Counting all viral vector therapies that have been approved, we’re sitting at 19 approved therapies versus 1 for CRISPR.

I think CRISPR ideas in a lab are just an easy way into the mainstream press, but viral vector delivery is the real future. It just didn’t get the same news cycle, for whatever reason.

The paper describes Cas12a2. This is a different mechanism with discovery origins in - of all things - agriculture. It does not attempt in any way to reprogram cells. It uses a guide protein to locate a specific mutation with exacting precision and, when it activates, unleashes total destruction of the cell.

The implications of Cas12a2 on undruggable conditions that exhibit known driver mutation profiles is profound.

Source: I have personally funded novel research based on Cas12a2 for an undruggable condition I have. I have personally seen my condition "cured" in vitro using this technology and it left all of my WT cells unharmed. Some of the researchers I've funded are co-authors in the paper linked. I am a layperson in this field (I'm a SWE, not in biotech), but I am happy to answer questions.

Yes! That's the next step. There wasn't a mouse model for my variant so they're building that, too. But in vivo testing should be underway this calendar year.

I've come to terms with what's happening to my body and that I may not benefit from my efforts.

Background: ~3 years ago I was diagnosed with a very rare MPLW515L-driven blood cancer known as a myeloproliferative neoplasm. My hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) acquired this mutation and they produce busted downstream products.

Most notably, one of those downstream products are hyper-lobulated megakaryocytes that spew inflammatory cytokines into my bone marrow and destroy the bone marrow niche over time. The destruction happens specifically because the inflammation mobilizes stromal cells and they erroneously produce scar tissue (fibrosis) all along the walls of the good, spongy marrow. There are other sources of damage but this is the one path most aligned to abbreviated survival and transformation into AML.

In effect, my bone marrow is rusting and very slowly failing. The failure could speed up with the acquisition of additional mutations or any other systemic inflammatory condition.

Anyway, 3 years ago my first retail hematologist told me "it's rare, you're fine, take aspirin and go home."

I couldn't accept that - this seemed bad. I decided that if I wanted to know the truth I needed to physically stand in front of the foremost expert in the world on the topic and ask them "what is the state-of-the-art?"

I came to this conclusion after about a year of reading all the most well-cited academic papers about AML, Myelofibrosis, and Essential Thrombocythemia. In particular, anything that mentioned MPL. There are virtually no papers mentioning MPL.

To put that in perspective: 500,000 patients in the US deal with the broad disease category. 5% of those are MPL, and 40% of those are the -K variant. So 10,000 people - which means anything targeting it would be well into orphan drug designation territory. I'd need to find a pretty niche researcher.

So, I laddered up the academic food chain using a little cash (donations), emails, airline tickets, and conference admission. ~2 years after my diagnosis I found myself in a closed-door session called the MPN Roundtable in Chicago with 100 of the foremost experts in the world. No cameras, no transcripts, just some of the greatest minds in the field earnestly debating the path forward to a cure.

I listen carefully to them, ask dumb questions, connect dots across research. I rehomed my care to an academic research hospital specializing in MPN research, and started funding research on the condition it includes my specific MPL mutation. Researchers happily oblige.

Cas12a2 was the keynote topic at this year's meeting and there was _very little_ dissent.

Hopefully you get great progress on your research but I just wanted to reassure you that the name sounds scary but the current treatment appears to work well and hopefully gives you enough runway to find your cure.

Even a charitable read is condescending. This person just wrote they are in the innermost research circles. I think they are beyond the "scary name" - needs reassurance phase.

How much overall has this costed you? Do you think that a middle-class person could afford to do what you did?

> So, I laddered up the academic food chain using a little cash (donations), emails, airline tickets, and conference admission. ~2 years after my diagnosis I found myself in a closed-door session called the MPN Roundtable in Chicago with 100 of the foremost experts in the world. No cameras, no transcripts, just some of the greatest minds in the field earnestly debating the path forward to a cure.

Why don't they allow recordings at the MPN Roundtable? It could be useful for others to learn from.

For this project, seed capital low six figures. I am collaborating with family and friends, non-profits, and using doubling mechanisms available to me to at work to fund the very early speculative bench research. This is where we are and its sustainable today.

Once we have the basic tech worth scaling up - to raise the first round of capital, I estimate $1-2m with a wider friends & family and angel investor round. This will be early de-risking research and delivery mechanism testing.

Beyond that I can see a path to a ~$20m round to further de-risk any assets that come out of these speculative efforts, but I haven't gotten this far.

In rare disease therapeutics the challenge isn't raw capital, it's finding the _right_ capital that understands how assets like these get de-risked and can tolerate the shape of the upside. Anything CRISPR-based is usually not a chronic therapeutic, so that disqualifies most of big pharma. Acute, curative technology like this requires informed capital.

> Do you think that a middle-class person could afford to do what you did?

Yes.

In the rare disease field even a small amount of capital attracts enough attention to have meaningful conversation with bench researchers. If you're willing to travel to the niche conferences, ask dumb questions, grind out the studying, and approach the speakers after their sessions.

Researchers respect people who do their homework and mobilize to meet them. They want (need) to hear from patients and caregivers - so they tend to listen very carefully.

Fun fact: I've had multiple researchers ask me for samples of my bone marrow. Has only happened in-person :)

> Why don't they allow recordings at the MPN Roundtable? It could be useful for others to learn from.

