> Hah, is there a middle-ground that likes choice in the Linux world without subscribing to the delusion that Mac/Windows ecosystems constitute anything a reasonable person might describe as "a thriving hellscape of proprietary crapware"?
I realize I come off as extreme here, but that's really how I feel.
I think that's an obviously fair way to describe the Microsoft Store and the Google Play Store. (Idk about iOS' App Store because I don't use iOS.)
I'd also make the argument that it's a good way to describe the setup of basically any macOS power user, with their inevitable collection of brittle, mostly proprietary, solo dev apps they use to hack basic functionality back into Apple's anemic OS offering.
(Windows suffers from that latter problem, too, though it's not as egregious as macOS.)
> you can run open source alternatives for everything except maybe some core software.
The core software is pretty much what we're talking about here: DEs and/or bundled apps.
> for now Mac is a pretty good experience
I understand that many people like it and I think their reasons for liking it are mostly good. But for me, using macOS is genuinely miserable, not just a little off. And I think the kind of app ecosystem that Mac people really love, of thoughfully designed, hidden gems by very small teams or individual devs, distributed as proprietary software for a small fee... is just not that great. To an extent that Mac lovers rarely admit or don't understand, a huge proportion of those apps exist only to compensate for Apple's own oversights, which wouldn't matter so much in an open ecosystem. The rest just aren't worth the cost of a closed ecosystem, in my opinion.
> I'd also make the argument that it's a good way to describe the setup of basically any macOS power user, with their inevitable collection of brittle, mostly proprietary, solo dev apps they use to hack basic functionality back into Apple's anemic OS offering.
Respectfully, this seems like a really out-of-touch perspective.
The software I use for Mac is a melange of open source and proprietary. I basically just use whatever is the least painful; sometimes that's open source, sometimes it's proprietary. Virtually every piece of software I use is high quality, and Mac doesn't really encumber my ability to use best-in-class software.
Linux desktop software is by far more brittle--it has to play nicely across a dizzying array of systems all while using crumby, buggy GUI toolkits from the 90s. Basic things like hidpi, webcam, (good) touchpad support are very unlikely to work out of the box if at all. Further still, support for popular apps can be really hit-or-miss on Linux. Not sure what the state of the world is, but for a good long time Spotify wasn't available on Linux. Yeah, I get that Spotify is proprietary and thus evil, but I don't really care about ideology, I want to be able to listen to my music without jumping through hoops (I would work around the limitation by using the web interface, but it was buggier and clearly a second-class citizen).
Like, I would love to be a Linux desktop user, and I often find myself daydreaming about how to build a Linux desktop platform that doesn't suck--it's not like I'm a MacOS partisan or anything. It's just that today, MacOS is wayyyy better than the Linux desktop. Linux can get there, but we really need to get rid of a bunch of cruft and build on a saner foundation (frankly, we should just use web APIs for building apps--something like ChromeOS but without the restrictions on what a program can do).
> I'd also make the argument that it's a good way to describe the setup of basically any macOS power user, with their inevitable collection of brittle, mostly proprietary, solo dev apps they use to hack basic functionality back into Apple's anemic OS offering.
Mainly a DOS/Windows user for about five or six years, then Linux for about eight or nine (mostly Gentoo and, later, Ubuntu), macOS for my serious-business desktop needs since 2011.
To this part of your comment: Wut.
I truly have no clue what you mean by this. I think I use one program that might fit this description (Spectacle—which has several active replacements I could switch to, and still works perfectly, not so much as a single glitch, bug, or bit of jank that I've ever seen, despite its having been abandoned years ago)
Meanwhile, "brittle and relying on tons of solo-dev apps to hack in basic functionality" (ok, mostly not proprietary ones, sure) is about how I would have described desktop Linux. But... I suspect we have different definitions of "basic functionality".
Power management I never have to think about or fiddle with is table-stakes for me these days, for instance—I don't got time for that shit these days, a computer that can't do that fairly competently without my telling it what to do is just broken, same as a thermostat if I had to go poke it every single time I wanted the AC or heat to kick on, then watch carefully to make sure it actually did what I wanted, would be broken.
