> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users
These threads always end up with veiled insults like this. Can you really not understand people who use Windows, Linux and Macs? They each have their strengths depending on what you are doing.
> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want
I've use Macs since my first G4 PB, Linux for longer, and used to develop for Windows though it's been a very long time. I've never felt stopped for doing what I want.
> by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS
Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro. I'm sure desktop Linux has improved since the last time I tried running it as my main computer, but I just not sure what the point is now.
I've recently heard that using Linux is an excuse to spend the day tinkering and ricing and do no productive work. It's the same kind of prejudice, but opposite.
I like the freedom to run my machine the way I want, but I also enjoy something that is reliable and seamless. My macbook air's battery lasts forever. It works flawlessly, almost always. "oh with nixos if you brick it you can rollback..." that's great, but it does not beat working great on the first try.
Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.
> Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.
Same here. macOS has been death by a thousand little cuts, and I'm finally accelerating my move away from it, as Apple locks it down more and more, and as they spend their engineering talent on crap I ultimately don't care about.
While I've switched most of my computers over to Linux, I still have not moved my daily driver over. There are so many silly little things Linux (and its various desktop environments) gets wrong and are just annoying enough to make me not want to use it every day, like scrolling with a trackpad.
NixOS is an extreme case, and I only mentioned it as a counter to the OP's article which was talking about the mammoth efforts required to remove unwanted processes. More generally, there are plenty of Linux distros which "just work" out of the box for most use cases.
No insult intended. I genuinely wasn't aware of what advantages macOS offers for a power user (by which I mean someone who wants to do tasks more advanced than browsing, email, etc.). From quickly skimming the replies the common theme seems to be a mixture of battery efficiency, hardware compatibility, and Mac-only software.
> Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro.
Yes, but my comment wasn't made in isolation or directed at people with your objectives. The OP's article is about doing exactly this, but in the opposite direction (expending large amounts of effort to remove unneeded processes). See for example: "if we assume that we need to identify just 500 candidates, and each takes an average of one week to research, that would take over 10 person-years".
Starting with that as the baseline (as opposed to starting from your position which is that you're not interested in spending time on this issue), building up from zero is a lot more straightforward. And, if you use something like NixOS, you generally only have to do it once since the idea of "reinstalling" the OS (e.g. for new versions) largely goes away: subsequent effort is just about changing your mind about what software you want, or what version you want (as with any OS).
The serious answer is that you get an "it-just-works"⁺ Unix-like operating system that gives you a development experience on-par with Linux.
If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.
If you care about configuration for your window manager, desktop environment, or systemd services: you will not like macOS.
If you are a graphics engineer or a kernel engineer: you will (probably) not like macOS.
If you are a C++/Rust/Python/JavaScript/Java/mobile/desktop engineer who wants a rock-solid developer environment and doesn't care about the above: you will like macOS.
You get all the Unix tools you could ever want, whatever shell you want to use (Zsh, Fish, even PowerShell), clang/LLVM, etc.
Does that answer your question?
⁺: caveat being "it just works" is getting less and less true with every macOS release.
This would be my answer, though I also do sysadmin stuff from macOS just fine. I've used OSX/macOS for a long time, I understand how it works and how to move around, and the ecosystem integration is nice. Adobe products, MS products also all work without any hassle along with any software development I want to do. Then there's the hardware which Apple Silicon has been great for. I bought an M1 Max 64gb laptop on release and it still never feels slow. Battery life is great, trackpad works great, etc...
And I say all this knowing that someone can likely get similar use out of a MS or Linux laptop. At this point, just pick what you know and get on with it.
MacOS is fine as a client/dispatch node for SSH/Ansible/Terraform/whatnot; I think they meant that you cannot sysadmin MacOS itself as a target with many of the same tools/techniques you would sysadmin a Linux server.
I wish that weren't true, as someone who struggles with a lot of cross-platform Puppet tooling that I wish behaved better on Mac. No, Nix doesn't help; not when the goal is "configure other people's machines to a baseline but don't otherwise prescribe how they should use them".