I don't know, it's been going on for a while. I can speculate: they're discussing pre-publication data, some of which had come out of their labs only hours prior to their presentation. It's completely unfiltered. I think there's real risk of some of the things that are shown being sensationalized or taken out of context.

The audience is trained and practiced in keeping a sober, skeptical lens on everything they see - so it's more about the debate and tear-down of the early data for the betterment of the niche.

There's zero attempt to hide anything, it's just a forum for collegial debate.

As an aside if you end up cryogenically freezing yourself for a future treatment don't forget to actually cure your boneitis when they thaw you out.

> other folks dealing with a tough diagnosis

The toughest part has been the spiritual journey. Loneliness unlike anything I've experienced. I felt forgotten without the opportunity to be known in the first place. I was happy - and emotional - to learn I wasn't alone. It took me 2 years, but I've found my people.

It’s only a matter of time before the next better thing shows up.

The approach I'm reviewing now uses lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for delivery. It isn't great for targeting my bone marrow condition but its workable. The team hasn't optimized it at all, either. There are also viral delivery mechanisms that I haven't studied yet.

The collateral damage problem is the backpressure on the delivery problem. If you get really good at delivery, you can destroy A LOT of cells very quickly. The human body (usually) responds to these events by releasing a lot of pro-inflammatory cytokines. This can lead to cytokine storms or worse.

As you "get good" at killing the target cells, the net effect can turn bad. It will probably be a balancing act.

> If you get really good at delivery, you can destroy A LOT of cells very quickly.

You can destroy cells quickly. Ok. So the question is: how do you detect specifically only cancer cells via lipid nanoparticles? That was already a problem years ago with Herceptin. The rationale that is always used is that "we need to do something" for certain aggressive cancers. It has never been a super-effective technique, despite all the promo of how monoclonal antibodies are so accurate.

> As you "get good" at killing the target cells, the net effect can turn bad. It will probably be a balancing act.

That's already the status quo in the whole cancer field. I don't think that more than sloppy accuracy is acceptable for any gene therapy - and the off-target cleaving of CRISPR has always been the number #1 problem here.

Valid critiques of Cas12a2 must acknowledge the mechanistic differences between Cas9 and Cas12a2. There is no research to suggest Cas12a2 is "sloppy" and significant research that demonstrates it is not "sloppy."

I appreciate the skepticism but I would encourage you to study the actual mechanism discussed in the paper.

You don't. Healthy cells will also get these nanoparticles, but without the triggering DNA sequence, the mRNA payload will remain inert and eventually will be degraded.

This is my understanding as well.

Yes, this is an approach. This starts to exceed my understanding of the problems the teams are facing - but there are concerns about the efficacy of Cas12a2-based approaches fading. Not because the cells adapt, but because your immune system starts acting funny in the presence of the payload.

I don't recall the specifics but there seems to be a window of opportunity for these things.

Others in this thread may be able to give a better analogy, but I'll try:

Cas9 is like open heart surgery on millions of cells all at once. We know the specific outcome we want - a surgical replacement of a sliver of a sequence - but just like open heart surgery, it's an inexact operation. Cas9 tolerates mismatches which categorically allows off-target matching. It also operates on DNA, so any off-target effects reprogram the cell's primary source code.

We want the Cas9 "patient" cell to survive.

In contrast, Cas12a2 is key-locked self-destruction switch. It targets single-stranded RNA transcripts with a specific guide protein. So the specificity is two-fold: the guide protein doesn't tolerate mismatches, and its operating on a _downstream byproduct_ of the DNA. When the key (guide protein) matches, it unleashes total destruction within the cell.

We want the Cas12a2 "patient" cell to die.

> If it were to work, gene therapy would be an accurate - and affordable - technique. Which it is not right now.

Correct on the first point. If it were to work, gene therapy could be more common. I do not know how to make it affordable, yet. In the models I've built to commercialize this I estimate a Cas12a2 treatment would cost approximately as much as a bone marrow transplant.

> How does "answering questions" offset the technology being inferior right now?

In fairness, asking and seeking answers to questions is all I have right now. There is no cure to my disease so the upside - no matter how futile you may perceive it to be - to me, is infinite.

If I can solve it I may get a few more years with my daughter. If I can't, I can show her how to live fighting for an answer that may never come.

You're not wrong, you and I just have different perspectives on the upside.

Tens of thousands of papers have made important scientific advances using it successfully and CRISPR-Cas methods are used routinely throughout almost all of biology.

This is like calling PCR "overhyped" because PCR-based infectious disease diagnostics are limited.

The public in general doesn't have a good understanding of basic genetics and I blame high school science curriculums for not covering it well enough. Too much time is wasted on Mendelian genetics without covering the Central Dogma.

You basically cannot "edit" your somatic DNA in a meaningful wholesale way since every single cell in your body has a copy of the DNA, and it's a foolish endeavor. What you can conceivably edit to good effect is your germline DNA, stem cell DNA, or modify mRNA expression (e.g. retinoids; yes putting retinol/adapalene cream on your face is "gene therapy"), or introduce foreign mRNA for your translation machinery to co-opt (e.g. mRNA vaccines).

Expressing mRNA that doesn't exist in the genome, that would be gene therapy. Or just a virus.

The comparison is kind of a category error. One is a DNA editing technique and the others are deliver platforms. I recall the hype mostly being how revolutionary it could be, not comparing it on a timeline to specific technologies that are at different levels of the stack.

I usually end Legend after the mannequin trap, and end Sunshine after the transit of mercury.

The CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool was developed in 2012, so I don't find it surprising that merely 14 years later, there's only one approved treatment. From discovery to approval, drug development often takes 10-15 years, and often much longer for novel techniques. So I'd say it too early to call it overhyped for treatments.

Finally, I think we'll see a lot of treatments that don't use CRISPR-Cas9, but related gene editing techniques, but it'll take another 10 to 20 years.

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine#History for how long another novel technique has been in development before it became really widespread with the mrna-based covid-19 vaccines.

> mRNA vaccines are also quite different. Do they modify the DNA? Of course not. So that's already very different.

And yet it took more than 30 years after the first mRNA experiments to develop a successful vaccine. Why it should be so much faster for CRISPR & Co?

As far as I know a few labs in this space are operating under the basic question, "why haven't viruses killed everything by now?"

So this category of research is more or less the answer.

> Do mammals have a CRISPR analog?

Not exactly. There are things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribonuclease_L that nuke cells and are stimulated by interferons. This might be why interferon injections are common chronic therapeutics for diseases in this space.

The closest thing we have is probably whatever adaptability B or T cells can muster on their own? I'm sure someone lurking in the comments has a better answer.

Beautifully said and truly clarifies how evil of a weapon they are.

With that said, are these drones paradoxically more ethical because their loiter time is dramatically shorter and therefore won’t harm civilians after the conflict is over?

But I think there is an extreme ethical boundary we are traversing by putting targeting and trigger-pulling in the hands of a robot. The ways this will later be abused by authoritarian regimes is just staggering. We are reducing the necessary footprint of a loyal junta and automating dictatorships with this technology. It’s very disturbing.

For those of you playing at home, you can definitely have multi-lateral agreements without creating a one world government. We’ve had a chemical weapons ban for decades over which many of the multi-lateral parties were in hot and cold wars with each other. The nations are not going to magically combine over the presence of a treaty. Not how power works.

> https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jun/26/jimmy-savile-s...

An annual summary from Homeland Security’s inspector general said the department initiated 1,389 investigations into internal matters, leading to 318 arrests and 260 convictions of DHS employees. In 2011, the auditor -- which describes itself as “the principal agency within the department with the authority to investigate employee corruption” -- found instances of bribery, child pornography and “nonconsensual sexual contact” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees among the crimes DHS staff allegedly committed.

> https://www.govexec.com/defense/2012/08/laptop-thefts-drug-s...

> https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/enforcement/former-acting-hhs-cybe...

> https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/federal-employee-charge...

You could go all day. Surface just being scratched.

But all progress points to a commodification of foundation models--Google first named it as "we have no moat, neither does anyone else." So there must be some secondary play driving this, right? Hardware sales? Hedging for search ad revenue?

Still feels mispriced. I think asset inflation leaves too much money desperate for the Next Big Thing.

This is why SpaceX could be a dark horse in this race. Putting compute in space is expensive but so is building a data center in the US.

You know what's also really hard in a vacuum? Dissipating heat.

Correct. The economics of space-based DCs comes down to permitting delays versus radiator mass.

At ISS-weight radiators (12 to 15 W/kg (EDIT: kg/kW)), you need almost decade-long delays on the ground (or 10+ percent interest rates) to make lifting worthwhile. Get down to current state-of-the-art in the 5 to 10 W/kg (EDIT: kg/kW) range, however, and you only need permiting delays of 2 to 3 years.

If there is a game-changing start-up waiting to be built, it's in someone commercialising a better vacuum-rated radiator.

Saudi will host the biggest data centers in the world

I really couldn't have been more obscure, could I? :P

In 1932, "the first oil field in the Persian Gulf outside of Iran" was discovered in Bahrain [1]. (The same year Saudi Arabia announced unification [2].)

In the end, Saudi Arabia had larger reserves and wound up geopolitically dominating its first-moving rival. In commodities, the game tends to be scale in part through land grabbing. Less who got where first.

To close the analogy, if AI does wind up commoditised, the layers at which that commodity is held are probably between power and compute [3]. So if AI commoditises (commodifies?), Google selling computer (and indirectly power) to Anthropic and OpenAI is the smarter play than trying to advantage Gemini. (If AI doesn't commoditise, the opposite may be true–Google is supercharging a competitor.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahrain_Petroleum_Company

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_the_Kingdom_of...

[3] The alternate hypothesis is it's at distribution.

Source? That would be surprising!

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5654eb6ee4b0e19716ec5...

Showing how old I am with that reference

A more recent article https://www.productplan.com/learn/first-mover-advantage-fast...

I should say it’s “mostly” a myth, there are some fleeting competitive advantages to first mover but a lot of them don’t apply well to tech companies and there isn’t strong historical evidence supporting it.

If you want to benefit massively off being a first mover, you better do the work in figuring it out how you are going to acquire exclusivity that lasts long enough that keeps most firms out.

US law here is nuanced. Good quick primer https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

As long it further's American interests globally - monopoly is fine. Other countries need to take notice and start picking winners nationally in order to compete with the large American big tech firms.

ed: @er2d, can't reply to your comment for some reason, so doing it here: I don't agree. In theory a monopoly decreases the necessity for R&D. Of course this becomes more complex if the R&D is funded or steered by the state. But look at the current state of LLMs. There is fierce competition between 3 US companies. But geopolitically it's the same as if there would be one monopoly. The US being the clear technological leader in an industry is not dependent on that industry being a domestic monopoly.

