back

by toddmorey·7mo ago·view on hn ↗
Commercial OSes (both Windows and MacOS) now feel so insanely agenda driven, and the agenda no longer feels like anything close to making the user happy and productive. For Mac, it feels like Apple wants to leverage what came out of VisionOS and unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop--two things no one asked for. For Windows, it feels like ads for their partners and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent transition the way they did with mobile.

Linux is SUCH a breath of fresh air. No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be. Modern desktop Linux has a much improved out of the box experience with good support for all the hardware I've thrown at it. And Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate, etc.

24 comments
>unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop

Lol, that's what Microsoft tried 10+ years ago and everybody gave them shit for it, especially Apple fans. Now Apple is "inventing" this again.

Ubuntu also tried this with Unity. They were hoping that Ubuntu would become more popular on tablets if they had a more tablet-friendly UI... They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it and basically nobody used Linux on a tablet. It was kind of a disaster. Ubuntu is a commercial entity though, so yeah, prone to the same kind of bad management decisions. as Microsoft and Apple. At least with Linux you have options. Personally I just want Linux to keep becoming more reliable over time, and have better support for energy-saving features on laptops. It's sad that Ubuntu still has issues waking up from sleep mode in 2025. Somehow those problems haven't been fixed in 20 years.
I'm old enough to remember everyone praising Apple for not following Microsoft and making iOS it's own separate thing.

It's totally mad that they're now trying to converge their two differentiated, successful, and (mostly) well-liked OSes with the new one they just made for a $3000 headset nobody bought and even fewer people use with any regularity.

You can't seriously compare how inappropriate Windows 8 was on desktop to the latest macOS. Bad UI aside, the OS is effectively the same OS X from 2001 with some fresh skin.

Also a lot of people hate on macOS changes, I myself did not upgrade to the latest version.

Honestly, forced to use a macbook for work and I get incredibly strong "windows 8" vibes from macos.

Apple still has pretty incredible hardware, although it's definitely priced with that in mind - but the software has been a constant slog. Change for change's sake, needless shifting in settings/config menus. Weird "we tried to make this similar to mobile" themes in some places but not others. Overly complex os navigation, without clear goals or direction.

Frankly - the OS apple is producing for their traditional computers feels like garbage. I use Arch/Gnome on my personal hardware and I feel like some time in the last 5ish years my opinion swapped - I used to think Gnome was mostly copying Apple design choices, but slightly worse. Now I think Gnome is just a more clear, more usable DE than what Apple is releasing. I moved my wife to Arch/Gnome on her personal laptop last year, and the sure sign was that she hasn't really had any problems with it.

All that said... I still keep a laptop around with Windows 11 on it, because I have a couple of legacy tools (CNCs, solar inverters) that still want it, and holy shit is modern Windows just absolute trash. I grew up on Windows, from windows 3.1 to windows 10, and it's the worst of the 3 by a good distance right now.

You know something's gone wrong with commercial tech companies when the only OS that actually feels like it's intentionally designed for users is the free product.

That is because Microsoft put a touchscreen GUI on servers. Windows server had the stupid charm menu thing. It was just amazingly stupid.
Effectively no one is arguing Apple is “inventing” this, and tons of people—especially the most ardent Apple fans—hate this direction. Adoption of the 26 OSs is lower than others in recent memory. Even the comment you’re replying to is critical of it.

There are a lot of legitimate reasons to criticise Apple, especially under Tim Cook. Let’s please not do this obvious rage bait where you fabricate that a group has a singular unified hypocritical opinion which is the opposite of what we’re seeing just so you can hate on them.

What even is the point? For the past twenty years, I have never seen an Apple fan being as close to annoying as the haters are. Same thing with other groups like vegans: There are more people loudly proclaiming that vegans are annoying than there are annoying vegans in the world.

Why must we keep defining ourselves by hating on others? As long as they’re not causing harm, let people be. “Why are you so angry?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExEHuNrC8yU&list=PLJA_jUddXv...

