In my story linux didn't work well at first. Then with some time and work, it worked fine. An HP windows laptop didn't work well at first - but after I spent some time removing the HP bloatware, it worked "fine". This article says that mac laptops aren't working well because of memory leaks. But in a few months Apple will probably fix their software bugs and they'll work fine too.
You said:
> The [mac users] that don’t complain have low standards
I agree with you. I'd go even further and say most users have low standards, because the out-of-the-box experience with most modern computers is pretty bad. Apple users should absolutely complain more when the out-of-the-box experience with their computer isn't perfect. We all should.
Apple customers keep buying apple computers despite their issues not because we have low standards. We do it because the alternatives are even worse.
As an avid linux user I can tell you. Linux users aren't "trained" to have low expectations. They are trained to be masochists that enjoy pain. The raw amount of configuration, fixes and setup work that has to go into making some linux distros work is astronomical.
If nonlinux users are trained to have low expectations, Linux users are trained to rape themselves constantly.
I see your point of view a lot but I don't think configuring a system is that hard and I think it's preferable, compared to have tons of complexity preconfigured without your knowledge.
Here's my experience with Arch Linux:
1) You install what you need to install
2) You read the doc and configure to your liking, learning what the system can and cannot do and how it works with everything else
3) Things generally work as documented and you go your merry way
4) When something break or doesn't work, you have the knowledge or a general idea of what to fix
Compared to proprietary systems where there is no documentation and little configuration, when things break or misbehave you're essentially screwed. Will you wait for an official fix or look online for reverse engineers?
You bought a black box and you can't just open it and fix it.
I'd rather spend a day learning about my system during the installation and having it work for years, instead of buying yet another black box I can't open.
>I'd rather spend a day learning about my system during the installation and having it work for years, instead of buying yet another black box I can't open.
Learning linux doesn't take a day. Second off those black boxes statistically are more reliable than linux EVEN when you account for all the things you talked about.
The reason for this is simple. Microsoft has a business advantage and unfairly strong arms hardware manufacturers to make their stuff work with windows. This unfair advantage makes the windows user experience better and more reliable than GNU linux whos' developers constantly have to play catch up with hardware.
In the last 20 years PC hardware has become ridiculously faster - and yet the user experience seems to have changed little.
I saw an article ages ago whereby Microsoft apparently had a dependencies approval gateway. If you made any change based on Windows you had to remove/reduce your dependencies or make a good case for not doing so.
You said:
> The [mac users] that don’t complain have low standards
I agree with you. I'd go even further and say most users have low standards, because the out-of-the-box experience with most modern computers is pretty bad. Apple users should absolutely complain more when the out-of-the-box experience with their computer isn't perfect. We all should.
Apple customers keep buying apple computers despite their issues not because we have low standards. We do it because the alternatives are even worse.