And for the Europe comment: Also don't agree. Look at Boeing & Airbus. Both are companies where the US & EU have decided that they need to ensure the existence of a domestic airplane manufacturer. So in these cases they support these companies (often in violation of international trade laws). But it has nothing to do with monopolies. If a state decides to support a company to ensure its existence, a monopoly is the logical consequence and not the aim. Because if that industry would be profitable it wouldn't need to be supported in the first place.

But all these tech companies are not in industries that would move off-shore or stop existing because they're not profitable enough, so it's an entirely different setting.

Why do people comment on stuff they barely have an understanding of? Comical. People like you create noise.

Airbus ?

Now, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.

couldn't this just be framed / spun as just using search data as training? i don't seem being bundled enough to run afoul with anti-trust.

Running at a loss long enough to kill the competition is basically the name of the game these days.

When Uber started, they were basically setting VC money on fire by selling rides at a loss to destroy the taxi market.

Buwahahahahahahahhahah

They drop a little cash on some shitcoin the president controls and those problems go away.

> In September 2025, Google is in talks with several "neoclouds," including Crusoe and CoreWeave, about deploying TPU in their datacenter. In November 2025, Meta is in talks with Google to deploy TPUs in its AI datacenters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit

As a user and a consumer, I don't want them to have a moat. Moat means pseudo-monopoly. That is the exact opposite of what we want.

Only the investors and owners want a moat, to keep others out.

So what they're doing? They're competing. Good.

Because they are investors, VCs, or startup founders who hope to establish their own moats.

Users and consumers can get a lot of useful information from HN, but it's important to keep the local demographics in mind.

That's why it's interesting to try to pick apart where the moat is.

Also those personalities, quirks and choices accumulate. A lot of people talk about using Claude Code and Codex for different things. This is 100% my experience. Some people make better models, but on the top 3, there are often differences that are fixed only by switching between them. If I feel the need to switch between them, then there are significant enough differences and those differences will accumulate.

The integration of LLMs with tools and data via agent harnesses has created the opportunity for a real moat. As these products start differentiating, the moats will develop to be significant.

No YouTube competitor can rise because ad blocking is so pervasive and celebrated. People think (selfishly) that ad blocking is some niche thing, the but the reality is that it's around 30% on average, and up to 70% if you have a tech literate audience.

So we have paid competitors, like nebula and curiosity stream, but those are essentially dead because they have to compete with "free" YouTube.

The internet is, pretty predictablely, totally unwilling to look in the mirror.

Opposite of what you said. The "dig" was not retrenching to more use, but rather I evaluated what I saw them doing and have migrated our company to much better options.

See also: the imago dei.

What you’re describing is not “Christian values” but the famed “Protestant work ethic,” a product of puritan immigrants fleeing European discrimination. That ethic is Christian in source but when divorced from the knowledge that God makes you worthy—not your productivity— you begin the long slide into hustle culture, greed, and other current miseries.

> “The point of these markets is to get information, so the only reason you should ever be trading on them is if you think you have some information,” said Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University whose academic work inspired the founders of prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi. “People with more information should trade more and get more money because that's how they get paid for the information they contribute.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2026/01/09/why-predi...

Seems like you should read more about these markets.

What you are describing is governmental corruption and that should be handled via corruption laws not insider trading laws.

The point of HN is to discuss, not to tweet about your political enemies.

That leaves me to conclude HN is a left leaning circle jerk echo chamber, much like reddit. With any dissent to the right triggering the non-hateful liberal lefties.

I was fully locked-in to the ecosystem, the phone, the services, the TV, and I am looking for the exits.

I’m starting to parallelize to software which will play well on Linux, and when I’m feeling ready (or miserable enough) I will not be looking back.

The macOS exodus will be like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy: very slowly and then all at once.

All the _just works_ feeling and reliability seem to be gone. Tahoe is so unstable that I now restart the Mac every day, when in the past it happened on software updates only. Apple Music is another huge mess, I can’t comprehend how can it be so unreliable.

Looking for exits as well and kind of looking forward to migrating to Graphene OS, self-hosted Immich, and Navidrome

It shouldn't have been broken though. It shouldn't be a native app written by Apple that feels worse to use than both Spotify and YouTube music. I mean, I open it now just to see if there's anything janky and yeah. "Get 3 months for $5.99" and then below that "Get 3 months for $8.99" and you'd have to scroll and read much smaller text to see that the second one is for family - I mean that's reasonably obvious but it's weirdly unpolished. And then the play bar, which is floating around, looks unintegrated with the app, obscures the content area, and provides enabled controls that do nothing because there is no song to play. Not broken, but UX stuff that shows a lack of care.

They managed to mess up an entire ecosystem and they’re acting so stupid about it that I cannot believe all this software was made by Apple.

There’s no elegance, no thought out user experience, no good design, it’s all stupid glass design with comical amount of padding. It all looks like it was designed and implemented by a team five over a half assed pool party.

What the hell is Apple doing with its tens of thousands of engineers, if they cannot make a freaking window manager.

Take your favourite rock band and turn over all the musicians until no one is left from the original band. Should we expect the band to continue cranking out chart-topping hits?

There's one further factor that makes the situation even worse than the "Rock Band of Theseus." That's the fact that young software engineers are not interested in stewardship. They want to build their own projects, not fix bugs in someone else's. Across the software industry we see this lead to a continual churn, rewrites and redesigns no one wants, and a huge amount of wasted effort reinventing the wheel (and often making a worse wheel).

