I have trouble understanding why people go through these hoops.
Yeah, I get it, people love their Mac's... but the company that produces them actively undermines your ability to continue using perfectly good hardware past what they feel is "profitable". This leads to huge efforts to hack/reverse the updaters, or alter newer OS versions to trick them into installing, etc.
I'd personally jump over to some system that doesn't hate it's users nearly as much. But, that's just me.
Linux just isn't plug and play enough yet to make the switch less painful than dealing with the pain-points created by anti-consumer practices by Apple and Microsoft on MacOS and Windows, even for technically literate people.
I made the switch a year ago after having reached my breaking point with Windows and it still was a massive pain and daily loss of performance. For comparison, I also rooted my Android phone and installed LineageOS without google services which crippled it significantly and it still wasn't as much as a pain to do as using Linux on my workstation.
People often say (not talking about you, just something I see on HN often) that it's easy nowadays and anyone can use it but it's not been my experience and I think it's the very attitude that keeps it from being a commonplace OS for the consumer market. I keep a list in a file I call "linux sins" but without having to look at it you can figure out the problem by just googling any benign problem someone might encounter on their OS and checking the answers. Do the answers start with "Click there" or "Open your terminal"? I don't see the situation changing since people who develop for linux generally refuse to acknowledge the problem.
Fair criticisms. We're still waiting for the fabled "year of the linux desktop".
Although, I feel the specific issues you raise are less of a problem on a desktop-focused distro like Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Those distros really focus on a complete desktop experience, and really try to never require a user to drop into a shell to get anything done. So, perhaps it's a case of people using the "wrong" distro for their needs?
I'm afraid the issues I describe have been with Ubuntu.
Here's the first line from my "linux sins" file as an example:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1151283/disable-nautilus-cac...
If you copy a large file to a USB drive on either Ubuntu or Mint the progress bar goes to 100% instantly and closes and the actual transfer of the file is done in the background without the knowledge of the user. And the answer is "It's your fault, just try to eject the drive until it works."
And even beyond the OS, the whole software ecosystem is broken. It's impossible to find simple, working UIs for the most basic pieces of software, everything goes through the commandline.
Fair enough, but I'd just like to point out that specific issue you linked to happens on Windows too (and almost certainly MacOS as well).
It's just how device writes work, and is why Windows users have been told for years to select their device -> Eject instead of just yanking the USB drive out when Windows says 100%.
So, not exactly a fair criticism in my opinion, but your overall point stands - Linux can be rough around the edges for some use cases.
> I'd just like to point out that specific issue you linked to happens on Windows too
The poster of the question explicitly states that this behavior does not happen on Windows using the same hardware. And indeed, Windows doesn't cache as aggressively as Linux does (which is one of several reasons why Linux tends to have better disk performance and less risk of disk fragmentation), so no, by design, this issue is more pronounced on Linux.
The actual reason why Windows users are told to explicitly eject instead of just yanking the device is because there are various background processes that might be writing to the device (particularly relevant if you're using SpeedBoost or whatever it's called), not because of file copy progress bars being entirely unaware of the OS' caching mechanisms.
It doesn't happen on Windows because the cache is made to be small enough that the caching and flushing happen at the same time regardless of the size of your RAM. So your transfer progress bar will end at approximately the same time as the actual transfer. I don't use MacOS but I assume they have the UX & UI figured out as well. That's not the case on Linux, the progress bar will disappear in seconds while the transfer can last hours.
And, I say this with no ill-will toward you, I'm not trying to be antagonistic but you're having the same response as all linux users I encounter online. You're denying the problem even exists, saying it's not fair and it might be rough for some use cases? This is transferring a file to a USB stick, this is a very basic use case, and the UI is broken and the UX is dogshit (excuse my french). If we can't admit there is a problem we're never going to get around to fixing it.
It's not out of some love for Macs. I have a 2008 MacBook running Catalina and it's simply because the cost of replacing it is >0. If this works and works well(and it does) then why would I get rid of it? Just to spite apple, which doesn't care either way?
I also have a 2005 car that still runs - should I get rid of it because the company that made it stopped providing any kind of support for it long time ago? Or you know....keep using it because it works?
Maybe it was easy for you to modify your OS to continue updating, or you downloaded some ISO of Catalina someone else pre-hacked for you - but it was certainly a non-trivial effort for whoever figured out how to trick the OS into installing and/or updating.
It just seems like wasted effort, since the company all this supports really has made it clear they do not want you to have this ability, and can at any moment make future updates break everything all over again, leading to a new effort to reverse engineer the changes.
So I don't agree, and I will use the car analogy again - old cars are not "supported" in any way and yet many people keep them going. There's serious engineering effort to make the parts, to write new software, to improve existing firmware etc.
