This is a lengthy discussion from Hacker News, derived from a tutorial by user mpasternacki on how to get FreeBSD set up on a MacBook Pro.

Top comment:

wwweston 15 days ago [-] > Six years later, it less and less “Just Works”, started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn’t need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I’d need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system…. GUI that used to be nice and unintrusive, got annoying. Either I came full circle in the last 15 years of my computer usage, or the OSX experience degraded in last 5 years.So… it’s not just me. Somewhere between Snow Leopard and Mavericks I started finding building various things from source that never were a problem became an exercise in figuring out what library had been removed or moved or what Apple had done with lib/header paths or something else. If people aren’t going over to another unix, what are they doing? Homebrew? Container-ing or virtualizing another unix? Or just suffering?

Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027506

Since 2008 or 2009 I work on Apple hardware and OS: back then I grew tired of Linux desktop (which is going to be MASSIVE NEXT YEAR, at least since 2001), and switched to something that Just Works. Six years later, it less and less Just Works, started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn’t need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I’d need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system. I am finding myself turning away from GUI programs that I used to appreciate, and most of the time I use OSX to just run a terminal, Firefox, and Emacs. GUI that used to be nice and unintrusive, got annoying. Either I came full circle in the last 15 years of my computer usage, or the OSX experience degraded in last 5 years. Again, this is from a sysadmin/developer kind of power user perspective; power user, whose definition of “fun” includes spending 6 hours in the middle of the night figuring how to get dual boot working with UEFI.

Original tutorial: https://gist.github.com/mpasternacki/974e29d1e3865e940c53