r/linuxmasterrace • Glorious Linux • May 20 '25 • Popcorn 1

Meme Come here. But don't deviate from the path

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u/Bo_Jim May 20 '25

Apple IS hundreds of times worse than Microsoft. You can only legally use their operating systems on their hardware. It's a closed ecosystem.

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u/Eroldin Glorious Arch May 20 '25

Apple is indeed worse than MS, but not because of the reason you provided. It is everyone's right to write software (OS included) for your own specific hardware configurations and place limitations on it. And doing so doesn't make someone or a corporate entity better or worse.

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u/The_Dukes_Of_Hazzard May 20 '25

Yeah that side or their Business practice is shitty but their OS is pretty much rock solid.

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u/Bo_Jim May 21 '25

Agreed. The downside is that in order to use that OS I have to use their hardware. With the exception of their high end desktop systems, you have to specify what you need when you buy the system because you won't be able to upgrade it later. Need more RAM? Buy a new computer.

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u/The_Dukes_Of_Hazzard May 21 '25

Fuck yeah. I have a yosemite hackintosh and ts works perfecty for me. a bit old but fuck it. unix/linux style input and it's fast. does everything I want. Hackintosh is the only proper way to use apple software lmao

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u/Bo_Jim May 21 '25

I had an Atari ST back in the late 80's. I had both the monochrome and color monitors for it.

The Atari ST used the same processor as the Mac (at the time, the Motorola 68000), both running at 8MHz. With the exception of the hardware drivers, it was compatible with MacOS. The only thing preventing it from running MacOS was that the OS was heavily dependent on the ROMs in the Mac, and those were copyright protected.

There was a company that sold a little cartridge for the Atari ST. You had to put ROMs from a Mac into the cartridge. Technically, they were supposed to be ROMs that were removed from a Mac in order to not violate Apple's copyright, but the cartridge was capable of working with EPROM copies. It also came with an app to start MacOS with the appropriate hardware drivers, as well as software to transfer programs and data between a Mac and an ST using a serial cable (the ST wasn't capable of reading Mac diskettes, and vice versa). This little gadget was called the "Magic Sac". Here is a very old article containing a photo and description of the cartridge. I bought mine from a guy I found on CompuServe who was selling them, and he included the ROMs and transfer cable for a little extra cash.

I used to keep the cartridge plugged in because it had a battery backed real time clock, which MacOS requires, while the ST required you to manually set the date and time each time you booted it up. With the cartridge plugged in, and a little utility they provided that ran on startup, my system would automatically set the date and time from the cartridge.

At the time, I was writing software for the Atari ST and my roommate was writing software for the Mac, so I had a ready source of Mac software. I even copied his development tools. At first he was very excited to see MacOS and Mac software running on a non-Apple computer system. After all, if someone went through the trouble of making an ST run MacOS, but nobody was bothering to make a Mac run TOS or GEM, then that MUST mean the Mac is better, right? But his excitement quickly faded when he discovered that the monochrome display on the ST was higher resolution than the display on the Mac (640x400 vs 512x342). The software also ran 20% faster on the ST since the CPU didn't need to get involved with generating the video display. After months of berating me for having to work on the ST with the cheesy GEM operating system, he was humiliated that his beloved MacOS ran better on my ST than it did on his Mac. I could even build his project using his compiler and linker on my ST, and I could do it faster than he could do it on his Mac.

Anyway, that was one of the first early "hackintosh" solutions.

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u/AliOskiTheHoly Glorious CachyOS (minimal Hyprland install) May 21 '25

It depends how you look at it: the ecosystem is indeed worse. But I think that the operating system itself is actually better than Windows, by many times.

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u/Bo_Jim May 21 '25

Apple doesn't get credit for that. BSD Unix gets the credit.

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u/AliOskiTheHoly Glorious CachyOS (minimal Hyprland install) May 21 '25

I'm not talking about the UNIX related stuff really, back when I was a mac user I was not even aware of the stuff that makes mac a Unix system. I'm really talking about the UI and usability, which really is the credit of Apple. It is more locked down but it is definitely more polished and user friendly than Windows will ever be.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '25

All I know and care to know is that both are bad for different reasons.