For me, they both suck. I’ve been on Linux for close to 10 years now and continue to enjoy it more and more.
However, I will say, that if I need to recommend a computer to somebody who knows nothing about computers and doesn’t want to know anything, I will recommend Apple. I die a little inside each time though, knowing about their right to repair and privacy policies.
Honestly, if y’all would help your friend out with Linux they might be interested. If you just write down a note for them with the most basic commands for Debian, they would be okay.
DE: Use GNOME
Partiton layout: Use default /home for everything, don’t make seperate partitions for /root, /var, etc.
Add their user(s) to the sudoers file
CTRL+ALT+T to open the command line
Basic commands:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Install Flatpak, and bookmark Flathub in their browser. That should be good enough and honestly anyone could figure this out.
Be a good neighbor and teach them then. It’s not as hard as most people think it is. I’ve taught my mom, grandma, and friend how to use Linux before. My grandma uses Debian daily and she only had experience with computers by playing those online casino sites. Now she does it in full freedom and now I saved her some extra dough to throw into becoming a online casino addict! Yay grandma!
I am trying to say you guys should set it up for them, make it easy for them. It is very easy to just setup a taskbar and let them click on the browser, file explorer, etc.
I’m not sure why you are being downvoted but I agree with you. Helping them set up the first time makes their transition to Linux smoother. I just had someone’s laptop prepared with the steps you outlined in your previous comment and left them on how to install flatpak apps. They said they want to learn more beyond flatpak and genuinely interested how to learn to install the distro themselves.
Yet everytime you open Twitter they act like they know what they’re talking about and send clown emojis whenever someone responds with a counter argument
Well, “tech illiterate” is relative. Some people may be ignorant of how their desktop works, but do wonderful things with PD or something else for synthesizing music, which requires knowing lots of math and music theory and signal processing.
Never be arrogant, please remember than people doing actual stuff - developers, business analysts, musicians, artists etc, and even lowly office workers sometimes, - are kinda more important than IT personnel. There are of course infrastructure and network admins who know their sh*t quite well and get paid accordingly.
I got haggled for being a macos user in college because, “pc was superior”. Turns out, that the CompSci people that gave me shit about my Mac, didn’t understand the difference between “PC” and "Windows’. My MacBook is still the best laptop I’ve ever owned. It literally survived having beer being pulled into it’s fan, and it’s battery turned into a balloon long ago… it still runs fine, almost a decade later (if I keep it plugged in). I was “tech illiterate” to people because I used a MacBook. But switching from windows to mac, got me comfortable with trying linux. It got me comfortable with being uncomfortable, because I was constantly trying to figure out how to “get this to work on macos”
I’ve met a lot of tech-illiterate people over the years… and they all gave me less shit about trying something different.
I use Windows and Mac but I would think that Mac is slightly better. Just because I got this privacy statement off them once where they said they will do as much processing locally as they can, rather than sending it off to the cloud to be processed. I just appreciate that they acknowledge that.
Also, Windows has just swapped to a new default email app that requires I sync my email with their own servers. They can fuck off with that.
In what way is macOS more closed than Windows? The kernel is open source, the app store and cloud stuff is entirely optional, and it runs most Unix-y stuff natively.
In the ability to legally and without hassle install it on random PCs.
The kernel is open source
The actual userland is proprietary in both cases. Opening Apple Terminal on macOS and using homebrew is as “open” as running Windows Terminal with WSL: Basically the things in the terminal are FOSS, the graphical surroundings of both systems aren’t.
Having used both, I don’t find WSL comparable to macOS’s native unix shell. Aside from the bloat of it, integration with the rest of the OS is troublesome on Windows, and WSL apps are second-class citizens. On macOS, there is no “rest of the OS” because the unix shell is fundamental. It’s not running in a virtual environment like WSL; it is the native environment.
the WSL 2 architecture uses virtualized networking components, which means that WSL 2 will behave similarly to a virtual machine – WSL 2 distributions will have a different IP address than the host machine (Windows OS).