They also seem to be reinventing Windows Vista (visually).
Except that GNOME Mobile is actually pretty close to achieving that right now, and runs quite well on any reasonably up-to-date mobile hardware if the kernel-level support is there.
Lots of Apple fans are giving Apple shit for it now too.
Commercial OSes (both Windows and macOS) are also both American, and lots of people are trying to de-Americanize.
Yep, I'm in this boat. After years of macs my next will be a FreeBSD Desktop.

edit: Although phone is much harder. I guess I'll just turn all the 'stuff' like icloud off, use only signal and my banking/etc apps, and get a separate camera.. Anyone found a less painful way to live without an iPhone/Android?

However if we don't get something like SuSE desktops and laptops at Media Markt and friends, most people won't care.

In fact I know of library that rolled back to Windows kiosk mode, from a previous SuSE deployment, because it wasn't what library users were expecting.

Linux is also realistically American since the largest contributors are American corporations and the dictator for life lives on Portland oregon.

America has a monopoly on software essentially.

Yeah. The TechBros changed things globally. I can not support their Evilness, so I also need to get people to commit to having viable alternatives, e. g. improving LibreOffice to the point where the proprietary office suites from US corporations are no longer needed.
Mac feels like it is constantly trying to sell you on their cloud services. A few times a day it will tell me that I haven't backed up to the cloud.

Windows is strangely less direct, but will regularly automatically try to save something to onedrive and force a subscription. Plus, it is just full of ads and nonsense.

I’ve noticed on my work machine, it really really really wants me to save my new document to one drive. It was about three clicks in the save dialog to get back to a local drive.

They were sneaky about it, with a switch to “turn on autosave” only working when you save to the cloud.

I miss my Linux work machine with Libre office..

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-office/mi...

How odd.. I have this on my iPhone, but to my recollection the mac has never not once asked me to enable any kind of cloud stuff or sell me storage.
as a dude who uses all three heavily for work & personal (windows/linux/macos) macos doesnt even come close to windows in the "trying to sell me on the cloud services" front. microsoft ddos's my brain with sign in with an o365 account at every corner of computing now. microsoft products are actually insane now.

i have quite a few mac vms for development things and ive had no issue just disabling all the icloud pieces & my usage in these environments seems to be pretty damn quiet the way i like it. windows has gone completely bonkers damn file explore has network service call stacks summoning bing wtf is going on there.

feel like i have to shower after using windows now it's crazy. reminds me of early 2000s when HP laptops were just filled with bloatware when you bought them, except microsoft has now baked this unforgettable experience into their operating system.

i will remain on macos for my personal device until other hardware manufs make great hardware. i have the pleasure (or displeasure) of using lots of different devices for work so ive got a stack of thinkpads and surfaces and a couple frameworks even and apple is still leading the charge on the bonkers hardware that fits in my backpack. im loyal to no one in the end and have no dog in this fight, but i would really enjoy if someone could catch up to apples chip developments for mobile desktop computing. id love something that is as refined and performant+efficient as my m4max pro but runs linux.

all in all i think device/manuf tribalism is the lamest part of computing and it's always been in my best interests to try them all myself and switch on a whim to whatever feels like it meets my needs. im in a unique position to use a lot of diff devices and os's with what i do and there's undoubtedly frustrations with all of them. there's always going to be a free spirit inside me that champions linux to the ends of the horizons though, but apple is undeniably in a unique position to r&d bankroll tsmc, design their own soc, develop hardware and software and marry all of those things together. it's cool shit, and they'd score a lot of goodwill if they just documented their damn stuff so linux distributions could just work on these devices rather than requiring some crazy reverse engineering effort and all the associated mailing list drama that came with asahi.