However bad you think Apple is getting with MacOS - windows is getting worse. And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having". Meanwhile I can't use bluetooth on my desktop (works perfectly fine on windows), and I was watching laptop reviews from justjosh recently where he's adding a segment where he is trying out linux on the device - and his experience on the two videos I've seen "sound does't work, wifi doesn't work, BT doesn't work ..."

All that said I am looking into leaving the Apple ecosystem as well because I just don't like how locked down and the devices are, but I'm fully aware that it's going to take significant effort for stuff that I'd get out of the box from Apple.

You can anticipate "the linux brigade" because it works well for many of us.

This isn't to say there _aren't_ problems. Bluetooth, audio, etc. working all depend on having the luck that someone wrote good drivers for the device you want to install Linux on. When you do have a problem, you don't have the benefit of having many people on your same configuration like you do with Apple. You might find yourself troubleshooting as the only person with your specific combo of dongle, mobo, cpu, distro, and kernel.

I've been on Linux since 2009 and MacOS since 2021. I've never had a bluetooth problem with Linux but I've had a ton on MacOS (but that might just be airpods).

The nice thing about Linux is that you have control over all your problems. On MacOS, if you have a solvable problem, the solution is often either "Pray that Apple fixes it in the next release" or "The fix for that costs $10 per month and it'll clog up your app switcher". On Linux, if you have a solvable problem, the solution is often "go into the settings for your distribution" or "install this tweak tool" or "find someone who had it before on a support forum and follow their steps".

It's not unreasonable that someone who is fed up with unsolvable problems on MacOS would find Linux more appealing. It's not a naive mindset, it's just how things are.

The big idea with Linux/BSD/fully-open-source is that you can fix whatever you don't like.

That was the breaking point for me with Tahoe. I never loved MacOS before that, but it never got in the way. Then with Tahoe, it got in the way, so I went to fix it, and found out that fixing it is actually impossible! That was the breakup moment.

Sophisticated LLMs make it even easier to fix or tweak any Linux/BSD/fully-open-source software to our liking.

That's a great theory, and sometimes it's actually true, but in reality for most users most of the time, Linux is as "fixable" as Windows or macOS, because most people, even the technically savvy ones aren't driver developers. Heck most software developers probably aren't even C programmers anymore. And even if someone had the competency in the language and low level system programming, do they have the time and the inclination to re-write the audio stack so that it finally works correctly? Or to fix the fact that even in 2026, sleep and hibernate are hit and miss? And then to maintain their patch against future system updates or go through the process of getting it upstreamed?

Most Linux users, and especially most Linux users switching from something like macOS or Windows would be waiting and hoping that someone else decided to fix the thing for them because they either lack the skills, time or inclination to do it themselves. And we know this is true because if it weren't true, all the various "wars" over the years like systemd and pulse audio and wayland wouldn't have been a war at all because everyone who didn't like it would have easily patched it out and moved on. But a modern full fledged OS experience is a mess of intertwined and complex dependencies. So when a distro decides to switch a big chunk of the underlying stack like that, most people either have to go along with it, or hope that enough people feel strongly enough about it to fork everything and make their own distro, and then they have to hope the forkers have the passion and drive to maintain that for them.

Yes, you "can" fix whatever you don't like in linux. Just like you "can" find all the information you need to diagnose and treat whatever medical condition you might have online and at your local libraries. But most people are still going to pay a doctor, because most people don't have the time or skills to actually do it.

I disagree with this. For most users, most of the time, Linux is significantly more fixable than Windows or MacOS.

In nearly 20 years, I've never had to write a line of C or touch the Linux kernel to fix issues I've had on Linux.

For example, one of my big peeves I've had lately on both PopOS and MacOS are the looooong animations to switch desktops.

On PopOS, I had two paths to fix this: Tweak the COSMIC desktop to fix the behavior, or the simple thing of simply installing GNOME (or KDE or any other DE of choice).

On MacOS, I'm SOL. There's no way to fix that on my Macbook (short of installing Asahi Linux, of course).

> Just like you "can" find all the information you need to diagnose and treat whatever medical condition you might have online and at your local libraries. But most people are still going to pay a doctor, because most people don't have the time or skills to actually do it.

This isn't a great analogy, but it's worth noting: Many conditions are expected to be self-diagnosed and self-treated. I don't go to the doctor for scrapes, bruises, colds, dry eyes, a stubbed toe, etc. By this analogy, Linux users are buying their own aspirin and applying their own band-aids, while MacOS users are waiting in line, dependent on someone else to fix these things.

I say this as someone who uses both MacOS and Linux daily.

So what did you do? Did you fix the DE? Again, this is effectively outside the skill of the sorts of people who would be "switching" to linux due to the issues with macOS or Windows.

And while installing a new DE is certainly easier than re-programming one, it's still dependent on someone else having written a DE that not only solves your problem, but doesn't introduce entirely new ones and isn't so fundamentally different to the user that they might as well have switched OSes in the first place. And if the user's primary issue was being forced into a major interface re-design like liquid glass, having to switch to a completely new DE is more of a lateral move than actually fixing the problem.

And to be clear, the fact that it's POSSIBLE for someone to fix a problem for you even if you can't, and it doesn't have to be the primary OS vendor is a benefit of using an open source OS. So I'm not saying it's not possible to benefit from this. I'm just saying that for most users, most of the time, the ability to "fix it themselves" is effectively as out of reach for them as it is using macOS or Windows because having access to the source code is only the tiniest part of actually fixing a problem for themselves.