As of right now WSL 2 does not include serial support, or USB device support
If you have no open file handles to Windows processes, the WSL VM will automatically be shut down. This means if you are using it as a web server, SSH into it to run your server and then exit, the VM could shut down because it is detecting that users are finished using it and will clean up its resources.
WSL is a great addition to Windows, but it’s still kind of a band-aid.
Having used both, I don’t find WSL comparable to macOS’s native unix shell.
I use Windows with openSUSE WSL, macOS with homebrew and “real” Linux.
Aside from the bloat of it
Which bloat? It’s just a regular terminal.
WSL 2 will behave similarly to a virtual machine
That’s not so much different from a sanboxed environment on native Linux where a Flatpak application can request file system access but not touch processes outside its sandbox. If anything, I prefer that I have all my regular openSUSE thingies (zypper, my own Build Service repository,…) available unmodified on Windows, whereas the macOS terminal (and I know that’s subjective) just feels off.
It’s a virtual environment that requires installation of an entire Linux system. The disk and memory usage is not comparable to a native Unix OS.
Everything uses some sort of “virtual environment” these days. It’s not bloat, it’s the norm. homebrew does not use native macOS libraries except the very low level stuff. It handles its own dependencies. “Regular” macOS applications usually bundle their dependencies inside the .app folder bundle. On Linux, Flatpak installs its own dependencies. Heck, for whatever reason the Bazzite maintainers decided that installing Steam within a Arch Linux distrobox container is somehow preferable to the alternatives and Steam on Linux in turn uses “virtual environments” because the various Steam Linux Runtimes are specialized Ubuntu and Debian environments and every version of Proton is its own “virtual environment” of Windows.
I’ve bought a notebook almost exactly 10 years ago for €629 that had a 1TB hard drive and that I’ve upgraded to 16 or 24GB RAM for relatively little money (IIRC around €100). Sure, if you look at the insane prices that Apple asks for even a pathetic 8GB RAM / 256 GB SSD entry level MacBook, you surely want to avoid “bloat” but for many people in the regular x86 PC world a few “virtual environments” here and there don’t make a difference and aren’t considered bloat at all. If anything, for WSL users being able to run most unmodified Linux binaries is a benefit over relying on crappy ports of GTK to macOS and such because those ports of Linux software to macOS integrates so well…
I disagree with the characterization of Homebrew as a “virtual environment”. It installs binaries and libraries in its own directory and by default adds those directories to your PATH. This makes them first-class entities on macOS. Unlike with WSL, there is no secondary kernel and no hypervisor. Everything runs natively within the macOS environment. There’s no bridge, no virtualizer, not even sandboxing with Homebrew or MacPorts. Homebrew and MacPorts do not install “Linux” software; they install Mac software.
As a real-world example, I can install newer versions of standard tools like openssl and kerberos5 via MacPorts or Homebrew, and native Mac apps that rely on those pick them up seamlessly. I don’t think that is realistic with WSL, if even possible.
I haven’t re-evaluated a lot of development stuff since the release of WSL2, so perhaps things are smoother now, but in WSL1 I found there to be a big disconnect between e.g. a Windows-native installation of Spyder and a WSL-based Python environment. If there is a way to set that up, rather than installing Spyder within WSL and wrestling with X11 to run it as a second-class GUI, I’d love to hear it.
From what I have gathered online, it seems like most people believe that macOS is (slightly) more private than Windows. macOSshow you detailed characterization of the telemetry, and you can turn most of it it off; whereas you cannot turn off basic telemetry in Windows.
I cannot verify this claim, since I never owned an apple product.
That being said, if I have to use a closed-source OS, I would probably choice window, since I am more familiar with it and it is (slightly) more open than macOS.
You can shut down all telemetry in Windows Pro/Enterprise, I believe. You probably could with regular, too, especially if you’re blocking all Microsoft domains via DNS, firewall, or other methods.
and you can turn most of it it off; whereas you cannot turn off basic telemetry in Windows.
If only most telemetry can be turned off on macOS, it retains some basic telemetry that cannot be turned off. How is that better than basic telemetry on Windows?
It requires a little bit of computer knowhow but is definitely possible, heres a video of a guy building a custom pc and installing macos on it Here is the open source software he used to do it
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