Ugh it annoys me so much that the desktop etc is all in one drive without me setting it that way. But then there is still a desktop/documents directory in the usual spot under your profile, just the files don’t appear if you actually look at the desktop.
It makes sense. Services is their second largest division, and it accounts for just under a quarter of their annual revenue (and growing).
Even within the range of Linux distros there are some that feel more agenda-driven than others. That's the absolute wonder of it. One can sidestep the flamewars and just use another distro that suits likeminded people.

On the other hand I think this makes it difficult to provide a perfect experience - you have to stay closer to the herd if you want trouble free computing. You have the choice.

I think it's great that there are Linux projects where the people in the project are obviously unhinged fanatical idealists sent on a mission by god to do <whatever> in the One True Way. I wouldn't use any of those projects, but it's great that they exist, and sometimes their good ideas percolate out to projects that I do use.

Like fine, they're gonna make a distro that only uses software under one of the FSF's free as in freedom copy-left open source licenses, not just excluding closed source software, but also binary blob device firmware and software distributed under one of those filthy permissive licenses. That's great. It's fucking unusable, but it's awesome that it exists and it's great that they're doing it.

I turn on my computer, the desktop shows up…and that’s it. No random windows, no popups about some bundled software I don’t use or how my subscription for X service I don’t want isn’t activated. A chime and a blank screen. Bazzite made my computer fun again.
Windows is a bizarre product at this point; it is what the company is famous for, but it is small beans next to Azure, right?

Nobody would get into the Operating System business to make money I think, the going rate is $0, subsidized by something (an ad company, a hardware company, or general kindness and community spirit).

No, Windows still has Windows tax, which is why I always choose "No OS" when buying a machine. MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately, so we can't judge the price. Android sure is subsidized though.
If you want the "Home" version of Windows, you'll get ads and crap, but the cost will be free/low. If you don't want the ads and need a more professional setup, then you can pay for Windows "Pro" version. They also have server versions that cost a lot more, so yes, Microsoft can and does make money from their OS. No, it's probably not as much as they make from Azure now, but in the past it made them a lot of money. It's estimated Windows brings in ~$20 billion for Microsoft, which is nothing to balk at. Azure brings in ~$75 billion. $20 billion isn't "small beans" in this equation, it's substantial.
Productivity and Cloud have a revenue of about 30B each while personal computing only was 13.5B (that includes windows Xbox and search + advertising) according to ms earnings report q4 25
It's interesting to think how incredibly clunky, unintuitive, difficult, unpleasant to the eye, and just generally painful the Linux desktop experience used to be. These days Linux has proved it's usefulness on the desktop, both to novices and power users alike. I have no doubt that 2030s will be the decade of the Linux desktop. Perhaps until 2038 anyway.
On build your own PC desktop with known parts, yeah.

On random laptop regular people buy at computer stores and needs to be reversed engineered by volunteers, it will be business as usual.

Windows and macOS are now sales funnels for the various subscriptions Microsoft and Apple offer.
> Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate

I used Claude to define some CS exam computers using NixOS; it was just GNOME, but with a few tweaks made via dconf. For example, add a maximize icon next to the X (close) in the menubar, make the dashbar behave like a dock with smart autohiding. On a Tailscale VPN so I can service them. And with a few programs preinstalled, preconfigured and pinned to the dock. System users for every student. And with mirroring the screen at a certain resolution by default.

Anything I hadn’t tried before, I just asked it to make. The dconf tweaking in particular was so much easier than when I tried to do this manually.

> No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be

I wish I could agree, but the recent push for Wayland only, or GNOME deciding to deprecate middle-click paste, or further reliance on systemd, comprise a non-exhaustive list of examples of things I don't want, and which may end up pushing me off the platform again on the desktop. There are definitely opinionated agendas in Linux (and open source more broadly), and the relative instability of Linux as a target makes forking and maintaining a project + dependencies often unrealistic for a single person... which is how these big projects are able to exert so much influence.

> and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent transition

They've already fumbled it.

> the way they did with mobile.

It's the exact same way they fumbled with mobile. They were very late to the party and decided to buy their way in. It _never_ works.

