- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
IT professional here with 20+ years work experience. Not once have I ever met another tech that liked Apple. Personally, I despise them. Unintuitive locked down garbage that can’t do anything a PC can’t do for half the price. And yes, I have seen viruses on Macs.
They’re just really good at advertising to people who don’t understand technology.
Unintuitive locked down garbage that can’t do anything a PC can’t do for half the price.
From the user perspective, enterprise managed Windows is locked down, too, and somehow less reliable.
Most of the software engineers I know in FAANG and similar tier companies use Macbooks to program. Poke around a coffee shop in the bay area during a weekday and look around.
And personally, I switched to Mac about 15 years ago mainly because dependency management and the shell made more sense to me coming from Linux. Windows has always been trash, and most other non-Apple OEMs make the actual physical laptop experience worse (hinges, behavior on closing the lid, trackpad behavior and size, power management, display quality in both brightness and pixel density, webcam/audio behavior).
Long time and still current hater of all things Apple here.
I have to use a locked down enterprise managed Windows 11 laptop for work. If given the choice of that or a locked down enterprise managed Mac, I’d switch in a heartbeat.
Maybe 10-20 years ago. Today macs are great machines, especially for the price.
I write things for my Appla laptop all the time. And download whatever I want.
By default windows does block unverified binaries. It’s pretty annoying. You have to click more info and then run anyway:

This meme might be referring to the RedSun zero-day, currently unpatched in Win10 & Win11, where detected malicious SW gets installed to the system folder for you by defender.
Linux experience :
I want to delete my entire filesystem
Sure thing! It’ll be gone by the time you rebootThat’s kind of dated. All the times I’ve done this recently it’s gone seconds after I screwed up.
Linux experience:
What really is a virus? Software is software, bro 🤷♂️
Chill brah, it’s just files
I don’t know if it’s the headcanon I’m reading the nordic chad voices in but I laugh literally everytime I open this image lol
I didn’t know there are Nordic chad voices
The macOS Gatekeeper quarantine is stupid, and Windows loves detecting random files as malware and deleting them while you’re using them and not restoring them even after you tell it to allow the “threat”.
Though I do wonder how much of that “detects random files as malware” is actually detecting real malware hidden inside software that also does what it claims to do. Like “this removes game’s DRM and also installs a helpful little rootkit for if we need to help you debug something, DDOS websites we hate, or act as an annonymous proxy”.
Windows does it to apps and files from people I trust or to ones I’ve created myself. I’ve even caught it basing detection on fuzzy string matching and nothing else (Bifrost vs Bifrose in the app name and that’s it).
Yeah, that’s the frustrating part, it could be either way. Could be based on a heuristic analysis that recognized a pattern associated with malware (that may be based on the malicious parts of the code or maybe some big data algorithm associated otherwise innocent code with the malicious software and flags anything with similar code), maybe it’s just some string match (ie a bad attempt but maybe in good faith), or maybe they are using the malicious code removal tool to also targer code that the user wants but MS considers malicious to their desire to make money.
Iirc, it’ll say what it matches it to but from what I remember, the actual details remain vague. Like it seems to be at a “report information that sounds useful to managers” level rather than a “report useful technical information for engineers who want to understand what’s happening at a low level”. So you get malware name but nothing about what that malware does or how this current flag associated it with that.
There are also viruses on MacOS. Just sayin’.
Yeah, but no free ones.
there is one bundled for free called MacOS X
I wrote a program (not a virus) on my computer. Windows deleted the exe immediately after I compiled it because it was “an unverified application from an unknown source”.
It didn’t bother deleting the batch script I downloaded from an email that would delete all files if run. Apparently that one was fine.
Sounds like a step towards forcing developers to pay Microsoft to let them run their software on Windows.
Well that script was ran on enough other computers, so the magic algorithm decided if everyone else ran it, it must be fine.
What language was it written in? I read that Microsoft Defender likes to flag the baked-in runtime of some languages as malware because they commonly shows up in actual nalware.
C#. The language made by Microsoft.
That is incredibly ironic.
It relies on the .NET runtime already existing on the system, so it can’t even be excused as a false positive mistaking an embedded language runtime as malware.
The script was from a verified source.
My mom is a verified source too, but that doesn’t mean I should be trusted not to break your PC…
(By which I mean formatting the disc and installing Mint. The data loss is your fault, really, for not having backups.)
You mean it was flagged as malware? You must have written something that was deemed very suspicious. Or it is one of the few false positives.
Also, that batch script would be flagged the moment it ran.
