Well for example on Mac it seems to be impossible to turn off stuff like "App Nap" completely. I want my workstation to run 24/7 so it is ready and responsive whenever I need it. Yet in the latest versions I used every time I returned to my Mac I saw all the apps 'catching up' for a while, they had obviously been sleeping. And I had all sleep functions turned off in the GUI and with CLI commands like pmset. Yet they persist in pushing this. Another time I was decrypting a FileVault external drive, and went to bed after a few minutes when it was at 3%. In the morning when I looked it was at 5% and when I moved the mouse I heard the external drive spin up. Again it had been sleeping without being asked to do so, and this really screwed me up because I needed to clone that drive before going on a flight. I don't want Apple overriding what I want, probably so they can publish higher battery lifetime (and in fact in this case it was a Mac Mini so 'battery' lifetime was completely irrelevant).
Another thing is SSH access. I want to permit only public key access to my SSH daemon. Since about 10.12 or so (when SIP really started taking effect), macOS has been removing my changes from /private/etc/ssh/sshd_config and dumping them on the desktop when upgrades were done, in a passive-agressive way of saying "keep your shit to yourself". Not sure if it's even still possible to do this now with the sealed system volume because by the time Mojave and Big Sur came out I was already off the platform in terms of personal use.
Caffeinate (a CLI command to keep the machine awake) and a tool to constantly move the mouse (Jiggler) combined did work, but this is too hacky for my liking. If I want my OS not to do sleep of any kind, I should be able to tell it so.
Customisation with Gnome and Mac is possible but requires a ton of third-party tools which are often broken by system upgrades. I've tried all that both on Gnome and Mac but I got too annoyed with things constantly breaking. As a user wishing for great amounts of customisation you are clearly an undesirable on the platform.
I've used Mac as a daily driver from 10.2 until 10.14 or so, and I've had enough of these issues over the years that I just gave up on it. I still use every OS under the sun every day :) Because of work. But my main driver is FreeBSD + KDE and I like it a lot better.
Ah interesting. I always assumed running a basic app that keeps the Mac fully on work. Maybe I haven’t noticed this stuff not working. Maybe whichever app I used worked?
Yeah agree with SIP stuff. I don’t have that stuff turned on. Im on Catalina and Big Sur so I also have wanted stuff like you said and do that. However I completely agree with you. I expect at some point MacOS won’t let me even semi easily edit stuff like that. It’ll be like iOS which I jailbreak usually and then customize ssh etc. however iOS 15 also has newer SIP sort of things that now mean jailbreaking won’t be allowed to edit the root file system.
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I was thinking the things that would be brought up would be random geeky sort of stuff. Like the plethora of apps I use on Mac (usually procrastinating) that let me do quite a bit without putting into much time. Like alt tab alternative app, using keyboard as much as possible, keyboard maestro and apple script for GUI automation, etc.
Not saying Linux can’t do all that. I was more thinking in situations like that are comparable.
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I do want to try FreeBSD soon one day. Hopefully this will push me to prioritize that.
Another thing is SSH access. I want to permit only public key access to my SSH daemon. Since about 10.12 or so (when SIP really started taking effect), macOS has been removing my changes from /private/etc/ssh/sshd_config and dumping them on the desktop when upgrades were done, in a passive-agressive way of saying "keep your shit to yourself". Not sure if it's even still possible to do this now with the sealed system volume because by the time Mojave and Big Sur came out I was already off the platform in terms of personal use.
Caffeinate (a CLI command to keep the machine awake) and a tool to constantly move the mouse (Jiggler) combined did work, but this is too hacky for my liking. If I want my OS not to do sleep of any kind, I should be able to tell it so.
Customisation with Gnome and Mac is possible but requires a ton of third-party tools which are often broken by system upgrades. I've tried all that both on Gnome and Mac but I got too annoyed with things constantly breaking. As a user wishing for great amounts of customisation you are clearly an undesirable on the platform.
I've used Mac as a daily driver from 10.2 until 10.14 or so, and I've had enough of these issues over the years that I just gave up on it. I still use every OS under the sun every day :) Because of work. But my main driver is FreeBSD + KDE and I like it a lot better.