MS was almost two decades early to the mobile party, and still fumbled it. Because they didn't have the usability insights around touchscreens that others pioneered.

Also could never name things—they named it Wince.

I've been using macOS since 2020, but for the last year I have seriously considered switching to Linux. macOS Catalina felt really fast, easy to use, and lacked the useless features they kept adding and the ipadOS like interface they began implementing. In 2020, the feature set felt much more intentional.
I’m stuck in a world of AirDrop and expecting my phone to know the Wi-Fi password on my laptop, so I’m not gonna leave MacOS but it absolutely does suck. It used to be that Spotlight file finding was broken, but as of the last today Finder file finding is broken too. This is on multiple new Macs.
I feel like cli agents are the main benefit of going back to Linux. It’s such a joy to have all the solutions to customizations and fixes I want completely automated, using an agent that can control anything I permit and understands my OS completely.
I find it so odd that Apple put so much weight behind the VisionOS design, rolling it out to all platforms, considering so few people have Vision Pro. The justification for bringing some iOS ideas to macOS made sense, because everyone knows how to use iOS and is familiar with those conventions.

I’m curious if we’ll see another major shift with the new deign lead, or if the higher ups will want to run with Liquid Glass for a while after so much investment, and not wanting to alienate users by radically changing design direction too often. Or if Liquid Glass is here to stay as long as we have Vision Pro, because VR/AR demand that style of UI, so everything else needs to fall in line for consistency’s sake.

I think I’d be more apt to switch to Linux if it wasn’t for all the mobile integration macOS and iOS have. Giving that up is a tough sell. It also means finding new solutions for managing photos, music, notes, and a bunch of other things. I also struggle to find non-Apple hardware I find acceptable. I’ve used Linux on and off for over 20 years, and in the past few years is gotten to the point where I think I could daily drive it with little to no compromise, in a bubble. But mobile really bursts that bubble.

I am curious about how you are improving the Linux experience with claude code. Can you dive into that a little?
I agree with you. Microsoft really has gotten bad in this regard. In the past, the operating system was kind of semi-useful. Now one has to wonder what the real agenda is. For me the quitting point was the recall-sniffing on everyone; I don't care if this can be disabled. To me it means that the USA wants to monitor me non-stop. That's a no go. (I was already using Linux before, so I don't depend on Microsoft anyway, but it now meant that I also need to stop using secondary computers with a Microsoft-tainted operating system. I can not trust the USA in any regard anymore with the TechBros in charge. They killed all goodwill and reputation.)
As if Linux was/is not agenda driven. People really forgot I guess.
Windows has evolved into the world's highest security risk. MacOS feels like Eye Candy due to its increasingly inaccessible price for people with low resources. So, price and security are the reasons why I switched to Linux.
It's typical business logic. It's not enough to focus on making the product better than the user, you must have a "big" product vision and you're only allowed make changes that align with that product vision.

So when that vision is something that users are ambivalent on (3D TV, AI operating system, etc...), well tough, that's still all they're getting until it hurts the company financially or the next executive has a different "big idea". :(

You paint a very rosy picture of Linux.

It's a mess of disparate highly inconsistent systems.

The Linux user experience matches what it is - a random bunch of developers developing random software in the way they like with a very thin patina of consistency failing to hide the mess.

It's nowhere near as fabulous as you are making out - it's fanboiism to say otherwise.

Commercial OS's are terrible, but theres nothing that gets me on guard more than someone claiming theres an "agenda". The word has lost all meaning.
Windows 10 and Sequoia are the last two versions before the complete and utter enshittification of these operating systems.
Come back when I can run Linux on a laptop that has 12+ hours battery life, runs fast, that’s lightweight, quiet and doesn’t cause infertility from the heat when I put it on my lap….

Using an x86 laptop in 2025 is like using a flip phone 6 years after the iPhone came out.

Of course if you are a gamer, ignore everything I just wrote.