OS</i>.<p>I've tried every iteration of Ubuttnu, CentOS, and FreeBSD since. Even OpenWhatever, before the goblins bought it. I have Thinkpads and Dell XPS "Developer Editions" and a drawer full of other crap like that.<p>Executive summary: it's all garbage time. It's like going back 10+ years. Nothing works right, on any of them. Copy/paste, batteries, wireless networking, drag and drop, high-res displays, multilingual input, even like fucking word processing and email and image editors and terminal programs... it's all like Mac OS X Jaguar level.<p>We can't give Apple the finger, even though we want to (and definitely after last week, we <i>all</i> want to) because there literally isn't an OS in the world that can touch Mac OS for general-purpose workstation/laptop use. (For niche and limited-purpose, yes, there are options.)<p>Elementary OS is a fucking joke. Every OS mentioned disparagingly above is a better choice for almost any purpose. But those are still horrible.<p>Apple's OS advantage is what lets them say "Fuck you peons, here's some 3 year old technology and a bag of dongles, that'll be $4000."<p>But we're mostly all gonna buy the new shitty MacBook Hipster, or gut it out with our old ones, until a better fucking <i>OS</i> happens. And that won't be soon — it's not even remotely on the horizon.