> We are heading rapidly towards the corollary to “it just works” being “and if it doesn’t, just wipe everything and re-install”.
Is this really all that bad? In the era of everything living in the cloud, it generally takes me only a couple hours to setup a system again from scratch. Not that I've ever had to do this on macOS personally (though I did once on iOS), but if I had, I wouldn't be terribly upset about it.
> If every time your car had a problem you had to replace its engine, wouldn’t you consider that abysmal engineering?
This is a ridiculous analogy. Re-installing an OS is free (both the materials and, for Apple customers who don't know how to do it themselves, the service).
macOS today doesn't always just work. I run into bugs sometimes and get frustrated. But whenever I boot up Windows and have to fight to get the most basic dev tools working, or boot up Linux and have to fight to get a core function like system updates or audio working, I'm reminded how much closer macOS still is to "just working" than anything else out there.
That's true, but it leaves out the other half of the equation: you'll still likely spend less of your valuable time on your making your Ubuntu installation work, than on anything else (speaking as someone with commercial dev experience on MacOS, Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD).
I spent hours trying to stabilise my wife's XPS13 after a recent Windows Update sent it into paroxysms of BSODs. Reset, reimaged, the whole nine yards: nothing. Ended up installing Ubuntu on it and it's been rock-solid stable since.
I've always wondered if Ubuntu was introduced to a child would they learn to use it just as fast as a child that uses Windows? All the times I've used Ubuntu it's exactly the same as windows without all the distraction.
I guess so, yes. This comment from Zawinski is very old by today's standards, and Linux has made massive progress when it comes to usability. A child should be able to learn it quickly.
Basically, yes - it can work like that depending on circumstances. My son started with Ubuntu and doesn't like windows (new school requirements forced it). But he's not into gaming.
I've known a couple of other fathers that had the same experience. But it isn't common.
FWIW the amount of time I've spent fiddling with my OS in the last year approaches zero, and I don't remember it being this unintrusive when I was using Windows or macOS at work.
Nothing just works quite like something that simply hasn't changed.
In the amount of time I used to spend in a month making sure macOS wasn't on the brink; a couple weeks ago I investigated and implemented a feature in a system component, one that is not present on any commercially available desktop operating system.
Now my input method client displays language-appropriate glyph variants based on the input method's locale, and you just managed to get the App Store to shut up, or fix some of your homebrew after a system upgrade.
Maybe a better analogy is: You have a problem with your living room light dimmer not working. The solution is to move all of your furniture out of your house, or being generous, just the living room, and then moving it back. Would you consider that reasonable?
Assuming you have a backup, then lets say some movers come out (for free) and do the moving. That's not inconvenient, right? After all, you don't have to do any of the moving. Just wait an hour or so and the movers will move everything back and quietly disappear.
It is ridiculous, but I can't help but think of cars.
I had a car a couple years back, where I had to get behind the side panel of the trunk to get to something (tail light?). The (ford) trunk panel was not held on by a screw, but y a weird fastener that had to be pried out (and I felt like I was breaking it). When it was out, the fastener looked like a christmas tree, and went into a hole easily in one direction and the design really didn't support coming out very well.
Turns out all cars are designed this way. They are "designed for assembly". Pretty much everything in the world is that way or moving that direction.
I think the computer equivalent is package managers and app upgrades and os upgrades and modular data.
But it's different. "designed for assembly" for cars becomes "designed for re-install" and the more troubling "designed for one-way upgrade"
The push fasteners are usually removable if you're able to squeeze on the underside of them. Otherwise best way to pry out is with a Y-shaped tool that digs under three sides.
I treat them as disposable, like tape or glue, but easier to replace without making a mess of it. They're dirt cheap, so I just rip them out and replace as necessary.
I eventually bought a bunch of them, but the thing is, the car was gone before I pulled any of that apart again. So now I have a bag of fasteners that match no car I own. :)
Depends how often it happens. If I had to move all the furniture out of my house to fix the dimmer every five years then it still wouldn't be a huge deal. Anecdotally, I've been using MacBooks for six years and never had to reinstall the OS.
> whenever I boot up Windows and have to fight to get the most basic dev tools working
What are the most basic dev tools are you struggling with on windows?
VS Code + git (perhaps the most basic requirements for me) docker, node/deno etc "just works" on windows. WSL handles anything I need that doesn't have native windows builds which is ultra-rare for me these days. Windows is IME now a very viable option particularly if you are doing web and/or container-based development. I don't see any advantage for OS X any more ... apart from appealing hardware/industrial design if your work is paying for it! :)
Linux though I agree is a cluster-fuck. I frequently suffer daily issues with graphics drivers causing visual artifacts and outright crashes on my work Dell laptop which is my current work daily-driver (although my work Linux desktop is rock solid)
Just the other day I was trying to install a package through apt and kept hitting some error about a lock file. After some googling it appeared to be because the OS was doing an auto-update process in the background. Which in itself is something I'd want, but it's insane as a user experience that it would block you from installing anything else and show nothing but a cryptic console error. So then I had to dig in and figure out how to kill the other process so I could install what I needed, which ended up putting my apt in a corrupt state so I had to run a repair process. By the time I got everything sorted out, an hour was gone.
