> This sucks. We think it sucks. You think it sucks. But we can't fix it: Apple has to do so.
And this is why I gave up on macOS several years ago now and moved to Linux.
It's not about which OS is better or worse. All software has bugs. It's about the empowerment to _do something_ about the inevitable bugs, rather than wait and hope that a fix comes down from above.
In theory I can make bluetooth and wifi and deep-sleep work with Linux, but am I actually able to fix it? No, and not for a lack of trying. If we're talking about practical ability to fix what goes wrong with my daily driver, then macOS still wins hands down.
As opposed to all the people who can't make a USB keyboard work with MacOS and can't do a damn thing about it.
The thread about it generally reaches 40+ pages before Apple erases it only for it to come back. Apple has known about it for half a decade. I can pinpoint the OS release when they broke it. Sure, it doesn't seem to affect everybody, but the people it does affect have no recourse.
With MacOS, as long as everything works, everything works. But, when it doesn't, you cannot do a damn thing about it.
Linux very, very rarely leaves that kind of catastrophic bug for 5+ years.
idk my xbox controller works on macOS, doesn't on Linux. Same bluetooth chipset (Magic of multiple drives and hackintoshing some crap). Idk what USB thing you're talking about but you surely seem to be capable of providing some actual useful info for people like me who would actually like to understand what you're talking about?
It broke approximately 2018, and it works for most people. When it doesn't work, "why" it doesn't work is unclear, but it's very consistent for those of us to whom it happens.
I tracked it to a single OS update because it was one of the last iterations that still had removable SSDs. I could swap the drives and the USB failure moved with the OS.
It's almost certainly an overly zealous macOS USB HID driver. macOS will do very strange things if the HID descriptor and the USB report don't correspond exactly and it will do those weird things silently. People have had to work around strange macOS HID handling for quite a while now.
It is impossible for a Linux-compatible PC to have a problem with Linux, because if a PC has a problem with Linux, it is obviously not Linux-compatible.
Therefore, if you ever have a problem with Linux on your PC, it is your fault for expecting Linux to work on your non-compatible PC, and you cannot blame the difficulty of fixing the problem on Linux.
This isn't a tautology. Plenty of hardware is in the set of hardware officially supported by manufacturer or oem under Linux or known to be well supported by open source drivers. If offical data is absent unoffocial data is oft readily available.
If nothing would lead a reasonable person to believe it is supported then your default assumption should be that is likely not.
If the functionality that one expects to work works as expected on supported hardware but not on yours then Linux isn't broken your hardware is.
If it doesn't work on previously supported or otherwise well supported hardware its a bug in the software.
It's weird that compatibly is discussed as if for the next 20 years one shall be forced to use a succession of randomly chosen machines and compatibility will ever be a crapshoot.
Often people will initially try Linux on random machines but official Linux machines are out there and those who have decided that Linux meets their needs can easily find well supported hardware.
Alternatively buy laptops that come with Linux or at least are known to be well supported.
Whenever I buy a new piece of hardware of any sort I end up reading lots of spec sheets, reviews, and articles and comparing choices according to a whole range of desirable features. Making Linux support one of them hardly makes it any more complicated.
If nothing else search for product category + Linux then find a list of recommendations and then google choices that look good looking for unbiased critique focusing especially on people claiming systemic flaws in design that effect all units.
Frankly, the same is still true for Windows. Not all WiFi and BT devices are created equal. Sometimes an update breaks them in subtle ways.
Actually, I had fewer compatibility problems with Linux than I had with Windows, using absolutely non-esoteric hardware, like Thinkpad laptops, Asus motherboards, etc. Hell, sometimes it was easier to set up a printer under Linux than under Windows (which, frankly, is more often the other way around).
But usually Linux, and to a smaller extent, Windows, allows you to cobble your own solution if a solid predefined solution is not available.
MacOS is much more often a "my way or highway" kind of environment. Some enjoy it; I don't.
I would literally pay good money to watch some of you use Linux and try to figure out... you know, what's going on.
And or pay to know the actual truth about when the last time you used an up-to-date distro was.
My NixOS laptop is by far the most, stable consistent, unchanging device in my entire life. Speaking of which, shout-out Google for breaking LDAC on their most recent Pixel 9 updates.
All of those work. As for bluetooth, I can connect multiple bluetooth headphones and playback audio at the same time. This is a bit fiddly, but I wouldn't even know where to start on some other systems.
I was recently shocked to find out that you can't change the volume in macOS when the machine is connected to a TV over HDMI[1]. Volume control is entirely disabled, and you need to adjust it via the TV. Or use a 3rd-party program.
This is absolutely insane.
I'm sure Apple will claim to have a very good reason for this, but the concept of controlling volume on audio devices has existed since the dawn of computer audio. All other operating systems do this as expected.
This is my main issue with using Apple devices. You either accept their vision of how to use the device you paid for, or consider yourself lucky that a 3rd-party solution exists (and that Apple has allowed to exist), which you also usually need to pay for. Insanity.
Bluetooth on Windows is a nightmare too. Headphones, keyboards, mice etc might work initially, but at some point they don't connect anymore and it's almost impossible to fix. Mac is better in that regard, unpairing and repairing usually works. On Windows it's just broken.
It's why I only use hardware with fixed dongles (Jabra, Logitech, etc).
I'm failing to find the offical docs, but from the release reporting:
> One of the lesser known facts about the Apple M1 chip is it has an always-on processor. This means that even when your Mac goes to sleep, it isn't really completely asleep. Macs with Intel chips have had a feature called Power Nap for a while now. M1 Macs don't need that feature because it's built-in and automatically running at all times.
