Me too, I ultimately ended up quite frustrated with the laptop. My suspicion is that it ultimately comes down to your comfort with MacOS and your workflow. I spent a long time trying to get my M1 Macbook Air to simulate my workflow on Linux, but it was never _quite_ there. Sure the thing is zippy, but it doesn't mean much to me without a proper package manager or open operating system.
With that being said, I'm an old-school curmudgeon when it comes to computers. I'm hard to please, and I don't necessarily hold it against Apple that they didn't make "the perfect computer".
As an aside, is anyone interested in an $850 8gb Macbook Air? Lightly used with only 70tb written to the drive.
I'm asking because I'm assuming your real issues are with your stated reasons, since MacPorts is a "proper package manager" (being ported from one of the BSDs) and if you don't like that one, Brew is certainly popular. And I've never directly benefited from Linux being an "open operating system", since I don't write code that interacts with anything lower-level than the C API, but macOS' Darwin kernel and many of the binaries are open source.
I'm kind of old-school (my intro to Unix was a DECStation), and I find macOS to be plenty Unixy. If I'm not using Xcode I'm using Emacs (in VI mode). I've never said "I wish I had <Linux feature>"; actually, it's been rather nice that my Wifi doesn't break, I don't have to deal with PulseAudio, it goes to sleep--and wakes up!--when I open and close the lid, the UI is unified, networking is easy to use, etc. However, if you run the Linux GUI applications on macOS it's a klunky experience, so you benefit from finding native applications. Also, Docker wasn't very pleasant, but that might have just been Docker; fortunately I've only had to use it for one project.
As someone who loves the macOS + Unix experience, I'm just curious what workflow it doesn't work well with.
Well, I write quite a bit of GTK, and as you mentioned that's not necessarily a first-class experience on MacOS, which I expected and was fine with. It was quite a bit more frustrating to get the Rust toolchain working though, and from what I understand it will be a while before they iron out the issues on the M1. Another papercut. Then I had issues with binaries disappearing out of nowhere, similar to the aforementioned git disappearance. My Rust programs automatically were removed from PATH, and I still don't know what causes the issue. As for the package managers, I think Brew and Macports are both fine pieces of software, but they don't even come close to how robust and compatible something like pacman is. Working with the App Store is a frustrating experience, and I'd prefer to have all my software managed in one place.
Maybe it's just different strokes for different folks, but I'd much rather just clone my dotfiles and have a Linux workspace up and running in ~10 minutes tops. Moving my workflow over to MacOS feels like trying to board a plane while it's taking off, and it doesn't bode well for my productivity when I can't rely on my tools even showing up in the first place.
My experience (as a user) is that GTK on macOS is functional at best, and I find it an unpleasant experience, so macOS is definitely not ideal for that. No experience with Rust, but it isn't the path the tools expect, for sure. I've never had a problem with PATH not working, maybe the new shell in Big Sur is mostly-but-not-quite like bash? You could try changing your shell to bash, if you haven't already.
If you really want an apt-get (never used pacman) kind of everything-repository experience, though, you're going to be disappointed on any system that doesn't prioritize a centralized repository of software. In practice, this eliminates a commercial OS, and probably commercial software, since there's no effective way to get a central repository. The App Store is the closest, but then you get people complaining you're the gatekeeper, or you get a free-for-all like Google Play. I think Linux manages only because the number of people that use it are small enough that bad actors go elsewhere.
That doesn't seem to have anything to do with the M1, though? It just seems you're uncomfortable with macos. A new processor isn't going to change that macs run macos, and if you don't like macos, then you're not going to like the Mac.
Sure, it is an amazing chip. But the delta is only large compared to the rehashed 14nm Intel chips that Macs shipped with in the last few years. Recent Ryzen-based APUs are in a similar ballpark as M1's performance-wise.
I think that a lot of Mac users overestimate the M1, since their only experience with x86_64 is low-point Intel and not peak AMD.
I mean, I mostly agree with you. It is an issue with MacOS, and the M1 is a pretty nice package for what it offers. If I could reliably run Linux on it, I'd be a lot more excited. Hell, if I could even drive my monitors with it I'd be mostly satisfied. I guess I'm just one of those "niche users" at the end of the day.
Me too, I ultimately ended up quite frustrated with the laptop.
Same here. I used Macs since 2007 and the M1 MacBook Air basically ended my Mac tenure. The M1 felt like yet another step towards making the Mac more closed. The M1 is another case of Apple breaking a lot of backward compatibility and using the community to fix it for free (who needs a working Fortran compiler, to compile their BLAS and other numeric libraries?). Even though the M1 Macs feels a lot faster than the Intel Macs, macOS still feels tediously slow compared to Linux. Then there are a lot of low-level tools on Linux which do not have good equivalents on macOS (e.g. perf). And then there is the issue (unrelated to M1) that every good MacOS application is slowly switching to a subscription model, which only extends the feeling that I don't own my machine anymore.
I returned my M1 Air and bought a Ryzen-based ThinkPad, upgraded it to 32GB RAM, and I am very happy with. I am now selling my old Intel MacBook Air, which was my last Mac.
> The M1 felt like yet another step towards making the Mac more closed
There's a certain amount of hubris in this, in that (at least until AMD came along), pretty much every single Intel chip has only made Intel money, while ARM is broadly-licensed and is ripe for a surge. All Apple did was create an ARM-compatible chip, which is how someone already got Linux running on it: https://corellium.com/blog/linux-m1
Now, which one is more "closed", really? Near-absolute Intel hegemony that only benefits Intel, or ARM, which seems to benefit anyone who wants to tackle creating an ARM chip?
Honestly (disclosing my bias here), I hope IA64 dies in a fire in 5-10 years. It's had enough time in the limelight, Intel has rested on its laurels of late (arguably holding back progress), and its technical flaws run quite deep (another reason why the M1 seems impressive; ARM is simply a better-designed architecture from the ground up)
With that being said, I'm an old-school curmudgeon when it comes to computers. I'm hard to please, and I don't necessarily hold it against Apple that they didn't make "the perfect computer".
As an aside, is anyone interested in an $850 8gb Macbook Air? Lightly used with only 70tb written to the drive.