It's weird, because at work we're a Mac shop, but I (among a small group of others) buck the trend and run Linux. I have very few issues; I just run Debian stable for 6 months or so after its release, and then switch to testing until 6 months after it goes stable.
Meanwhile, my coworkers complain all the time about macOS. Definitely some of it is due to the poorly-written corporate management software they're required to run, but a lot of it is just them constantly fighting against the OS to get their work done. And then even after IT has finished testing the new major macOS release every year (which takes them like 4 months) and allows people to run it on their laptops, they still look at over an hour to upgrade, and a lot of post-install issues.
The one big caveat is that on occasion, say once every 2 years, I hit a big issue on Linux that I can fix, but an average non-technical user would probably not be able to figure out, and would end up having to do a full reinstall (or get their family techie person to do it). I do feel like MS and Apple have mostly eliminated that sort of issue (though I could be wrong).
The other problem I see is that most people have an existing laptop and want to try Linux on it, and run into hardware incompatibilities. Unfortunately that's just how things are going to be; if you really want to try to run Linux on a laptop, you need to make your purchasing decision with that in mind. You never really think about that when you run macOS or Windows, because Macs/PCs are designed to run that particular OS, and the manufacturer guarantees that everything will work. This phenomenon is especially bad for people with Mac laptops; at this point anything after 2016 means a lot of pain and things that just won't work. Even with a 2016 MacBook Pro you're going to be fighting to get things set up.
On the flip side, if you get something that's designed with Linux in mind (like the Dell XPS 13 or something from System76), you're going to have a much better time. But I totally get that most people won't want to buy a new laptop and would prefer to give Linux a spin on whatever they have already. It's just that results are going to be wildly mixed in that case.
I almost never have major issues with macOS, except for the poorly-written corporate management software. :) But, I know a lot of that is simple familiarity. Someone who's used to Windows or a given Linux desktop environment is going to struggle a bit; I get frustrated with Windows laughably easily. I'm better with Linux, but I've run it -- and FreeBSD, for that matter! -- as full-time desktop environments in the past, and even though the "full-time" part of that is many years ago, some of it still sticks. (I also ran BeOS full-time for a bit over a year, and oddly, that's really the one that I miss the most.)
> The other problem I see is that most people have an existing laptop and want to try Linux on it, and run into hardware incompatibilities.
Yes, a thousand times. I ran into that more often than I would have expected just trying to get Linux to run in a VM on various Macs over the years, and once in a while on more recent PC hardware that I was trying to do something with. (Then I would write something that suggested Linux was still hard to install and people would argue with me. If it ever comes up again, I should definitely remember to add your caveat about existing hardware!)
Same. Off the top of my head, one upgrade broke my external monitors (by breaking DisplayLink drivers), one upgrade broke Karabiner (by breaking the way it remaps keys) which entirely broke my remote-work workflow, one upgrade broke my ability to play music (by removing iTunes, and having the Music app replacement not be compatible with the iTunes server capability on my Synology NAS), Big Sur for Apple Silicon broke my ability to install any CLI tools. (Homebrew didn’t have Apple Silicon support for some months after the launch of Apple Silicon Macs.)
I get that these are in large part technically the fault of third-party developers, but it’s still pretty inconvenient as an end user to be unable expect to upgrade my OS without some major portion of my workflow being entirely non-functional for months.
I've rarely had even anything minor break. I don't know how much of a unicorn this makes me. (I also never had an issue with running MacBook Pros in clamshell mode, which I did literally every day for years, but that's something I used to hear lots of complaints about from others.)
I've done the FreeBSD thing and I'm currently on macOS. Were you running actual BeOS or Haiku? I wish someone would dump a chunk of money into funding another OS for hardware support.
I was running actual BeOS. This was a long time ago. :) I think it'd be harder to do that with Haiku in modern times; BeOS had a nascent commercial software market for a fleeting moment, so I had a credible "Works" style office suite (GoBe Productive), a good text editor (Pe), a good GUI mail client (Mail-It), a surprisingly good object/bitmap hybrid graphics editor kind of like the old Macromedia Fireworks (e-Picture), and probably other things I'm forgetting. I think I had an AIM client, for instance. Which also dates this. But it was important then!
> I think it'd be harder to do that with Haiku in modern times
Probably, but maybe not for the reasons you would think...
> so I had a credible "Works" style office suite (GoBe Productive)
Haiku has a LibreOffice port.
> a good text editor (Pe),
Pe is still around, or you can use Koder (a new Haiku-native app), Notepadqq, GVim, Kate, ...
> a good GUI mail client (Mail-It)
We have a few mail clients; the native one is alright but could use some work; there is also Trojita and some others like it.
> a surprisingly good object/bitmap hybrid graphics editor kind of like the old Macromedia Fireworks (e-Picture)
e-Picture has gone the way of the dodo (though you probably can still use it on 32-bit Haiku which has BeOS binary compatibility.) You can instead use WonderBrush (a native application), Krita, etc.
I regret not picking up a boxed copy of the office suite at Frys years ago. I still have my installation media for BeOS 4.5 and 5.0. The software I saw was for stuff like stage management. Thanks for sharing!
As someone who's used a Mac for work while juggling a variety of other systems on my personal devices, my biggest complaint is actually the constant need to realign muscle memory for basic keyboard operations.
Sure, I could find something that would give me more familiar bindings at the system level, but I'd then also have to (hope that it's even possible to) also deal with all of the downstream apps that then have to use different ones, because the globals in macOS have superseded whatever they'd be using on other systems.
It's like dealing with English grammar. Swap Cmd for Ctrl and Ctrl(?) for Alt, except when you're switching tabs or windows and it's the exact opposite, or when whatever operation you need is bound to Option for some reason.
Meanwhile, my coworkers complain all the time about macOS. Definitely some of it is due to the poorly-written corporate management software they're required to run, but a lot of it is just them constantly fighting against the OS to get their work done. And then even after IT has finished testing the new major macOS release every year (which takes them like 4 months) and allows people to run it on their laptops, they still look at over an hour to upgrade, and a lot of post-install issues.
The one big caveat is that on occasion, say once every 2 years, I hit a big issue on Linux that I can fix, but an average non-technical user would probably not be able to figure out, and would end up having to do a full reinstall (or get their family techie person to do it). I do feel like MS and Apple have mostly eliminated that sort of issue (though I could be wrong).
The other problem I see is that most people have an existing laptop and want to try Linux on it, and run into hardware incompatibilities. Unfortunately that's just how things are going to be; if you really want to try to run Linux on a laptop, you need to make your purchasing decision with that in mind. You never really think about that when you run macOS or Windows, because Macs/PCs are designed to run that particular OS, and the manufacturer guarantees that everything will work. This phenomenon is especially bad for people with Mac laptops; at this point anything after 2016 means a lot of pain and things that just won't work. Even with a 2016 MacBook Pro you're going to be fighting to get things set up.
On the flip side, if you get something that's designed with Linux in mind (like the Dell XPS 13 or something from System76), you're going to have a much better time. But I totally get that most people won't want to buy a new laptop and would prefer to give Linux a spin on whatever they have already. It's just that results are going to be wildly mixed in that case.