I ran Linux as my daily driver OS from 1995 to 2004. I learned a lot along the way, but I was always fixing something, vs you know, actually working. I ran FreeBSD as my daily driver in 2005 and part of 2006. To me, it was more thought out, consistent and documented vs a random mishmash of components like Linux at the time. The problem with both is that a number of apps I needed didn’t run in either and the open source alternatives sucked in comparison. In 2006 I switched full time to MacOS and have not regretted it. I’ll give some reasons that are in addition to what I’ve seen mentioned so far:
- HDPI displays work fantastic and have for a long time
- hardware is generally well supported of all types. Installing a printer is trivial and doesn’t mean adding a metric ton of crapware like on Windows of past.
- I get a close enough Unix environment that I feel at home in the terminal. Maybe it’s my prior background with *BSD (Free and Open BSD) that helped so I wasn’t as attached to GNU flags on commands, so YMMV.
- app ecosystem exists for almost everything I need natively. The few examples that don’t (SolidWorks and some FPGA toolchains) are trivial to run in a VM (they also don’t run on Linux natively either).
- Several apps available only on MacOS are best in class (at least for my needs, but generally considered great anyway by all)
- I could buy the latest Apple machines (which is best in class in my opinion, at least for the things I care about) and it always worked out of the box with my OS of choice. If you agree that Apple hardware is great, but prefer Linux, you will consistently be a third class citizen hoping somebody is able to write a say graphics driver for the M1 while you sit using older inferior hardware. Yes, you can get decent hardware that has official manufacturer support for Linux, but it’s inferior to Apple hardware in ways I care about (Trackpad as one obvious example).
Yeah it’s apps for me. I live my life by my Omnifocus setup. They have a browser-based “companion” that I can and have used occasionally but it’s not the same.
Airmail is the other big one.
There’s just nothing that supports Linux and iOS hah, and I want to keep similar workflows across them.
And I actually ran PopOS as a daily driver for about 6 months during the pandemic, I’ve tried!
- HDPI displays work fantastic and have for a long time
- hardware is generally well supported of all types. Installing a printer is trivial and doesn’t mean adding a metric ton of crapware like on Windows of past.
- I get a close enough Unix environment that I feel at home in the terminal. Maybe it’s my prior background with *BSD (Free and Open BSD) that helped so I wasn’t as attached to GNU flags on commands, so YMMV.
- app ecosystem exists for almost everything I need natively. The few examples that don’t (SolidWorks and some FPGA toolchains) are trivial to run in a VM (they also don’t run on Linux natively either).
- Several apps available only on MacOS are best in class (at least for my needs, but generally considered great anyway by all)
- I could buy the latest Apple machines (which is best in class in my opinion, at least for the things I care about) and it always worked out of the box with my OS of choice. If you agree that Apple hardware is great, but prefer Linux, you will consistently be a third class citizen hoping somebody is able to write a say graphics driver for the M1 while you sit using older inferior hardware. Yes, you can get decent hardware that has official manufacturer support for Linux, but it’s inferior to Apple hardware in ways I care about (Trackpad as one obvious example).