By your logic, that's also "wasted" effort since the manufacturer chooses to abandon cars after just few years, so why would you keep them going.
I feel the same way about computers - like, who gives a damn what apple thinks. I have a laptop that is still going because people keep making it compatible. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
The difference there is you're not violating some TOS or EULA by replacing parts on your classic car, and when you change your oil (do OS updates) there's no chance of suddenly your transmission refusing to allow you to shift gears until you perform more heroics and disable the artificial limitations.
Very few non-classic and/or popular cars receive massive aftermarket support for all parts - often the aftermarket supports parts that are in common with a lot of vehicles or are vehicle-agnostic (such as belts, etc), and in some cases you're plain SOL (try replacing an airbag on a 1993 Dodge Caravan, for example - all you can find are OEM used ones pulled from junkers).
I think your comparison would be more apt if, say, Ford disabled all vehicles that were 10 years + 1 day old. While Apple isn't disabling your OS, they leave you exposed without security patches, etc... - making it approximately the same.
>The difference there is you're not violating some TOS or EULA by replacing parts on your classic car, and when you change your oil (do OS updates) there's no chance of suddenly your transmission refusing to allow you to shift gears until you perform more heroics and disable the artificial limitations.
How long do we have to wait for the early Teslas to be considered "classics", because they're doing worse than this already...
"Self driving? No, that was only licensed to the original purchaser, you need to pay us $8000 now because we just remote disabled it when we worked out you bought this Roadster second hand. Hope that helps, have a nice day - Elon"
My wife's MB Pro faced an upcoming support reckoning with Apple, and I just tossed Linux on it. Problem solved ;)
I've also used FreeBSD on (non-Apple) laptops in the past. It actually worked ok, I even had wireless working (this is very hardware dependent though, and things may have gotten worse over the years for all I know).
Based on the rest of your profile I think you might enjoy switching that workstation away from OS X to FreeBSD. Of course, it means some tinkering and looking for new tools to replace the ones you use now, but the tinkering is half the fun... :)
I like to get that kind of use out of my machines though I upgrade workstation on a more regular basis (though the last one went a full 7 years with nothing new but a RAM upgrade and an SSD midlife) - You come to identify with the hardware after a while, it takes on a life of it's own.
Since I'm (excluding Win10 for gaming when I rarely have time) exclusively a Linux user I get to use the old hardware for other purposes at the end until it finally becomes either useless or lets out the magic smoke (as my 2004 R50e Thinkpad finally did - man I miss those keyboards, so much better than the T470P (which itself is excellent)).
It paid of just recently, I had 2012 Vostro 3750 kicking around and when schools went into lockdown with a quick wipe and Fedora install it made a perfectly serviceable machine for my step-son to do his remote learning on - there was an irony in running MS Teams on Linux on a machine that wouldn't have been able to run current generation Windows 10 and Teams anywhere near as comfortably.
My last personal desktop was about 11 years old when I retired it. It had an AMD Phenom II 965, just to emphasize it's age.
It started life with Windows 7 (Win7 was like a month old at the time) and was subsequently upgraded to Windows 8, then Windows 8.1, then finally Windows 10 (and all it's "feature" updates) until it was retired. It ran slower than a new system, but fit my needs perfectly.
If Microsoft had arbitrarily decided I wasn't allowed to run Windows 10 on that hardware, it's very likely I would have installed Linux or BSD - after all, the hardware was a non-trivial investment and discarding it purely to please some company really rubs me the wrong way.
So, I guess I can sort of understand why people jump through these hoops... although personally I would just move onto some other OS that doesn't undermine my ability to operate my personal computer.
It probably helps that it sounds like you mostly use it as a dumb terminal. If you had a compute-intensive workload, it would make sense to upgrade, since even a quite powerful 12-year-old desktop is likely outperformed by a current-model smartphone for many types of work.
Every operating system/hardware combination has its own pros and cons. For you, it seems the cons outnumber the pros when it comes to macOS and Apple hardware. Fair enough. For me, I see no major reasons to consider anything else than Mac. I really enjoy using both the OS and the hardware. To each their own.
You download an ISO, put it on a USB key or burn it to a CD, and install it like you would Windows10 or any other OS.
If only it was that easy all the time.
I have an old laptop (2017) that I wasn't for anything else, using so I tried putting Linux on it. Nope. I went through five distributions before I found one that would finally work. And then, it was not really useable.
The whole reason people use MacOS is because they know what to expect. Linux is still a crapshoot.
Yeah, I get it, people love their Mac's... but the company that produces them actively undermines your ability to continue using perfectly good hardware past what they feel is "profitable". This leads to huge efforts to hack/reverse the updaters, or alter newer OS versions to trick them into installing, etc.
I'd personally jump over to some system that doesn't hate it's users nearly as much. But, that's just me.