> If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.
Even then, that's debatable. Should say if you like doing sysadmin stuff on your own machine.
I am a sysadmin, and my daily driver is an M4 macbook pro and I wouldn't have it any other way. I admin other machines, I don't want to play sysadmin for my own. But its mostly for the hardware more than any other reason.
Again, my comment wasn't isolated. It was a response to the article. In that article, the person was concerned with tracking down 500+ potentially unneeded processes, and lamenting the difficulty and time consuming nature of doing so.
Perhaps I could have phrased my question better, but what I'm really asking is: for that type of user, why would you pick macOS over Linux when such things are trivial (relatively speaking) in Linux by comparison. Note that I didn't ask "what advantages does macOS have?" I qualified it with: "which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?". I wasn't suggesting that there are no advantages at all. Nuance matters here.
> And bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. has been a pretty big GOP selling point.
Which is comical since the US is the #2 manufacturer in the world behind China. And that makes sense given the absolute size of China. The US manufacturing output continues to increase every year. What's not increasing are the manufacturing jobs because of automation.
If there are strategic industries the US wants bolster, like microchips, there are ways to handle that through long term incentives. The CHIPS act did this, but was killed by Trump because Biden put it in place.
> (...) Donald Trump (...) asked (...) to "get rid" of the (...) act. (...) However, as of October 2025 the Trump administration has instead preserved the Act, even adding an additional 10 percentage points to the advanced semiconductor manufacturing tax credit. (...)
Also in my opinion it's more about removing dependency than just job count (which is just nice to have side effect).
US/Trump doesn't want China to have any levers that control US economy, ie. they want situation where any China decisions that can be made to be immaterial to US economy.
If you look at it from this perspective then things like Greenland also do start to make sense as it is indeed long term investment into independency (minerals, rare earth elements). It's not about military presence, they already have it through NATO, it's more about setting up industry around resources – military advantages do exist as well of course but imho that's lower on the list, it just sells better to plebs.
> She just didn’t lie and claim she had a magic wand to fix price gouging her first week in office.
This is part of Trumps genius and preys on many American's ignorance. Ask random people on the street if they understand the inflation rate for example. Most issues are complex and require nuance and complex fixes. Trump distills them down to simple problems when they are not, and lies with impunity that there are simple solutions. People believe him because it's too much work to believe anything else.
> - US inflation has continued to slow at 2.7% with core inflation at 2.6%, continuing the trend from the last 2 years under Biden after a huge 9.1% inflation spike in 2022.
Because of the missing data from the shutdown, most financial people are putting the last inflation print closer to 3% which means it's continuing to rise.
Bringing up Biden is funny since that's so far in the rear view at this point. You going to also talk about how much stimulus Trump dropped into the economy during COVID? Regardless, Biden was POTUS when inflation spiked and was killed almost as fast as it went up. It was on a nice glide path back to target until Trump through a tariff grenade into the mix.
> Writing code is one means among many for achieving an outcome, and if the same outcome could be achieved by the business without software, the software would be dropped instantly. Not because care doesn’t matter, but because the purpose was never the code itself.
Early in my career I was called in a number of times to write software for some business process. Many times after talking to the users and understanding the process, I would recommend against any software. It wasn't needed, or the time could be spent in better ways (AI is likely changing that calculation though). IIRC, my title was even 'Solutions Provider' or some such. I love writing software, but it's always been a means to an end for me.
Time and thus cost. Early in my career I would look across a fairly large company at processes being ran on spreadsheets and see if it would be worth the time to create software to address and if those processes should be standardized. We barely scratched the surface with all the possible custom software opportunities for this company.
These threads always end up with veiled insults like this. Can you really not understand people who use Windows, Linux and Macs? They each have their strengths depending on what you are doing.
> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want
I've use Macs since my first G4 PB, Linux for longer, and used to develop for Windows though it's been a very long time. I've never felt stopped for doing what I want.
> by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS
Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro. I'm sure desktop Linux has improved since the last time I tried running it as my main computer, but I just not sure what the point is now.
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