By: sparkSammy

NOTE: THIS IS NOT YOUR USUAL “FAKE NEWS WITH ZEST” ARTICLE, WE SHALL BE DOING THAT SOON ENOUGH. FOR NOW, I JUST NEED TO GET THIS OFF MY CHEST.

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1. THE LIE OF “IT JUST WORKS”

The core promise of Apple is that their hardware and software are so perfectly integrated, the complexity is erased. That’s a bald-faced lie for any power user, tinkerer, or server administrator in the macOS Tahoe (26.x) era. It doesn’t “just work”—it works until a mandatory update breaks it, and then it works only if you pay a $200 ransom to a third-party vendor, or spend three days debugging a Terminal session.

Our entire headless streaming setup failed not due to a permission error, but because the $4 Trillion company can’t be bothered to let the WindowServer process acknowledge a virtual display without a dummy dongle. Why? Because they prioritized an arbitrary power-saving feature over fundamental server stability, killing the core use-case of the Mac Mini we were promised.

Jobs promoted headless XServes. Today, Apple promotes locking down their hardware so tightly we can’t even get a stable GPU encoder running without a physical monitor. That is intentional “enshittification.”

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2. THE DOCKER TAX AND THE WSL2 REALIZATION

On Linux, Docker is a native, lightweight container on a native kernel.

On macOS, Docker is a performance parasite that forces a heavy Linux Virtual Machine (Hyperkit/VirtioFS) to run underneath. This creates a cascade of failures:

• SLOW AS MOLASSES I/O: Every file operation is a tedious RPC request between the macOS host and the VM guest. Development with bind mounts is a nightmare.
• RESOURCE HOGGING: The VM layer hogs resources, causing memory pressure, thermal throttling, excessive SSD wear, and fan activation—on machines that should be silently blazing fast.
• THE WSL2 KICKER: Microsoft, the supposed Goliath of closed systems, engineered WSL2 to integrate far more efficiently with its Windows kernel than Apple integrates its own virtualization framework. Docker on Windows is faster and more stable than Docker on a modern Apple Silicon Mac. The fact that my current Windows setup is “just working” is the ultimate indictment of macOS’s developer experience.

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3. THE VENDOR LOCK-IN TAX

The ecosystem is not designed to be open; it’s designed to be milked:

• VIRTUAL MACHINE EXTORTION: Why pay $200 PER YEAR for commercial VM software on a Mac, when Windows has free options and Linux has superior FOSS options? The cost is irrational, and the performance is often worse than a simple WINE translation layer.
• BROKEN CORE FUNCTIONALITY: Simple headless streaming breaks on every major update. Users are forced to purchase paid tools (like BetterDisplay) to fix functionality that should be built into the operating system.

We are not running broken hardware; we are running a broken philosophy. The operating system has become an active barrier to power-user control.

I demand simplicity, stability, and control. I demand a system that does what I tell it to do, not one that decides what is “best” for me every time a patch drops.

MAC OS DOESN’T WORK. It’s time to build the ship on a better kernel.

(Now back to your regularly scheduled Feaux News)