Since my doctor analogy fell flat, let me try again with a traditional car analogy. A kit car is infinitely more open, customizable and user controllable than any car bought from an auto manufacturer. And yet, for the vast majority of drivers, buying a kit car, even if it was turn key and pre-built would do absolutely nothing to make it more likely that they will do their own repairs or modifications to the car. They will continue taking it to the same mechanics they always took their traditional cars to, they will continue to buy off the shelf parts if possible and do without if not.

Nope, I swapped to GNOME. Forking the DE was something I was considering doing just to contribute back. It's not something I'd recommend someone to do. (That said, it's Rust and not C, so the barrier for entry is much lower.)

If someone can install Linux, they can install a new DE. It's easy peasy.

> if the user's primary issue was being forced into a major interface re-design like liquid glass, having to switch to a completely new DE is more of a lateral move than actually fixing the problem.

No, switching DEs fixes the problem. If MacOS were open source, then you'd have a community-run fork from before Liquid Glass. (If MacOS were open source, you'd also probably have an LTS branch anyways, and no dark patterns forcing you to update.)

Ubuntu users dismayed by Unity were able to stay on GNOME by installing GNOME. Ubuntu users dismayed when Unity went away were able to stay on Unity because someone forked it. GNOME users dismayed by GNOME 3 are able to stay on forks of GNOME 2.

And it's worth stressing that _none_ of these were so bad as Liquid Glass.

>for most users, most of the time, the ability to "fix it themselves" is effectively as out of reach for them

This is the thing I take contention with. This seems hard to square with the experience of someone using Linux. Is this an assertion you're making as someone who doesn't use it?

I think the most common experience on Linux is that people are able to fix the things that annoy them. It's a tangible and normal thing, not a hypothetical.

And again, all of these solutions are the user being dependent on someone else doing the work they want for them, and are very much not "fixing it themselves" any more than installing Asahi linux on their macbook would be "fixing it themselves"

> Is this an assertion you're making as someone who doesn't use it?

No it's an assertion I'm making knowing that the vast majority of computer users barely understand what it is their computer is doing at any given time or why. And of the subset of users that do have an understanding, an even smaller subset of those users have the necessary skills, time and inclination to fix something wrong with the system. I worked computer retail for years. The vast majority of people I interacted with had no interest in knowing what their computer was doing under the hood or how they could solve their own problems. For every one customer that I had the chance to show how they could do something for themselves, I had 10-15 other customers tell me they didn't want to know, they just wanted it fixed.

I have plenty of experience using Linux. I spent 7 years working at a job where I was thankfully allowed to use a Linux box as my primary development machine. My home network runs stacks of Debian boxes, my 3d printers are running klipper, my home media systems Ubuntu or Debian. I built an arcade system than runs off of a Debian box. I've built remote scanning and printing workstations out of some Raspberry Pis for a company I worked for, and built custom touch screen inventory workstations prototyping them out on "Puppy Linux" installations (some weirdness around needing to work forward from a very old x11 config that didn't work with modern ubuntu at the time). I've been installing and using Linux in some form or another since I first spent 3 days twice in a row downloading the set of 600MB install CDs for "mkLinux" over a 33.6 dialup connection (twice because the first time I pulled the files down in "text mode" which broke the images).

But it's also these experiences that inform my opinion that Linux presents plenty of its own pain points and that plenty of those pain points are simply unfixable by the vast majority of their users. Every other year or so, some updates to Ubuntu would inevitably break multi-display handling or the network or something else on my dev machine at work. I would easily lose a day or two to hunting down esoteric configuration options and work arounds and digging into things that most computer users will never want to touch. My arcade system worked fine for months until an update to something in the Debian/Ubuntu audio stack broke audio on boot. It's been over a year now and it's still broken. You have to manually go into alsamixer, swap which audio "card" the system thinks its talking to (the onboard audio presents as two different cards, one for the normal audio jacks and one for HDMI out) and then toggle the muting on the various outputs until you find the one that was enumerated to be your current output on this boot. As near as I can figure out, it has something to do with a change in the order that the audio system is brought up on boot. It's now loaded much earlier in the boot process and apparently this particular chip and board combination doesn't initialize the second card until after some later step in the boot process pokes it. So when the audio system first comes up, it only sees the one card, can't apply the saved configurations and drops into a default. I've built some work around scripts that try to re-apply the audio settings again later in the process, but so far they're only about 60% effective. In the mean time, it's just broken for me and plenty of other people like me with the same AMD on board audio setup. And I'm someone comfortable digging into debugging hardware boot-up issues and the rats nest that is the linux audio stack.

But this same box also saw me need to switch from XFCE to KDE because some bug with the "notifications" system in XFCE hard hangs any user input for 5 minutes or so if you try to pop up a notification before the first time a user logs into the DE, something that I was doing because the arcade doesn't have a mouse plugged in, but you can hit a hotkey combo to switch to a keyboard mouse control scheme and I wanted a notification to display when you switched control schemes.

I have a raspberry pi running home-assistant that refused to boot if one of the zwave radio devices is plugged in to USB on boot. No idea why and it's been working fine ever since I switched to a different zwave radio, but was certainly a pain if the power ever flickered.

And lets not get into the nightmare that getting each individual linux system to play nicely with DHCPv6 was. Apparently every linux distro does IPv6 DHCP things just a little differently and even across versions of the same distro it can vary wildly.

