macOS for personal use, Rocky Linux or Ubuntu for my servers
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And what do you like about it?
macOS is just a great OS. It's polished, and thoughtfully designed with care, as are many of the apps available for it. I like that it integrates very well with my other Apple devices. Because of its BSD underpinnings, a lot of Linux-y things work very well with it. I use the Terminal (actually Warp, but same idea) on a daily basis for different things. A lot of the tools that I know and use on my Linux servers work here as well. I can write automation for it, and apps like Raycast and Alfred make building workflows and scripts, and tying those together, really easy. It's much more secure than Windows. I also don't have to worry about stupid shit like literal fucking advertising being built into the OS, as you have with Windows.
As for Rocky Linux, well, I'm a co-founder of it (and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation) and helped build it, so my biases there are obvious.
Mint but replace cinnamon with sway. It just works, is reliable and has minimal bloat
Opensuse Tumbleweed after the whole Red Hat situation i started looking for similar distros as i really liked Fedora went to Opensuse Tumbleweed had no issues almost as if i never switched distros (obviously package manager is slightly different but not too hard to get used to honestly) i mean i can even still install Rpms
Windows because I have to use it at work anyway. Also it's simple, nearly everything works out of the box and it's still the best choice for gaming.
MacOS for the trackpad gesture functionality.
Linux and Windows.
Windows for "just works" functionality and software compatibility
Linux for light weight, customization, and overall support on hardware (ie there is some distro that will run on just about any set of hardware)
manjaro kde + bismuth for tiling
Qubes OS
The virtual machine workflow has made me completely rethink how I use computers, and there's huge security benefits of compartmentalizing your digital life through Qubes. Qubes OS successfully compartmentalizes your VMs and brings them together under one unified desktop, so even though you have several VMs running, you can see all of them at once because you see their windows as if it was a regular Linux desktop.
There are some issues with it though, such as lack of 3D acceleration for gaming, and its rather picky hardware support. Along with needing hardware that supports Linux drivers, you need a crap ton of RAM (I'm running 20 GBs on my Thinkpad T450s) for all of the VMs you run at one time. It doesn't take as much CPU power as you'd think, though, as it uses Xen's PVH emulation, instead of full-blown virtual machines like you'd see with VirtualBox.
However, if you have the right hardware for it, and you don't mind dual-booting or using another machine for gaming, I urge you to give it a whirl.
Xubuntu
- Simple, somewhat retro interface
- Highly customizable
- Stable as hell
- Fast
- Simple to setup
- Regular OS versions upgrades
I've been a loyal System/MacOS/OS X/macOS user since System 6. From the first time I sat down at a Mac, it's the only OS family that allows me to forget that I'm using a computer and just do things.
Architecturally the Classic MacOS was a hacked-together mess (though I was pretty good about managing my extensions, and I put together some pretty impressive uptime with my old Power Macs), but the UI was incredibly fast and responsive. Even on my M2 Pro Mini I don't believe I can navigate my filesystem as quickly or as easily as I could on my OG iMac running 9.2. And I'd still love to visit an alternate universe where macOS evolved from the Server 1.0 UI rather than the Aqua UI.
OS X/macOS feels a little more cumbersome, a little less personal. I don't always love all the new features Apple pushes in its new releases. (IDEK with the new Settings menu.) And I really didn't love the hoops I had to jump through to get PHP running on my Mini (I could have gone with an all-Homebrew setup, but I wanted to keep things relatively uncomplicated). The last version of macOS I unabashedly loved was 10.14 Mojave. But in the end, I appreciate all the things that bringing Unix to the Mac allows me to do, and there's enough of the old MacOS DNA that I'm still mostly able to sit down, forget I'm using a computer, and just get my work done. That's what I look for in an OS.
1? Linux 2? Freedom
I've always used Windows as my main OS, but I have experience with Macs as school computers, and now I'm exploring Linux. I gotta say Linux is probably my favorite. It's so configurable and my workflow is so smooth now that when I try and use my Windows laptop instead I find myself trying to use keybinds from my WM lol. I miss my terminal! WSL is just not the same. I have to have Windows on my school laptop, and I still have it on my PC. My hope is that I can switch my PC to Linux when Win10 loses support. Hopefully Nvidia will play nice. But I do prefer Windows over Mac simply cause I've used it longer. I've only ever used Macs on a surface level, never had my own or was able to tweak settings and such. So idk I might feel differently if I had one. But I'm definitely liking Linux a lot more cause of the customization and no update badgering lol
Gentoo. It makes me feel like Iโm in full control of my system.