Sometimes I use macOS for work and get reminded why I prefer Linux.
- homebrew is slow and brittle, between 10x and 100x slower than pacman in my experience, and the only package manager I've used that breaks at least every year
- homebrew is only a userspace package mananger, many applications have their own update mechanisms. I greatly prefer being able to update my entire system with one command.
- xcode is a fragile 10GiB pig that I don't want, but homebrew needs it
- docker has a significant performance overhead on macOS
- the tiling window managers available on macOS are less reliable and don't have the features I value
- some terminal based software is significantly slower on recent versions of macOS, even on a 2019 macbook. I'm not sure what's causing it but there is noticeable lag that I don't get on much older hardware with linux
- documentation; in my experience searching for error messages on macOS results in something like "paste this command into a terminal, no one knows why, and it will break again on the next OS release" or "plug the charger into the left usbc port not the right". Where as on linux I end up on the arch wiki with a fix that makes sense, and I've learned something I find valuable or interesting
- I don't like how macOS is visually turning into iOS, I like that I have the option to use what looks like a "desktop" on linux
I'm learning nix at the moment, and hopefully that can solve a lot of the problems I have with maxOS/brew.
macOS is good, linux is good, as always it depends on what you need.
- homebrew is slow and brittle, between 10x and 100x slower than pacman in my experience, and the only package manager I've used that breaks at least every year
- homebrew is only a userspace package mananger, many applications have their own update mechanisms. I greatly prefer being able to update my entire system with one command.
- xcode is a fragile 10GiB pig that I don't want, but homebrew needs it
- docker has a significant performance overhead on macOS
- the tiling window managers available on macOS are less reliable and don't have the features I value
- some terminal based software is significantly slower on recent versions of macOS, even on a 2019 macbook. I'm not sure what's causing it but there is noticeable lag that I don't get on much older hardware with linux
- documentation; in my experience searching for error messages on macOS results in something like "paste this command into a terminal, no one knows why, and it will break again on the next OS release" or "plug the charger into the left usbc port not the right". Where as on linux I end up on the arch wiki with a fix that makes sense, and I've learned something I find valuable or interesting
- I don't like how macOS is visually turning into iOS, I like that I have the option to use what looks like a "desktop" on linux
I'm learning nix at the moment, and hopefully that can solve a lot of the problems I have with maxOS/brew.
macOS is good, linux is good, as always it depends on what you need.