Are all of these things fixable by AN end user? Yes, probably they are. Are all of them fixable by me? Probably with enough free time and a little luck, yes they probably are. Are they fixable by most people who use a computer day to day and especially the sort of people who aren't already interested in Linux? No almost certainly not. Those users would rely on people like me (or more likely the people I'm relying on) to figure it out and drop a solution in the up stream or provide some package you can install to replace the broken component. And again, I'm not denying that this possibility is a benefit. It's just not the same as "fixing it yourself".

There are often comments on threads like this that go along the lines of "If only the people making Linux desktop did X then they'd get more people". But there there isn't really anyone making Linux on the desktop. It's not a product. Even the products within it are built on the work of people with very disparate interests. It's kind of amazing that we get a cobbled together working experience at all.

Apple and Microsoft can focus on particular things, like getting more users, or supporting hardware they want to sell, or trying to get you to sign up to Office 365. No Linux desktop environment can have that kind of focus. So when you say it's not fixable to most users I think: well it's not supposed to be. It's not supposed to be anything, it just kind of is. Like coming across a mountain instead of a theme park - it's not a curated experience, it's not going to be for everyone, you might get hurt, but it's far far more beautiful.

It does matter if you're selling someone on the idea of switching away from their mac or windows machine that they're complaining about something the OS vendor has done by highlighting that with Linux they could "fix it themselves". It misses the point that most people don't want to "fix it themselves" and even if they had the inclination to that, for many problems they don't have the time or the skills. If someone is upset that Apple forced a move to Liquid Glass with Tahoe and all the bad UX that comes along with it, it's possible that they could also have the skills to fix their OS if they were equally upset that their chosen linux distro switched to Wayland. But it's more likely than not that they don't have those skills and so for that user, Linux is theoretically an OS they can fix, and practically just as likely to force them to accept the march of technology as any other OS they use.

I don't think anyone will switch from MacOS to Linux because of rounded corners. If they're really into theming it would make sense.

Being able to fix things is also a bit of a vague statement. You can fix things in many different ways, and you can fix some things in every OS. Fixing might be writing your own code, or switching a theme, or an application, or a distro, or the whole OS. The level of lockdown then matters. MacOS has the greatest lockdown because you can't just get a new Macbook and fix it by installing something other than MacOS.

> it's more likely than not that they don't have those skills

No, they absolutely do.

Even at the most basic level of interacting with the OS, Linux desktops usually offer more options in its Settings application than you'd get with MacOS.

If something annoys you on Linux, it probably annoyed someone else, and there's probably a toggle or switch for it.

If not, the barrier to fixing it is usually "sudo apt install cool_thing". Higher than "open the settings app", but it doesn't require compiling or coding. It only requires literacy (and, granted, not everyone is literate).

> Linux is ... practically just as likely to force them to accept the march of technology

For starters, let's not characterize Liquid Glass as "the march of technology". It's a symptom of dysfunction within Apple.

Second, no, this is just simply wrong. Many Linux distros offer LTS versions. Ubuntu 16.04 was released in 2016 and its support is ending this year, after a decade. (That's not counting the five more years of security maintenance.) Very importantly, these also don't have dark patterns to tick you to update like Apple did with Tahoe.

It's really disappointing to me that so many people assume that just because you're not convinced that linux is the right solution for every computer user that you don't have experience with the system. As I mentioned in my other reply to you, I have plenty of experience with Linux, and those experiences are why I say that Linux is just as "unfixable" to your average computer user as MacOS or Windows is.

> That's a great theory, and sometimes it's actually true, but in reality for most users most of the time, Linux is as "fixable" as Windows or macOS, because most people, even the technically savvy ones aren't driver developers.

But there a whole lot more people who are happy to pay Claude $200/month now than there used to be. Claude isn’t a driver developer, but it’s taken a bunch of different open projects and modified for them for me in such a way that it’s made my life meaningfully better.

Things I couldn’t do for years, that I’ve wanted for years, got accomplished in 2 evenings: one to implement and deploy, one to optimise because the original deployment was a good POC but not good enough to keep running (e.g. doubling or tripling of CPU usage or RAM from prior to modification).

Sure, you could argue I’m paying a doctor, but there isn’t a doctor for the apple ecosystem. There’s just “suck it up, sunshine.”

(Written from my iPad, where I continue to suck it up)

Sorry but the level of stuff that Apple users complain about when they say "not working" is not comparable to the level of unreliability of linux for me - it's not even in the same class of reliability - Apple users are just spoiled and rightfully mad about the platform quality deteriorating.

I'm not a Linux noob, I've been running linux desktop on and off for a long time (I remember ordering the free Ubuntu CD's and having to go to customs with my father at 14-15 so over 20 year probably - holly shit time flies). The last attempt was like a year ago for two months. Linux is still very much a hobby you pick up to run your computer for me and every colleague I see using it just confirms this even if they won't admit it (issues connecting to calls, unmuting, turning on camera, etc.). Like I'm annoyed that I can't use HDMI 2.1 via my USB 4 dock on Mac because it doesn't support some protocol, on Linux HDMI 2.1 on my AMD card is a no go from the start (unless I want to go with some random dude unofficial kernel driver patches).

I still use my desktop as SSH workstation and run arch on it, but my client is MacOS - I just need something that works reliably for everyday productivity tasks.

