Geez man we have 5 MacBooks, 5 iPhones, 3 Apple TVs, a few iPads and watches. Even a couple iPods still. Not a hater. But Apple makes their money off selling hardware, not the OS. That doesn’t make the OS “free”, because keeping old hardware updated conflicts with their business model. If you buy a Mac you get 6 years out of it and then it becomes unsupported. What everyone else is telling you is that MacOS isn’t free, it’s prepaid, as part of the hardware purchase. Hope that helps.

Thanks for the advice but unfortunately I don’t read documentation.

On big difference between Windows and Linux is that Windows will work around hardware that is not configured correctly or isn’t compliant with whatever spec or protocol (eg USB). You get errors on Ubuntu because there might be something wrong with your setup. Windows would ignore 5”these issues or have a patch to work around.

Learning curves are real but Linux is way easier to screw up than MacOS. I farted around for a couple days last week getting my Nvidia card to work (switching from AMD). It was not trivial. macOS truly does “just work” unless you’re setting up a hackintosh. That said, the reason I like Linux is because it’s your machine and you cans get it to do pretty much anything you want, whereas MacOS has many limitations. Those limitations aren’t that relevant to most users though, hence the popularity.

I think that is right. It’s probably $15k worth of telemetry for the “Air Force target practice” use case.

Intel Arc Pro is the only GPU attainable to normal people that supports SR-IOV. in general using a couple cheap cards is more reasonable than one expensive card that handles all those functions.

Turing or newer. 20XX or 16XX and newer.

Worked great in VM with Nvidia A4000. Zero problems, just a learning curve to use rpm-ostree and brew instead of dnf.

I don’t think Ubuntu is ruined so much as that Bazzite is very focused on the gaming use case and is a better choice if that’s what you want to do. I use Ubuntu and have tried Bazzite (in a VM with an Nvidia GPU pass thru). Bazzite made the Nvidia based install incredibly easy, and is a particularly good choice for VFIO. I personally use Ubuntu specifically because it’s the same OS as my cloud servers. They solve real problems in that space.

It was sort of a trick question. To upgrade to Sequoia you need to buy a new Mac because the 2016 MacBook Pro doesn’t support it. The Mac is a license dongle to use MacOS until you’re required to buy a new dongle.

Bazzite has native drivers included. I believe Fedora requires you to install them.

Recommending the —user flag is good advice and isn’t intuitive!

Basically every app is sandboxed to some extent. That way you don’t get conflicting dependencies. Because I use this machine for work, game performance is a much lower priority than file system permissions and stability and for most typical workloads. MacOS does the same thing by default now and very few apps get access to the actual root directory.

How much to upgrade it to Sequoia?

I bought the cheapest MacBook Air for my wife. It’s pretty nice. Lightweight, sturdy, and such good battery life that she doesn’t keep track of her charger. Personally I have a physical KVM that I use to switch between my Linux workstation and my laptop.

I have a MacBook Pro 15” 2018. I paid around $3K for it new. What is the cost for me to update to macOS 26 Tahoe or the one that comes after it?

Floo just means that Apple used to charge for MacOS updates but they don’t anymore. They are old enough to remember the $129 upgrade fee. You’re also right because the hardware is obviously a license dongle that costs more than a retail copy of Windows. If you want MacOS, at least the $500 Mac mini and $800 MacBook Air are as good as anything you can buy at that price point. Kind of irrelevant but to this thread tho.

That’s a limited time opportunity because x86 support is getting dropped with macOS 27.

Literally this week I learned that you need to install flatpak Nvidia drivers if you use flatpak Steam. Once I found that out, proton works great!

I’d personally start with billboards but instead now the billboards are screens too, not adjusted for night time to avoid distracting or blinding drivers and zero consideration for neighbors that have their backyards illuminated.