A good default en keyboard layout (why would the default not be a good one? It boggles the mind—and sure, that's a distro concern, not a "Linux" concern, but so's everything that matters on Linux).
"Find my" or equivalent.
Low jitter and reasonably consistent latency, at least under light load.
A trackpad good enough I don't even consider taking my mouse unless I'll be gone several days.
Bluetooth audio that works well enough that I don't hate it and spend no more than a minute or two a week fiddling with (and that mostly because I also use the same devices on Windows).
Seamless password & payment sync across all my (non-server) devices, relying on biometrics on all of them so I rarely have to type a password at all.
I'd be "hack[ing] in" all of that—and far, far more—back in on Linux, if I could attain it at all, and that stuff—the stuff that I rely on weekly, if not multiple times a day—is what I regard as "the basics".
I'd also still be using exactly one of those "thoughtfully designed, hidden gems by very small teams or individual devs, distributed as proprietary software for a small fee" text editors if I went back to Linux. Sublime beats anything else I've used on Linux, and it's not a close contest—failing that, something from Jetbrains. Open source editors and IDEs would only enter the picture if I somehow couldn't get Sublime or something from Jetbrains. Meanwhile, I struggle to think of anything else in that category that I use. It's mostly first-party or open-source. If I did more multimedia or GUI design I'd probably use a few more of those small-team proprietary programs, but I don't think it's controversial to assert that those largely blow anything available on Linux out of the water (except the ones that are cross-platform because they're—ugh—electron or browser-based, so do work on Linux) so it's not like I'm missing out on the riches of open-source, at least when it comes to that kind of thing.
> A good default en keyboard layout (why would the default not be a good one? It boggles the mind—and sure, that's a distro concern, not a "Linux" concern, but so's everything that matters on Linux).
You must have had some very bad experience with keyboard on Linux. Just curious: what was that?
Normal en keyboard layout's just not good—too hard to type various characters that occur in English text, some uncommon-but-not-rare and some downright common (—, ü, å, ¢, °, •, é, ç, ñ, and so on, and sure, a bunch of those are for loan words, but that's still English).
Linux has good ones, I've just never seen one as the default; if you just click through the "happy path" you'll have a crap one, and there's little guidance on which you should pick if you need to, like, actually compose text in your native human language, so the user just has to know in advance or go look up which one to select.
Mac's default, meanwhile, is (at least) nearly as good as the best Linux has, so you can start fluently typing English without having to fiddle with settings or memorize weird number sequences (sure, there's still some memorization, but much of it's simpler and closer to making sense and far more guess-able than, say, a four-digit string of numbers). Last I checked, Windows gets this wrong, too. Why either of those operating systems does that, I have no idea. That it was even incorrect didn't occur to me, somehow, until I switched to Mac and was like "why isn't the default at least this good on every platform!?"
Linux has the "Compose key" concept that solves 99% of what you list in your claim. You have to map it to some physical key on PC keyboards, though. All the DEs I checked let you do this in the settings. My only complaint is they they don't allow out-of-the-box to assign it to the Insert key, which I never use in its intended function.
I realize I come off as extreme here, but that's really how I feel.
I think that's an obviously fair way to describe the Microsoft Store and the Google Play Store. (Idk about iOS' App Store because I don't use iOS.)
I'd also make the argument that it's a good way to describe the setup of basically any macOS power user, with their inevitable collection of brittle, mostly proprietary, solo dev apps they use to hack basic functionality back into Apple's anemic OS offering.
(Windows suffers from that latter problem, too, though it's not as egregious as macOS.)
> you can run open source alternatives for everything except maybe some core software.
The core software is pretty much what we're talking about here: DEs and/or bundled apps.
> for now Mac is a pretty good experience
I understand that many people like it and I think their reasons for liking it are mostly good. But for me, using macOS is genuinely miserable, not just a little off. And I think the kind of app ecosystem that Mac people really love, of thoughfully designed, hidden gems by very small teams or individual devs, distributed as proprietary software for a small fee... is just not that great. To an extent that Mac lovers rarely admit or don't understand, a huge proportion of those apps exist only to compensate for Apple's own oversights, which wouldn't matter so much in an open ecosystem. The rest just aren't worth the cost of a closed ecosystem, in my opinion.