This was the simplest possible task, and it was on Ubuntu LTS. Seemingly every time I have to switch over to Linux for something I end up dealing with an issue like this. Yak shaving was fun when I was in college, these days I just want to get on with my life.
Perhaps the error message should be improved, but your response shouldn't be to kill an update process mid-update and assume everything will be ok. The OS didn't cause that issue.
As far as I could tell it was only downloading the update, not actively installing it, which just makes the error even more frustrating. I assume the OS would at least show me a real dialog when it was in the process of applying the update. Then again, who knows.
I was very pleasantly surprised when I switched from macOS -> PopOS -> Arch how easy everything was. Have zero problems with drivers, updates, etc.. I'd even say I have fewer mysterious issues than I had on macOS because at least I can see how everything works.
Not everyone wishes to submit all of their data to the warrantless government surveillance that cloud storage necessarily entails in the Five Eyes countries.
Much of the data in iCloud is not end-to-end encrypted, giving Apple (and the FBI and US military intelligence by extension) full access to a lot of your data, such as photos or notes. I don’t use iCloud at all for this reason.
Additionally, media production, especially 4K video, is not “in the era of everything living in the cloud”.
Also, many people may compete with cloud vendor service offerings. If I were trying to obsolete a GCP service offering, I wouldn’t store my product development notes in Google Drive.
"... of the data in iCloud is not end-to-end encrypted, giving Apple (and the FBI and US military intelligence by extension) full access to a lot of your data, such as photos or notes. I don’t use iCloud at all for this reason..."
Is all of this true? Apple claim it is not accessible.
No, they do not. They claim it is encrypted, but nowhere do they claim those types of files are end-to-end encrypted.
Some iCloud data is e2e (keychain, health) but not most of it. Critically, device backups, containing all of your chat history for all time, are not e2e. Cryptographically, you would not be incorrect in describing this as a backdoor in iMessage’s end to end encryption.
It’s encrypted in transit with Apple keys and it’s encrypted at rest with Apple keys. Apple can always decrypt it without you, and you would have no way of knowing if they had done so.
They are vulnerable to subpoena or search warrant, but due to Apple’s participation in PRISM, they often turn over the data to military intelligence without a warrant at all.
So when there are public spats between law and Apple about unlocking Apple devices, and talk of universal rule changes on how big tech must add backdoors in the U.S. political arena, and Apple vocally saying 'Never', it's all (bare faced lies) theatre - because there already is virtually, or as I'm reading here, easy, access to any Apple service when requested by U.S. law?
It doesn't matter what Apple claim. All their software and hardware is proprietary, including of course their "cloud" computers. You have no way of verifying anything they say.
We can take them at their word: they tell us what is end-to-end encrypted, plainly.
Everything not on that list is not, and thus readable by Apple. The critical items not end-to-end encrypted being device backups, photos, notes, email.
In practice the end-to-end encryption of Apple products isn't better than regular encryption (in transit and at rest) with Apple holding the key. In what I assume is an effort to make the services more user friendly they have done away with key verification (something you see in Signal and Matrix-based chat services) that means the user has no way of verifying the parties of the chat and users have no say in how session keys are shared to parties. This makes it trivial for Apple to participate in all E2E sessions. It's no more work that just decrypting your non-E2E data.
Seriously, though: Audio or updates not working on Linux is a thing from >10 years ago.
I guess it depends on your distro of choice, but I haven't seen an Ubuntu machine with these problems in a long long time. You install it and everything just works.
> Is this really all that bad? In the era of everything living in the cloud, it generally takes me only a couple hours to setup a system again from scratch.
In the 90s I used to laugh at my Windows friends who had to "reformat the C drive and re-install Windows" every month or so when it became unusable. Their excuses sounded much like yours: a lot of hand waving about how it's "not so bad" and not a big deal.
Reinstalling MacOS is easy but setting up tools in Windows is too hard? This just doesn't reflect my own experience. Windows is pretty workable these days.
>"But whenever I boot up Windows and have to fight to get the most basic dev tools working"
Not sure what tools in particular are you talking about. My main: Visual Studio for C/C++, VS Code for various scripting languages, Delphi, Lazarus install and work flawlessly from the first try. So do whole bunch of other software products I use.
If you are on an island that has no wired comms and you are restricted to a 4g connection that thousands seem to share the thought of re downloading 100s of gb at 9kb/sec isn’t something to look forward to.
Is this really all that bad? In the era of everything living in the cloud, it generally takes me only a couple hours to setup a system again from scratch. Not that I've ever had to do this on macOS personally (though I did once on iOS), but if I had, I wouldn't be terribly upset about it.
> If every time your car had a problem you had to replace its engine, wouldn’t you consider that abysmal engineering?
This is a ridiculous analogy. Re-installing an OS is free (both the materials and, for Apple customers who don't know how to do it themselves, the service).
macOS today doesn't always just work. I run into bugs sometimes and get frustrated. But whenever I boot up Windows and have to fight to get the most basic dev tools working, or boot up Linux and have to fight to get a core function like system updates or audio working, I'm reminded how much closer macOS still is to "just working" than anything else out there.