I installed ChatGPT on her laptop and allowed it to run a certain subset of shell commands and it finally worked.

If im gonna have to muck around in the terminal to do the most basic of tasks, I may as well use Linux so I actually have a semblance of ownership on my computer.

The author's inability to uninstall or fully disable AI features is one for Mac OS. Window management is a common one for people used to other systems.

Windows has many, with (again) AI features that are hard to get rid of, and attempts to coerce users to create an online account being two of the most prominent lately.

So yeah, KDE's NetworkManager frontend is a little janky sometimes, and they should fix that. Is it worse than trying to coerce the user into using services they don't want to? For some people, probably. For me, no.

While I'm not deeply familiar with Red Hat/Fedora - I'm curious if you know what happened here? What changed to trigger this behavior?

Looking at a few search results - looks like an upgrade to 44 likely exposed/introduced a bug in power management that result in the Ethernet being turned off, and the kernel mode unloaded?

I'm guessing the intention behind the change was to enable more power saving.

But that is certainly a valid concern with most Linux distros - ocationally an improvement (higher resolution, faster, better color depth console or driver) will mess with bootloader, x/Wayland etc.

Still driver yank isn't unheard of with windows upgrades either. With MacOS I'm just going to assume any os upgrade is likely to cause some issues - even when Apple owns both the hw and os.

After the learning curve of linux desktop(well kde) it's basically the same as macos for me and for most people that would use it. most of the computing is done in the browser and that's basically the same experience in any os.

But don't fool yourself. You're subverted to Apple's rules the same as Microsoft users are to Windows.

I prefer to fight a little bit on an update on a unix system on something that is not working 100% to give up choices. When you use Windows, MacOS, Android you do not have choices. Choices are dictated from above, like it or not.

As for me every time I have to interact with something that is not BSD or Linux I suffer miserably.

A large portion of the HN crowd woefully underrates this aspect of macOS. The types who would get pleasure tweaking their OS and understanding it intimately are overrepresented here, though props to them.

I don't care what people say; macOS is the only OS I've ever used that has never booted to a black/blue screen with relatively cryptic error after performing an upgrade. Not once ever. Windows today is of course abusive to users and shouldn't be used, and as much as I absolutely love Linux as a server OS and for VM appliances, I get no joy whatsoever trying to figure out why the DE stopped working after letting the OS update itself or debugging subpar rendering from the Wayland compositor or X11. (Linux people still tell me this isn't a problem in 2026 but, guess what, my Ubuntu VM hit a black screen a couple days ago after upgrading with no other changes made to the installation, so they're wrong) That and so much graphical Linux software is written with the attitude of "I'm a freak who thinks context menus shouldn't exist so fuck the user and fuck anyone who tells me I'm wrong", yet so many DEs integrate these apps anyway.

The worst thing that macOS has ever overtly done to me is slightly change the look of its interface over the years, which is incredibly minor compared to all the changes that Windows, Ubuntu, Gnome, and KDE have gone through in the last decade. Does it pull lame crap like phone home? Probably, but these days I assume that just about all software thinks it knows better than I and constantly pings cloud servers. MacOS is not really unique in this regard. I will switch to my own Linux if Apple goes down the road of "use our AI or else", but for now I don't really see the venom towards macOS to be justified when it's incredibly easy to prove that the alternatives are usually very poor.

Oh yeah, and the hardware is excellent. (except for the keyboards which need TPU dam covering them or else dust kills them after a couple years)

Compared to the last XPS I had, it's substantially better for my use case, since I'll generally be remoting into systems anyway.

That's defined as "the device has become a brick, cannot be recovered". It was mostly popularized by broken firmware updates which effectively destroyed the device, as it could no longer be salvaged.

You calling a borked package install in userspace almost bricked is telling about your technical capability.

And I agree that people that are basically technologically illiterate should not use Linux.

They could if someone administers it for them, but if nobody can help them - it's just not the right choice.

Apparently it doesn't judging by the tons of articles published after every macOS update.

> just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates

And I am on a run of 11 years of update (since Fedora 25 or 26) without a single issue. Anecdotal evidences are just that. Anecdotal. Some people will have issues, others won't. Putting yourself in a situation where you have less risk of having issues like not using hardware from a company whose drivers are not maintained in the mainline kernel source tree goes a long way.

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/jan-2025-state-of-linu...

for some odd reason though, there's not many rabid windows fans.

This 'maybe later' dark pattern seems to have gained so much traction that UX folk just use it because everyone uses it. There is probably some handwavy reason for it that amounts to not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive, but it just ends up being another grain of sand on the micro-annoyance pile of today's tech.

a bad example from apple becomes the status quo for other companies.

The frog is being slowly boiled.

If you're not willing to stop using harmful software that's your problem.

And let's not forget that cheating in online games is only an issue because companies have co-opted what was a social activity between people you know (or at least can get to know) into a more profitable asocial e-peen measuring contest between randoms.

kernel level invasive garbage would be beyond destructive and still not solve the problem

There are hardware cheats that are not detectable by KLAC, so it doesn't solve the problem, just improves the situation.

The only way to avoid cheaters is to play with people you trust.

If you are fine with that, fine.

If this post bothers you and you feel the need to defend yourself against it or something, realize I'm not the one making it true. Nothing you say to me can change this.