To make it accurate. The final picture of Linux should have been a Frankenstein of a self-build car. Functional, but not aesthetically pleasing. And missing all the features you didn’t add yourself.
What? Gnome is a beautiful DE that works flawlessly. It’s like being on a Mac that you can customize, have full control over, with window tiling out of the box, and saner keyboard shortcuts.
Last time I installed arch or Gentoo it reminded me of a race car I drove with a friend. It rattles, it pops, it makes some strange noises but damn is it fast.
What was it the Ferrari guy said? I don’t care about door gaps, when a Ferarri owner hits the gas I want him to shit his pants. Well if that ain’t Linux.
While you are correct in that macOS primarily isn’t composed of tools that “do one thing well”, macOS is still UNIX-certified under the Single UNIX Specification (identical to saying it’s POSIX-compliant and X/Open Curses compliant) and is literally a UNIX system. Most Linux and even BSD systems are not UNIX these days, though I’d say a higher proportion of their tools/components follow the UNIX philosophy.
Yours was as well. This conversation was actually a breath of fresh air, last time I conversed about this topic, it came down to an argument that lasted for days and left us both failing to come to an agreement!
It’s not technically true that Mac is Linux, but people say Mac “is” Linux because they are closely related and function identically for a lot of workflows.
Bear in mind that most people think of Linux in a DE-agnostic way. “Linux” isn’t what your desktop looks like, it’s a collection of a kernel and (mostly GNU) software that is largely shared between many distributions. Mac feels a lot like a different distribution of Linux, with some (or a lot of) quirks.
I’m a SWE and I work heavily in a CLI environment. I can use the same shell with the same software and the same configuration files shared between my Linux machine and my MacBook. Honestly the biggest indicator that I’m on Mac instead of Linux is that I have to remember to use homebrew instead of pacman/apt/etc. Otherwise, I was move my entire Linux workflow to Mac in a day or two, and can maintain the two environments in parallel.
Trying to do the same in windows is… frustrating, and only works at all because of the WSL letting me run a Linux pseudo-VM on top of my windows session.
Because it is a Unix system, so the Bash feels very similar and if you install homebrew you have a package manager with a very Linux like feel and a software catalog where most Linux command lines tool have a port for OS X. From a usability perspective OS X is Linux, but without permanent issues and reinstalls. (and I am saying this as a 12 year Linux User who only uses Macs for work)
With the exception of his reference to Be, inc, this looks a lot like Neal Stephenson’s car dealership analogy from “In the Beginning…Was the Command Line”: web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
BeBox had dual processors (unusual for the time) and the GUI had a little tool that let you see the load on both, and a little check box to turn off a processor so that you could force all the processes to run on on the other. If you turned off both processors the computer halted.
The Be employee I met at the time said they left it that way because that’s what you told it to do. And it was funny.
I always had to appreciate that commitment to pedantry.
The first review of the BeBox I read, the reviewer deliberately wrote code to cause the system to crash, opened up every app, and the only way he could get it to crash was to manually turn off both processors.
I do love me some Gunpla, but I wasn’t thrilled about the computing equivalent of having to sand, glue, assemble, and paint a Master Grade kit every time my distro upgraded and everything inevitably broke. Granted, a lot of that boils down to matching the right DE for your distro, and I liked to try to make KDE fit where it wasn’t necessarily the best option. Eventually, I learned to enjoy GNOME, but then started messing with distros that weren’t a good fit with that. The freedom Linux offers is both its greatest asset, and biggest weakness. It can make just setting up a basic, decent-looking desktop environment feel like you need IT classes just to know what the heck you’re supposed to do to get things working the way Windows and MacOS do right out of the box.
It’s excellent when it works. But a frustrating, often times deliberately obtuse mess when it doesn’t.
Same, I mainly use my PC for gaming, and at least as recently as 2015, Linux and gaming went together like oil and water, and unlike in the kitchen, I didn’t know where the emulsifier was. I first tried Linux in 98 or 99. Windows does what I want without a heck of a lot of tweaking
It should be a metro. It’s genuinely pretty great, up until you need to go off the well beaten path. A lot of the time, you can find a bus - the transfer sucks, but it’s manageable.
But if you’re a trailblazer, either you build out the rail network as you go or you start parking beater cars all over
I agree, but it’s kind of a low bar… I’m mostly glad with clearly leftist instances, regardless of their main orientation, since there’s at least some common ground.
Windows' reputation has never been like a supercar, it's always been quite the opposite. It's reputation has always been like a work truck that's a bit janky. It'll do almost everything you try to do with it, but it won't do many of those tasks well, and the ride experience will usually be rough.
Welp, the only and very important is that Linux is precisely like a car. You have to pay attention to it and de-facto make it by yourself. Even, let’s say, Linux Mint installation. Yeah, you kinda have everything, but as time goes you will make it more and more your very own installation at all levels. Mac is kind of evil version of a Unix system. Windows… it’s windows… everything is deadly nailed and cannot be changed, almost
Your distribution choice is your service contract, some will carefully swap all your car parts and wiring every semester, some will change your parts as soon as new parts drop and expect you to keep your wiring in a working state yourself, and everything in between. All of them allow you to make changes, but some service contracts will revert your changes or break your car if you changed it too far from their defaults.
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