And not just that: if an update breaks my Linux install, I can figure out what broke it and roll back to an older version. Rolling back updates on macOS or Windows is just... not really a thing, at least not without a full reinstall, assuming you even have installation media for older versions these days.
If you restart several times in succession after an update (e.g. if the machine is stuck in a boot loop), Windows automatically rolls back the update. If the machine boots but you still want to rollback manually, the option is available for a period of time after the update is installed in Settings under Windows Update > Advanced options > Recovery. It's true that once the period of time is up (something like 10 days), you can't rollback any more, but I think your statement about Windows is untrue enough to warrant a correction. Rollback of Windows OS updates is there and it works. I have relied on this functionality in actual real life practice.
It's actually really difficult to roll back a MacOS machine to an earlier OS even with a full reinstall.
You either have to make MacOS backup disks immediately upon opening the machine, or you have to find MacOS installation disks from the dodgy high seas.
Not really difficult to reinstall every major Intel Mac OS release, at least, as they're all downloadable from Apple in one way or another:
1. You can reinstall "the version of macOS that came with your Mac or the closest version that’s still available" via Internet Recovery[1].
2. You can download installers for every major release back to High Sierra from Apple via the App Store[2] or directly from Apple's update servers using a tool like installinstallmacos[3].
3. You can download installers for Sierra, El Capitan, Yosemite, Mountain Lion, and Lion directly from the Apple support site[2].
3. You can download Snow Leopard and Leopard from the Apple developer site[4] (free registration required; paid membership possibly required).
Note that the downloads on the developer site are the 10.x.0 retail builds, which may not be compatible with all Macs that shipped with a later build.
In this case, assuming the version you need is no longer available via Internet Recovery, you'll probably need to install and patch on an older machine, then transfer the patched install to the target via disk swapping, imaging, or NetInstall, or to install and patch directly to the target machine's hard drive using Target Disk Mode (or else track down a copy of the model-specific restore DVDs that shipped with the target).
Downloads from the App Store and support site should always be the latest point release, so this should only be a problem if you want to install Snow Leopard or Leopard on a post-release machine.
Installing non-final point releases is admittedly problematic: you can download some but not all x.y.0 builds from the developer site, some but not all patches from the support site, and a few x.y.(z < latest) installers from Apple update servers, but AFAIK there's no way to get an arbitrary point release of any version unless you can find someone who has a copy saved.
Though I wouldn't even be a little surprised if older patch releases were still available, unadvertised, somewhere on some public Apple Web server, given that you can still download System 6.0.3 (released October 1990; last supported Mac was the Classic, discontinued September 1992) if you know the correct URLs[5].
You can. Most Linux users can't -- I say 90%, if not 99%. Most Linux users are just users, many of which don't know how to use tar or xargs without looking it up, very few have the technical knowledge and capability of figuring out "what broke it".
I had it for a while. Then systemd came and everything changed. Can’t just grep logs and won’t bother learning how to handle that “journal”. Some programs don’t write logs at all, they just crash with an indicator in a systray that something crashed (the most useful info in the world, /s). Linux was being made by hackers who know how to debug things, not anymore. Now it’s new kids raised on rainbow unicorn nonsense. I feel myself in linux like I’m in early windows now, so what’s the benefit?
Here's the command it sounds like you're looking for:
`journalctl --grep="search string"`
You can limit it by time period like this:
`journalctl --since=-6h --grep="search string"`
Note that there's a separate user journal (such as for things that show up with an indication in the systray), accessible like this when in a shell as that user:
Also, if you really want, SysV still exists and works. You can setup a system with SysV and syslog-ng and have the good ol' service run system and flat log files back.
Thanks, but today I avoid troubleshooting it, I just accept the roadblocks and escape to my windows+msys2 installation as soon as possible. I find this combination a better gnu-based system and better upside / downside balance, which is all I need on desktop. Even logs usually get written to text files cause windows system logs are rarely used by regular apps and unixy services.
I’m not a gnu vs linux pedant, but gnu never let me down like that, and linux is really just an implementation detail underneath that I’m free to replace without compromising key functionality.
It's a shame as APDS does support snapshots and they appear to work well. Having said that I could foresee problems with rolling back the system partition but not the data.
I'm part way down this path. I bought a 2nd-hand M1 that only runs Asahi Linux (mainly for OpenGL/Vulkan and being able to use the unified memory for local LLMs). Still trying to find replacement apps to fully transition away from my old mac.
Especially, I'd love to find a tool as great as SuperDuper for my backups. I've been running it for 16 years now, including some full restores along the way. Thanks to the devs for a dependable tool! Pretty sure I used it to migrate laptops, which I imagine is also something that would be more tricky with later macos versions.
Anyway, I hope apple fix this bug soon. If not, then I'll look forward to buying a linux license for SuperDuper one day.
I'm waiting with bated breath for the day I can run Linux with full hardware acceleration on a MBP or laptop of equivalent quality.
Everywhere I look in the tech world there is so much potential for incredible products just out of reach because of bad software forced on us by anti-competitive practices.
Apple. You're the richest company on Earth. For the love of god, let me use my "pro" device to do professional work.
I am overseas right now and am quite literally typing this from an AMD mini PC with my MBP set up as a second monitor I interact with via a network based mouse/keyboard sharing application. It really hurts the promise of portability if I need to carry a second computer with me because my MBP is _nerfed by software_ to prevent me from using it for everything I do.
And this is why I gave up on macOS several years ago now and moved to Linux.
It's not about which OS is better or worse. All software has bugs. It's about the empowerment to _do something_ about the inevitable bugs, rather than wait and hope that a fix comes down from above.