People frequently overlook how nice the nix experience is on macOS. I had a new mac user complain about iTunes opening when they hit the play button like its some kind of conspiracy against him. I asked if he tried `sudo chmod -x /Applications/iTunes.app`. We tried it, and I don't understand why he was so surprised that it worked, and remained a permanent solution to his issue.

Your choices are the worlds most prevalent OS which is laden in telemetry and spyware by default, an OS that costs a fortune in hardware but comes backed by a company who has always stood behind their hardware mistakes (arguably after some period of denial each time), or to chose Linux. In this case, Linux means choosing from at least two variants* of distributions, and praying that everything works. I have an Intel NUC Hades Canyon that I run linux on, so that I always have a fallback if Apple significantly changes from their current course of treating users really well in exchange for a cash premium. First, my linux experience dates back to 1997/8 before the Linksys BEFSR41 ( the first hardware router under $300 ) became available, and installing a 56k modem or ethernet card meant re-compiling the kernel. Somehow, that was less painful than trying to get the amd gpu to work properly, and persist against breaking on updates and reboots. Yesterday, the author of i3, a window manager, shared a posting of his gear. I dug through his blog (cool stuff), and noticed on another of his posts that getting an amd gpu to work well on a debian distro was an issue for him as well. Again, I chose reference intel hardware expecting support for Ubuntu.

Being opinionated about design is not 'gaslighting' developers. And sure Apple is not perfect, I for one refuse to by a touch bar mac. I can't stand it, its annoying, and you have to pay extra for someone that for my computing preferences is a giant regression. But of the top 10 companies in the world (by market cap), which ones actually care about end users. Apple was started to put the power of computing in the hands of users, and they were damn successful at it.

Finally, in regards to Apple not caring about app development on their platform. Have you not used XCode? On the internet, you can find Steve Jobs demonstrating making a database driven application in 1989 using drag and drop components to design the UI. That is XCode, or its predecessor Project Builder. That is why Xcode Projects have files with the suffix pbxproj nestled within. Its all XML, and all of the build tools and chains are command line driven. You don't need to run XCode to develop an iOS app, but every year they add more and more of what developers want to it. Sometimes I wish that I could develop python inside of XCode, but I'm more than happy to stick with vim.

Swift and Swift UI are the real love letters to developers however. Swift, is open source, and runs on linux. Swift UI, is basically the react pattern of UI development, and they built it to solve the pain points of developers who were struggling with outdated development patterns on something that didn't even have color when it was first invented (Project Builder).

Sure, the iOS experience maybe too much of a "Disneyland" style experience of a great swath of the HN crowd. I for one love playing with Android phones that can run docker containers and X11 over USB-C. But at the end of the day, I am willing to pay extra money for a company that actually respects my privacy?