Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the law.
My disrespectful shirt just arrived today. It amuses me; it’s just for laughs, but I created it out of my frustration. I’m making fun of the tech bros who love to hate on Apple who have clearly never used a Mac for any meaningful length of time. I designed the shirt myself. It’s a one of a kind and they are not for sale.*
The hate and misinformation about macOS that tech bros love to spread drives me nuts. So much of it just isn’t true and you’d know that if you’d do the research or even just use a Mac for awhile. For example they try to say you can only get software from their app store but that’s not true. You can download .app files from anywhere. They generally come packaged in .dmg disk images that you can just mount and copy the contents over to your applications folder. It just warns you that Apple can’t verify the app isn’t malicious if they haven’t signed it so you run at your own risk. All you have to do to get it to run anyway is right click and open. If they’d used one for any meaningful amount of time they’d likely know that. I ran tons of unsigned code on my MacBook when I had it and it didn’t give me any issue. It’s really not that far away from Linux in many ways. They also complain about the cost being higher for a Mac than for Windows but they fail to adjust for the full cost of what you’re getting. That machined solid aluminum chassis isn’t cheap to produce and it makes them so much more durable than the cheap plastic so many Windows laptops are made of. Hardware wise they’re actually pretty comparable to equivalent Windows laptops if you actually do the math. They just don’t sell budget models. That’s the biggest difference. But you can always buy refurbished and save there. That’s how I got mine.
I’m no Apple fangirl but I do prefer macOS over Windows if that’s my given choices. macOS is built on Unix architecture which is very like Linux, so it’s familiar. I can learn and use the same skill set across both platforms and a lot of it directly transfers. Windows is off in its own little world doing things its own way. Its based on nothing, really, beyond their arbitrary design choices. It’s for this reason that for me, Windows just feels so ass-backwards and it’s like pulling teeth to get it to work sometimes. I’ve all but given up trying to share the network printer with Windows computers. I’ve tried and tried and tried to get it to work and it just won’t, so I’ve given up. If people in my household want to print from my printer and use Windows, they can just give me the file to print from my laptop or my phone instead. On macOS, Linux, and Android, the printer just shows up the moment you connect to the Wi-Fi ready to go with nothing to do but just use it. It’s just already configured to work. Windows doesn’t even see that it exists and I have no idea why or how to fix it. It’s just broken. I’ve tried everything I know to do to try to set it up and it just won’t see it or interact with it correctly and I’m baffled. My only guess is that because it’s such an old printer there’s no modern Windows drivers for it but it still works perfectly fine for me on Linux and Android, and it meets my needs so it would be senseless for an upgrade. Plus I can still get toner for it easily and affordably, and it lasts a good long time when I do.
Beyond printing, compiling Python code on Windows is a pain in the ass compared to macOS and Linux. macOS and Linux can just run python scripts directly from the terminal without even needing to compile them. For some reason Windows can’t do that as far as I can figure out. (Or at least not without extra configuration I couldn’t reliably expect an end user to do.) On macOS and Linux all I gotta do is wrap it in a shell script and it’s ready to go from the terminal. I don’t even need a separate one for each platform. Since they both run bash**, they can both run the same bash scripts just fine, no big deal. On Windows I have to painstakingly manage all the dependencies and manually run python compiler stuff and configure it and the whole nine yards. It’s a pain but I have to do it since that’s the most common OS people use to run their computers and I don’t want to be a dick about it. It’s annoying to have to do but at least I know what I’m doing and can get it working easy enough even if there are a bunch of needless extra steps involved. I can do it all from a VM at least. I won’t do it for arbitrary commits but major releases I will.
At the end of the day though, you gotta pick the best tool for the job and unfortunately that means some people really do need to use Windows simply for that reason and I understand that. For me, right now, that happens to be Linux. In the past when I had a MacBook, the best tool genuinely was macOS. It gave me access to the many audio tools only available on that platform. I used them to work on my music.
I don’t really care that much in terms of brand loyalty or anything else along those lines; I just wish people would stop pretending like Windows isn’t the red-headed step child of the computing world that somehow inexplicably became the biggest name in town and refuses to play nice. It’s not that great an OS, its design specifications are a mess, and it works so terribly with what are common tasks for me specifically that it’s a constant pain point for me to have to support it at all. There’s so many unnecessary extra steps to get it to work with industry standards and I don’t understand why. It’s not like they could be that hard to implement and include with the basic OS package, so why don’t they? You need third party tools to do so many tasks that you can just run directly from the bash terminal on other platforms. Nobody in the server space would tolerate a Linux distribution that didn’t ship with ssh support by default, and yet Windows gets away with it. You need a program like PuTTY to connect to ssh on Windows. You need FileZilla to access an sftp share. Just extra gubbins on top that really should come bundled directly inside the operating system by default. Plus it comes with no tools or support to access files saved on other platforms. NTFS, the modern Windows filesystem, is supported nativity by macOS and it can be easily configured and mounted in the filesystem on Linux using ntfs-3g. Meanwhile, Windows doesn’t support Linux’s ext4 or btrfs at all despite it being an open standard they could implement with minimum effort and not even have to pay a single dime in licensing fees to include it. Why they still don’t in the days where Linux has completely taken over the server space is beyond me. They’re just making things harder on their users for no good reason. Granted, I’ll give you that such a thing would be considered largely superfluous in the home version of Windows since most average users wouldn’t need it, but for businesses it’s something that should be considered essential in my eyes. Plus, including more useful tools along with the package only makes it a better value for money anyway. It makes them look better and it can’t be that hard to implement easily. Windows doesn’t support macOS’s file systems HFS+ or APFS at all either. However, in that case there may be patents or licensing in the way that Apple doesn’t want to give up without a fight, or a fat paycheck so who knows? I can get that but not ext4 and btrfs. There’s really no excuse for not supporting it in my mind.
In any case, I didn’t create this shirt exclusively for Apple. I’m a Linux user first and foremost these days and I have just as much reason to wear the shirt in defense of Linux as anything else.
Anyways, use what you want but I don’t have to like it for myself. For now I’ll stick with my Pop!_OS Linux and keep macOS in my back pocket as a backup. Tech Bros be warned.
Love is the law, love under will.
Amused,
Vanessa
*The design incorporates the Windows logo, so I can’t legally sell it even if I wanted to.
**Yes, I know Apple recently switched to zsh over bash, but it still has bash as an option and can still run bash scripts by default, so there’s no need for a re-write. Zsh is still pretty close to bash anyway and a lot of the syntax is identical in both shells.