After spending the majority of my personal computing adventures on my MacBook Pro last year, I received my final deprogramming session with the latest batch of macOS updates. Surveillance tech has now festered deep inside macOS Sequoia itself with the rollout of Apple Intelligence. Apple’s promises of groundbreaking privacy protections aside, I employ a strict zero-trust policy when it comes to accessing my personal data.

The rclone mount command worked without throwing any errors, and I could browse all my files from the local directory. However, when loading up my music collection with VLC, I got that little annoying spinning beachball of death. The reason appeared obvious going by rclone’s error log:

For reasons that currently escape me, I bought a 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro during a black Friday sale back in 2021. After feeling somewhat discouraged with the latest offerings in the Enterprise Linux world, I decided it was time to unwrap the MacBook and have a closer look at macOS. Now, six months later, I thought it would be fun to look back on this journey and maybe get an answer to the dreaded question: Is macOS better than Linux?

I’ve never owned a single Apple product but lately I’ve been wondering how good a real UNIX certified operating system might actually be. To get my feet wet, I decided to try out macOS Sierra in a VirtualBox session on a Linux host. I’m aware that much of the Apple experience is closely connected to the hardware, but personally I was more interested in the isolated OS experience.