The first of these systems is actionable: When it doesn't work, it can generally be made to work. The whole journey may be an awful affair for the entire duration, but a person can usually (not always!) get there.

The other two systems are inactionable: When it doesn't work, there is no fixing it. There is no pathway, nor any journey. One can only accept that it is broken, that they are powerless to change it, and that this is the end of the road for that problem.

---

There are probably healthier ways to learn acceptance than this.

It's also important to mention that it is more likely a person would get help along the way.

And - it should also be said that there are non-Linux free operating systems, like the BSD's, for which it can also "generally be made to work". And there's the more niche HaikuOS (where I don't know if what doesn't work can be made to work, but people do use it).

- shared buffers between phones being flaky: Can't fix. Acceptance-only.

- using face time on PC to answer calls from iphone being glitchy: Can't fix. Acceptance-only.

- my browser crashing when I try to screenshare, repeatedly, on linux: Can fix. I don't have to accept this.

Again if you're coming from MacOS and expect Linux to be better at "just works" you're in for a bad surprise.

Right. That's why you're complaining about how they don't work.

Anyway, I never suggested that Linux is better at "just works."

Instead, I suggested that -all- of them have issues and further posited that, on Linux, those issues are actionable.

I am disinclined to defend a position that I do not hold.

I have come to hate Android, but every time I seriously look at switching to iOS, it seems Apple has chosen that time to make things even worse. Unfortunately, there's no Linux equivalent for phones. (Or at least, nothing that's easier than gentoo was in 2004. That was great for learning, but for daily use of a critical device, not so great.)

But you can run Linux on an M2 Macbook.

And there is premium windows hardware on the market, where Linux actually works better than Windows (notably business laptops like the Thinkpad x1 and HP Elitebook).

But, compared to W11?

I guess it depends a lot. My Precision 5520 got an extra hour of battery on the 9cell varient. Thats about a 20% uplift from W11; but thats an old Xeon laptop now.

Your experience isn't uncommon, but it's largely the result of trying to force a square peg into a round hole. There are thousands of different smartphones, game consoles and set-top boxes that rely on Linux for all of their basic functionality. You only get problems trying to smash reverse-engineered drivers and hardware together expecting OEM-level support. If you want good Linux support, pay for good Linux support.

I think you and GP agree more than you realise, their point seems to be that Apple was worth all the locked down walled garden stuff because at least it "just worked." Now it's a locked down walled garden which _also doesn't work._ Tahoe and iOS 26 are the worst of both worlds.

Ok, you're having Bluetooth issues. Fair enough. But using Bluetooth (on a desktop no less) is not so overwhelmingly common that one can justify a sweeping statement like yours on that basis. The "Linux brigade" says that stuff works for them because it does. My desktop "just works" for me and it has for like 5 years at this point. That doesn't mean everything is perfect, but neither is Linux the train wreck of incompatibility you describe.

I think that's probably a few years out of date. Certainly, it used to be completely true and was a major problem.

I'm just not finding that now. Drivers are better, and more widespread, and there are less odd hardware innovations in standard PC components that screw it up.

And, if you want a laptop that runs Linux perfectly, there are more than a few options out there that ship with Linux installed and supported now.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

ElementaryOS is supposed to be a very clean transition environment for mac refugees. AI makes everything so much easier, Windows and Mac both have far more friction and hassle in contrast. Good luck!

Yesterday, my wife wanted to use Discord. It was right there in the applications folder. But MacOS couldn't find it. Launching it manually took minutes, for some reason.

We wanted to download a clip using yt_dlp (a Python program). Terminal told us, this would require dev tools, which it doesn't. So we installed Python from python.org instead, which worked. Except, that non-blessed python could not access the internet because of some MacOS "security" feature.

Another security feature requires all apps to be notarized, even the ones I built myself. This used to have a relatively easy workaround (right click, open, accept the risk). Now it needs a terminal command.

I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and have set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between the German and English keyboard. MacOS does not have a keyboard shortcut for this. But Karabiner can do it, albeit a bit jankily.

Lately, the keyboard layout no longer sticks. It resets to English when I press shift. Sometimes it does work, sometimes it doesn't. This is unrelated to the aforementioned Karabiner shortcut.

The German keyboard layout for MacOS on non-Apple keyboards is insane. So I made my own layout. This is relatively easy, and worked well. Except, every single OS update reinstates Apple's insane layout.

Sometimes my Mac does not wake from sleep. Pressing the power button does nothing. Hitting keyboard keys does nothing. Only a long-press of the power button eventually reboots it. The power button on the Mac Studio is in an insane place of course.

There is still no indication anywhere that the hard drive is getting full.

There is still no simple way to reset the computer to factory conditions.

Gaming is still largely impossible, even though the hardware is very capable.

I have replaced TimeMachine with restic, as TimeMachine keeps resetting itself after a while.

My Linux PC should arrive this week, and will replace the Mac. I've had enough.

It will require wine for two apps, and a VM for two others. At this point, that's a price I'm willing to pay.

MacOS has since the early OS X days the default shortcut CTRL+Space for that. It may be deactivated for newer releases. It's findable under:

Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Inputsomething

(Einstellungen → Tastatur → Tastaturkurzbefehle → Eingabequellen)

Personally I dream of a Mac keyboard with OLED key caps for multilingual keyboard layouts.

When someone (Google?) finds me a way to seamlessly find/lock my phone from my computer, my computer from phone, and they all find my wife phone and computer, and they all find my keys and my wife keys... that will be the day I escape.