The exe was flagged immediately, even before running. I did not feel like running the batch script to be certain.
The exe had absolutely nothing harmful. It didn’t interact with any files or do anything with drivers. It was entirely self contained.
I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it can’t have been any more complicated than a game of snake in a terminal.If it does requests to a website it can be flagged too, i was doing a web scrapper for some sites, since i had to test it, i runned it often while developing, windows decided to delete the exe
I can tell this meme is old because windows does the same shit MacOS does now and has been since at least Windows 10
Nah I use both pretty regularly and I’m fairly sure macOS still makes you do the “nope sorry, press ok, go into system settings, security panel, become admin and click trust this unknown publisher” thing
Windows still just does the same safescreen thing they’ve been doing for ages now: “windows stopped this unknown thing from running, wanna run it anyway?”
It’s extra fun when you’ve inserted a 30 year old install CD and Defender gets all up in arms because the developer/distributor dared to not register their signing key with Windows defender in 1998
There can only be one defender in these parts
Actually worse - you don’t do it in the system settings anymore. You have to run a terminal command to dequarantine it. On windows you just have to click see more and accept the risk (or similar). Mac made it way more painful with no prompt to even show you how to do it - and it sort of acts like the app is broken rather than telling you it’s even a security protection.
Can I get a source for that? Because I daily drive MacOS, am on the latest version, and it absolutely doesn’t behave like that for me
The de-quarantine thing is for warez (we need this back), binaries that have been changed after signing.
Unsigned or self signed apps make you go to the control panel, unlock and click “open anyway” and have since Gatekeeper was introduced. But you can also run
spctland mess with app or blanket settings in the command line.
sudo apt-get install your_mom
I’m going to mount your_mom on my /
I tried running it on your_mom and it threw up an error: “No space left on disk.”
Good luck, I’m behind 7 Commodore 64s
S tier meme 👌
WINDOWS PROTECTED YOUR COMPUTER 🍑
We have detected 🍆 and unverified app attempting to run on
ouryour device and stopped it.you are being protected, please don’t resist.
Satya Nadella: “Whether the users like it or not, I’m going to protect them.”
I’ve never used a Mac, can you not just write your own app and run it?
I do that on windows all the time.
Apple blocks even apps that they define as “too old”.
Like every new version of Macintosh forces every developer to scramble and update their app even though nothing needs to change just so Apple doesn’t block them.
That’s fucked. Normally I can coax just about any windows app to run on even windows 11, and I have to because sometimes I interact with ancient industrial machines with monolithic Configurator apps that need a serial connection and a bunch of weird custom commands that was last used in 1998. I’d be boned without them.
Afaik, Microsoft made it a core principle to not break backward compatibility. Something that mattered to a lot of enterprise users. Applications made in Windows XP era, still work today on Win 11.
That’s a pretty cool thing ngl. But unfortunately it doesn’t make up for everything else.
It used to be a source of annoyance. So many programs relied on undocumented behavior that MS couldn’t go back and change decisions they made that turned out to be bad ones without potentially breaking things for some programs, even if that decision should have been entirely transparent to end users. So there was a bunch of technical debt being carried in the OS itself, at least until they started adding compatibility layers that allowed the quirks to be moved to there and the OS itself to progress.
But then they started with the enshittification that made those technical debt days look so innocent in comparison. It was a time when MS cared about the quality of its products.
You can run what ever you want, it doesn’t stop you outright, it just asks you a bunch of times and makes you jump through some hoops if the program isn’t from a verified source. It’s annoying for someone who knows what they’re doing, but arguably a good backstop to keep someone clueless from running something hostile. It’s a complicated enough process that someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing won’t be able to run it.
Arguably it’s overkill and them trying to force users to stay in their closed “verified” garden, but it’s not totally unjustified.
For now, that is. Thing is that MacOS is on a trajectory where it becomes more and more locked down.
Pfff get outta here with your differentiated opinions, weighing pros and cons and all that mumbo jumbo. macOS bad!!11
You can. You can also install other package managers like brew.
“Can I delete root directory, please 🥺🥺?”
“Of course 👍”
Me: “Do the thing.”
OS: “no.”
Me: “Fuck you. Sudo do the thing.”
OS: “yes sir. Right away sir.”
That is the way it should be.
Sudo gives you slavery right /s
Back when I was a linux noob I uninstalled python since I had some package issues. Lol, lmao even
And you learned an important lesson that day.
That was the moment I understood Linux yielded the user with great power and great responsibility. I instantly fell in love and have been distro hopping ever since













