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I do not agree on this based on what I saw generally on the web.

The article was about *hackers* moving from a platform to OS X. With M1, I saw a lot of content producers, web devs, ... to go to the M1, but not so much hackers... especially as the platform is *very* restrictive in terms of APIs / apps / etc.

A lot of my friends moved from macOS to a GNU/Linux distribution recently, especially as the hardware in general is more and more "as good" as a macbook.

But, again, this is my own opinion based on what I read and saw - I do not have stats to show how many hackers just passed from macOS to anything else (or stayed on an Intel powered macbook).

2 comments

> especially as the platform is very restrictive in terms of APIs / apps / etc.

This is utterly false.

Nope, it's completely true. I left MacOS when they ditched support for 32-bit software, and was delighted to find that 95% of my software "just worked" on Linux. If you're looking for a true Unix box, you're shooting yourself in the foot by buying a Mac, especially today.

"the hacker" wants a suite of coreutils that are updated constantly. They want a package manager and an extensible system. They don't want their computer to second-guess them, and they don't want a large corporation to decide what's right for them.

> when they ditched support for 32-bit software

This has nothing to do with the false claim about restrictive APIs.

> If you're looking for a true Unix box, you're shooting yourself in the foot by buying a Mac, especially today.

This has nothing to do with the false claim about restrictive APIs.

> "the hacker" wants a suite of coreutils that are updated constantly. They want a package manager and an extensible system. They don't want their computer to second-guess them, and they don't want a large corporation to decide what's right for them.

This is an ideological statement that has nothing to do with the false claim about restrictive APIs.

All of what you said may be true, but it doesn’t make the claim about restrictive apis any less false.

I agree. I used to do low level windows kernel-level hacks such as rootkits, custom memory and network sniffers, and this stuff does not travel because macos is much better designed. But for pretty much any other type of hacking, the good or the nasty stuff, one can make do with just about any platform. People make the mistake by assuming that if the OS is restrictive then they cant hack. Literally the opposite is true. If you want to truly hack, get an OS that tries to resist it :-) and for anything more common, like network-based hacking, using custom peripherials and the like - macos is just fine. Nope. Choosing a platform for hacking is mainly a matter of personal preferences.

Just a note that 32-bit support was also ditched in popular Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat) in the same year as MacOS.

> especially as the platform is very restrictive in terms of APIs / apps / etc.

What’s restrictive about it?

Nothing, really. There's plenty that's restrictive about one of several app stores on the platform (the one offered by apple), but - that's a store.

Actually using the OS; you can do pretty much anything you want - up to and including installing practically everything ever written for linux (including entire window managers and the whole lot - I've seen full GNOME installs on top of MacOS). About the only thing you can't do is modify the proprietary binary blobs they give you, but that's just commercial software 101.

This dark idea of an "authoritarian apple" is the same sort of "conspiracy fantasy" that people project onto the motives of political parties they don't like. It's the same sort of "leaps of logic" to assume "oh, yeah, they restrict app store apps from adding kernel extensions, so — they must hate the idea of you having control over anything, so obviously you don't have root access to your own machine.". "Or okay, yeah, you still have that, but obviously they're about to rescind that, any decade now." They're not.

The prediction is wrong, because it's an extrapolation from a bad starting point — which is a total misread of their motives. The motive isn't about authoritarian control; it's about eliminating footguns.

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For example, it's awful nice to be able to have a power failure, have my machine boot back up, and see all of my windows from the prior session right where I left them, and even have all the data in them refreshed from an autosave. As a system API, not just a per-app thing. Or, it's nice to install a program, and know that doing so is totally self-contained; it's not barfing a bunch of (potentially incompatible) new library dependencies into /usr/ or whatever that could screw with something else I've got installed. That I don't have to sweat over it "altering something" in my system when I do the install process. There are a lot of things like this; things where I basically feel like I've got a "wingman" or someone watching my back, because the folks who wrote it were primarily concerned about designing it so I'm highly unlikely to screw myself (i.e. the polar opposite of `rm -rf`).

It's just way lower stress to be able to focus on the actual problem I'm working on instead of also having to second-guess if my machine's going to betray me. That peace of mind isn't just a fluffy emotional thing; it also reduces cognitive load so I can work more effectively.